A conference & hackathon in privacy-enhancing technologies and distributed systems Monero Konferenco (“MoneroKon”) is an annual meeting of privacy advocates, cypherpunks, researchers, and developers and is designed to disseminate scientific and technical results in privacy-enhancing technologies and distributed systems. Site : MoneroKon
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Artificial intelligence is the most powerful surveillance and control technology ever invented — and every state that can get its hands on it will deploy it against you. CBDCs with behavioral triggers, client-side chat control, predictive pre-crime enforcement, and a handful of jurisdictionally-captured frontier labs shaping what can even be thought: this is the Four Horsemen of the AI State. But AI is also the most powerful individual empowerment technology ever invented. The cypherpunk vision Timothy May sketched in 1988 finally has the missing computational piece. Anonymous digital cash, un
How do we bring permissionless digital cash from our wallets into everyday life – into supermarkets, cafés, and corner shops? For more than a decade, crypto has lived mostly on screens: on centralized exchanges, inside speculative narratives and in online shops. Although the conventional payment methods used in physical retail have evolved to become more digital, traceable, still relying on middlemen and have significant consequences for human rights, privacy, and dignity. We’ll talk about what it means to create “birth helpers” for crypto in the meat space — companies that lay the groundwork
We are used to think about Monero as privacy-oriented technology, but what it actually means? Let’s briefly recap how Monero works nowadays and what is actually visible for external observer. Then let’s take a look on Lightning (a Bitcoin layer), how it works and what kind of privacy it provides. The goal of this talk is to have a quick overview of those two technologies and to compare them from privacy point of view.
We are facing an onslaught of intrusive regulation, especially in the digital world: age verification, chatcontrol, kill-switches in cars, and self-incrimination thru mandatory reporting of digital assets. All because centralised institutions can afford to “boil the frog” when people are sufficiently reliant on them. This power equation explains all institutional capture, including the sad corposloppification of BTC. Permissionless, sovereign, anti-fragile technology is The Way. In my talk, I will show what I found interesting and useful as of late: the new XMR402 payment standard, TollGate ro
I outline several privacy flaws in monero that have resulted in successful prosecution of monero users. I also show how these flaws could have been addressed if the targets had used the lightning network instead.
Non-custodial swap aggregators show users the best single-exchange rate, but is that actually optimal execution? This talk presents empirical findings from a live BTC→XMR aggregator across 23+ exchanges, examining whether splitting trades can improve outcomes. The answer: yes, but only sometimes. Across 2,714 logged events, split routing gain scales with trade size, averaging 0.38% at 8 BTC versus 0.10% at 0.5 BTC, with a greater than 1% tail emerging at 2 BTC and above. Zero events produced a negative outcome. The underlying mechanism is the liquidity cliff: every exchange has a capacity ceil
Liberland is a sovereign country advancing voluntary governance, contribution based meritocracy, and crypto native public infrastructure, where influence is earned through participation rather than assigned by status. This talk explores how decentralized technologies support governance, voting, and public services while reducing bureaucracy and strengthening individual sovereignty, with a strong emphasis on privacy, self custody, and permissionless systems aligned with cypherpunk values. President Vít Jedlička will share how these principles are implemented in practice and invite collaboration
The talk will focus on how future surveillance mechanisms, such as carbon credits and the “Green Agenda,” can allow Monero holders to offramp their crypto into the real economy and purchase large assets with their coins. Unfortunately, XMR has an unfair stigma attached to it when it comes to larger cash-outs, and this presentation provides a roadmap for those wishing to legally buy land, property, businesses, and other major investments in a CBDC era, without bureaucratic holdups - and without surrendering their privacy.
In this presentation, I will explore the security assumptions of PoW networks and why only nation-states pose a risk. We will discuss the impact of a 51% attack, how it would be carried out, and the incentives/disincentives to do so. PoW’s economic security model, blockspace as a free market, and censorship resistance. Mining pool architecture, attack vectors, and decentralized mining incentives. We will also explore what honest network participants can do in response to such an attack and how to mitigate the risks. Finally, we will highlight Monero’s base layer privacy, ASIC-resistance, tail
No chain sync, No download, No account required. Sponsored by WizardSwap.io BasicSwap Mobile delivers a P2P Taker Style atomic swap service for XMR and other coins that will integrate into popular Crypto Wallets you love and use! Decentralized. Liquid. Private. Secure.
