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| post | Monero User Research | Getting into users perception |
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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:
- Partially answered or unanswered questionnaires were not taken into account (67 out of 179).
- Respondents that filled out the survey in less than two minutes were discarded (1 out of 179).
- 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.
- 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.
- 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).