It really seems a good coin. I have a question. What is "Adaptive parameters" under Features here:
https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/xmr-monero-a-secure-private-untraceable-cryptocurrency-583449This part is interesting:
Unlike Bitcoin, your funds are not held in the address you give out to others. Instead, every time you receive a payment it goes to an unlinkable address generated with random numbers. When you decide to spend the funds in that one-time address, the amount will be broken down and the components will be indistinguishable from identical outputs in the blockchain.
The adaptive parameters are discussed in the CryptoNote whitepaper - a good starting point is our annotated version of the whitepaper (the annotations are raw, so just ignore the occasional piece of snark;) that you can grab here:
http://monero.cc/downloads/whitepaper_annotated.pdf - a lot of it is around hard-coded constraints in Bitcoin and Bitcoin clones that are adaptive or flexible in Monero.
One of the key features that makes privacy inherent in Monero is, as you pointed out, stealth addresses. You only have one "address", which is not an address in the Bitcoin sense of the term, and when funds are sent to it the address is unpacked and the resulting key combined with random data to compute the destination for a particular output. This means that it's impossible to inspect the blockchain and find someone's balance, and if your address is leaked there's ostensibly no way for blockchain analysis to confirm whether or not you received funds to that address.
Of course, there are esoteric attacks that could reveal information about a sender or recipient, which is why ring signatures provide an additional layer of ambiguity. Basically, with ring signatures a transaction output is signed by you and by a group of random signatories (garnered from the utxoset, and the number of signatures is specified by you). Only one of these signatures is "true" (and that can be determined by the recipient), but to an outside observer they cannot determine which of the N signatures on an output is true, as they all appear to be valid.
Additional edge cases can and do exist that may "deanonymise" a group of signatures, but they are such extreme edge cases that they are not going to be a concern except where a sufficiently advanced and powerful attacker exists (and in that case they'd probably just beat you with a pipe wrench till they get your privkey and can access everything anyway). There have been suggestions such as enforcing a minimum mixin, and there's an interesting
discussion on the pitfalls of such a system on the CryptoNote forum if you're interested. Ultimately there are many, many things outside of Monero's control that are more likely to unmask someone, such as them being caught physically receiving a marked package at the post office, but for the purposes of most transactions Monero provides a 100% working system in which transactions are cryptographically unlinkable and untraceable.