How can I import a blackball database to improve my privacy?

Question

How can the blackball database that I generate be added to the Monero wallet in order to improve privacy?

Answer 1

A Monero blackball database can increase your privacy by avoiding outputs that are known to be spent in other transactions. You wallet will ignore these "bad" outputs and select other "good" outputs instead.

Acquiring the Database

You can acquire a database in several ways, but it's best to build the database yourself. See this answer on how to run the tool. Make sure to convert it from the LMDB file to a text file readable by the software.

If you prefer to trust someone else to provide the database, you can download one at moneroblackball.com.

GUI

To import the blackball database in the GUI, open the program, click on Advanced then Shared RingDB. This will pull up a list of several options. We are interested in the first box here. Click Browse and select the data.txt file you have created or downloaded. Then press Load. It may take a while to load the database, and there is no progress bar at this time. The GUI will become unresponsive while the database is being loaded.

CLI

After opening the CLI, run blackball <filename> add

Example: blackball /home/data.txt add

Note that the file path in the wallet must not contain any spaces.