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Comment by rolltiide | Hacker News Reader

SHUM

should have used monero

There is a reason that many darknet markets have it as an option and some use it exclusively

It remains to be seen if the methods used by monero, dash, and various zk-proof based coins are enough to prevent de-anonymization when a motivated state actor is involved.

Gotta say though, this is one of the few times I'm glad to see someone too stupid to use proper anonymization tools.

I know you were trying to be objective but Monero has to be considered in isolation

There already have been indictments that happened to involve finding a Monero wallet on a seized computer and the state was unable to discern any information about the current balance or transactions accompanying it

Again this would be another culprit busted because of their known bitcoin transactions, and the other wallets were just found alongside. So it doesn't prove or disprove that starting with a Monero transaction would net results, but it provides an ongoing and improving degree of confidence.

What makes Monero different than Bitcoin?

It effectively embeds a coin mixer in every transaction, so to speak. In bitcoin you can trace transactions from one account to the next in the public ledger, with Monero theoretically you won't be able to follow the funds quite as easily.

Of course it remains to be seen if it really works if some three-letter organization really wants to figure out who you are.

Does it remain to be seen? There have been busts and indictments where the state was not able to determine anything about the Monero wallet that were also seized in the operation

Can't the data just be taken directly from the ISP connecting to whatever crypto services are out there? If the FBI really wanted to get that info, I would think they can track all activity from the main hub directly.

It's encrypted, so no.

Monero nodes see IP addresses, but they do not see the sender's crypto address, and they do not see the receiver's crypto address.

So in its current state, ISPs would only know what someone has launched a Monero wallet at some point in time. Using Monero is completely benign.

In its also current but also upcoming state, Monero clients automatically connect to TOR or I2P. So a Monero node would not know your IP address and an ISP therefore would not either.

Monero exchanges are merely Monero clients, and a Monero client knows its own address, and it knows the address the sender told it to send to which would be the receiver. But neither of these addresses are ever seen on the blockchain, and the receiver's Monero client does not know which address sent to it.

Since the receiver's client doesn't reveal which address sent to it, and there is no passive blockchain sleuthing possible, and the nodes don't see any of this either, there is very little the FBI could do if users are following best practices which are the default behaviors of this network.

Non-default behavior would be users that rely on exchanges exclusively: they send their 2 Monero from one exchange to another exchange. Exchange 1 is an account that belongs to the user, and it knows the address of Exchange 2. Exchange 2 is an account that belongs to the user, and it only has the same balance and transaction id as Exchange 1's send. The FBI happened to have subpoena'd both exchanges and found the same transaction id. Improbable now, but it could happen anytime in the future.

When the user adds their own Monero client into the mix (exchange 1 - client - exchange 2, + time + different amounts), this gets exponentially more difficult as you already need access to the user, the subpoena, and their Monero client. There are many barriers to getting that, especially in the face of benign economic activity, and the blockchain itself doesn't help.

You also aren't supposed to re-use addresses. This is true for Bitcoin and all cryptocurrencies. It means that an exchange wouldn't even know if you were sending to yourself, one of your other wallets, to a vendor to pay someone, or what. With Monero none of those recipients know who sent to them.

It does already work and the "three letter organization" can't do much about it. Hell, they can't even do anything about the bitcoin wallet "wasabi", much less monero: https://www.cryptopolitan.com/disgruntled-chainalysis-employ...

There have been academic 'attacks' on the monero cryptocurrency, but nothing usable in the real world.

When the state names a particular company as anonymous or untraceable consider it compromised.

bitcoin is not "a company", it's a distributed network of computers that's basically impossible to take down.

Meh. The NSA will simply fabricate evidence if they really want to get you.

As an individual, I can't stop the NSA if they are genuinely out to get me. All I can do is increase the cost enough that random bureaucrats have to get up from their computer, sign a form, and expend some money to do so.

Maybe, but not in a usable way - if anybody had been working off of an assumption that Bitcoin were anonymous, they know better now. So if Monero is, as you say, compromised/compromisable, the government can only pull that trigger once before the cat’s out of the bag.

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