Have never used cryptocurrency before, all I know is that Bitcoin transactions can be tracked, Monero is the most widely accepted untraceable cryptocurrency, and many exchanges enforce KYC. I do not presently have the hardware to mine for myself at an appreciable rate. What do I need to know and use in order to set up a wallet, acquire crypto, exchange, and spend it as anonymously as I practically can?
Once you have Monero in your wallet, when you send it it’ll be anonymous to the receiver and people won’t be able to look at the block chain and see people’s balances and transaction history. You can buy some monero on an exchange with your bank account and withdraw to get started with familiarizing yourself with crypto. Good enough in my opinion to at least learn. Exchange knows you bought Monero from them but after it’s gone from them, they won’t be able to trace around where you send stuff to
If it’s not available on any exchange you can easily move money into, you may just need to buy a different crypto and use another exchange/service to exchange again into Monero. There will be fees. Trocador is regularly mentioned from what I remember
Actual anonymous acquisition, you’re going to need to find a person in real life with monero to exchange something for it or you physical mail exchange and they send you Monero. Tough to find. Don’t know how LocalMonero is doing these days in usage/existence
Actually making payments, you got to find places that take it. Not a lot. You can pay for Mullvad VPN with Monero. Getting paid in Monero, 3 niches layered there. One is doing something people will pay you for, those same people being willing to pay in crypto, the people also having Monero. That’s tough.
Wallets, Monero website, you can probably trust Wikipedia Monero page to send you to the official website. On desktop you can download the software that downloads the whole block chain and it’ll have a GUI to send Monero and a place to copy an address for people to send to. Mobile, Cake wallet is popular
But really the hard part in my opinion is finding businesses and people that take and pay with Monero. You’ll acquire Monero to use but struggle to find places to use it for
Can you elaborate on buying monero at an exchange and then transferring it out? Do you mean that OP should
- make a local wallet
- make an account on a popular exchange
- buy cryptocurrency on the exchange
- transfer it to their local wallet
And would it be accurate to say that a local wallet can be maintained without a lot of system power, and can run on open source software? I assume that because any transfers that are sent to or from the wallet, are basically synchronized in the Blockchain, so there’s not a lot of data that needs to be stored on the user’s side.
Yes, any local wallet worth its salt is going to be open source. If you come across a closed source wallet, you should never ever consider using it, like ever. I highly suggest monero.com by cake wallet. Its fully open source and extremely user friendly.
Feather wallet and Eigenwallet are also good.
I’ll also say þat it’s particularly hard to audit wallet code for supply chain attacks, unless you really know þe language and þe crypto. Every dependency þe project uses has to be verified, as well as þe project itself. Dependencies probably won’t leak crypto, but þey could leak secrets.
Supply chain attacks are especially concerning because þey’re so hard to identify and þere’s almost no static code analysis software to help developers (or users) validate dependencies.
Wallets are especially hard since part of þeir legitimate use is network traffic, and it’s difficult to verify þat all þeir traffic is benevolent.
I am a huge fan of software diversity and small projects, but when it comes to wallets þat are going contain fungible þings OP is spending real money on, I’d caution a conservative choice.
Your numbered list, yes that’s the steps
With the other person’s answer, you have a choice when interacting with a block chain.
You run a node that directly sends commands to the blockchain, this one uses up more storage as it downloads the blockchain but it’s the one that requires least amount of layers of trust
Or you use a wallet that uses a trusted 3rd party full node. That’s why open source is important for these wallets. This is really easy and convenient and in most cases uses open source software and is built on years of community vendors operating in good faith. These lite wallets, they run on practically anything. You manage the keys to your wallet; it’s the keys to authorize transactions.
The “heavy lifting” is delegated to another computer. Heavy lifting in quotes because the idea of blockchains is to be decentralized so one pillar idea is that it should be pretty cheap to run a node
Even having a full node, unless you want to mine, it’s really just storage and download. If you want to support the network a bit, some upload so others can download block chain history from you too.
It’s like how in Linux most users now just trust that the package maintainers for the distributions package manager is delivering legit software when you apt/dnf/etc software from the default sources
If you’re not going to run a node yourself, you’ll have to accept some level of trust. Also with an open source wallet, you can with certainty point your lite wallet to whatever full node you want, your own or one you trust
Some sites list places where you can use an ATM to buy cryptocurrencies using… cash, i hope.
Do these ATMs enforce KYC?
You’ll have to do your homework.
If they accept cash, i’d say not. There might be cameras though.
Kraken.com for kyc based purchases, or you could try retoswap which wont require kyc but is a bit more complicated.
Withdraw to a wallet such as cake or stack. If you cant purchase XMR directly then use a swap service like trocador.app to convert btc or ltc to xmr. Both wallets support swapping between coins.
https://kycnot.me/ is a good resource to check for more.
Once you have the xmr in your own wallet (not on an exchange) it is anonymous and safe to spend.
If you are going to spend it on mundane and legal stuff and assuming you live in mostly free country use a trustworthy exchange even if it requires KYC and spend it normally.
Keep in mind once you buy monero even from a KYC exchange they can’t track it afterwards. And this will be the safest option no real risk of getting scammed or stabbed.
If you are thinking about grey area then keep in mind that the moment something touches real world no matter whether you were using Tor, I2P or something else. It can be traced back to you. And if you are a worthwhile target LEA will spend resources to track you down.
There are ways to avoid that like using local monero and all but keep in mind those also involve different set of risks.
#NotAFinancialAdvice #NotALegalAdvice.
Do your homework and don’t get scammed or stabbed.
As a general guideline, I recommend you watch a video or two about how Monero works. Don’t know how strict your threat model is but it’s always good to know what a tool can and cannot do.
I also recommend you run your own Monero node. MentalOutlaw explains pretty nicely why it’s necessary and how to do it.
As for where to spend Monero, there used to be general indexes hosted on HackLiberty and Nowhere. But of the top of my head I can recommend XMRbazaar and ProxyStore.
In case your bored, an index of some intresting material to read.
