SatoshiClub and its community moving forward together and continue to introduce you the most interesting projects in cryptocurrencies world. Today we would like to tell you about the AMA session with our friends from Monero Enthusiasts Community. The AMA took place on June 23 and our guest was Diego Salazar.

The total reward pool was $300 and has been splitted in 3 parts.

In this AMA Recap we will try to summarise the most interesting points for you.

Part 1 — introduction

Serg: Dear community, today we will have an AMA with one of the best crypto projects according to CMC: Monero – number 15 at the moment. @ofthesalazar will be our guest today. Welcome!

Diego Salazar: yo what up?

Irina Kravchuk: Hi @ofthesalazar . Nice to meet you. How are you today?

Diego Salazar: I’m doing well. Chilling. Happy to be here to answer questions about Monero.

Serg: Please tell a bit about yourself and how did you become involved with Monero community 🙂

Diego Salazar: Sure. So to start with, a little background. Monero didn’t have a premine, ICO, and has no founder’s reward. There is no corporation, foundation, or anything behind it. Similar to Bitcoin, nobody is in charge. There are no ‘leaders’ per se (like other projects have a CEO or stuff like that).

We really are just a decentralized group with a passion for privacy.

We do have a Core Team, but our core team is very different than other core teams. They aren’t ‘in charge’. They aren’t the boss of anyone. And they don’t lead the project. Basically what they do is bridge the decentralized world that we want to exist with the centralized world that does exist. Let me give an example.

A domain name (i.e. getmonero.org) has to be owned by someone. It can’t be owned by a decentralized community. The payment has to come from somebody’s card, and somebody’s name has to be on there.

The Core Team is comprised of seven trusted individuals that do things like this. Things that require trust. One of their tasks is managing the Monero general fund, which is entirely funded via donations (no premine and stuff remember?). The general fund has a good amount of Monero in there, and the Core Team has made the decision that having someone working full time in Monero from a non-coding perspective would be helpful, so they hired me. I work for the core team and I’m paid from the general fund. I am the only one like this. Note, I am not an employee of ‘Monero’, but of the Core Team, which, again, are just trusted individuals that handle different tasks that require trust.

Further reading on the Core Team’s tasks can be done here: https://web.getmonero.org/2018/03/01/core-team-announcement.html

Serg: what if the person who buys that website for ex will divert its initial purpose? like Roger Veer did for ex

Diego Salazar: This is a good question. The Core Team serve at the pleasure of the community for as long as the community trusts them. We have had changes in the core team before for a few different reasons (none of them due to scandal), but if an individual in the core team were to break the community’s trust, it would be much good to have them in a group that is tasked with doing trusted things, would it?

So the community could kick away the current core team (presumably with some losses) and continue. The website is open source, the code is open source, and we use FOSS for our infrastructure, so everything can be rebuilt. In other words, they hold no cards against the community.

Irina Kravchuk: How does this control from the community happen?

Serg: Yes, how can the community participate in the decission making

Diego Salazar: via the open source nature of EVERYTHING about Monero. If the core team member responsible for the domain-jacking was unwilling to give the domain getmonero.org back to us, the entire getmonero.org website is open source (https://github.com/monero-project/monero-site/) so we can simply make a new name, and as a community tell people that the old site is defunct because of the scandal and we’re under a new site. We would do this on all of our various platforms.

Note, the core team is not the admins of the telegram group, or our subreddit, or our Mattermost, etc. So they would not be able to stop this flow of information.

Irina Kravchuk: Looks solid

Serg: It’s a nice check and balances system

Diego Salazar: Ye. So to answer how I got involved, I actually found Monero before Bitcoin. 🙂 I’m a privacy enthusiast and was looking into cryptocurrency, and remembered a terrible website I had seen, and it turned out to be Monero’s. I own a small design firm, and I wanted to remake the website.

They agreed, and as I did, I learned about Monero and what it stood for, and how it was a pillar of quality in the, frankly, sea of trash that is the crypto space.

