Monero Stealth Addresses Explained

Stealth addresses are an important part of Monero's inherent privacy. They allow and require the sender to create random one-time addresses for every transaction on behalf of the recipient. The recipient can publish just one address, yet have all of his/her incoming payments go to unique addresses on the blockchain, where they cannot be linked back to either the recipient's published address or any other transactions addresses. By using stealth addresses, only the sender and receiver can determine where a payment was sent.

From what I gathered, stealth addressing is a technique whereby a sender can take a recipient's public address and transform it to a one-time address such that:

1. it is publicly unlinkable to the original public address;
2. it is publicly unlinkable to any other one-time address;
3. only the recipient can link all their payments together
4. only the recipient can derive the secret key associated with the one-time address

Using stealth addressing, a recipient can publish one address and receive unlimited* publicly unlinkable payments. Even after sending funds Monero uses Ring Signatures to ensure that transactions are untraceable.

TLDR: Monero utilizes stealth addresses to provide anonymity when transacting.