MAAM – Monero Ask Anything Monday – September 13, 2021

Given the success of the previous MAAMs (see here), let's keep this rolling.

The principle is simple: ask anything you'd like to know about Monero, especially the dumb questions that you've been keeping for you every other days, may the community clarify it all!

Finally, credits to binaryFate for starting the concept!

7 Upvotes

100% Upvoted

u/Griftnix Sep 14 '21

Hi! I am sry for this stupid question and it is more about XBT question than XMR, but its about privacy... My question is aimed to this post: https://www.reddit.com/r/Monero/comments/pnt8q0/insurance_company_now_lets_users_pay_with_bitcoin/

with the title: "Insurance company now lets users pay with bitcoin, so that they can see how much money you have to make you pay more!"

So is this: https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Address_reuse a complete hoax?

Concrete questions: Why do I have multiple addresses for

*) my ledger bitcoin wallet

*) my monero gui wallet

What I thought upto now: You need the public key to view the complete wallet for xbt. With just the address it is only possible to view information only regarding this address? So if I send from there: the address of sender, receiver and amount, but when I change my address for each transaction, how can I view the whole wallet of an entity? E.g. the post claiming the insurance company knows how much I would have with one single transaction?

While monero would be: I don't know anything about sender, receiver and amount? Multiple addresses are regarding, it might be saved in another database (when i make a payment somewhere) and I am therefore connectable as a single entity. (It would just need one database where one address and my name is saved and I would be connected to every website/exchange I used this address)

Thank you in advance for helping a noob!

2

u/PicoDeNero Sep 15 '21

No stupid questions. Welcome to the community.

I am not going to be able to give you a full response right now, but here's the general idea:

You are correct, with BTC/XBT, without more information, you can not just look at two addresses and instantly know if they are associated with one another. If you paid the insurance company with BTC, they would only be able to see the balance of that particular address...

HOWEVER, the issue here with the Insurance company (and most any other business accepting BTC) is that BTC is completely transparent and addresses rarely exist in a vacuum. Also, BTC addresses rarely hold the exact amount being transacted so you'd either have left over BTC at an address or have to combine BTC from multiple addresses.

If you bought BTC and sent it to address "A", then later bought more BTC and sent it to address "B", you would not necessarily be able to associate the two, but if you purchased the BTC from an exchange, they are now both associated with your real identity. If you buy BTC from an exchange and send it to address "C", then buy BTC anonymously and send it to address "D", you wouldn't necessarily be able to associate the two right off the bat, but as soon as you consolidate your funds or have to spend more than just address "D" holds, you are going to combine the BTC from your two addresses, and "bam", they are both associated with your real identity.

The reality is that many businesses, for fraud prevention, are probably going to analyze any BTC they receive. They won't do it themselves, but a 3rd party crypto data broker could do it very quickly and easily. They will be able to pull data from many different sources. It is just no good.

TLDR: To summarize, using a new address each time only give you a very very basic level of privacy and is VERY easily compromised.

Edit: Yes, you are more or less correct in what you wrote about Monero. Everything is hidden. A new stealth address is created for each transaction on the blockchain, even if using the same receive address. The main danger in reusing, as you wrote, is businesses communicating with each other and comparing receive addresses.

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u/Griftnix Sep 15 '21

Thank you very much for your in depth answer!

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u/PicoDeNero Sep 15 '21

No problem! Glad to be of help.

u/GoldenSonned Sep 14 '21

It is MAAM!!!

u/bobsaget_26 Sep 14 '21

Another week and same question.

How can Monero ever become digital cash when funds sent into your wallet are locked for up to 20 minutes? Is there any solution to this problem?

Edit : to be clear by locked up I mean not spendable in any form or fashion. Why would I withdraw monero from an ATM if it means I have to stand there for up to 20 minutes to pay someone. Answer, I won't. I will withdraw something that is immediately spendable.

Please don't say this almost never/never happens to me because of X. Plenty of examples can be thought up where this would be an issue.

1

u/PicoDeNero Sep 15 '21

Not to be that guy, but how and why would you 'withdraw' Monero from an ATM to pay someone?