So I joined up and became a hard working community member. 🙂

(I didn’t get the job from the core team until a couple of years in)

Serg: That’s an interesting story 🙂 We’ve collected questions from the community via our website. We have selected 5 to be discussed in the first part. Are you ready to start?

Diego Salazar: ye

Q1 from Telgram user @maxzerone

Who chose Esperanto as the language from which to choose the name of the project? Do you use Esperanto for other communication within the project except for the naming?

Diego Salazar: So Esperanto was chosen by the founder of Monero, a random scammer. Yes, you heard that right, Monero was founded by a scammer. It’s a hilarious story, but quite long to get into, though I’d be happy to get into it a bit later if it’s desired. We don’t have contact with this scammy founder anymore (he disappeared), so we don’t know why he chose this, but it was a clever thing.
The name itself was originally bitMonero. Monero means ‘coin’ in Esperanto, so bitMonero means bitcoin. It was also an inspired choice because Esperanto is a stateless language. It has no home country because it was a deliberately man-made language. In the same way, Monero is a stateless money. It belongs to no country, so it fits rather well.
Esperanto is not used for communication purposes (though there are several in the community that speak it), but it is definitely used for several other names of different projects within the community. Things like Monerujo (means wallet) Android wallet, Kovri, Vendo, and more.

If there are enough Esperanto speakers though, we’d be glad to have Esperanto channels of communication for them.

Serg: Monero has nice stories behind it 🙂 You could create a movie 😄

Irina Kravchuk: That’s a great story. How did you get rid of him? Or her?

Serg: or it 😄

Diego Salazar: They left of their own accord. They were ignoring the community requests, doing their own thing, disappearing for a week at a time without communicating with anyone, and more. So the community decided to just put out their own code. That’s how the current Core Team got started actually. Some people heavily involved with the project just decided to do their own thing.
After a while, the scammer realized that the community trusted the new Core Team more than him, so he just disappeared altogether.

So the community hijacked a scam project (because it had actually good cryptography surprisingly) and turned it into a community-based, legit project.

We are one of the few projects who no longer has our founder with us. Similar to Satoshi leaving Bitcoin, our scammy founder isn’t with us either. 🙂

Irina Kravchuk: So the good guys won?

Diego Salazar: yes. One of the few cases where the good guys win in real life.

Serg: Thanks for this interesting explanation 🙂 Ready for the second question?

Q2 from Telgram user @marvelbounce

Do you have any statistics that you can share about how people use Monero (for what kind of transactions)? It would help a lot to fight the negative view that it is used primarily for illegal stuff. Thanks

Diego Salazar: We don’t. Monero is private and fungible, so we simply can’t know what it’s being used on. But let me emphasize something. WE WANT IT THIS WAY. Financial privacy is very important. You don’t post your bank statements online for everyone to see every month, do you? Then why do you use transparency coins that have all of your transactions available for everyone to see, whenever they want, forever? It’s insane. What I do with my money is my business.
That said, we can look at how cash and Bitcoin are spent, especially in their early days, and we can make guesses that Monero is probably similar. The reality is that Bitcoin is mostly used for mundane things (trading and speculating, not even commerce!), and the sad reality is that Monero is probably also used for mostly trading as well. 🙂
Another point of interest is that the dark net still primarily uses Bitcoin. Monero has been gaining adoption there, but most people still take Bitcoin rather than Monero. We think this is because of lack of education and/or convenience, but if Bitcoin is still the darling of DNMs, then they’re probably used for more illegal things than us.

Serg: I am glad you mentioned this because our next question is related somehow 🙂

Irina Kravchuk: What’s a DNM?

Serg: dark net market

Diego Salazar: dark net market, a marketplace on the dark web where people buy a variety of things, many of which are illegal

Q3 from Telgram user @IsaacBrave

One of my friends who works in the German anti-laundering and anti-fraud department, said that they are able to track even Monero transfers. He didn’t give me specifics however. Can you tell if that’s true? What are the steps to be taken to become untraceable?

