A good help to understand how ring signatures work in monero is to use Monerovis.com blockchain explorer for monero. Click on any transaction, then select any of they decoy inputs which will take you to the transaction where this utxo was originally created. Click this output pubkey to view the decoy map. This Might not be related to your question Directly , but will help you understand the current structure and tracebillity.

Bitcoin UTXOs can make future transactions more expensive. Learn how small deposits create inputs, affect fees, and when UTXO consolidation makes sense.

I’m a long-time Monero dev, and just happened to see this post. > **When spending XMR, do I need to manually select UTXOs／stealth addresses and manually set the change address?** Every output on the blockchain is unique and not connected to your address (assuming ECC/ed25519 is **not** broken). Every “change address” is also unique. You really don’t need to do anything, except for _maybe_ UTXO selection (typically referred to as “coin control”). After FCMP++ fork, coin control is also not needed. Every transaction contains a public-key for an ECDH operation. This operation allows **both** wallets (sender and receiver) to “find” the secret keys of the new UTXOs. As hinted at previously, there is no connection to any address that you give to others on the blockchain. The downside is that each wallet must perform cryptographic operations on _every transaction_ to determine if funds were received. > If a transaction requires multiple UTXOs, do I need to consolidate them into a single address first, or can I spend them directly and let the wallet automatically select funds from multiple addresses? You don’t need to do anything if multiple UTXOs need to be spent. The transaction will have 1 input for every UXTO, and each input will have a unique “ring signature” to obfuscate the real spend. Coin control _may_ be useful because of how ring signatures work. Every “spy” knows that _one_ of outputs listed in the ring was definitely spent, and transactions with multiple inputs leaks some information about associated outputs that never occurs with 1 input transactions. > **When receiving XMR from a KYC platform, should I perform churning (sending the funds to another address or another wallet), or can I spend them directly** There is something called the EAE attack. I’m not going to describe it, as the video probably does a better job. If a Youtube link is unacceptable, I’ll dig further to find a better resource. Like with the coin control mentioned above, EAE should be eliminated by FCMP++, as the information “leak” from the ring signature is no longer available. > **When an XMR wallet software is connected to my own self-hosted Monero node, are transactions broadcast by the wallet software or by the Monero node?** Every new transaction ultimately lands on a node, that broadcasts to the network over tor/i2p OR “clearnet” using Dandelion++. If the operator has configured `--tx-proxy` for their node, then the “first hop” is _only_ tor and/or i2p, otherwise the first hop corresponds to the Dandelion++ algorithm. The Monero community recently ran a simulation of Dandelion++, proving that the privacy claims of the white paper were seen in practice using real Monero nodes. > **When using Whonix + Feather Wallet, do I need to configure Stream Isolation? Which of the following approaches should I use?** You’ll probably want to use stream isolation.