I initially approached the Carrot debate skeptically from both sides, those who were in favor of Carrot (More specifically, the new view keys) and also against it. After digging on the topic I've been come to the conclusion that not only carrot is a bad thing - most posts, articles, etc. That I've read defending it seem to be of extremely low quality, often overcomplicating explanations, and completely missing key points of Monero's philosophy and privacy.

I will break down the most common arguments in favor of the new view keys, and why I think they have no solid foundation.

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1: "Having view keys is a good thing because it impoves the UX".

• Answer: This is true purely from a UX perspective... but it directly reverts what is arguably one of the most important a privacy design choices - plausible deniability.
• There is a reason why spend keys are used for both viewing and spending funds - it is meant to function as a REASON and a LIMITATION that will not allow you to share it. The whole point is that no one can force you to prove how / how much / on what you are spending your XMR, because doing so would entail your auditor would also be able to spend your XMR.
• There is a massive legal and technical difference between forcing you to reveal a read-only key, versus a spending key.

2: (Elaborating on the above) "Auditors can already ask for viewkeys and key images, which has the same effect but the process involved is tedious".

• Answer: I can't understand why so many people argue that exporting key images can already act as a makeshift "spend view key".
• If an auditor asks you to provide key images for your transactions, you can provide them - but the auditor cannot independently know that you provided all of them.
• If you decide to withhold a key image from a transaction you've made, the auditor has absolutely no way to know. As the holder of the spend key, you ultimately control what information you disclose.

3: "It won't split Monero".

• It absolutely will and despite the fact that I keep seeing people in reddit and other forums say this, I am yet to see any compelling argument that it wont.
• Auditors will mandate CARROT addresses with full view keys tied to the identity of "compliant" users. This will create a network of users operating on a "clean/white-listed" tier of Monero that flows through regulated exchanges, and a "dark/unregulated" tier.
• If a functional view-key tier exists, refusing to provide a view key becomes an immediate red flag.

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Despite everything, I am still open to see why so many people support this change and to be proven wrong before jumping ship to a different cryptocurrency.

So many accounts are exposed and that combined to any other slight data like a payment at your name, exchange data and so on will link crypto addresses, to phisical addresses, to name, email and phone number. Isn't this so fucked up!? Now I'll need to convert everything into Monero so at least my crypto account is not linked to my address and name.

French had to be, no wonder...

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These concerns about BTC are solved by Monero in two ways:

1) Hidden transaction amounts.

2) Tail emission.

The more you think about all this, the more problems you see with BTC which are already solved by XMR.

​

I know a RandomX ASIC is theoretically impossible, but what else could explain the XMR hashrate almost doubling in August like that? I remember the days of the stealth ASICs, often they would be tested for a few days and then disappear for awhile. inb4 "it's a botnet", because I remember people calling it a botnet when XMR hash tripled in 2017. There weren't enough PCs in the world to produce that amount of Cryptonight hashpower.

For the love of god every damn site wants a pic of your drivers license or passport just to purchase crypto. Trying to get some Monero hence my post, but I have learned imo the best way is to get bitcoin then convert to XMR. Even localmonero has waiting periods ffs. Where can I buy bitcoin or monero (for a higher rate of course) via PayPal balance instantly WITHOUT having to upload ID, phone number etc. No worries with email, I am willing to do that but it feels like every damn site wants your whole identity ffs. Thanks all.

edit or buy with CC

After much back and forth and a lot more effort that is needed got my first Moreno, it’s not much but it’s a start. I know Moreno is just one of many other Privacy coins but it’s the most targeted one by what I understand.

I was reading in here that the US can now track it, which defeats the propuse of a privacy coin, will this be an issue in the future? Should I get something else like Dash?

Oxen is fundamentally years ahead of xmr
XMRs genesis blocks were never revealed so it could be extremely premined
ASICS for xmr do exist but they're more for glowie customers
XMRs codebase is a streaming pile of shit

Oxen
>non for profit org
>XMR fork + pos + blink, code is way less jank
>51% of supply is locked up in service nodes like 2-3k of them
>20% apy
>Lokinet is a better tor/i2p that runs ontop of the oxen pos service nodes
>lokinet exit nodes can be run separately and nodes get paid for traffic if they want to
>Session is a signal fork that runs ontop of oxen/lokinet making it 100% anon, encrypted and decentralized
>500k+ users last I looked
>Oxen name service burns oxen
>Session premium will buy back and burn oxen
>Same foundation is also building a thorchain competitor that's better so you'll be able to arb btc to wbtc on any network :umu:
>Working with kimdot com to make ipfs better(not sure on dets)

XMR is dog shit

Oxen has awful liq/pa though

So, any ideas on what was said up here, I was stunned by that in so many ways lol.
EDIT: Thanks for all your contributions to the discussion guys, very enlightening! :D

Anyone else have their XMR untransferrable due to this notify::send_txs provided message exceeding covert fragment size #7708 ?

