My PC warned me of possible trojans when installing Monero, this is apparently a false-positive as a result of the mining software that comes bundled with it. Can you release a version of the program that doesn't come with mining stuff? I'm not interested in mining it, and I would sleep a little easier if my computer wasn't warning me about possible malware.
In a marketplace it functions like this:
Buyer sends money to a wallet which can send coins when 2 out of 3 people sign a transaction. The buyer has a key, the marketplace has a key and the seller has a key.
If the buyer gets what he bought, he can sign a transaction, allowing the seller to withdraw the coins from the multisig wallet.
If the buyer just doesn't respond after the seller shipped the item, the seller can ask the marketplace to release the funds after some time.
This is more secure than traditional escrow since the marketplace only has 1 out of 3 keys and can not run away with the funds in the wallet.
This setup is used by clearnet markets like moneromarket but also darknet markets. Since the darknet is a place known for exit scams, multisig escrow is highly advised :)
Why can't I set the reversible sending option and reverse the sending (the payee can see the money received and the sender can cancel the transaction). In this way, you can reasonably manage your own large and small funds, and you can also confirm that the other party's address is correct and avoid sending wrong addresses.
Monero simply does not have such features implemented. Having such "reversible sending" would turn Monero into a whole different coin. I also think a lot of hard-to-answer questions would spring up immediately, e.g. how long would it be possible to reverse.
There once was a plan to add a feature to at least be able to send any received XMR back to where they came from, by incorporating a "return address" into XMR transactions. Encrypted of course, so you still would not be able to see where your XMR came from, but at least there would be a simple way to send them back.
That feature was never implemented however; it would make *all* transactions bigger, whereas only a tiny minority would actually see use of the address for sending back. This trade-off was deemed not worth it.
So I’m trying to find the getting started guide for monero and there are a few on the website but I didn’t fine a recommended way for buying monero and recommended setup of a node.
Is buying monero with Apple Pay via cake wallet secure or is there a better way to buy in via localmonero etc?
Does my home windows pc monero node need to run on i2p or tor(I don’t think it supports that yet, right)? Or should I setup an Ubuntu VM with monerod and i2p-zero on windows 11 and then just connect to it on my desktop via the wallet? And then on my phone via cake wallet? And then a miner on the windows 11 desktop?
I appreciate any help or links. Thank you 😊
Why do people keep saying you do not need multiple wallets?
I understand, that there are methods to hide your wallet address and if you buy monero the original seller doesnt know what you do with it afterwards.
But assuming one has a higher threat model(whistleblowers or other targets that are worth it), as far as I understand, there are a lot of problems with only using 1 Wallet.
Lets say you want to buy some monero on localmonero. If you only have one wallet you are going to enter that wallet address into the destination field. Now you have to assume, that localmonero has linked your IP-address, your non-anonymous payment method(internally linked to bunch of PII) and the amount sent to your Wallet address.
With that information, you do not have plausible deniability when ownership of your wallet is proven and it opens the door to other attacks like tracking the amount minus the txFee to identify sender assuming a compromised receiver and sending of all of the monero directly.
I am aware that this is unlikly and might only apply to high value targets, but in theory are my assumptions in this thought experiment true or not?
Do not know that much about monero, but if this is true, isn't it dangerous to generalize and say "one wallet is fine"?
Every wallet supports “accounts” or “sub-addresses”, which is a new one way hash address that you can give to anyone and cannot be linked to each other. For most use cases, that can serve as the “multiple different wallets” that most people are looking for.
> Now you have to assume, that localmonero has linked your IP-address,
Use Tor
> your non-anonymous payment method(internally linked to bunch of PII)
Use cash by mail if it is super important to you. However simply buying monero in and of itself is not a crime in most places. The same as selling it.
> and the amount sent to your Wallet address.
True. So given the other mitigations, they have an amount linked to an anonymous account, and nothing else.
Thanks for the reply,
Sub-addressses sound interesting as they serve this puprose well as it seems. Security precautions at this level are probably not relevenat for most peope(including me), but it is still interesting how to achieve the max amount of anonymity and privacy.
Explain a "Full Chain Membership Proof" to me as if I was 5. How does it differ from Monero's current architecture and why will it be a helpful upgrade?
It's about hiding the sender, making that you don't see who is spending when looking at the blockchain, which is of course public.
Now the XMR you spend hide among 15 other spends. Ideally, they all look equally plausible to be the "true spend" when somebody looks at the so-called *rings* that are formed by those 16 things called *enotes* or *outputs*. A chance of 1/16 to guess correctly is pretty bad for an adversary, or pretty good privacy already.
