Docs - Monero User Research

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+---
+layout: post
+title: Monero User Research
+subtitle: Getting into users perception
+tags: [research,cryptocurrency,users]
+gh-badge: [star, fork, follow]
+---
+
+## 5 Monero User Research
+
+The goal of this research is to gather information on end users behavior
+regarding Monero cryptocurrency with emphasis on key management
+and security practices. For this purpose, an online questionnaire was
+created.
+Specific survey design and research questions are based on Bitcoin
+security and privacy study, typical usage patterns of cryptocurrency
+users, online forums and Reddit communities centered around Mon-
+ero as well as problematic areas regarding computer and data security
+in general [50].
+
+### 5.1 Research questions
+
+The survey was designed around seven question groups. Some of them
+were shown only if the participant chose the appropriate answer.
+
+- G01 - Introductory information
+- G02 - Monero usage
+- G03 - Monero key and coin management
+- G04 - Monero and malicious things
+- G05 - Monero recovery
+- G06 - Special question set for miners
+- G07 - Demographics
+
+
+Following this pattern, four research questions were set:
+
+- R1: What are Monero’s main use cases? How do participants
+    perceive Monero’s features?
+- R2: What are participant’s ways of wallet access and storage?
+- R3: What security incidents have affected users? How did they
+    deal with them?
+- R4: In case of recovery, how did they recover their keys?
+
+### 5.2 Participants and survey’s background
+
+The significant characteristic of Monero is its anonymity, and this
+feature is not taken by community lightly. Due to this fact, the survey
+was not hosted on third party servers, but instead on dedicated Virtual
+Private Server (VPS) running Lime Survey self-hosted software with
+HTTPS interface using signed Letsencrypt certificates [51–53].
+This means that data exchanged between participants and survey
+software stays only between these two parties, so Google or other big
+data company cannot analyze them. To allow extended anonymity
+features, Tor and proxy connections were allowed, but each participant
+had to solve the CAPTCHA before starting the survey.
+
+
+#### 5.2.1 Methodology
+
+Data collection method was online only and was using the survey
+website software. Participants selection was based on opportunity
+sampling. Links for the research were shared among dedicated Reddit
+Monero community, Facebook Monero groups as well as Cryptocur-
+rency forums. Study limitations are described in the Section 6.3.
+To reduce nonresponse rate, participants were asked only to fill
+out parts that were significant for them, e.g., Monero recovery part
+stayed hidden in the form if the user selected that he/she had never
+made any recovery of the seed or wallet keys in the previous part.
+The data from the respondents were collected from 11.15.2018 to
+01.27.2019. The complete survey is attached in the Appendix Figure C.
+
+### 5.3 Collected data
+
+
+Before entering the survey, each participant had to pass the bot test
+by entering the correct CAPTCHA, which resulted in 179 participants
+of the questionnaire in total. As for survey data cleansing, following
+measurements for valid dataset were taken:
+
+1. Partially answered or unanswered questionnaires were not taken
+    into account (67 out of 179).
+2. Respondents that filled out the survey in less than two minutes
+    were discarded (1 out of 179).
+3. Responses with more than 4 entries with the same IP were fil-
+tered (0 out of 179).
+    (a) In total 7 responses were sent from duplicate IP addresses.
+The highest number of responses from a single IP was 3,
+which belonged to MIT University.
+4. Responses containing invalid answers, e.g., not using Monero
+    or repeating the same answer pattern in multiple submissions
+(1 out of 179).
+
+Figure 5.1: Overview of respondents in the user survey dataset.
+Usinggeoiplookuppackage in Ubuntu on the filtered dataset, most of
+the responses were from USA (31 out of 113), followed by the Czech
+Republic (17 out of 113) and Germany (11 out of 113). Detailed list of
+countries with the corresponding number of responses is available in
+the Appendix Table B.1.
+
+### 5.4 Results
+
+
+Next section is based on the final filtered dataset with 113 responses
+of people who voluntarily entered the research based on opportunity
+sampling.
+
+#### 5.4.1 General information
+
+First, users were asked about their operating system preferences when
+accessing Monero. Majority of users tend to access Monero using
+Windows 58% (65 out of 113) or Linux 60% (68 out of 113). While
+accessing Monero from mobile Android OS 43% (49 out of 113) is
+primarily used. As for the Apple ecosystem, MacOS combined with
+iOS was selected as used method of access only in 14% (16 out of 113)
+occurences.
+
+
+Monero desktop application usage
+
+Desktop applications are used by 104 out of 113 users, making it
+the most frequent means of accessing the wallet. As Monero Official
+application has no other direct competitors aside from web-based
+wallets, the majority of users 81% (84 out of 104) use the official
+
+
+application with GUI, but there is also a notable part of the users
+in the dataset that use CLI as well 53% (55 out of 104). Alternative
+desktop clients, that were sometimes misinterpreted as web apps, are
+used by only a few users cca 4% (5 out of 104).
