I must admit I am not exactly sure on the specifics of Monero.

From a cursory Google it looks like they claim to be different from regular crypto-currencies on these fronts:

• Stealth addresses for the recipient, so you can’t track who receives money
• Ring signatures, so you can’t easily figure out who signed a transaction
• Encrypted transactions, so people outside the ring cannot see the value being transferred.

That leaves me with a few questions.

Assuming that we can trust everyone in our “ring” ourselves, how does someone outside the ring verify that a person is good for the amount they are attempting to transfer? The reason why in regular crypto the sender, receiver and amount are public, is so that anyone can verify that noone is spending more than they have. That is necessary in lieu of a central authority verifying transactions.

I take it that as outsiders we just have to assume that the “ring” is credible, and has verified the transaction for us.
That leads me to my next question. How can we trust the ring? What is preventing a small group of people banding together and forming their own ring, approving each others fraudulent transactions? It seemingly lowers the bar for a 51% attack quite significantly.

Any website I found also talks about stealth addresses for recipients, but how does the money then make it to the actual recipient? At some point the address of the actual recipient has to be made public in order for the funds to actually go where they are supposed to go.

And if there are only stealth addresses for recipients, does that mean there are no stealth addresses for senders? Can anyone still see if I’m making transactions, just not how much and to whom?

I’m currently at work, so admittedly I haven’t taken a particularly deep dive on the topic, but these are just some concerns that came to mind based on the information I found following a quick Google.