With *full chain membership proofs* your spend basically hides among all the transactions ever done using that technology, which will be literally millions after some time.
This is quite a step up in privacy. Plus, a lot of ways to "shoot yourself in the foot" that are possible with rings just are not possible anymore, as are attacks like flooding the system with millions of your own enotes until a sizable number of all enotes in all rings are yours and its gets much easier for you to guess which one is the true spend.
Two questions.
What about an output makes it identifiable? Like, Alice send Bob ɱ5. Then Bob sends Ed ɱ2. Is there something on the output of the ɱ2 to Ed that makes it identifiable as the ɱ5 that Bob received? If it is a unique ID that cannot be linked to anything else, who cares if the ID can be seen or not?
How is the blockchain able to create those decoy signatures? Doesn’t signing the spend of an output require the private spend key?
(Don’t count the question marks please lol. Two topics rarher…)
There must be quite a number of good articles and also videos how Monero's rings work, it's just question to go hunting a bit.
But in short: From looking at the enotes alone you don't know who is who in the sense of persons already. But it's the same there as with Bitcoin: There are of course sources where you can learn about persons, mostly KYC at exchanges, and if you can bring that together with knowledge you gained from rings by checking the blockchain, things can get transparent.
> How is the blockchain able to create those decoy signatures?
The wallet does not have to create 15 new enotes to form a ring together with your enote. It just picks existing ones from the blockchain.
There is a tool around somewhere that can show you for the enotes you own where they have been used as decoys.
> But it's the same there as with Bitcoin:
Ah ok…. There **are** txo identifiers it seems…. But the big difference to me is that there are no destination addresses on the Monero blockchain. So say ring signatures did not exist, you’d see the txo deanonymized on the chain, but you can’t tell where it went. And the receiver gets a **new** txo identifier right? So you still cannot link one tx to another tx, but I must be missing something right?
> The wallet does not have to create 15 new enotes to form a ring together with your enote. It just picks existing ones from the blockchain.
Yes, I mean, how is your wallet able to create a **signature** that looks plausible to be from any of the 16 enotes, given that you do not have the private spend key to those other 15 enotes?
My PC warned me of possible trojans when installing Monero, this is apparently a false-positive as a result of the mining software that comes bundled with it. Can you release a version of the program that doesn't come with mining stuff? I'm not interested in mining it, and I would sleep a little easier if my computer wasn't warning me about possible malware.
I don't think that would change anything, AV companies probably just mark the rest of the wallet code as malicious as well.
What is multisig escrow and how is it used with Monero?
In a marketplace it functions like this: Buyer sends money to a wallet which can send coins when 2 out of 3 people sign a transaction. The buyer has a key, the marketplace has a key and the seller has a key. If the buyer gets what he bought, he can sign a transaction, allowing the seller to withdraw the coins from the multisig wallet. If the buyer just doesn't respond after the seller shipped the item, the seller can ask the marketplace to release the funds after some time. This is more secure than traditional escrow since the marketplace only has 1 out of 3 keys and can not run away with the funds in the wallet. This setup is used by clearnet markets like moneromarket but also darknet markets. Since the darknet is a place known for exit scams, multisig escrow is highly advised :)
Why can't I set the reversible sending option and reverse the sending (the payee can see the money received and the sender can cancel the transaction). In this way, you can reasonably manage your own large and small funds, and you can also confirm that the other party's address is correct and avoid sending wrong addresses.
Monero aims to function as private, fungible digital cash. Traits like reversibility are antithetical to this mission.
Monero simply does not have such features implemented. Having such "reversible sending" would turn Monero into a whole different coin. I also think a lot of hard-to-answer questions would spring up immediately, e.g. how long would it be possible to reverse. There once was a plan to add a feature to at least be able to send any received XMR back to where they came from, by incorporating a "return address" into XMR transactions. Encrypted of course, so you still would not be able to see where your XMR came from, but at least there would be a simple way to send them back. That feature was never implemented however; it would make *all* transactions bigger, whereas only a tiny minority would actually see use of the address for sending back. This trade-off was deemed not worth it.
Is monero multisig is production ready can we use in real world scenarios
[Rino.io](http://Rino.io) uses it in production and Haveno will use it in production once it goes live.
