They add support for USDT I assume, as there is no support yet. Weird wording I agree

Yes you can just say that.

1. If someone knows for a fact that you have Monero and they know the exact amount, and want to know where it came from:

   • Move them to a new wallet
   • I mined these coins a very long time ago, I do not have the mining equipment anymore
   • Also the wallet I used to mine them was on an old computer that got infected so I moved all to this new wallet

2. If someone suspects that you have Monero but does NOT know how much:

   • Imagine you own $10k in Monero
   • Move a small amount to a wallet ($200??)
   • If authorities ask you how much you have, show them the wallet with $200.
   • Go back to scenario 1 (I got those 200 from mining a long time ago etc etc)

3. If no one suspects that you have Monero, and for now you are “in the clear”:

   • Follow good opsec
   • Do not tell anyone that you have Monero
   • Do not exchange that Monero for fiat using KYC services. Always use something like Haveno, or use the Monero to buy prepaid cards anonymously to use in shops
   • If someone starts suspecting that you might be using Monero but does not know how much, revert to scenario 2

Of course it is better if you avoid anyone knowing you have Monero altogether.

Remember that you always have the option of moving them to a new wallet, say you got hacked and have no access to it.

Of course all this depends on your country and how authorities are there. If you live in a very authoritarian area where authorities do not care about evidence and they only care that “you look guilty”, nothing will save you. If you live in a country where you must go to court and be proven guilty, I think with Monero its pretty easy to do any of those steps and cover your ass.

But as always, try to not be discovered using Monero in the first place

Yeah you could say that, but as said in another comment, just transfer them to another wallet and claim you lost them in a hack or accident 😄

Yes that is exactly it.

That is why you should always make sure to lose all your XMR on a boating accident right after acquiring them 😉

No, Haveno is completely Non-Kyc.

The only problem with Haveno is that you need to pre-own a small amount of XMR as a safety deposit to avoid scams. So it is not the best if you need to get started from scratch. (You get your deposit back after the trade)

Haveno essentially generates a wallet for you that you use on trades, so when I say “add funds” I mean to that new wallet (which is locally generated and thus non-custodial, keys are always under your control)

Once you add some funds to Haveno, just click any of the offers listed there. You’ll probably need to add a payment account to your haveno account but the app will guide you through all the steps. There are some tutorials floating around there.

Sounds daunting but it really is super super easy

Haveno all the way!

Super easy, just open the app, add some funds, click on “take offer” on whatever trade there is and follow the steps.

I understand your point, however that is not really the topic at hand, I was just trying to give some context and to open the discussion as to why XMR does not seem to be gaining traction in Russia or why there are no Ruble trades in Haveno.

Now I do not want to enter a political discussion here

It is irrelevant for the conversation if it is a good or a bad strategy, or if it is moral or immoral to apply these sanctions. If I were a Russian individual, I would be using Monero to escape these sanctions, which leads me to wonder whether or not this is happening or why we do not see Russian trades in Haveno.

I would like to add that if you actually have XMR in a wallet that you got from mining, and you never moved those funds before, you CAN confirm that those funds came from mining. In fact, the GUI wallet will show a symbol indicating that it came from mining (what’s called a “coinbase” transaction).

However you could just say that you moved the funds from the mining wallet to this other wallet, but then I will ask again: Show me the mining wallet that got those mining transactions.

Well as always, depending on your use case and your threat model, using those swap services might not be the best idea, specially if you want to be “stealthy” when purchasing or selling xmr.

If you buy or sell XMR in simpleswap and use a KYC’d coin (like BTC that you withdrew or deposited from/to a CEX like kraken or binance), then authorities can ask the simpleswap owners and they will show them that you traded Monero.

Again if this is not a concern to you, then perhaps those swapping services are “good enough”, even though I have read countless stories of them performing shotgun scams and shotgun KYC where they will randomly select you and make it very difficult for you to recover your funds, especially if those funds do not come from “trusted” sources aka another CEX.

But again as always, that is up to you and your use case / threat model, and the risks you are willing to take.

I would say depending on who is asking you…

If you have there some xmr valued many hundreds of euros, it is pretty unlikely you actually mined it unless you have some very powerful setup.

If I am the government, then I will ask you: Show me this mining setup. Prove to me that you at least owned or had access to this setup.

I think when we talk about plausible deniability it’s not in the context or “Where did this money come from”, but more along the lines of “I cannot prove it was actually you who bought this item”.

Imagine you buy an item that is restricted or sanctioned in your area, plausible deniability makes it so it is very difficult for me to prove in a court it was you who bought it, and very easy for you to evade these accusations.

If someone forces you to open your wallet, you can just have a second hidden wallet where you keep your stash, and then just open another wallet with, let’s say, 5 or 10 euros worth or XMR that you can actually mine in a reasonable amount of time with some old machines.

Used it on two occasions already. One trade took 2h (I guess the trading peer was busy) and the other one was less than one minute after blockchain confirmation finished (10 blocks as usual).

What else “working normally” do people need? There are already very good offers from time to time. If you check once or twice a day you can get pretty decent offers (0% markup or very close). Also I heard people say that liquidity is now upwards of 1400 xmr in the platform.

Just try it out, its way simpler than people make it sound

That is a very cool mechanism. Thanks for the info!

Just watched the 3 available episodes.

Quite impressed with the quality so far, and really excited for you to make more episodes!

This is a very nice continuation to Breaking Monero, nicely updated to the current times.

Hopefully it will not stop without closure like Breaking Monero though, all my luck to you! Keep up the good work :)

I think there is one very good usecase for churning though.

And before anything, yes I know that one should not use CEX but in some cases it is just much more convenient. Although I am now starting to use Haveno, I get not everyone is up to it, and CEX is just plain easier.

Imagine the following scenario:

I buy a shitcoin over at a KYC’d CEX.

I send that coin to a centralized swap, or trade it with a compromised person, in exchange of XMR.

Lets say I repeatedly do that procedure with the same person or CEX. Then I end with multiple “small” outputs on my wallet, all from the same entity. Let’s say for example 10 outputs of 0.1 XMR, which all have been sent to me by the same entity.

Now I want to buy something that costs 1 XMR. I need to use my 10 existing outputs. I make a transaction that takes 10 inputs and 2 outputs (what I buy + change). The transaction has 10 inputs, and all of those inputs have a ring, where one of the members of each ring is an output controlled by the compromised entity.

The likelihood of someone making a transaction with 10 inputs, where those 10 inputs happen to contain a member in the ring that was sent by that specific exchange and that is linkable to my identity is near zero, unless it is me who is spending those 10 outputs.

Therefore, the person that sent me those 10 outputs can make a very well educated guess that it was me who bought that item for 1 XMR.

This “vulnerability” is actually talked about in the Breaking Monero series, and as far as I know, it will be solved when FCMP++ comes, since we will get rid of rings altogether.

However let’s say I do one step of churning with all those outputs without mixing them with eachother. That is, I send to myself 10 transactions of 0.1 XMR, so I just “forward” each output to myself once, without making any transaction that contains two poisoned inputs at the same time.

Then I will still end up with 10 outputs of 0.1 XMR, but all the “poisoned” outputs are present in different and unlinkable transactions, and the negative actor does not know whether they are truly spent or not.

Then I can actually join those 10 outputs into one 1XMR transaction safely, knowing that I am the only person who knows where those 10 outputs come from.

Am I wrong in this thought process?