Find answers to recurring questions and concerns about Monero.
The terminology used in Monero can be quite complex, for this reason we have the Moneropedia. A comprehensive list of terms that you often see and their explanation. If you don't know what a word means or you would like to have more info about it, just visit the Moneropedia. Some examples of often searched terms are: node, fungibility, view-key, pruning.
Monero is an open source community project. Meaning that there is no company who runs it and there is no CEO who hires people. Everything is built by volunteers or community-funded contributors who dedicate their time to the project. There are many ways to contribute:
You can buy Monero from an exchange or from an individual. Exchanges are the most common way to buy Monero; there are compliant exchanges in most jurisdictions. Some wallets include functionality to easily buy Monero with fiat or other cryptocurrencies. Alternatively, you can try mining Monero to get coins from the block reward.
You can directly trade Monero for national currencies (USD, EUR, GBP, etc) or other cryptocurrencies on many exchanges. Some require KYC (proof of identification); others do not, like decentralized exchanges.
Monero is not based on Bitcoin. It is based on the CryptoNote protocol. Bitcoin is a completely transparent system, where people can see exactly how much money is being sent from one user to another. Monero hides this information to protect user privacy in all transactions. It also has a dynamic block size and dynamic fees, an ASIC-resistant proof of work (RandomX), and a tail emission, among several other changes.
Monero is an Esperanto word which means 'coin'. Initially Monero was called 'Bitmonero', which translates to 'Bitcoin' in Esperanto. After the community decided to fork from the original maintainer, 'bit' was dropped in favour of simply 'Monero'.
Monero used to have 2 network upgrades (hard forks) a year, but this is not the case anymore. The choice of the biannual hard forks was taken in order to be able to introduce important consensus changes, which added privacy features and network-wide improvements (For example Bulletproofs and CLSAG both required a hard fork) and avoid the ossification of the protocol.
Recently, the biannual hard forks included changes to the PoW algorithm, to preserve ASIC-resistance. Hard forks in Monero are scheduled and non-contentious, which means no new coin is created.
During the years the community has created a vast amount of informative content like articles and videos. Most of these videos are publicly available on platforms like YouTube. To optimize their effectiveness, they should be viewed in sequence:
No, Monero does not have a hard block size limit. Instead, the block size can increase or decrease over time based on demand. It is capped at a certain growth rate to prevent outrageous growth.
No. Monero uses a completely non-interactive, non-custodial, and automatic process to create private transactions. By contrast, mixing services require users to opt-in to participate.
Monero uses three different privacy technologies: ring signatures, ring confidential transactions (RingCT), and stealth addresses. These hide the sender, amount, and receiver in the transaction, respectively. All transactions on the network are private by mandate; there is no way to accidentally send a transparent transaction. This feature is exclusive to Monero. You do not need to trust anyone else with your privacy.
Monero is not magic. If you use Monero but give your name and address to another party, the other party will not magically forget your name and address. If you give out your secret keys, others will know what you've done. If you get compromised, others will be able to keylog you. If you use a weak password, others will be able to brute force your keys file. If you backup your seed in the cloud, you'll be poorer soon.
There is no such thing as 100% anonymous. If nothing else, your anonymity set is the set of people using Monero. Some people don't use Monero. Monero may also have bugs. Even if not, ways may exist to infer some information through Monero's privacy layers, either now or later. Attacks only get better. If you wear a seatbelt, you can still die in a car crash. Use common sense, prudence and defense in depth.
ASICs are basically special computers created to do only one job, contrary to normal computers, which are made for general purpose. This characteristic makes ASICs very efficient for mining.
The problem is that these devices are very expensive and can be afforded by few. This leads to few entities owning a big amount of the hashrate of the network, which is a serious threat to the security of the network itself. For example, if big ASIC operators collude and manage to gain the majority of the hashrate of the network, they could arbitrarily reject transactions.
Monero fixes this problem by being ASIC-resistant: it uses an algorithm (RandomX) that strongly reduces the efficiency of ASICs, making them not profitable to build. Miners can use common consumer hardware, which allows them to compete fairly. The Monero network is currently protected by thousands of miners using 'regular' computers. This results in a network much harder to attack, no miner having significant advantage over other miners.
The Monero community has created a series of videos called "Breaking Monero", where potential Monero vulnerabilities are explored and discussed. There are 14 videos, with each exploring a different subject. Check out the playlist on YouTube.
After you have downloaded the Monero software (GUI and CLI alike), your antivirus or firewall may flag the executables as malware. Some antiviruses only warn you about the possible menace, others go as far as silently removing your downloaded wallet/daemon. This likely happens because of the integrated miner, which is used for mining and for block verification. Some antiviruses may erroneously consider the miner as dangerous software and act to remove it.
The problem is being discussed and solutions are being elaborated. In the meantime, if you get a warning from your antivirus, make sure the software you downloaded is legitimate (see the guides linked below), then add an exception for it in your antivirus, so that it won't get removed or blocked.
Monero has value because people are willing to buy it. If no one is willing to buy Monero, then it will not have any value. Monero's price increases if demand exceeds supply, and it decreases if supply exceeds demand.
Fungibility is a simple property of money such that there are no differences between two amounts of the same value. If you and a friend each had one 10 dollar bill, you could swap these and neither of you would gain or lose anything. However, let's say that everyone knows your 10 dollar bill previously passed through a casino. Then, your friend might not want to trade, since they're afraid their bank will not accept the 'dirty' bill. Even if you aren't aware of the bill's prior use at the casino, you would be disadvantaged. This is a problem, since you need to constantly check that the money you're receiving isn't "tainted". Monero is fungible, which means people do not need to go through this effort.
