Receiving Monero privately — a 10-point checklist
Unlocked by your payment. Free to keep; tip if it saved you a mistake.
- Verify the address before you share it. A single typo sends funds to a valid-but-wrong address and they are gone. Use an offline verifier or your own wallet to confirm the address decodes as a standard mainnet Monero address.
- Use a fresh subaddress per counterparty. Subaddresses look different but share one wallet. They stop outsiders from linking "who paid you" across sends.
- Never reuse the same address for public tips and private deals. Public tip jars are linkable by design. Keep a separate subaddress for anything sensitive.
- Confirm on-chain, not by trust. Ask the sender for the txid and check it against a public node or your view key. Monero shows you it arrived; the sender cannot fake a real tx.
- Wait for confirmations before shipping goods. One confirmation is usually enough for small amounts; larger deals deserve more. The chain is the arbiter.
- Back up the seed — once. Write the 25-word seed on paper, offline. A wallet file alone is not a backup if you forget the password. Never photograph it.
- Lock down the spend key. The private spend key moves funds. It should live only in your wallet, never in a browser, a screenshot, or a "verifier" page.
- The view key is read-only — but still private. Sharing it lets others see your incoming payments. Use a dedicated wallet's view key for any public paywall/audit, never your main stash.
- Watch for clipboard hijackers. Malware swaps copied addresses for the attacker's. Re-check the first/last characters of any pasted address, every time.
- Assume the node is hostile. A remote node can lie about balances. For real sums, run your own node or cross-check with a second node. Lightweight is fine for small receipts; paranoia scales with the amount.
This checklist is part of the monero-static-paywall kit. The same engine that gated this page can gate your own guides, files, or tools for XMR.