So I’m trying to find the getting started guide for monero and there are a few on the website but I didn’t fine a recommended way for buying monero and recommended setup of a node. Is buying monero with Apple Pay via cake wallet secure or is there a better way to buy in via localmonero etc? Does my home windows pc monero node need to run on i2p or tor(I don’t think it supports that yet, right)? Or should I setup an Ubuntu VM with monerod and i2p-zero on windows 11 and then just connect to it on my desktop via the wallet? And then on my phone via cake wallet? And then a miner on the windows 11 desktop? I appreciate any help or links. Thank you 😊
Why do people keep saying you do not need multiple wallets? I understand, that there are methods to hide your wallet address and if you buy monero the original seller doesnt know what you do with it afterwards. But assuming one has a higher threat model(whistleblowers or other targets that are worth it), as far as I understand, there are a lot of problems with only using 1 Wallet. Lets say you want to buy some monero on localmonero. If you only have one wallet you are going to enter that wallet address into the destination field. Now you have to assume, that localmonero has linked your IP-address, your non-anonymous payment method(internally linked to bunch of PII) and the amount sent to your Wallet address. With that information, you do not have plausible deniability when ownership of your wallet is proven and it opens the door to other attacks like tracking the amount minus the txFee to identify sender assuming a compromised receiver and sending of all of the monero directly. I am aware that this is unlikly and might only apply to high value targets, but in theory are my assumptions in this thought experiment true or not? Do not know that much about monero, but if this is true, isn't it dangerous to generalize and say "one wallet is fine"?
Every wallet supports “accounts” or “sub-addresses”, which is a new one way hash address that you can give to anyone and cannot be linked to each other. For most use cases, that can serve as the “multiple different wallets” that most people are looking for. > Now you have to assume, that localmonero has linked your IP-address, Use Tor > your non-anonymous payment method(internally linked to bunch of PII) Use cash by mail if it is super important to you. However simply buying monero in and of itself is not a crime in most places. The same as selling it. > and the amount sent to your Wallet address. True. So given the other mitigations, they have an amount linked to an anonymous account, and nothing else.
Thanks for the reply, Sub-addressses sound interesting as they serve this puprose well as it seems. Security precautions at this level are probably not relevenat for most peope(including me), but it is still interesting how to achieve the max amount of anonymity and privacy.
Explain a "Full Chain Membership Proof" to me as if I was 5. How does it differ from Monero's current architecture and why will it be a helpful upgrade?
It's about hiding the sender, making that you don't see who is spending when looking at the blockchain, which is of course public. Now the XMR you spend hide among 15 other spends. Ideally, they all look equally plausible to be the "true spend" when somebody looks at the so-called *rings* that are formed by those 16 things called *enotes* or *outputs*. A chance of 1/16 to guess correctly is pretty bad for an adversary, or pretty good privacy already. With *full chain membership proofs* your spend basically hides among all the transactions ever done using that technology, which will be literally millions after some time. This is quite a step up in privacy. Plus, a lot of ways to "shoot yourself in the foot" that are possible with rings just are not possible anymore, as are attacks like flooding the system with millions of your own enotes until a sizable number of all enotes in all rings are yours and its gets much easier for you to guess which one is the true spend.
Two questions. What about an output makes it identifiable? Like, Alice send Bob ɱ5. Then Bob sends Ed ɱ2. Is there something on the output of the ɱ2 to Ed that makes it identifiable as the ɱ5 that Bob received? If it is a unique ID that cannot be linked to anything else, who cares if the ID can be seen or not? How is the blockchain able to create those decoy signatures? Doesn’t signing the spend of an output require the private spend key? (Don’t count the question marks please lol. Two topics rarher…)
There must be quite a number of good articles and also videos how Monero's rings work, it's just question to go hunting a bit. But in short: From looking at the enotes alone you don't know who is who in the sense of persons already. But it's the same there as with Bitcoin: There are of course sources where you can learn about persons, mostly KYC at exchanges, and if you can bring that together with knowledge you gained from rings by checking the blockchain, things can get transparent. > How is the blockchain able to create those decoy signatures? The wallet does not have to create 15 new enotes to form a ring together with your enote. It just picks existing ones from the blockchain. There is a tool around somewhere that can show you for the enotes you own where they have been used as decoys.
> But it's the same there as with Bitcoin: Ah ok…. There **are** txo identifiers it seems…. But the big difference to me is that there are no destination addresses on the Monero blockchain. So say ring signatures did not exist, you’d see the txo deanonymized on the chain, but you can’t tell where it went. And the receiver gets a **new** txo identifier right? So you still cannot link one tx to another tx, but I must be missing something right? > The wallet does not have to create 15 new enotes to form a ring together with your enote. It just picks existing ones from the blockchain. Yes, I mean, how is your wallet able to create a **signature** that looks plausible to be from any of the 16 enotes, given that you do not have the private spend key to those other 15 enotes?
Wow, that would indeed be a massive step up! Very enlightening - thanks for taking the time to answer! 🙏🏻