Diego Salazar: I find this extremely unlikely. Monero has a three-prong approach to privacy. It obfuscates the sender, receiver, and amount of transactions via different cryptographic methods. The sent output is protected by ring signatures, the receiver is protected by stealth addresses, and the amount is hidden by RingCT (confidential transactions modified for ring signatures). The weakest point of this privacy is the ring signatures. They aren’t impossible to break via heuristics (just extreeeeeeeeeeeemely unlikely), but in so doing you only reveal the output sent. NOT the person, and the amount and receiver are still a mystery.
Only under certain conditions would this lead to any identifiable information, the biggest one being an EAE attack (which you can learn more about here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iABIcsDJKyM)

The only way to break RingCT and stealth addresses would be to break the underlying cryptography, which is used all over the internet, for many many things (such as securing your bank accounts and passwords). So if somebody found a way to break those things, they could break the whole internet, and ‘tracking Monero’ would be the least of our problems.

All of this to say, we’ve got exciting technology in the pipeline that will allow us to really bolster the privacy offered by ring signatures. Within a year or two we hope to be able to take our effective anonymity set from 10 to over 100, really destroying any heuristics that can presently be applied to try to track outputs.

Irina Kravchuk: What’s the max. value? Isn’t it 100?

Diego Salazar: the maximum ring size is the size of every output on the blockchain. Ring size just means the amount of decoys (or fake outputs) you put alongside your real output so nobody knows which is the real one that is being spent. To learn more about ring signatures (in a fun, animated video) you can go to this page: https://web.getmonero.org/get-started/what-is-monero/

Go to the bottom where the videos are, and click the arrows until you get to ring signatures (you can watch the other ones too 😉 )

Irina Kravchuk: What about transfers from exchanges that are centralized? Does this security measures apply to them also?

Diego Salazar: this is a good question. At this point, the exchange is the sending party, so they know both the receiver (the address anyways, not the name), the amount, and the sender (because it’s them). So by using an exchange you are giving them all of the identifying information for one transaction. BUT!! This isn’t the end of the world.

Monero is like cash. I can go to the bank and pull out one hundred dollars. The bank now knows who I am, and that I have one hundred dollars. But after I leave the bank they have no clue what I do with it. Six months later, they don’t know if I still have it, or if I spent it all, or any combination of the two.

With Bitcoin, it’s not like this. When you take out of the exchange, they can follow the Bitcoin across the blockchain. Maybe they see that you donated it to a non-profit, or you spent it at a website, or anything. It’s as if the bank can watch what you do with the cash after you leave their building. So really, Monero doesn’t care if you buy from a KYC/AML exchange. It’s not damning evidence, like with Bitcoin and its derivatives .

Serg: you can use 2 transactions, right? by sending them again to your wallet

Diego Salazar: sure. You can send a transaction to yourself after it leaves the exchange, and the plausible deniability increases by a lot. This is a process called “churning”. It’s not bulletproof, and there’s still a little bit of leaked metadata, but it can help if you want to be super sure that you’re getting good privacy.

Q4 from Telgram user @iulya_i

In the last AMA with Ghost, it was claimed that Monero, Zcash and other coins are good but beside sending transactions, you don’t have more utility. What do you have to say about that? Thanks!

Diego Salazar: Do one thing and do it well. Money can just be money. Is your cash good for more things besides spending it? In my opinion, making your money an application for many different things increases the attack surface astronomically. We see this all the time where with ‘smart contracts’ that are implemented incorrectly, the end result is a loss of money.
Monero is just interested in being money. Nothing more, nothing less. But money has a lot of utility. Some might say the utility of money is higher than anything else, since we use it for pretty much everything.

