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Comment by puskavi | Hacker News Reader

Its been made very difficult to actually buy it

You can go to an ATM and purchase a coin and use a DEX to convert almost instantly.

wouldn't that defeat the privacy purpose? wouldn't someone be able to see that it was your card in the ATM, when they traced back the monero as exchanged for a coin that was exchanged for your fiat?

ETA: just to be clear - that's a genuine question. I don't know much about monero, so if it really is possible to have untraceable money, that seems like a prudent investment for precaution. I've just always assumed that digital money is inherently traceable, so I always assumed genuine privacy is a mirage. I assume I'm wrong about that, somehow, so I'm curious about the mechanisms of that anonymity.

The DEX will likely leak the fact that you received the monero, but after that there is no more paper trail. So you can spend it as you like.

so would that be a feature of monero-to-monero transactions? I'm still confused as to how it would actually be anonymous? like if I used another coin to exchange for monero, that's obviously traceable. so then I use monero to purchase something else which I then sell for other monero (or I just trade monero directly? if that's possible?). and I'm to believe that there's no way to trace that back and say "okay, monero from wallet X was traded to wallet Y" or whatever other intermediate steps (like"monero was spent on X from wallet A, and then X was resold using monero from wallet B")? like, assuming they don't get in to my wallet, no one would be able to track down a transaction on the chain to a wallet? Or they would be able to track it to a wallet, but they couldn't tie that wallet to me for... some reason?

sorry to ask, but the website seems very light on any actual technical detail about how they are achieving their privacy claims - at least in terms I can parse to make them understandable to me.

The flagged post in reply to you is correct. Each transaction is buried in one time addresses and decoy addresses.

very cool, thanks! And since I can't respond to that poster, I'll say it here: thanks for that detailed answer! That definitely seems like a pretty anonymous system. I'm convinced that monero is a pretty private coin!

There are many crypto ATMs that accept cash up to a transaction limit.

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