FAQ

FAQ

Here you may find answers  for all basic questions about Monero. There are 3 usual types of questions (Monero installing, using and troubleshooting), just look tgrough them and find an apropriate answer. If this infromation is not enough, check on this thread.

A 64-bit OS is highly recommended. At the time of writing (July 2014), 4 GB of RAM should be sufficient, and 45 GB of disk space is required to store the blockchain (growing at ~260 MB per day).

The official 32-bit binaries have been reported to work only with PAE enabled. More info here.
If you prefer to just move to a 64-bits Windows, here’s a tutorial.

  1. Assume your 32-bit wallet file name is “wallet.bin” (adjust this instruction for other name accordingly)
  2. Backup your wallet.bin.* files.
  3. Delete ALL Monero files from your computer.
  4. Download 64-bit Monero zip & blockchain.bin from 1st sticky page of this thread.
  5. Unzip & place all the files downloaded above to the directory: “C:\Users\\AppData\Roaming\bitmonero\”.
  6. From the backup made at step 1, place wallet.bin.* files !!! EXCEPT wallet.bin itself !!! into directory at step 4.
  7. Start bitmonerod.exe and wait for it to sync with the net.
  8. Start simplewallet by the commad prompt: “simplewallet –wallet-file wallet.bin” (!!! name of the file that must NOT exist in directory at step 4 !!!).
  9. When you want to stop any monero executables – ALWAYS type “exit” & be patient. Simplewallet re-creates correct version of wallet.bin for you.

Actually, as the time have passed, the Monero team developed the official GUI wallet:

https://github.com/monero-project/monero-gui

It looks very nice in comparison to the majority of other cryptocurrencies official wallets.

Official GUI Wallet is available here.

Information about several available GUI wallets can be found on the GUI wallet bounty thread here. Several unofficial GUI wallets are available:

  1. Qt GUI (Cross-platform) by Neozaru
  2. Windows GUI by Jojatekok
  3. lightWallet by jwinterm (avoids running the daemon on your machine, still not as light as SPV, see question above)

No. You can use any available light wallets out there:

This is due to many small inputs (dust) to the address such as from mining to it. The solution is to split up the transaction and send smaller amounts.
This problem has mainly been mitigated by the pools updating their software to not payout dust amounts.

The privacy features in Monero do come at a certain cost of an increased blockchain size which is around 45GB right now.

That said, the codebase is very much alpha stage at the moment, and currently, there is absolutely no compression of the blockchain data. This is one of the main priorities for the dev team – to implement a robust & scalable database platform.

The team is very active on this, but it is pointless to ask/spam ‘are we there yet?’ on the forums or IRC, since the task is non-trivial and will take whatever is the necessary amount of time to be done right.

When this is complete, bells and whistles will be heard on the Interwebs.

Short version – yes. Long version – Each wallet currently holds a single address. To have multiple addresses, you’ll be creating and executing multiple wallets (one per address).

Note: Multiple wallets cannot be running concurrently on a given system. Non-experienced users are strongly advised to not attempt running multiple wallets.

Keep in mind this is a file, so anyone with the file could view your balance – and a file can be stolen too.

This is not necessary with Monero, you only ever need one receiving address. A new receiving address is created automatically for every transaction, inside the program.

Block time is one minute. On average it will only take a one minute a transaction to first appear in the block chain; however, exchanges usually will require at least 18 confirmations (blocks) before adding funds to your account, and the standard wallet requires tbd confirmations before considering received coins to be available for use.

A time of 10-20 minutes is generally the longest length of time you should consider waiting if your transaction isn’t confirmed in a couple of minutes.

Zero mixins were disallowed years ago with some very limited exceptions (for spending old coins). Initially the minimum ring size was 3 but is now 5. You can see from the stats that they essentially never happen any more: https://moneroblocks.info/stats/ring-size

Source: https://www.reddit.com/r/Monero/comments/7sv5vv/new_to_monero_zeromixintxs_already_fixed/dt7phdw/

There are no “coins” in your wallet, there are “outputs” corresponding to transactions you have sent or received. These outputs can only be spent in their entirety. So if you have an output of 10 that you received and you use it to send 1, then a transaction of 9 is sent back to you as change. As with any transaction, this one coming back to you takes time to confirm. Until that time the wallet reports that 9 of your balance as locked.

Typically, it takes a maximum of 30 minutes to be confirmed on the blockchain.

  1. List of txid: In simplewallet, type incoming_transfers then enter, copy the output in a text file and use the search function of your editor.
  2. List of transaction for a specific payment ID: in simplewallet, type payments then enter.

NB.The binary used to be named simplewallet and it got changed to monero-wallet-cli at one point. It’s the same wallet, only different name. Be sure that you got it at https://getmonero.org/downloads official site.

Openalias is Monero’s aliasing system. It is meant to make it simpler to send monero to an address, by applying a label (itself using DNS) to an address. Using DNS prevents landgrabing (of course, landgrabing DNS itself is still an issue). openalias is compatible with simplewallet 0.8.8.5 or above and MyMonero.com but not with any exchange yet).
For instance, if you want to send moneroj to support the development of Monero, you can either send to the dev fund address

46BeWrHpwXmHDpDEUmZBWZfoQpdc6HaERCNmx1pEYL2rAcuwufPN9rXHHtyUA4QVy66qeFQkn6sfK8aHYjA3jk3o1Bv16em

or the much simpler to memorise alias:
donate.monero.cc
Of course, before sending to an alias, the said alias must have been created. To do so, add a record to your domain name (if you don’t have a domain name, get one through your favorite DNS registrar). Simplewallet will decode these so you can type transfer 3 donate.monero.cc 100 and it will go to the project donation fund.
More info here (including information about privacy and security issues).

MyMonero.com is much easier to use than the command line utilities and is ran by fluffypony , a Monero core team member. I doesn’t require registration or email (the first time, you generate a private login key and the next time you just enter it).
A notable community member said: “It’s probably the most intuitive GUI I’ve used in my life (no kidding).”

You can mine directly to your MyMonero address. MyMonero is completely free to use and most of its code will eventually be open-sourced. Most of the work is done client-side, so MyMonero only has write access to your funds when you are logged in (and it logs out automatically pretty quickly so you run no risk of accidentally letting your wallet open). Finally, MyMonero is compatible with openalias(so you can donate to the dev fund just by sending to donate.monero.cc) and uses HSTS

In the future, you will be able to take advantage of the viewkey mechanism (read-only access for selected third-parties) as well as use it as an alternative access point forIn the future, you will be able to take advantage of the viewkey mechanism (read-only access for selected third-parties) as well as use it as an alternative access point for your regular wallet.