In the last Monero General Fund transparency report in March 2023, the General Fund held 8452 XMR. As far as we know, this separate wallet is safe and unaffected. It would be possible to pay people with active CCS proposal from the General Fund, but nothing has been decided.
A hard blow.
I’m thinking of Pegasus-like outliers that are out-of-scope or potentially rather governments.
Air gap may not be sufficiently safe in extreme cases.
This raises the question about the General Fund wallet. How is it secured?
Something is seriously wrong. There’s a reason decentralisation is important. Anonymity or not, you never put all your eggs (digital or physical) in one basket for precisely this sort of reason. Once the wallet size reached a certain threshold (say 100 or 500 XMR), a new wallet should have been created for subsequent funds and the previous wallet should be in a hardware or paper wallet with a different trusted person ideally multisig. If funds were stolen via hack or the police forces the wallet holder to give up the keys, only a fifth (for a 500 XMR wallet) or a twenty fifth (for a 100 XMR wallet) of the amount would have been lost. If multisig is buggy, it need be ready for Seraphis. If it’s just a matter of UI, then it needs to made usable and widely adopted. Remember, one of the key advantages of Monero is that it make privacy easier. You can try use Bitcoin and go through a lot of hoops to get privacy and forever stay vigilant, or just use Monero. Multisig and managing multiple accounts should be at most as difficult as Bitcoin.
Ooof
Womp womp
