Okay Mullvad have sadly removed the option to pay in cash in my country so I thought it was the perfect time to start to learn/use monero but I know pretty much nothing about it and have no idea where to start.
Tldr I’ll only be using android and I don’t very care about crypto and moon rockets. My only interests is only buying services anonymously as possable.
Where is a good place to learn about monero/crypto? Videos/websites
How do I buy monero privately with fiat?
What wallet should I use for privacy/anonymously?
Is it a good idea to get other shitcoins like bitcoin? If yes why?
Is hardware wallet a meme? If not should I get one?
From my own limited experience (I managed to pay for Mullvad with Monero at least), this is how you could do it. I’m sure there’s better ways.
Get a Monero wallet app. For example Cake Wallet is a popular one for mobile use. Set up your wallet, save the seed phrase (25 words I think) somewhere where you won’t lose it but nobody else can see it as this is the key to access your coins.
Buy Monero. It’s not super easy to buy these days because governments have cracked down on privacy coins. Multiple options:
In some countries (e.g. in the US) you can buy Monero with KYC (giving your name and photo ID) from Kraken.com and then withdraw it to your own Monero wallet. KYC doesn’t really matter that much with Monero, because unlike with Bitcoin they only know that you bought Monero, but not how much is in your wallet or what you are spending it on.
In some countries (Europe) you can buy Monero without KYC through Cake Wallet buy clicking on “Buy” and selecting “DFX” as the onramp provider. You need to send them the money via SEPA (Euro) bank transfer and they will send you the Moneros the next day. I’ve used them before and it worked fine each time but you need to wait a day.
There’s also a program called Haveno which enabled peer-to-peer exchange between fiat money and Monero. Theoretically this is the best and most private option. It’s brand new and there’s not many guides on it yet (here’s one: Bank transfer / Cash by mail / Cash in person)
Alternatively, you can buy a different, non-private cryptocurrency and swap that to Monero. I would avoid starting with Bitcoin because it has high fees, but for example Bitcoin Cash and Litecoin are great as you can buy them easily from every exchange (e.g. Binance). You can then swap them to Monero on another site without needing further KYC, e.g. on changenow.io or (to compare the best rates) trocador.app. I’ve done this before and it also works fine.
Finally, you can do the latter all in Cake Wallet. Just create a Bitcoin Cash or Litecoin wallet in the Cake Wallet app, go to the Buy tab to buy those coins, then go to the Exchange tab and swap the coins you just bought to Monero. You might get a slightly worse ‘exchange rate’ but it’s convenient as it’s all done in one app and it will auto-fill your Monero wallet address and all that.
In Mullvad, select Monero as the payment method. It will show you a QR code. Go to the Send tab in Cake Wallet and scan it, it will auto-fill the amount and receiver address, then confirm that you want to send the Moneros. It takes about 20 minutes for a Monero transaction to be fully confirmed so don’t worry if you don’t immediately get your Mullvad credits.
(You don’t have to use Cake Wallet specifically, and it might not be the best one there is, it’s just the one I use myself.)
They know that you bought Monero and how much you bought. You also had to give them a lot of PII because of KYC, which they will probably store, which means that your information is exposed if those exchanges get breached.
There is also Monerujo, which I personally prefer over Cake Wallet.
Apparently it’s live, but I haven’t tried it yet, in fact I didn’t even manage to get it installed on my system (Fedora Kinoite)
I agree, it’s best to avoid KYC. But with Monero you still have privacy and plausible deniability - “I donated it to some developer or blogger”, “I just bought a VPN subscription”, “I was betting on the price going up”. Nobody knows what you did with it, unlike with Bitcoin. The only information that gets exposed is “this person bought Monero for this amount from that exchange”. It’s no different from “this person withdrew this amount of cash from an ATM” (which might already be an ‘odd’ thing to do in some cashless countries).
You have to build it yourslef if I remember corectly. Or at the very least there is no easy .AppImage/.distrofile way of installing it.
Even after going trhough the hassles, there were bugs. From what I understand it is only available for testnet Monero, and thewhole thing is a Beta (more of an Alpha really).
Haveno is “just” a decentralized, Peer to Peer exchange. I read in an article it was only for Monero testnet, but I am not sure what does that imply exactly.