jeffro256

joined 1 year ago
10
Monero General Fund transparency report - February 2025 (www.reddittorjg6rue252oqsxryoxengawnmo46qy4kyii5wtqnwfj4ooad.onion)
submitted 2 weeks ago* (last edited 2 weeks ago) by jeffro256@monero.town to c/monero@monero.town
 

Monero General Fund transparency report - February 2025

[Cross-posted from Reddit]

Note that it is a preliminary post on reddit only. I will give it few days for any discussion to take place and see if anything needs further clarification. After that we can make a blog post on getmonero.org.

Current General Fund usage policy

I have expressed the general spending policy several years ago and it has not changed. See previous report: https://old.reddittorjg6rue252oqsxryoxengawnmo46qy4kyii5wtqnwfj4ooad.onion/r/Monero/comments/11fslu9/monero_general_fund_transparency_report_march_2023/

In short:

  1. The GF is used to cover costs of basic infrastructure useful for the Monero project. (domain, hosting, CDN...).

  2. It is used to cover part of some CCS proposals deemed "fundamental" to the project. When I donate to these CCS proposals I always mention it immediately, so at any point in time you can get an up-to-date overview by looking at my comments on this page: https://repo.getmonero.org/binaryFate

If that general spend policy was to change (say, an important payment appears necessary and does not fall under the two categories above), I would inform the community immediately without waiting for the next report.

Reminder on Core Team funding

Just like the rest of the core team, I am not and I have never been paid for any of my contributions. I am just a passionate volunteer.

Current setup

Until late 2023 we had the following wallets (see also my previous report).

  1. GF: The known address for donations, this wallet has existed for many years now. Me and Fluffypony have access to it, plus possibly some other core team members.

  2. GF2: A new wallet I created when Fluffypony had issues in the US, to contain bulk of the funds.

End of 2023 following the hack of the CCS wallet (even though the incident had nothing to do with me) I decided to revamp my personal opsec and setup. I deprecated the wallet GF2 (now empty), and moved all funds to a new wallet I call "GF-Vault".

Amounts of XMR as of February 6th, 2025

Drum rolls. Currently 162.980239254745 in GF and 15,584.2318619398 in GF-Vault. (GF2 empty). Total 15,747.212101194545 XMR. The Bitcoin donation address contains 0.21869208 BTC.

All transactions in a readable spreadsheet

I have exported all transactions from the 3 wallets and annotated every spending made since the last report. The format is ODS. Please note there are several tabs in the file! :) Find it here: https://downloads.getmonero.org/GF_report_February_2025.ods

Notes

There are small "debts" outstanding to me, so a heads-up:

  • I never refunded myself for the payment I made of the last 2 years of SSL certificate for getmonero.org. Total cost = 140$.

  • There are recurring payments for some secondary servers (like matrix, repo...) that are charged to me personally in fiat, and I am supposed to recover costs from corresponding sponsors. If these sponsors fall through, I will eventually refund myself from the GF.

  • I will give an explicit notification to the community if/when I execute these transfers, as I am mindful any payment from the GF to me personally is extra sensitive and I want to be vocal about them.

Technical info

Note the Monero General Fund donation address remains 888tNkZrPN6JsEgekjMnABU4TBzc2Dt29EPAvkRxbANsAnjyPbb3iQ1YBRk1UXcdRsiKc9dhwMVgN5S9cQUiyoogDavup3H.

The info below is to verify all wallets activity and outstanding balances.

GF

Base address: 44AFFq5kSiGBoZ4NMDwYtN18obc8AemS33DBLWs3H7otXft3XjrpDtQGv7SqSsaBYBb98uNbr2VBBEt7f2wfn3RVGQBEP3A

View key secret: f359631075708155cc3d92a32b75a7d02a5dcf27756707b47a2b31b21c389501

Key images: https://downloads.getmonero.org/key_images_GF_until_20250206

GF2

Base address: 47Q7HtVaKZKKfxEwK1qJgDdutgxYu892b1qu34Yy1Fow5m1hPQCpQNx6cBTc6tgJDvdggtHqssfybH5AJSaud7t3DffrAXw

View key secret: 5c58e403ec2076594f4791b0322ad4b8720ad6bedfafee03aa3ff97f7b1a540f

Key images: https://downloads.getmonero.org/key_images_GF2_until_20250206

GF-Vault

Base address: 48UUYsQX9fXf34zW5MurZs8SiAZi3nhUZL3d24xSoxniJaDeLSFUrJv7uaPQ8TfRxR8BDHJV7qKxr4bDqKmgGk5KKjXfUA8

View key secret: c19710062c7ca4f3bda9039d323c99b387cd1684ee0ca5fe7bd744a70688c500

Key images: https://downloads.getmonero.org/key_images_GF-Vault_until_20250206

The Bitcoin address is: 1KTexdemPdxSBcG55heUuTjDRYqbC5ZL8H, you do not need a view key to track it or verify its balance ;)

[–] jeffro256@monero.town 6 points 3 weeks ago

I do not recommend this application whatsoever. The techniques used are far from "The proper way to churn Monero" and most are actively harmful to privacy. I hate to be so harsh, but this repo is a hot mess of all the worst ways to churn Monero clobbered together.

