Could there possibly be an inflation bug for XMR as well?

Question ⁉️

Hey everyone, this is my first post here, and thanks for your attention.

As a privacy advocate with number theoretical background, I added Monero to my portfolio, occasionally taking a look at ZCash for comparison. However, given the bad news three days ago that halved the ZEC price, I realized I should not pretend to be an expert, and math isn't everything.

In case you don't care about ZCash, let me recapitalize. An AI model from Anthropic found an issue with its protocol, which according to Gemini, "could deduct 1 ZEC from Alice but yield 100 ZEC in Bob's wallet without alarming a third party". Its developers had to implement something overnight to stop losing users' confidence -- "hard fork". No matter how many counterfeit coins were generated along with this 4yo bug, they will stay there forever.

I think this should concern other privacy coin users as well, in that no public audit could be carried out to monitor whether the total input equals output. To make things a bit worse, ZEC has the same hard cap as BTC, so if one day 21,000,001 ZEC were spent in one transaction, we'll know it has been inflated by some bug. The same verdict can't be made on XMR, whose theoretical upper bound rises by the same constant value annually. That means, we won't even know how many is too many, if time's sufficiently long. And it's not theoretical -- in 2017, Monero patched a critical flaw in its "CryptoNote" protocol to prevent double spending.

So, please let me come to the title: Except for the negligible possibilities pardoned by cryptography, have we considered all possible inflation loopholes? Thank you for your time.

Posted Jun 8, 2026, 10:22 PM UTC

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