In Monero, every transaction output is uniquely associated with a key image that can only be generated by the holder of that output. Key images that are used more than once are rejected by the miners as double-spends and cannot be added to a valid block. When a new transaction is received, miners verify that the key image does not already exist for a previous transaction to ensure it's not a double-spend.
We can also know that transaction amounts are valid even though the value of the inputs that you are spending and the value of the outputs you are sending are encrypted (these are hidden to everyone except the recipient). Because the amounts are encrypted using Pedersen commitments what this means is that no observers can tell the amounts of the inputs and outputs, but they can do math on the Pedersen commitments to determine that no Monero was created out of thin air.
As long as the encrypted output amounts you create is equal to the sum of the inputs being spent (which includes an output for the recipient and a change output back to yourself and the unencrypted transaction fee), you have a legitimate transaction and know no Monero is being created out of thin air.
Monero has a fixed emission rate, not a set maximum supply. Monero tail emission started at block 2641623, on 2022-06-09 at 00:29 UTC, and will permanently remain at 0.3 XMR per minute (0.6 XMR per block). This is approximately 1% inflation for the first year and will approach 0% inflation in future years. This tail emission allows for permanent incentives to secure Monero, even in the far future, while keeping inflation at a very low percent.
Miners process transactions on the Monero network by mining blocks. The miner of a block is paid the constant block reward of 0.6 XMR, and the transaction fees of the users who have transactions in that block. Monero has the block reward rather than relying solely on the transaction fees to give the miners incentive to keep securing the network with their hashrate, and keep transaction fees low.
The tail emission caused by this constant block reward creates an inflation rate of less than 1% which trends towards 0% over time. The fixed emission of the currency ensures human corruption cannot over inflate the supply. Keeping the network predictable, decentralized, and secure.
For a lightweight wallet, you give your view key to a node, who scans the blockchain and looks for incoming transactions to your account on your behalf. This node will know when you receive money, but it will not know how much you receive, who you received it from, or who you are sending money to. Depending on your wallet software, you may be able to use a node you control to avoid privacy leaks. For more privacy, use a normal wallet, which can be used with your own node.
There are multiple wallets available for a vast number of platforms. On this website you'll find the wallets released by the Core Team (GUI and CLI) and a list of widely trusted and open source third party wallets for desktop and mobile.
View available walletsYou probably didn't. It's very hard to simply 'lose' your coins, since they are technically nowhere. Your coins 'live' on the blockchain and are linked to your account through a system of public and private keys secured by cryptography. That's why if you don't see your funds, it's probably because of a technical issue. Take a look at the 'Resources & Help' section for a list of useful resources that will help you identify and fix your problem.
Don't worry, your coins are safe. To be able to spend them you only have to download and run the latest Monero software. You can use the mnemonic seed you previously saved to restore your wallet at any time. Note that hard forks in Monero are scheduled and non-contentious. Which means no new coin is created.
If you are running a full node locally, you need to copy the entire blockchain to your computer. This can take a long time, especially on an old hard drive or slow internet connection. If you are using a remote node, your computer still needs to request a copy of all the outputs, which can take several hours. Be patient, and if you would like to sacrifice some privacy for faster sync times, consider using a remote node or lightweight wallet instead.
A new block is added to the blockchain approximately every 2 minutes. Your wallet will need to scan these blocks to find transactions which belong to it. This process is not necessary when using a light wallet, also known as a remote synchronization wallet. For light wallets, a remote server (which could be managed by you) does the scanning on your behalf.
Yes, you can, but you probably shouldn't. Importing an external blockchain is very resource intensive and forces you to trust whoever is providing you the blockchain. It's usually faster to download it the normal way: running the daemon and letting it synchronize with the other nodes in the Monero network. If you really need to import an external blockchain, you can find one on downloads.getmonero.org.
Support for Tor is still in its infancies, but it's already possible to natively send transactions through the network and to run a Monero daemon on the Tor network. Better Tor and I2P integrations are in progress.
A full node requires a considerable amount of storage and could take a long time to download and verify the entire blockchain, especially on older hardware. If you have limited storage, a pruned node is recommended. It only stores 1/8th of unnecessary blockchain data while keeping the full transaction history. If plenty of storage is available, a full node is recommended but a pruned node still greatly contributes to the network and improves your privacy.
The Monero blockchain is always growing so there is no fixed size. As of 2024, the full blockchain is around ~225GB. A pruned blockchain is about ~86GB. Check out the Moneropedia entry on pruning to learn the difference between a full and a pruned blockchain.
When you download the blockchain, you are downloading the entire history of the transactions that occurred in the Monero network since the genesis block. The transactions and the cryptographic proofs that come with them take a lot of space, which is needed to ensure that the history can be proven to have happened in a certain way. Technologies like pruning can reduce storage requirements.
Yes. You don't need to download the blockchain to transact on the network. You can connect to a remote node, which stores the blockchain for you. All the most common wallets (including GUI and CLI) allow to use remote nodes to transact on the network. There are multiple ways to take advantage of this functionality. For example GUI and CLI offer a 'bootstrap node' feature, which allow people to download their own blockchain while using a remote node to immediately use the network.
Running a personal node is the safest way to interact with the Monero network, because you are in full control and you don't need to rely on third parties. From a general point of view running a node is not dangerous, but keep in mind that your ISP can see you are running a Monero node.
It's safe to use a remote node, but be aware it can compromise some privacy. The node operator can see your IP address and the height at which your wallet synced. They can see when you broadcast transactions (though they can't tell if the transaction is yours or if you're relaying it). For maximum privacy, run your own node or connect through Tor/I2P.
Join the community and ask. We're always happy to help newcomers.