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I don't know enough about Monero's construction; wouldn't this be trivial to counterfeit? Can you use this key to ultimately transfer the funds?

• sandGorgon 7y ago
  no - the view key does not let you do any transactions. It only lets you verify the balances. It also does so in a privacy-preserving manner. this is full text of a View Key A keypair specific to Monero. The public part of it makes up the 2nd half of monero address, and is used by the sender to generate a one-time stealth address to where the funds are actually sent. The owner of the wallet uses the private view key to scan the blockchain and find the funds sent to his address. At the protocol level, the sender performs an encryption with the recipient's public view key, and the recipient attempts to decrypt all the outputs on the blockchain to find the one belonging to him (where decryption was successful). For audit purposes, it could be shared with the auditor, along with the signed key images to prove the balance of a wallet. Sharing only the view key would enable the auditor only to see received transactions, but he wouldn't be able to tell if any funds were spent, so he couldn't know the actual balance. In the trivial case that each kong is a wallet - a view key would actually show the balance.