Confusing but the official site is not monero.com but www.getmonero.org, where you can see the full list of officially suggested wallets. Official GUI is a safe option. Feather is also good, Electrum-like.
Cake (Monero.com) is one of the suggested options too & is popular, but certainly not “most private“. With Feather, you can do everything over Tor, more privacy-friendly.
Most Monero users only use non-custodial wallets; so they just say “wallets” meaning that. Technically running a local node yourself is the most secure & private—though this option is not for everyone.
as much as I love moneroju I have been having problems with it recently. The wallet mysteriously crashes and sends don’t work consistently. Would not recommend at this time, but I have no doubts the team is working to fix this. I hate to talk shit as the moneroju guys are dedicated, goodwilled and innovative, but I don’t want someone to have a bad experience. Perhaps download it and use it but don’t rely on it
Im not a big crypto person, but ive owned some in the past.
Isnt any reputable wallet pretty much the same? From my understanding, especially when using something like monero, the privacy falls apart at the exchange, not the wallet.
Most people use custodial wallets (they don’t really hold the coins) and multiple wallets have had hacks (or ““hacks””) where a lot of user funds were stolen.
I personally like
Electrum for Bitcoin
Feather for Monero
Guarda for Ethereum based coins because it allows you to generate a new address each time.
You’re right. Use a centralized exchange (CEX), and you’ll be KYCed and de-anonymized. That’s why most privacy-coin users prefer DEX. For normal persons, if privacy is important, using anonymous gift cards or prepaid credit cards, which you can easily buy without ID, is more practical, much better than KYC’ed crypto.
If you can somehow get KYC-free coin, maybe from DEX, i.e. if you can get it personally from your friend or peer without showing ID etc., then and only then, you have real private crypto. There are two popular ways for this (Bisq and LocalMonero). Another option called Haveno is hopefully usable soon, but that is still iffy.
Using DEX is not essentially difficult, much safer than you might imagine due to a mechanism called multisig, but maybe this option is not for normal people. When you feel experimental, you might want to try to buy a small amount via DEX, to see what it’s like. If you’re a popular programmer or artist, accepting donations in crypto is also an easy way to get no-KYC coin. Another option is p2pooling—you can get a few Euro worth of XMR relatively easily; yet this last option is time-consuming and not very effective. Many of p2pool users or full-node people are privacy-advocating volunteers, maintaining/participating the Monero network for philosophical reasons, fully aware it’s not profitable in terms of money. This might be part of the reason why Monero tx fees are almost zero (like 1/100 of that of BTC). At the same time, there are many sketchy people around crypto too 😟 Be careful and stay safe!
Let’s say I’m selling you a book B and accepting a crypto payment. What if you sent me your crypto C trusting me, but I exit-scammed, vanishing without sending you B you’re trying to buy? That’d be bad. But what if I sent you B first, trusting you’ll send me C as soon as you receive B? Now you could cheat and vanish without paying. That’d be bad too.
To prevent any of those things from happening, there are a few methods. One is a 2-of-3 escrow service. Another is 2-of-2. Both based on multisig. A simplified example follows.
The book costs you 100€. You’ll send, say, 200€ to address A controlled by both you and me via multi-signature. I too will send 100€ to A. Now Wallet A has 300€. When 2 persons (you and I) sign, there will be a 2-output transaction from A to you (100€) and to me (200€), but any single person can’t move fund from A. That’s multisig.
Now I must send you the book in a good condition, because I don’t want to lose my 100€. So I’ll act carefully and honestly, and sign when I ship the book. You too will be willing to sign when you receive the book, because otherwise you can’t retrieve your 100€ (you deposited 200, when the book only costs 100). Sometimes an unexpected accident may happen, but usually something like this will work pretty well. This is one way how a P2P platform works (not very accurate, but I hope you get the idea).
I recently moved all my personal accounts to a VPS instance. I decided on Mailu’s docker compose setup because of its ease of use and it has been working great so far.
I used Oracle’s free tier cloud (4 ARM vcpus and 24GB of memory) and email delivery instances so it’s worth a try, but any other cloud provider offer similar options.
I could have had an x86 server running with that much RAM
You only get that much memory with ARM. With x86 I think you only get 2 vcpus and 4GB of RAM. But for containers, if they run on ARM, it’s great. And Mailu has been running very smoothly so far.
As of downsides… well, it’s Oracle. But other than that, I actually find Oracle Cloud interface and offerings much more intuitive and straightforward than other big providers such as AWS or specially Azure, at least for non power users.
Email hosting is hard for two reasons. The first is that there are too many parts to configure - MTA, MDA, DKIM, RDNS, spam filter, webmail, etc. The viable solution is to use a turnkey solution like mailinabox, mailcow or mailu.
The second problem is deliverability. At the minimum, you will have to ‘warm up’ the server. You will have to send a few dozen mails to others and ask them to mark as not-spam. Even then, a lot of other factors come into play - like the IP address block (for example, mails from AWS always gets blocked), domain name and even the top-level domain - they all influence the spam filter score.
Meanwhile, deliverability with Google and Microsoft (incl google workspace and ms 365) are lost causes. Google sends your mail to the spam folder irrespective of your spamassasin score. They provide no viable solution to this. MS on the other hand just drops mail silently. This isn’t a bug. Both of them are trying to destroy the federated nature of email and consolidate all email business to themselves.
Meanwhile, the big players like fastmail and migadu get better treatment. Especially, migadu is a good choice if you want unlimited aliases.
Finally, talking about aliases. Most services (except migadu) offer only a few aliases. That limitation is not there for selfhosted email. An alternative to aliases is to use + addresses (eg: mybox+bank@mydomain.com). The advantage of this method is that you can make up multiple addresses on the fly (without registering) using a single alias/address. You can use this in combination with a filter like sieve (server-side) or notmuch (client-side) to sort and filter incoming mail.
@tesseract Yea, I was thinking about using aliases and alias providers as a middle-man to send&receive emails to&from providers that are known to be hard to tackle for people self-hosting their email. I understood from the article I linked that setting up an email server and maintaining it is a hassle itself, but I was wondering whether doing what I said above does make things easier for me or if it would be an extra burden.
Using a public service like proton or firefox for that has the advantage of you blending in with the crowd, i.e. the service doesn’t know who the account belongs to whereas the service knows exactly that it belongs to you because only you have the top level domain.
In theory … in the real world it doesn’t matter too much because noone will hunt you down.
I guess that it’s no more of a hassle than using one email with your own top level domain.
Many people forgot, many others now think that he is the villain of the story just because he did what he had to do to save his life, a whole lot don't care because 'they have nothing to hide'. For what it's worth, people who actually care about their privacy is a very small minority in pretty much all countries.
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