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I want to learn about Monero in good detail. Unfortunately I am not able to find any good and complete resource which described how this cryptocurrency works.

Most of the papers I found are analyzing the anonymity of Monero. On the homepage of Monero I found this resource. However this is not explaining how Monero works, it is explaining Group signatures which are used by Monero. Still its not explaining how everything works together.

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    Have you read the cryptonote whitepaper?
    – assylias
    Commented Feb 13, 2018 at 15:38
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    @assylias Hello, is this really the paper describing monero? I heard that monero is using ringCT and the cryptonote protocol where used in older versions. This is true?
    – Marm
    Commented Feb 24, 2018 at 14:25
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    And once you finished the crypto note whitepaper, have a look et the Monero Research Lab's publications.
    – Maxithi
    Commented Feb 25, 2018 at 10:24
  • @Maxithi Thanks, one question: Are Cryptonote and RingCT working together or did RingCT replace Cryptonote?
    – Marm
    Commented Feb 26, 2018 at 16:01
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    Hello, serhack here. Would you like to have a good resource in order to learn more about monero? The Monero community is helping a lot in order to compose a good and solid resource called Mastering Monero.
    – SerHack
    Commented Feb 27, 2018 at 15:00

5 Answers 5

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Since Monero is based on the CryptoNote protocol, you should take a look at this resource and the standards here

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The most detailed instruction about RingCT I had saw.

https://cryptoservices.github.io/cryptography/2017/07/21/Sigs.html

This describes ring signature, Pedersen commitment and range proof together and clearly.

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An excellent overview of most aspects of Monero (excluding subaddresses and bulletproofs) is here: https://github.com/kurtmagnus/Monero-RCT-report/blob/master/main.pdf

Learn about Elliptic Curve Cryptography here: https://steemit.com/monero/@luigi1111/understanding-monero-cryptography-privacy-introduction

Learn about Monero's proof of work algorithm, stealth addresses and Monero's original ring signatures (LSAG) in the cryptonote white paper https://cryptonote.org/whitepaper.pdf

Learn about how confidential transactions hide transaction amounts (including what range proofs are) here: https://people.xiph.org/~greg/confidential_values.txt

Learn about blockchain transaction structures here: https://cryptonote.org/standards/

Learn about the MLSAG upgrade to Monero's ring signatures here: https://lab.getmonero.org/pubs/MRL-0005.pdf

Learn about Bulletproofs, which will be replacing Monero's existing range proofs, here: https://github.com/AdamISZ/from0k2bp/blob/master/testzkp.pdf and here: https://eprint.iacr.org/2017/1066.pdf

Learn about ring signatures in a more general sense here: http://diyhpl.us/~bryan/papers2/bitcoin/Borromean%20ring%20signatures.pdf

Learn about subaddresses here: https://lab.getmonero.org/pubs/MRL-0006.pdf

See all of the Monero Research Lab publications here: https://lab.getmonero.org/

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A self-contained and comprehensive description of the crypto of RCT transactions can be found under https://github.com/kurtmagnus/Monero-RCT-report/blob/master/main.pdf

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  • Thank you very much, I found this pdf document very useful as it is comprehensive and complete. For me its really hard to understand how which parts of the original CryptoNote paper and the document you posted are being used and how they are working together. E.g. How relevant is section 4.4. one-time ring signatures in the Cryptonote paper? Thanks :)
    – Marm
    Commented Mar 7, 2018 at 21:41
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I've also noticed a certain lack of comprehensive papers / documentation. I believe that monero's git repo has recently outpaced some of the whitepapers, and now is a good time to start analyzing the code, and building documentation / wikis.

This paper is mentioned many times in the source. Regarding RingCT, there's also this helpful QA.

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  • The problem with this paper is that it contains some errors. Also, there are divergences with the code, in that multi-input transactions use a different scheme. Check github.com/kurtmagnus/Monero-RCT-report/blob/master/main.pdf It describes signature schemes and links them to the actual implementation
    – Kurt
    Commented Mar 3, 2018 at 9:04

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