I’m going to be 100% honest, the vast majority of you people that consider yourself crypto-savvy are probably not great at threat modeling and subsequent security. You’re probably not good at analyzing attack surfaces, and, if I was to go further, you’re probably just looking at white papers trying to see if there are buzzwords that will make you money.
All of this aside, ‘smart contracts’ as they stand today, are pretty much useless without working oracles. There is currently no good, working solution for the oracle problem. All of the blockchain 3.0 solutions you’re following are hilarious premature in their claims of ‘utility’, and will likely NEVER be as useful and full of ‘utility’ as they claim.
I’m sorry to be the debbie downer and bearer of bad news here, but as a person who actually knows what I’m talking about, that’s the truth. 🙂 I’m more than happy to expand on this as well with reasons why. Sorry if you get mad at me because you have heavy bags. 😉

So all of this to say, Monero isn’t trying to make big, grandiose (and ultimately false) claims about offering any utility beyond what a trustless, fungible, private money can offer. But make no mistake, that utility is massive!

sorry if that took a bit of a darker turn 😀

Serg: Nobody is getting mad about anything and we are not searching for the truth because there is no black or white things in this world 🙂 we are just trying to make a good debate

Q5 from Telgram user @halvving

In a time when sustainability and green energy is a focus for more and more people, how do you comment the fact that Monero is a POW coin that uses a lot of energy to be created and if you (the project) plan to switch to POS or other technology that doesn’t involve that much energy consumption?

Diego Salazar: Let’s get one thing clear right off the bat, Proof of Stake is not a proven mechanism for securing a blockchain. Proof of Work is very very simple, and the security, trade-offs, and game theory are very easy to understand. Proof of Stake is much MUCH more complex, and the attack surface is much larger. That’s not to say that in time it won’t be as well understood as PoW, but it’s currently not there yet. All of this talk of everything moving to PoS is extremely premature. It’s like talking about moving to a new building or bridge design that we THINK is not going to collapse, but we can’t prove it yet. That would be absurd.
One (large) thing to note is that PoS requires weak subjectivity (i.e. trust) to get working properly. It’s just a part of the security model. PoW is 100% trustless, but PoS requires a small amount of trust under certain conditions, and in those conditions. In this way, if you want a completely trustless currency in terms of a security mode, you cannot use PoS.
Going even further, PoS is incompatible with privacy (and therefore fungibility). PoS requires you to put a discreet amount for staking, and that amount has to be known so blocks can be signed accordingly. Since Monero hides amounts, this would not be possible. It is theoretically possible that somebody can create a zero knowledge proof that would be able to show a number is in a certain range without revealing the number, and work is being done on that, but it’s currently not possible for Monero.

Beyond the above, the argument of PoW not being green enough has been covered several times by several coins also using PoW. Usual arguments such as ‘taking up unused electricity spaces’, ‘forcing innovation in efficiency’, and ‘it’s not wasted if it’s providing a strong utility, unlike Christmas lights’ all apply here, but if none of these arguments have satisfied you in the past, then perhaps PoW coins aren’t for you. If that’s the case, you’ll have to be satisfied with trusted blockchains, since we currently don’t have a way to do trustless currency in an energy efficient way.

And if you dig into the game theory, inefficiency is actually somewhat required for reasonable security, but that’s a big topic that requires a lot of background to understand.

Serg: Well, you really can give good arguments 🙂

Irina Kravchuk: you would be good as a preacher

Diego Salazar: Sure.
1. Monero uses several different methods for privacy, and the ‘breaking’ of one does not constitute the breaking of the whole privacy scheme.
2. PoW is the only completely trustless form of blockchain security, and Monero prizes trustlessness above all.
3. Monero just focuses on being money, but money itself is full of utility.
4. KYC/AML does not affect Monero in the same way it affects transparency coins (like Bitcoin and its derivatives).
5. Your financial privacy is very important! Ask questions about how much information you’re comfortable with sharing, and evaluate your investments based off of privacy conferred.

Part 2 — live questions from the Telegram community

Q1 from Telegram user Kath

Monero has reached many milestones. But of all the milestones you have achieved, which do you consider to be the most important so far and why?

