Some of those offer nice features like the possibility to automatically convert part of your income in fiat money or to accept other cryptocurrencies along with Monero.
No. Monero uses a completely non-interactive, non-custodial, and automatic process to create private transactions. By contrast for mixing services, users opt-in to participate.
Confidential transactions are used in distributed digital assets to demonstrate the balance of values hidden in commitments, while retaining signer ambiguity. Previous work describes a signer-ambiguous proof of knowledge of the opening of commitments to zero at the same index across multiple public commitment sets and the evaluation of a verifiable random function used as a linking tag, and uses this to build a linkable ring signature called Triptych that can be used as a building block for a confidential transaction model. In this work, we extend Triptych to build Arcturus, a proving system that proves knowledge of openings of multiple commitments to zero within a single set, correct construction of a verifiable random function evaluated at each opening, and value balance across a separate list of commitments within a single proof. While soundness depends on a novel dual discrete-logarithm hardness assumption, we use data from the Monero blockchain to show that Arcturus can be used in a confidential transaction model to provide faster total batch verification time than other state-of-the-art constructions without a trusted setup.
Monero uses @randomx, an ASIC-resistant and CPU-friendly POW algorithm created by Monero community members, designed to make the use of mining-specific hardware unfeasible. Monero previously used CryptoNight and variations of this algorithm
A new @block is created every ~2 minutes. There is no maximum block size, but instead a block reward penalty and a dynamic block size, to ensure a dynamic @scalability
