The founder, thankful_for_today, proposed some controversial changes that the community disagreed with. A fallout ensued, and the Monero Core Team forked the project with the community following this new Core Team. This Core Team has provided oversight since.
Monero has made several large improvements since launch. The blockchain was migrated to a different database structure to provide greater efficiency and flexibility, minimum ring signature sizes were set so that all transactions were private by mandate, and RingCT was implemented to hide the transaction amounts. Nearly all improvements have provided improvements to security or privacy, or they have facilitated use. Monero continues to develop with goals of privacy and security first, ease of use and efficiency second.
Monero takes privacy seriously. Monero needs to be able to protect users in a court of law and, in extreme cases, from the death penalty. This level of privacy must be completely accessible to all users, whether they are technologically competent or have no idea how Monero works. A user needs to confidently trust Monero in a way that this person does not feel pressured into changing their spending habits for risk of others finding out.
Users must be able to trust Monero with their transactions, without risk of error or attack. Monero gives the full block reward to the miners, who are the most critical members of the network who provide this security. Transactions are cryptographically secure using the latest and most resilient encryption tools available.
You can have much more control if you want to. Monero gives the possibility to create multiple accounts, each containing multiple subaddresses, useful if you want to control multiple accounts. For example, you may want to have an @account for receiving donations and another one for your daily use. That will allow you to easily monitor incoming funds to your 'donations' account, without mixing it with your primary account.
When you create your wallet for the first time, an @address will be automatically shown to you. That's your primary address. If you want, you can simply use that address to receive payments. You should be concerned about who knows about this address (since one address in different locations can be associated), but you do not need to worry about blockchain observers watching transactions to this address like with Bitcoin. A friend can send transactions to the same address without reduced privacy.
As you can see from the picture above, every account has an index number that you can use to switch from one account to the other using the command `account switch [index]`. For example, using the picture above as reference, if you would like to switch to the 'Donations' account to monitor it, you can do so by giving your CLI this command `account switch 1`. Now you are sitting on your 'Donations' account and you can start using it right away.
Every account can host a virtually infinite amount of subaddresses. These work exactly like a normal address and you can create as many as you want and use them to receive XMR to the account they are linked to. To create a new subaddress for an account, use the command:
Note that the instructions below are just the minimal necessary to create and use accounts/subaddresses. The CLI offer more capillary ways to handle accounts and the wallet in general. Use the command 'help' to list all the available options.
Accepting a payment with the GUI is very easy. Doesn't matter if you are a merchant or an user, you will have two pages available: Receive and Merchants.
To receive XMR you only need to provide the payer with an @address where they can send funds to. Most of the time it's easier to just share a QR code and let the payer scan it, instead of copy-pasting the alphanumeric string. With the GUI every generated address come with its QR code. Make the person scan the QR code with the Monero @wallet on their phone and receive your XMR in minutes. Remember you can generate as many addresses (subaddresses) as you want. This is useful if you want to keep funds separated for any reason.