Diego Salazar: We have two big ones. Adding RingCT in 2017. Before, several more attacks were possible on Monero than anyone realized, but most of them were mitigated when RingCT was added to hide amounts. It brought Monero to a truly private coin.
Second was bulletproofs. The addition of RingCT increased transaction sizes by a LOT (meaning less scaleable). Bulletproofs brought these down by over 80%, allowing us to increase the ringsize (i.e. better privacy) with much smaller transactions (i.e. more scaleable).
There’s more in the pipeline, and much more that we have done, but those are the big two, and both have been quite revolutionary.

Q2 from Telegram user John Max

Privacy blockchains have promoted money laundering and criminal sponsorship, how do you tackle this?? What procedure will be required of me to access a transaction information, even though I’m not a government agency, is it even possible?

Diego Salazar: Do you know what has supported money laundering and criminal sponsorship? Cash. Dollars. Corrupt governments. I don’t want to get too political here, but some of the biggest sponsors of terrorist organization, criminals, and mafia-type gangs are our very own governments. Corrupt officials who have much to gain in this.
It’s actually hilarious how the governments have spread fear among the population about the spooky boogieman of cryptocurrency, when some of the biggest criminals in the system are those same people spreading fear.
This isn’t to say that no illegal things happen as a result of cryptocurrencies, or Monero specifically, but the VAST MAJORITY of money laundering is done with dollars, not Monero. Why don’t we cross this bridge when we come to it rather than saying the sky is falling when really, the sky is falling with our current, traditional system many orders of magnitude worse than the tools we’re building.j

Q3 from Telegram user Dron Kutsen

How to use our data in the future, how will users be affected and how can we manage to transfer as little data as possible?

Diego Salazar: This is such a big question. It’s so important. The average person has ZERO IDEA how much their data is worth and who wants it. Literally everyone, from corporations, to governments, to various interests want your data. Your data is VALUABLE!
With your personal information, people can sell to you better, arrest you, threaten you, intimidate you, give you better gifts, make you happy, take away your happiness, or much more. PLEASE PROTECT YOUR DATA! Not just your financial data, but ALL data.
Once your information is revealed, it cannot be taken back. Let me repeat. Once your information is revealed, IT CANNOT BE TAKEN BACK!
If you don’t know my name, then it’s up to me if I tell you or not, but once I tell you, I cannot untell you. This is why privacy (and Monero) is so important. If you transact stupidly on a transparent blockchain, there can be massive consequences, even if you did nothing wrong. Let me give an example:
Let’s say you own a tshirt selling business. You accept Bitcoin for your shirts. Somewhere two bad guys do a drug transaction with Bitcoin. Later, one of the guys buys a shirt from you with the same Bitcoin he received for the drugs. Now, you can be under investigation by the authorities. They’ll ask you “where did you get this Bitcoin? Did you know it was part of a drug transaction? Were you a part of this?” You did nothing wrong. You sold a tshirt. But now you have a dirty bitcoin.
Take your privacy seriously, financial and otherwise. There can be real consequences. In the first world, perhaps the worst you suffer is targeted ads, but in many other places, lack of privacy can lead to loss of money, freedom, or life.

To finish up that same question, how to transfer as little as possible? Choose the correct tools. Choosing Windows will send a lot more of your personal data to Microsoft than using a Linux distribution. Using Bitcoin will reveal a lot more info than using Monero. Etc. Being privacy conscious can be a pain, because it’s constant choices and it is definitely the road less traveled, but it’s something well worth exploring.

Q4 from Telegram user Harsha

Do you have any plans to attract non-crypto investors to #monero and how? What are the actions to increase awareness around #monero in non-crypto space?

Diego Salazar: We have many many many translations for most of our resources. Our website has been translated to many different languages with more on the way. And yes, we have different communities for the different languages spoken in the community.
We have Spanish podcasts, Russian podcasts, YouTube channels from many languages, interviews, and I personally have gone to several conferences all over the world as a speaker.
If Monero doesn’t have a translation for a certain language (or a community) and you want to make it happen, then please let us know. We’re all about making Monero accessible to everyone.

