So as we learned before, the entire ledger used in bitcoins, the whole blockchain is public.
So the ledger contains all transactions done using bitcoins for each transaction.
Anybody can see the sender address, the receiver address and the amount.
Now, if the sender and the receiver are using proper opsec and obtain their bitcoins anonymously,
then these addresses will not be tied to their identities.
But like I said, there are a number of ways that these addresses can tie to a person's identity.
The easiest is if the person bought bitcoins using a coin exchange that requires identity verification,
or if the person or the entity you're sending coins to has made their address public and is linked to
an actual identity.
For example, if you're sending money to unknown store or to unknown market.
Therefore, based on this information, anyone can analyze the blockchain.
They can know exactly the balance of each address by tracing the amount of money sent to this address
so they can know how much money is in your wallet.
They can track your spending habits, and based on that, they can profile you and serve you more things,
more ads and so on.
Not only that, but if you have a considerable amount of coins, then you'll become a target because
people know that you have a lot of coins in your wallet, again, by tracing the amount of coins sent
to your address.
Not to mention the fact that if you're sending money to an entity that is linked to an actual identity
or if your actual identity gets linked to your address, then this will reveal even more information
that you might not want to be public.
All of this was the incentive to making a more private cryptocurrency.
There is a number of private cryptocurrencies.
The most popular at the moment is Monero or XMR.
Now it's similar to Bitcoin, it's decentralized, so there is no single entity that control it.
But unlike Bitcoin, it is private.
So if you analyze the whole blockchain, you won't be able to get useful information on who is sending
money to whom and the amount sent.
So you can see addresses, but the addresses used are temporary and secured.
Therefore you can't see the actual sender, you can't see the actual receiver, and you can see the
real amount being transferred.
Therefore, what you analyze is not very useful.
The transactions are untraceable and the sender and receiver are not likable.
All of this is achieved using ring signatures, ring confidential transactions and stealth addresses.
The exact way how all of this works is a little bit complex and it dives too much on how blockchain
and cryptocurrencies work.
Therefore, I'm not going to cover it in this course, but I will include useful resources in the resources
section of this lecture, which you can read for further information.
Now, unfortunately, Thales does not come with a Monero wallet.
We have to manually install it, but installing it is very, very easy.
So let's go to Thales and see how to do that.
First of all, you need to go to the download page of the official Monero website.
I'll include its link in the resources of this lecture and you want to scroll down to the Linux download
link.
Now I have the 64 bit version of Thales installed.
Therefore I'm going to click in here to download the 64 bit version of the Monero wallet.
Now, just like any other download, you want to click on Save File and select the location where you
want to download it.
So by default it goes into amnesia tor browser.
And as you can see, I've already downloaded it in here, so I'm not going to click on Save.
But in your case, you want to click on Save and wait for it to fully download the wallet for you.
I'm going to click on Cancel because I've already downloaded it before this lecture to save time.
And as you can see, I already have it here in my Tor browser directory.
And before interacting with this file, just like any file we download from the Internet, we need to
make sure that this file did not get modified as it was being downloaded because as explained before,
anything that you download from the Internet can be edited and modified at a number of locations as
it's being downloaded.
So previously we show how to verify downloads using their PGP signature.
The verification process really depends on the information the developer is giving us.
So as you can see in this case and here, the developer is not giving us a pjp signature.
Instead it's giving us a SHA two, five, six hash.
So to verify a downloaded file with its SHA 256 hash, we need to go to applications accessories and
we're going to use an application called GTK Hash.
I'm going to open this application and in the file field in here, I'm going to select the file that
I want to verify.
It's hash.
This is the file that I just downloaded.
So I'm going to click in here and I'm going to go to Tor browser.
And this is the file that we just downloaded.
I'm going to click on Open and I'm going to click on hash to calculate its hash.
Now we have the SHA two, five, six hash in here.
And what I'm going to do is I'm going to copy all of this and compare it to the hash that the developer
is giving us here on the download page.
Now, as you can see, the hashes match.
This means that the file did not get modified as it's been downloaded because if a single bit is changed
in that file, the hash that I just calculated manually on my local computer will not correspond to
the hash that we have on the Web page in here.
So because the hashes are matching, this means that the file did not get modified since this hash right
here got calculated.
So we can interact with this file now safely as long as we trust the developer that gave us the file.
So I'm going to right click this file because it's a package and I'm going to click on extract here
to extract it.
Okay, perfect.
That's done.
So you can leave it here.
But if you leave it here, as you know, tales is amnesic.
So when we restart the computer, these files will not exist.
Therefore, I'm going to copy it and I'm going to paste it in my persistent directory.
So right click and paste.
And if we navigate inside it will actually see another directory for the application itself.
So I'm actually just going to cut this and paste it outside just to make it easier to access.
And I'm going to delete the empty one and I'm going to rename this one to just more narrow guy again,
just to make it easier to access.
And if we navigate inside this directory, you'll see we have a number of files that's needed by the
wallet application.
And the main file that starts the wallet is this file right here.
The start GI Dot is huge.
Now this is a batch file, which means that it can only be executed from the terminal, from the Linux
terminal.
Now, if you've done any of my other courses, this will be very, very easy for you.
If you haven't, then don't worry about it.
And the next lecture, I'll show you how to run it and create our first Monero wallet.