What is Monero? Comprehensive Guide to XMR

How is Monero Completely Anonymous?

Monero combined several technologies to make its way of transacting completely anonymous. Monero has implemented a cryptographic technique called Ring Signatures. Technical Explanation Disclaimer: Monero bundles your transaction with a random selection of other public keys, such that any public key can be used to check the validity of the transaction, wherein only one of the corresponding private keys was actually used to produce the transaction. The ring signature ensures that it is computationally infeasible to find out which public key was used to produce the transaction.

Simply put, Monero builds plausible deniability into every transaction. There is no way to tell whether or not you participated in any given transaction.

Monero also hides the amounts that are being transacted within any given transaction. This keeps the balances of all Monero addresses hidden from public view, along with the amounts that are transacted on the network. So even if you were to be discovered using the Monero network, the amount of money that you have been transferring would still be hidden from public view.

How to Buy Monero (XMR)

Despite its status as the ultimate privacy coin, most cryptocurrency major exchanges allow you to purchase Monero. Of course you’ll likely have to go through Know Your Customer (KYC) identity verification protocols with most major exchanges, which does defeat the purpose of Monero somewhat. One potential work around KYC is to purchase something like Bitcoin or Ethereum on a major exchange and trade it for Monero on a smaller crypto-only exchange. Crypto-only exchanges generally have less KYC but of course you’ll still be leaving a paper trail at the original exchange.

Another option for buying XMR is a peer-to-peer cryptocurrency market. These markets cut out the middle man and let users deal directly with other users. It’s very important to be very careful when using P2P crypto exchanges because there is generally less security than the major exchanges. Finally you could offer to buy directly from a friend or family member if you trust them 100%.

Head on over to our guides for the following cryptocurrency exchanges if you would like to purchase Monero.

• Coinbase
• KuCoin
• Crypto.com
• Binance
• Kraken

History of Monero

Monero was started in April 2014 by member of the popular Bitcoin forum bitcointalk.com. Originally BitMonero, the cryptocurrency was renamed to Monero five days after its establishment by the team of developers that formally took over the project. Monero received an upgrade in 2017 that strengthened its security and anonymity, making the amounts being transacted confidential to viewers. This means that passive observers of the blockchain could no longer see the amount of money being transacted in each transaction. This on top of Monero’s hidden account balances, and single use addresses for transactions makes Monero arguably the most secure transaction processing system ever invented.

Monero currently is rewarding miners at a rate of 2 XMR per block, or 2 XMR every 2 minutes. This boils down to 1 XMR created every minute. Monero will continue producing blocks at this sort of rate until around May 2022, when the amount of new Monero entering the system will be a constant .06 XMR per block.

Monero’s Popularity on the Dark Web

Monero was instrumental to certain organized crime movements such as the WannaCry attacks that occurred in 2017 and general dark web transactions. During WannaCry, after ransom was collected in Bitcoin, the attackers would move the funds into Monero, to further hide their identity. Monero is a popular dark web payment method, as it inherently has more privacy built into the protocol than other popular cryptocurrencies. While a careful user of Bitcoin can disguise or mask their identity, it still doesn’t come close to the level of protection gained by using the cryptographic techniques built into Monero. To this day, many dark web merchants prefer, and even insist on their patrons using Monero instead of Bitcoin for transactions.

In terms of endorsements by privacy advocates, it really doesn’t get much better than Edward Snowden himself declaring that he’s used Monero. Edward mentions that in order to securely transfer and secure the documents he released to the public in 2013, he “may” have had to use Bitcoin in order to pay for anonymous server infrastructure. Edward thinks that zCash is the most interesting cryptocurrency project out there right now due to its unique privacy aspects. had Monero or zCash been around in 2013, Edward may have found himself using these digital currencies to aid ins disclosure. This is to say that Monero being a privacy coin is often hailed by criminals and terrorists as being a safe haven for their digital presence, but sometimes there is a real need for ordinary people to protect their information and transactions online.

How Does Monero Work?

Monero uses a proof of work mining algorithm, just like Bitcoin or Ethereum. That being said, Monero is significantly different than the aforementioned cryptocurrencies. Monero is completely anonymous due to different cryptographic techniques used to disguise the identities and activities of the users of the network. These techniques are called Ring Signatures, Confidential Transactions, BulletProofs and Stealth Addresses.

The privacy implications are as follows:

• The amount transacted in any given transaction on the network is not known.
• The sender of any transaction is not known
• The receiver of any transaction is not known
• The balance of any address on Monero is not known

The above facts make it difficult for law enforcement to determine what the flow of money is on the Monero network. Traditional blockchain analytics tools are therefore unable to compile statistics about the movement of Monero on the network.

Other than the enhanced privacy mechanisms unique to Monero, transaction with this cryptocurrency is much like transaction with any other cryptocurrency. You have a wallet, which consists of a public and private key. You sign transactions with your private key, and send money to your public key. If you really would like to look at your Monero balance on an online block explorer such as xmrchain.net, you can use a special Monero key called the private view key. This could be useful when checking your Monero transactions to and from exchanges.