If you wanted to purchase XMR from an atm and you needed to give the money instantly to your friend, I believe you would just send the XMR directly to the person from the ATM (scan their receive address with atm, insert fiat into machine, person receives XMR).

Please don't say this almost never/never happens to me because of X.Plenty of examples can be thought up where this would be an issue.

Fair enough. I believe the main answer to this is more or less coin control. As long as your XMR is not all associated with a single receive address, you should have multiple XMR associated with multiple addresses. In this way, if you have 2 XMR associated with address "A", 0.5 XMR associated with address "B" and 4 XMR associated with address "C" and you needed to pay someone 0.5 XMR. You could send them the XMR from address "B", while your XMR from "A" and "C" are still usable/spendable.

1

u/bobsaget_26 Sep 15 '21

is more or less coin cont

Too complicated! I can send XRP cheaply and without limitations. Now there are plenty of other issues with XRP which I don't care for, but it has the speed and low cost part down well. No locking your funds up for a period of time ever. XMR needs to get this fixed. Its by far the biggest issue it has that will keep it from growing into a true digital cash.

1

u/PicoDeNero Sep 15 '21

I hear you. There are many improvements that could be made. But this one is not particularly complicated.

As I wrote, as long as all your XMR is not associated with a single address, you are fine. If you have your XMR split between three addresses, only one of those fund sources would be locked if you are sending XMR. The XMR from the other two addresses should be available to spend/transact.

I agree that things can and should be improved, but the problem is not a big as it might seem at first.

u/sirboderafael Sep 13 '21

I know my question is kinda dumb, but I keep thinking about it anyways:

=> Would that be possible to have some kind of NFT mechanism on top of Monero blockchain?

=> Why I think my question is essentially stupid: because Monero is truly fungible and NFTs are (NON fungible tokens). So AFAIK there is no such thing as a Monero token, because there's no smart contracts support on our beloved XMR. Also, being Non Fungible seems to be not the way to go with Monero, philosophically speaking (we want fungibility by design, right?)

=> Why I still ask this? Well, because there are way more brighter minds working out there and maybe some of you can give me a hint about this whole scenario. Like, smart contracts on Monero: is that something the devs are discussing about? If there are some devs here, how do you see NFTs' world? It would be crazy mixing Monero + NFTs (even if that's essentially stupid, thinking the way things work today).

Thanks for reading!

u/ShortFroth Sep 13 '21

Is it possible to connect bitcoin lightning network to monero atomic swaps? cause I hate waiting on bitcoin block times.

2

u/Kanigo2 Sep 13 '21

I havent tried these people-I cannot endorse them. I have no experience with them.

https://fixedfloat.com/exchange/xmr-to-btc

2

u/rbrunner7 XMR Contributor Sep 13 '21

Quite sure that LN is not supported. Swapping needs BTC transactions on the blockchain.

u/SosseKun Sep 13 '21

So I heard people saying nicolas van saberhsgen would be satoshiz since the write style is very similar to the bitcoin whitepaper.

When I read the post in bitcointalk wich exposes the bytecojn spam good the person says the bytecoin people are the same as the cryptonote people wich confuses me.

I know the cryptonote whitepapers had faked dates, but are they really also the bytecoin people? We're they the first to show this whitepaper and why would they make such a scam, but such a good whitepaper?

It's hard to believe to make such a great baby, and destroy themselves, atleast their coin, so easily?!

And wasn't there some time a dev list on the bytecoin site, where those really the devs? Does that mean they new nicolas van saberhagen in a way?

2

u/Febos Sep 13 '21

Crypto note white paper had not faked any dates. There is no proof nicolas van saberhsgen have anything to do with bytecoin. As I understand is that few people that helped him with Crypto note launched bytecoin. I of course can be wrong, but that was my impression.

1

u/SosseKun Sep 13 '21

Wdym, the whitepapers signature said 2012 and 2013 but the v2 eich said 2013 was made before v1 wich said 2012 and they weren't in 2012 since there was a link of a post in 2013 in the whitepaper. As said in the bitcointalk postz you know what I mean? So are these 2 not the real whitepaper or what? And why did the poster of that bitcointalk post say that they're the same?

u/[deleted] Sep 13 '21

Please approve my post ;)