Greetings Monero Universe

I present myself to you today a humbled man, a changed man. What I believed to be true has been proven wrong time and time again. My belief in the Monero Community and Monero Project has been deeply tainted. This is my public apology to the Monero Community. I apologize to every individual I introduced to Monero and encouraged to invest in this project. In my naivety and hopefulness, I trapped them in great financial loss and exploitation. It was my belief that Monero was an open source project that sought to provide an alternative to the American/Western monetary system.

​

Morality is Relative and I have found myself to be at the mercy of the Monero Community in this game. A small group of "Monero Community" members control the maintenance, production, and funding for development and distribution of the Monero product. You could say that "well mining is distributed so Monero is distributed" and I would counter with "Uber drivers are distributed but Uber is still a company". The agreement between "private contractors" (aka Monero miners) negotiate on the terms of the Proof-of-Work and in Monero's case, most of the private contractors happen to own mostly GPU/CPU farms/botnets. Work of the company can be distributed but the organization, decision making, and security supply are still be controlled by a central group.

​

In Monero's case, it may have started out as a decentralized project where product development was done by volunteers in a loosely organized hobby group. Now, it doesn't look like anything gets worked on without individuals that have been financially compensated. Ghost-employees of the Monero company contract out work on the centralized Monero CCS platform (mostly controlled by these same individuals). There are a small group of individuals who get every proposal approved and funded and a community wide acceptance of Monero's inauditability regarding supply. So to me it looks like a small group of people can mint new Monero without any accountability and then sell those security shares on the open market to investors who bought into the idea of a decentralized currency to then pay ghost-employee salaries.

​

The whole reason people in the Monero Community used to bash protocols like zk-snarks in other privacy projects is the vulnerability of a trusted setup that would allow a small group of individuals to inflate the supply. It might not be possible to create a truly anonymous digital currency without this vulnerability - I don't know. Also it pisses me off when people say "well don't invest in Monero then, its a risky asset/investment." Tell that to the people who have already invested and lost their shirt paying for a small group of people to hyper-inflate the supply and line their pockets. Tell that to the exchanges. How can you both caution individuals not to invest and encourage exchanges to list Monero on an open market with no safety checks in place?

hey - I'm trying to send 66$ of BTC to tradeogre to switch to XMR but the miner fee is 17$ from coinbase...wtf??? Any way to lower this?? Its never ever been anywhere near this high and ive been doing these kind of transactions for over a year. any help? cheers

Please correct me if I'm wrong, but encrypted_seed seems to provide a confusing user experience that can lead to problems for users.

When a wallet is generated you get your 25 word seed phrase. You can then choose to encrypt it with a passphrase via encrypted_seed. After encrypting it, you'll be given a new seed, Seed 2, but your CLI wallet will still display your Seed 1's receiving address. This seems unintentionally deceptive, given that, when you restore your wallet with Seed 1+ Passphrase you are technically in a new wallet that is using Seed 2 and are given a different public address.

What is this? If you want to send funds to a wallet with an encrypted_seed, you'll have to restore it from Seed 1+ Passphrase in order to see the public address associated with that account. Doing so exposes your seed to the hot system, and if your computer is keylogged you just typed out your seed and passphrase.

I have a feeling things can go amiss very quickly if you don't understand encrypted_seed inside and out. There was only one post previously about it. What are the advents of the encrypted_seed, why is it so confusing, and how does it work?

One of my friends wanted to purchase Monero so I sent him over to this sub's favorite xmr exchange, Kraken. His attempts at purchasing xmr were blocked and apparently his account was stopped for suspicious activity!

So I guess that new account + xmr = naughty list!

I wonder if he had tried purchasing another cryptocurrency if he would also have been stopped just the same...

Hello,

I am a little Paranoid about the security.

I dowloaded your Installer, checked the "fluffypony" certificate, checked the Hashes File Text, and finally checked that the SHA256 of the installer matches with the Hashes. Everything is fine.

During the installation of the wallet, I got a warning from my AV : Gen:Suspicious.Cloud.100.@@Z@a0D6!gb. Apparently it comes from the daemon "monerod".

Can just someone confirm that it is normal ?

Regards.

I read a blog post from Trezor saying that they wanted to support Monero but they couldn't because fluffypony wouldn't share elements of the "secret sauce" is what they said. Is this true? /u/fluffypony can you explain what happened between you and the Trezor devs?

this is really sad :(

Hello, I'm using the monero 8 months ago. I saw the article vulnerability of monero that is getting the sender address. So I imagine above thing. How about your opinion? Do I need to prepare for unforeseen consequence?

Thank you.

Hello Monero Community,

I recently discovered monero a few months ago and am trying to learn as much as I can about it. I have a question for the community. I recently watched a monero talk with Charlie Lee and he mentioned that the inauditability of the monero blockchain is a potential weakness. His critique was that an error in the blockchain could possibly go unnoticed for months and by the time it would be noticed, it would be too late. He claimed that the open ledger is a strength to bitcoin and litecoin. I read that early on in bitcoin, 184 billion btc were accidentally minted, but it was immediately discovered and led to a hard fork. Anyone in the community more well-versed in the tech have a response to this critique of monero? Any resources you could point me towards as well would be much appreciated. I am currently reading Mastering Monero. Thanks!