Take Flight with the Monero CLI Wallet

3 minute read Published

Be your own bank. Store your secure, private and untraceable cryptocurrency and keep it safe from prying eyes. Learn to take flight with the Monero CLI wallet.

Monero is a secure, private, and untraceable cryptocurrency. It is open-source and accessible to all. With Monero, you are your own bank. Only you control and are responsible for your funds. Your accounts and transactions are kept private from prying eyes. Learn how to install the Monero CLI wallet. There’s only one way…

Arise, you have nothing to lose but your barbed wire fences!

Timothy C. May, The Crypto Anarchist Manifesto

Monero Features

The secure, private, untraceable cryptocurrency.

Privacy: Monero uses a cryptographically sound system to allow you to send and receive funds without your transactions being easily revealed on the blockchain (the ledger of transactions that everyone has). This ensures that your purchases, receipts, and all transfers remain absolutely private by default.

Security: Using the power of a distributed peer-to-peer consensus network, every transaction on the network is cryptographically secured. Individual wallets have a 25 word mnemonic seed that is only displayed once, and can be written down to backup the wallet. Wallet files are encrypted with a passphrase to ensure they are useless if stolen.

Untraceability: By taking advantage of ring signatures, a special property of a certain type of cryptography, Monero is able to ensure that transactions are not only untraceable, but have an optional measure of ambiguity that ensures that transactions cannot easily be tied back to an individual user or computer.

Installing Monero Wallet

Keep your Monero safe using the official Monero Wallet. Get the latest version from the Monero Project code repository on GitHub.

Before extracting the archive verify you have downloaded the correct file by validating the file hash. File hashes are provided along with the download links for the latest release.

To validate on macOS run the shasum command from Terminal and pipe to cut to output the value of the file’s SHA256 checksum:

shasum -a 256 monero-mac-x64-v0.11.1.0.tar.bz2 | cut -d' ' -f1

Shown here, the hash for the 64-bit macOS Monero wallet version called Helium Hydra, Point Release 1 bumped up next to the value retrieved from the above command:

75b12623760574688572adfb10504d872d60ca7c4ac7571011d62429d6288e50
75b12623760574688572adfb10504d872d60ca7c4ac7571011d62429d6288e50

Tip: Being your own bank means it’s a good idea to validate your shasum against the canonical list of GPG-signed hashes on the Monero website.

If it’s a match, extract the wallet from the archive using tar from Terminal:

tar -zxvf monero-mac-x64-v0.11.1.0.tar.bz2

Resulting in output similar to the following:

x ./monero-v0.11.1.0/
x ./monero-v0.11.1.0/monero-wallet-cli
x ./monero-v0.11.1.0/monero-wallet-rpc
x ./monero-v0.11.1.0/monerod
x ./monero-v0.11.1.0/monero-blockchain-export
x ./monero-v0.11.1.0/monero-blockchain-import

Of the five binaries, two of particular importance are:

  • monero-wallet-cli handles the account
  • monerod handles the blockchain

The CLI can be used as a stand-alone to create an account. Used alongside the monerod daemon it can perform common tasks such as checking your balance, accepting and sending payments, and proving payments to 3rd parties.

Check the Monero website for usage guides, security practices and be sure to RTFM before asking for help on StackExchange or prior to /j monero on Freenode.

Tip: Check out Irssi if you’re looking for a good command line IRC client.

After that learn how to securely purchase and store Monero.