provoost on Nostr: Quite a few wallet fingerprints, which you can't really blame on the protocol. But it ...
Quite a few wallet fingerprints, which you can't really blame on the protocol. But it does seem that combining lots of funds in a single transaction undoes the benefits of decoys. Bad news for merchants.
Hiding among N decoys is of limited use when law enforcement is really interested in you and just checks all N of them. Chainalysis has tools to make that easier. The video doesn't explain how they filter some of the decoys.
Also Chainalysis once again admits they're collecting IP addresses without consent. And that they're running bait "RPC" nodes, though it's really insane that any wallets connect to them over clearnet (albeit sometimes with VPN). But there are very bad Bitcoin wallets too.
Dandelion and 1-shot Tor broadcast (easier) remain good ideas.
Perhaps increasing the number of decoys to hundreds would fix the issue for a while.
Fundamentally though, it's better to not leave any bread crumbs on a blockchain, or other public spaces, to begin with. Which is why I think Lightning is a better design in theory. But beware of practice. If you e.g. use a custodial wallet, they know who you're paying (until blinded paths). As a recipient things are even worse.
So I guess both Monero and Lightning still suck for merchants (charities), but might be good enough for individual customers (donors).
Also note that the goal of chain analytics isn't necessarily to collect sufficiently strong evidence for conviction. Finding a (tractable number of) suspect(s) may be enough, then they know where to look for additional evidence. Being marked as a suspect by a black box algorithm should still be serious legal issue though.
Hiding among N decoys is of limited use when law enforcement is really interested in you and just checks all N of them. Chainalysis has tools to make that easier. The video doesn't explain how they filter some of the decoys.
Also Chainalysis once again admits they're collecting IP addresses without consent. And that they're running bait "RPC" nodes, though it's really insane that any wallets connect to them over clearnet (albeit sometimes with VPN). But there are very bad Bitcoin wallets too.
Dandelion and 1-shot Tor broadcast (easier) remain good ideas.
Perhaps increasing the number of decoys to hundreds would fix the issue for a while.
Fundamentally though, it's better to not leave any bread crumbs on a blockchain, or other public spaces, to begin with. Which is why I think Lightning is a better design in theory. But beware of practice. If you e.g. use a custodial wallet, they know who you're paying (until blinded paths). As a recipient things are even worse.
So I guess both Monero and Lightning still suck for merchants (charities), but might be good enough for individual customers (donors).
Also note that the goal of chain analytics isn't necessarily to collect sufficiently strong evidence for conviction. Finding a (tractable number of) suspect(s) may be enough, then they know where to look for additional evidence. Being marked as a suspect by a black box algorithm should still be serious legal issue though.
quoting nevent1q…lleyMonero people will tell you monero is untraceable but you can watch a video of chainalysis tracing it transaction by transaction. Here is the video:
Here are the timestamps:
26:55 - Morphtoken to the perp
30:43 - Perp to ChangeNow or Liquid Exchange
32:49 - Perp to Exodus Wallet
35:08 - Perp to Exodus Wallet or mining pool
36:51 - Perp to Centralized Exchange or Merchant POS, this is how they nabbed him