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Monero Internals Quiz (Expert)

No hand-holding. Test whether you truly understand Monero's cryptography and protocol internals.

Covers material from Monero Internals: Cryptography & Protocol Deep Dive.

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On Ed25519, what is a Monero private key and what operation produces the matching public key?

A prime number; the public key is its factorization A 256-bit hash; the public key is its SHA-256 A curve point; the public key is its x-coordinate A scalar mod ℓ; the public key is scalar·G (scalar multiplication)

For a standard (non-subaddress) output, how is the one-time output public key P built?

P = A + B hashed with Keccak P = r·(A + B) P = Hs(r·A)·G + B, with R = rG published in the tx P = B, reused for every payment

What exactly is a key image, and what property makes it stop double-spends?

The Keccak hash of the output amount I = x·G — the public key itself I = x·Hp(P) — unique per output, so a repeat image is rejected A random nonce chosen per spend

In RingCT, an output amount is committed as C = aH + xG. What must hold for the transaction to be valid (ignoring fees)?

Each a must be published in the clear Σ input commitments = Σ output commitments (+ fee·H) x must equal a for every output C must be a prime-order point

What do Bulletproofs+ prove, and why are they needed?

That the miner solved the PoW That each hidden amount is in range [0, 2^64), so no inflation That the ring size is at least 16 That the sender owns the inputs

Why does a view tag speed up wallet scanning?

It marks which ring member is real It's a 1-byte hint that lets a wallet skip most outputs before the full check It stores the recipient's address on-chain It encrypts the amount for faster decoding

What makes RandomX resistant to ASICs?

It needs so little memory that only ASICs can run it It uses SHA-256 with a secret salt Random code execution in a VM PLUS memory-hardness (a ~2 GB dataset) — a CPU with fast RAM is near-optimal It changes the elliptic curve every block