learn me a monero
How Monero actually works — explained so that someone who has never opened a cryptography textbook can follow along.
Where do I start?
The site has four parts:
- Beginners — simple explanations without formulas. If you have never heard of Monero, start here.
- Technical — how it works inside: keys, addresses, signatures, commitments, RingCT and FCMP++. There are formulas, but each one is taken apart step by step.
- Practice — wallets, seed phrases, staying anonymous, running your own node, where to buy, comparison with other coins, resources.
- Tools — live calculators in your browser: generate keys and an address, build a one-time address, add Pedersen commitments, see how decoys are chosen.
How does Monero work?
The big picture in 10 minutes. The best first page.
RingCT and FCMP++ in plain words
What exists now, what will change and why it matters.
RingCT weaknesses
An honest look at where Monero's privacy is imperfect today.
FCMP++
A ring the size of the whole blockchain: how is that possible?
Staying anonymous
Monero hides the blockchain. Everything else is up to you.
Key generator
Real Monero cryptography in your browser.
Why this site?
Bitcoin has wonderful plain-language explanations. Monero mostly has research papers, C++ source code and developer discussions that assume you already know everything. Between "Monero is a private coin" and "CLSAG is a concise linkable spontaneous anonymous group signature" there is a chasm.
This site tries to build a bridge across it. Each topic starts with why, then explains how, and only then shows the formulas. Diagrams use the same colours across the whole site:
- red — private keys and secrets (nobody else should see them);
- teal — public keys and curve points (everyone sees them);
- purple — key images (the fingerprint of a spent output);
- green — amounts and commitments;
- yellow — hashes.
The tools on this site use the same math as a real Monero wallet (Keccak-256, Ed25519, Monero Base58) and have been checked against a reference implementation. The code is small, dependency-free and lives in xmrcrypto.js. It is teaching code, though: don't use it to store real money.