monero-site/resources/user-guides/prove-payment.md

---
layout: static_page
title: "How to prove payment"
title-pre-kick: "Prove "
title-kick: "payment"
title-post-kick: ""
kick-class: "kicks"
icon: "icon_about"
attribution: "<!-- Icon is based on work by Freepik (http://www.freepik.com) and is licensed under Creative Commons BY 3.0 -->"
---

When you send money to a party who then disputes the payment was made, you need to be able to prove the payment was made.

With Bitcoin, this is typically done by looking up the transaction ID, where the origin and destination addresses are
shown, along with the amount transacted.

Monero, however, is private: that information is not available publicly on the blockchain. The steps are therefore a bit
more involved.

To prove to Charlie that she made a payment to Bob, Alice must supply Charlie three pieces of information:

- the transaction ID, as is done in Bitcoin
- Bob's address, as is done with Bitcoin
- the transaction's key, which is new with Monero and other CryptoNote currencies

When Alice made the transaction, a one time key was automatically generated just for this transaction. Alice can
query it thus in monero-wallet-cli (new name for the old simplewallet):

> get_tx_key TXID

Alice would plug in her actual transaction ID instead of this TXID placeholder. All being well, the one time transaction key
will be displayed.

Note that this will only work if monero-wallet-cli is set to save transaction keys. To double check:

> set

If it's set to 0, set it to 1:

> set store-tx-info 1

Alice can now send Charlie the transaction key along with transaction ID and Bob's address.

Note: if several transactions were made, this needs repeating for each such transaction.


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Charlie now received those three pieces of information, and wants to check Alice is telling the truth: on an up to date
blockchain, Charlie types in monero-wallet-cli:

> check_tx_key TXID TXKEY ADDRESS

The information supplied by Alice plugs neatly instead of the placeholders. monero-wallet-cli will use the transaction
key to decode the transaction, and display how much this particular transaction sent to this address. Obviously,
Charlie will want to double check with Bob the address is really his - same as with Bitcoin.

Alternatively, the transaction key can be obtained in the GUI in the History tab. Click on details for each individual transaction to get the key.

Note: if several transactions were made, this needs repeating for each such transaction.