How Monero keeps you anonymous, explained plainly

On Bitcoin anyone can follow coins from address to address and read every amount. Monero was built so the chain tells an outsider almost nothing. It gets there with three ideas working together.

Stealth addresses hide the receiver

When someone pays your Monero address, the coins do not land at that address on the chain. The sender creates a one time address for that single payment, and only your wallet can recognise it as yours. Two payments to the same published address look completely unrelated on chain.

Ring signatures hide the sender

When you spend, your wallet mixes your real output with fifteen others pulled from the chain, making a ring of sixteen. The signature proves one of them is being spent without saying which. An outsider sees sixteen possible sources instead of one.

RingCT hides the amount

Amounts are encrypted. The network can still verify that nothing was created out of thin air, because the math checks that inputs equal outputs, but nobody watching learns how much moved.

What Monero cannot hide

• Your IP address, unless your wallet connects through Tor or i2p, or you run your own node.
• Your exchange account, if you bought XMR somewhere that knows your name.
• Your habits, like moving the same amount at the same hour every time.

That last part is where a swap helps. Swapping into Monero from a wallet you control, into a fresh subaddress, keeps your Monero history out of every exchange database. See BTC to XMR or the Monero page.

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