This talk makes the case that Monero represents a working piece of counter-economic infrastructure in the sense proposed by Samuel Edward Konkin III.The presentation situates Monero within the broader intellectual lineage running from Rothbard’s anarcho-capitalism and Konkin’s agorism through the cypherpunk movement of the early 1990s. It draws on Hayek’s theory of concurrent currencies and denationalisation of money to show that Monero’s privacy-by-default architecture is not merely a technical preference but a direct answer to a theoretical problem posed decades earlier. Where Rothbard, Haye
Liberation.travel
Monero combines a priced adaptive block weight based upon the CryptoNote excess size penalty with a constant block reward or tail emission.of 0.6 XMR per block. This leads to a unique fee market that can provide insight into the fee markets found in Bitcoin like crypto currencies with small blocks, big blocks and adaptive blocks. We will use the the proposed Full Chain Membership Proofs++, FCMP++, Monero scaling parameters to illustrate this fee market. We will consider the inpact of pricing, and a block reward vs the lack of a block reward on this fee market. We will discuss the overall impli
Since the announcement of a rewrite of EVM-XMR atomic swaps at MoneroKon 5 the project has progressed quite a lot. This talk aims at updating the audience on the current state of the project, it will cover the following items: How swaps work, deposits, funding requests, seeds, … Web GUI tour - This was made possible thanks to the community who supported a CCS Price feed and oracle bot Maker bot Deployment on a new EVM chain The project will be completed by the time MoneroKon 6 is held and will be fully usable, the audience will therefore be able to do atomic swaps with stable coins or any EVM
The Monerujo team wants to share with you all the thought processes and design choices we take when designing a wallet for a future where Monero is a true p2p currency, which means widely used by normal people in everyday situations. Also the challenges and assumptions we face when doing that for a mostly paranoid userbase with strict privacy-preserving tastes. We’ll feature past and new features and hopefully a fully fledged Monerujo 2, live.
The browser won the app platform war, and with it came fingerprinting, ad tech, session replay, and an ever-growing attack surface we’ve quietly accepted as the cost of doing business. This talk argues for a different path — distributing apps over SSH, rendered as TUIs — and backs it up with a working example: a cryptocurrency exchange where your SSH key is your account, swap history lives against your public key, and there is no web frontend to compromise. I’ll cover the architecture in Go using charmbracelet’s Wish, Bubble Tea, and Lip Gloss; the threat model compared to a typical web deploy
Monero’s cryptographic privacy is well-established but its P2P layer is a different story. Using Nebula, ProbeLab’s open-source network crawler, we conducted the first large-scale topological crawl of the Monero network, discovering over 29,000 nodes and successfully handshaking with more than 16,000. The findings are stark: over 81% of reachable nodes exhibit the peer ID mismatch pattern the Monero Research Lab associates with surveillance infrastructure while every flagged node tracing back to a single provider: Spruce Creek Networks LLC. Force-directed graph analysis reveals a bifurcated ov
This presentation outlines a sociological study and statistical analysis of user trust in digital tools. The study addresses the following questions: What factors influence user trust? How do secure and anonymous technologies affect user trust? The findings are important for positioning digital services and building user trust.
Bulletproofs is a critical piece of infrastructure for cryptocurrencies like Monero, permitting users to prove that the amount in a transaction is small, preventing overflow errors and inflation bugs. We present an enhanced version of Bulletproofs tailor-made for Monero, speeding up range proofs and shrinking their sizes.
This talk discusses the fundamental scalability challenges facing Monero, and demonstrates a radical upgrade pathway to address them. The approach consists of two sequential upgrades: Republic and Universe. Republic introduces a transition to a quorum-based consensus model, aiming to significantly improve throughput and stability. Building on this, Universe represents a more theoretical second stage, designed to enable effectively unbounded (ad infinitum) scalability via the implementation of a demand-based chain splitting and merging mechanism.
Privacy tools are usually defended on technical grounds: better cryptography, stronger anonymity sets, harder to trace. That framing concedes too much. This talk draws on The Praxeology of Privacy to make the economic case. When surveillance is cheap, control is cheap. Confidential transactions and stealth addresses impose real costs on the adversary’s ability to observe and act. Mises’ action axiom tells us economic calculation requires informational freedom; Voskuil’s axiom of resistance tells us security is measured by the cost to compromise it. Monero operationalizes both. The talk covers
Selfish mining literature has traditionally focused on MDP to probe for theoretically ideal strategies. However, these fail to integrate crucial factors like network latency, difficulty adjustment, and node/pool internal processing delays, which can significantly affect the outcome of a real-world attack. The Monero Simulator incorporates these elements, plus discrete asynchronous agentic mining pools, into a configurable Monte-Carlo framework capable of sweeping over a broad set of input parameters. Tunable parameters include: pools/hashrate, difficulty adjustment constants, network latency/b
Remember when Linux users went for “like Windows, but cheaper?”. They’ve lost their edge - libre, better, customizable, loved by users, stable and performant. Are we Monero folks just “Bitcoin with better privacy,” clinging to a fading dream? Network effects are kicking our ass—money loves a crowd. Is there still some place for us in the world? Are we the last cypherpunks or are we doomed to be the crypto equivalent of groupies for a band that’s already broken up? I’ll propose some meaningful things we can do in this situation.
On 2022-08-12, the Monero network was stress-tested with ~50,000 transactions and under $1,000 in fees in 24 hours, triggering “dynamic block sizing” for the first time, and highlighting performance constraints. Under peak load, a few nodes crashed, and the average confirmation times rose from about 2 minutes to roughly 30 minutes (≈ 15 blocks). Services like CakeWallet, by then running on “default low-priority fees”, also experienced a multihour slowdown, with some users reporting waiting times of 3 hours (x.com/cakewallet/status/1558094085642194945). These results expose concrete performance
Monero has excellent transaction-level privacy, and things should get even better soon with FCMP++s. But these innovations aren’t sufficient if you have deanonymization vectors on the network level. Tor gives you network privacy in theory — but how do you know your Monero wallet isn’t leaking some network traffic outside of Tor? Proxy leaks are a surprisingly common class of security vulnerability, and they’ve historically been difficult to audit for.