[–] jeffro256@monero.town 8 points 3 weeks ago

Please note that the private view key, barring some edge cases, can also see outgoing transactions for all practical tracing purposes. They however can't see the outgoing destination address. See this presentation: https://youtu.be/MYzZ1DzSWCY?t=263 for more info.

 

Discussion welcomed for discussion of possible future rule to take place upon FCMP++ hard fork activation. This rule would retroactively ignore the unlock_time field of transactions past some future block height. This would make the migration to FCMP++ tree building easier.

[–] jeffro256@monero.town 3 points 5 months ago

Get a Pixel phone and flash GrapheneOS onto it. Best out-of-box privacy and security experience that currently exists still with great usability IMO. Does not have an advertising ID or even Google Play services by default. Also, it actually has better battery life in my experience.

[–] jeffro256@monero.town 4 points 6 months ago

quite literally a Uniswap clone taking over 2 years without any solid results - how sad!

This is also completely false. Serai is not a "Uniswap clone"; Uniswap only supports ERC20 tokens, where Serai can support almost any coin from any chain, given the right validator setup. Also, there have been "solid results": there was a testnet 5 months ago.

[–] jeffro256@monero.town 4 points 6 months ago

None of those linked articles support the claim that "almost all of Monero’s usage is crime-related".

[–] jeffro256@monero.town 5 points 6 months ago (4 children)

Chain analysis companies have proved that almost all of Monero’s usage is crime-related darknet activity. Ransomware, drugs, CP, and all the worse things you can imagine are used strictly with Monero in mind.

This is not skepticism. This is bullshit, plain and simple. Unless you have behind-the-scenes knowledge that the public does not currently possess, there is zero evidence to suggest that almost all of Monero's usage is crime-related. As of 2024, the IRS has still not paid out their final bounty for a tool to trace Monero transactions, and almost all spokespeople for chain analysis companies (some of which I have personally talked to) say that Monero is effectively untraceable in the majority of cases. As such, I don't see how you conjured up this statement unless you have a specific distaste for Monero and no sense of obligation to speak truthfully. Please point to a source where chain analysis "proved" the majority of Monero usage is illicit. Even if we take at face value that Monero is the currency of choice for many criminal rings, there still needs to be evidence of actual numbers related to the criminal volume versus total Monero volume. Some organizations have tried scoping this out, but I honestly know of no source that pins it anywhere near that high. Most place it around the same as USD and BTC at ~1-3%, with some going as high 15%. There is a ton of variability in those figures, and all acknowledge that comprehensive data collection is inherently impossible (criminals don't report their transactions, and good financial data is hard to collect even for honest participants), and not a single one has ever claimed to "prove" any of those figures.

[–] jeffro256@monero.town 0 points 8 months ago (1 children)

Both are bad for privacy, but B is especially horrendous. Every time you consolidate transaction outputs like this, you are yelling at the people you received money from: "HELLO! REMEMBER WHEN YOU SENT ME MONEY? I AM CONSOLIDATING THAT IN THIS TRANSACTION RIGHT NOW". When that transaction is the SAME transaction to actually spend those funds to someone else (AKA scenario B), you lose almost all plausible deniability about the origin of the funds. For the love of everything holy, PLEASE do not "churn" like this. I don't mean to sound harsh, but since you do not know anything about coin control yet, I would recommend staying away from churning and consolidations at the moment. The most private way to send money to someone is NOT to consolidate ever. Sweep each output to them individually, one at a time, in separate transactions over multiple hours with random timings. However, if you insist on consolidating everything into one output before sending it to them, there's a couple rules to live by: A) NEVER consolidate outputs AND spend them in the same transaction (i.e. only ever consolidate to an output address that you own), B) never consolidate more than 2 outputs at a time, C) use random delays when churning, D) if you are trying to keep different receiver identities (subaddresses) unlinked from one another, don't consolidate outputs from those different identities in the same transaction E) once everything is in one output, do at least one extra 1-input tx churn to yourself before spending (after a random delay of course).