A document created by the Monero Outreach workgroup containing materials and tips for an effective guerrilla marketing campaign.
faq->a4
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 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.
As long as the encrypted output amounts you create is equal to the sum of the inputs that are being spent (which include an output for the recipient and a change output back to yourself and the unencrypted transaction fee), then you have a legitimate transaction and know no Monero is being created out of thin air. Pedersen commitments mean that the sums can be verified as being equal, but the Monero value of each of the sums and the Monero value of the inputs and outputs individually are undeterminable.
Monero uses a unique hash function that transforms scalars into elliptic curve points. It is useful for creating key images, in particular. This document, authored by Shen Noether, translates its code implementation (the ge_fromfe_frombytes_vartime() function) into mathematical expressions.
Ring signatures are a common construction used to provide signer ambiguity among a non-interactive set of public keys specified at the time of signing. Unlike early approaches where signature size is linear in the size of the signer anonymity set, current optimal solutions either require centralized trusted setups or produce signatures logarithmic in size. However, few also provide linkability, a property used to determine whether the signer of a message has signed any previous message, possibly with restrictions on the anonymity set choice. Here we introduce Triptych, a family of linkable ring signatures without trusted setup that is based on generalizations of zero-knowledge proofs of knowledge of commitment openings to zero. We demonstrate applications of Triptych in signer-ambiguous transaction protocols by extending the construction to openings of parallel commitments in independent anonymity sets. Signatures are logarithmic in the anonymity set size and, while verification complexity is linear, collections of proofs can be efficiently verified in batches. We show that for anonymity set sizes practical for use in distributed protocols, Triptych offers competitive performance with a straightforward construction.
The Monero Research Lab released an annotated version of the cryptonote whitepaper. This is sort of like an informal review of the claims that are made line-by-line of the whitepaper. It also explains some of the harder concepts in relatively easy to understand terms.