Q5 from Telegram user Alejandro Urich

• Apart from hiding our identity and making private transactions, what added value does Monero have? What use does it have in daily life?

Diego Salazar: Fungibility. You’ve heard me say this word a few different times already in this AMA. It’s about time I explain it.
Fungible is when one of something is the same as another of that same thing? Confused? Here’s an example.
You have one dollar bill, and I have one dollar bill. We exchange bills. I now have your bill and you now have mine. Even though we exchanged bills, we both still have one dollars worth of dollars, because 1 USD = 1 USD. They are fungible.
The same is NOT true of Bitcoin or other transparency coins (i.e. literally almost all of them). I know people like to say 1 BTC = 1 BTC but it’s not true.
In the previous question I gave an example of someone obtaining dirty bitcoin by selling a tshirt. In many cases, if the individual were to put that Bitcoin on an exchange, their account would get shut down. There are many many stories on the internet of people’s coinbase accounts getting temporarily closed for review, or binance, or many other exchanges, because they unknowingly put dirty cryptocurrency in their accounts. Seriously. Google for these stories. There are so many.
What this does is mean that some Bitcoin is different than other Bitcoin. If you have 1 BTC and I have 1 BTC, and we exchange BTC, unlike dollars, there may have been an exchange of value. If I gave you a dirty BTC and you gave me a clean one, then I get the better deal, because I can use my BTC in more places than you can. So maybe you’re willing to get rid of your BTC at a discount to compensate for it.
Bitcoin is not fungible. Transparency coins are not fungible.
Opt-in (optional) privacy also doesn’t help. Because if you use an optionally private coin (most others except for Monero) then what people see is that you mostly use transparent transactions and then suddenly you use a private one. Wait. Why did you need privacy there? It stands out.
But if everyone is private, all the time, then everyone looks the same. There’s no way to distinguish a history of a coin. Those people who did the drug transactions will not affect your tshirt business. Monero is fungible. But fungibility is unlocked by mandatory privacy.

So really, it’s less about hiding your identity. Monero isn’t about being sneaky, avoiding taxes, or being a hacker or criminal. I am a squeaky clean guy. I don’t do drugs, or hacking, or criminal activity. But I need Monero. Because otherwise, somebody who DOES do those things will ruin my reputation for something I’ve never done (like the tshirt example). Monero isn’t for criminals. It’s for everyone. Ye. Done. 🙂

Irina Kravchuk: How are you? How was it?

Diego Salazar: Good. I hope it was useful.

Irina Kravchuk: Your answers were very good and interactive. Thank you so much for your time

Serg: Thank you Diego. I really enjoyed reading your answers

Diego Salazar: Sure. Thank you everyone for coming. I hope it was informative! As I said before, I’m more than willing to do a livestream to continue answering questions I didn’t get to. Sometimes it’s good to pick the brain of someone who actually knows what they’re talking about. 😉

Serg: It’s a good idea. We can talk about a date to organize this. I am more than willing to do this

PART 3 – Quiz Results

In the final part we would like you to check your knowledge in terms of Monero. They’ve prepared 4 questions for this part, so everyone could be a part and answer. All the correct answers you will find at the bottom of this Recap. Enjoy!

Q1

What does Monero use to hide transaction amounts?
A. zk-SNARKS
B. Ring signatures
C. RingCT
D. Dandelion++

Q2

How does Monero finance it’s initiatives?
A. 10% Premine
B. Crowdfunding system
C. Founder’s reward
D. ICO funds

Q3

Who created Monero?
A. Howard ‘hyc’ Chu
B. fluffypony
C. Satoshi
D. thankful_for_today

Q4

Besides privacy, what is one other thing Monero is known for?
A. Egalitarian mining secured by a tail emission
B. Smart contract oracle provider
C. Second-layer solutions
D. Innovation with private proof-of-stake.

Answers:

1.C
2.B
3.D
4.A

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