+
+Monero Mobile application usage
+
+From 113 people that filled out the survey, 53 of them stated that
+they use either Android or iOS application for accessing their Monero
+wallet. Digging deeper, out of 49 Android users, Monerujo application
+is used by 92% (45 out of 49) of them, followed by other Android
+wallets 14% (7 out of 49). Freewallet on Android is only used by one
+user (2%) in the dataset thus following the fact the community does
+not like closed source software with bad history as mentioned in the
+Chapter 4.4. Detailed description of the applications is included in the
+Section 6.1.3.
+
+5. Monero User Research
+
+
+iOS is used by 7 out of 113 users (please note that users could check
+usage of both platforms as can be visible from simply adding iOS and
+Android users and comparing it to the total number of mobile users).
+All of them (7) reported using the Cakewallet application. Following
+the Android pattern, one user also revealed usage of Freewallet app.
+
+Online wallet services
+
+When asked about online wallet usage, only 24 people (out of 113)
+said that they use some sort of online service with MyMonero wallet
+being used the most 79% (19 out of 24).
+
+Wallet software usage
+
+First part of the survey shows that userbase present in the dataset is
+more oriented towards open-source software in general (110 out of 113
+use some form of open-source Monero client), but this is not limited to
+the usage of particular OS as there are 33% (37 out of 113) of Windows
+only users, 35% (40 out of 113) Linux only users and 25% (28 out of
+113) users of both OS. This discovery follows the information about
+Monero community as they prefer open source software (OSS) to
+closed source software (CSS) because they can not personally review
+for hidden features or unintentional bugs.
+
+#### 5.4.2 Monero usage
+
+When asked “ _What are your reasons to use Monero?_ ”, the majority of
+respondents in the dataset said that they use Monero or at least are
+interested in the topic because of the technology 88% (99 out of 113),
+but also see it as an investment 73% (83 out of 113).
+A significant portion of respondents also see Monero as a way of
+secret storage of value 74% (84 out of 113) but not as much in the way
+of sending money 53% (60 out of 113).
+
+This result is strongly affected by the way how participants were
+selected (self-selection) and from what sites they were informed about
+the survey (mainly Reddit Monero subreddits and Facebook Monero
+groups). The short overview of the preferences is shown in the Table
+5.1 with the full text of the questions asked available in the Appendix
+Figure C.
+
+Transactions in the Monero network performed by respondents
+can be divided into two user groups, where the first group that can
+be described as active, those who make at least one transaction per
+month, 50% (53 out of 107) and passive who are much less frequent
+51% (54 out of 107). Detailed overview of transactions frequency in
+the dataset is in the Figure 5.9.
+Following this question, respondents were asked if they hold onto
+their coins for a long time (often referred to as one being a HODLer).
+Majority of respondents 79% (84 out of 106) said that they are, but this
+statement conflicts with transaction frequency. When comparing data
+of respondents that make a transaction at least every month, about
+60% (34 out of 57) think that they are HODLers, this contradicts the
+previously mentioned statement.
+
+Important usage factor of a currency is where its users can pay
+with it. Monero has already a known reputation between darknet
+markets, but its mainstream usage isn’t something that is advertised
+as its feature.
+When asked about the payment options, many of the respondents
+45% (51 out of 113) selected that they use Monero as a way for donating
+other people, followed by paying for VPN services 35% (31 out of 113).
+Although Monero features are considered ideal for black market use,
+only 5% (6 out of 113) respondents revealed that they use Monero
+cryptocurrency in this way.
+Perception and the reality of anonymity in cryptocurrency is an
+important topic in the cryptocurrency environment [54]. Although
+Monero is private by default, additional precautions can be made to
+hide users activity from the third party like using Kovri or Tor.
+Among users in the dataset, Kovri 7% (8 out of 113) or Tor 20%
+(23 out of 113) is used by less than one third of the respondents in
+total as can be seen in the Table 5.2.
+
+**5.4.3 Monero key and coin management**
+
+Apart from client software that is used for accessing and making
+transactions in Monero, wallet management is at least as important.
+Main reason is that users choice of wallet storage has a direct influence
+on who has access to the funds as explained along with the wallet
+types in the Chapter 4.1.
+
+#### 5.4.4 Monero recovery
+
+For further wallet protection, the majority of users also encrypt their
+wallet or the datastore on which the keys reside on 78% (88 out of
+113).
+A slightly higher number of users admit backing up their wallet
+keys 89% (101 out of 113) while a significant number of respondents
+had already needed to restore their wallet keys 44% (50 out of 113).
+To complete the recovery statistics, 98% (49 out of 50) were able to
+restore the keys from the backup media.
+See the Figures 5.12 and 5.13 for visualization of wallet recovery
+reasons and restore methods.
+
+#### 5.4.5 Monero and malicious software
+
+This part was answered only by those respondents that selected Yes
+(15 out of 113) when asked whether they have ever been affected by
+malicious software that used Monero in some way.
+The primary cause of problems was mining malware (8) or some
+form of mining script (7). The main affected platform was running
+Windows (10), and malware was recognized mainly by slow system
+response (7) and high CPU usage (11).
+
+#### 5.4.6 Demographics
+
+Survey participants were mainly males 44% (50 out of 113), females
+2% (2 out of 113) represented only a small portion of the dataset, and
+some of the participants did not disclose their gender 54% (61 out of
+113). Most respondents in the dataset were from the age groups 25-34
+29% (33 out of 113).