Tracking Mixed Bitcoins
arxiv.org
arxiv.org
no limit on distinct orders.
Americans just turn on your VPN to access the frontend website, the server and operator don't actually care.
> XMR.to is currently not available in your region.
I guess no Americans allowed
Don't trust, verify. [1]
I worry that many people are confused by this, and don’t understand that this will continue to get eroded as time goes on for completed transactions.
gist
(in case you've ever wondered why gist.github.com is so named)
But this is not necessarily true. Two strangers could meet anonymously in an online chat and agree to trade e.g. Bitcoin for Ethereum using a cross-chain atomic swap. In this case the transactions occur on two separate chains, and any available metadata is likely very hard or perhaps impossible for a third party to discover.
Besides brute-force tracking of the chain, a clever way to track cryptocurrency users (including Monero users) is to add backdoored cryptocurrency wallets/apps into app stores and capture the data at the point it is created, just as Facebook/Whatsapp capture keystroke input in realtime. This is probably even cheaper than breaking Monero's obfuscation techniques, and also works well against better privacy technologies such as Zcash.
Yeah that's a solid "citation needed", you are talking about breaking serious cryptographic assumptions there.
It's not even worth responding to this person.
I'm not sure there is an educational moment with people like this.
For the record, to anyone passing by, I and many others view things in the opposite way. Zcash is less private, it operates in two states with the default state being just like bitcoin, with a separate state having opt-in privacy. Many/most Zcash users think they are using the opt-in state by default which is unfortunate. The Zcash opt-in state is not as anonymous as Monero and is easier to deanonymize and harder to use best practices to thwart. Zcash is developed and run by a US based company which can be much more easily coerced than a distributed team like Monero has doing open source work that collectively funds development when necessary. Zcash organization has budget for advertisement. It is suspicious that Zcash followers present an alternate reality so opposite to this that it is gaslighting, and does exactly what people are worried a centralized VC backed US based company would do.
That is why privacy-by-default is very important, and why right now Monero should be considered more private.
Right... if you have tens to hundreds of millions of U.S. dollar's worth.
But even if we decide to include cross-chain swaps, its not untraceable at all. You still need to verify hashes match up, its just an extra hop to have an oracle look on the other chain.
And it really depends on the surveillance vector.
For example, I'm not worried about the government having records, via a subpoena, but I don't want customers, merchants, random blockchain sleuths and pencil pushers having any usable information.
As such, I often trade with OTC desks. OTC desks have reportedly had more volume than deposit/withdrawal-based exchanges for years. This is not a "lit" market, it is the opposite.
When I trade with an OTC desk, they give me a new address, and they send me the other crypto I asked for at an agreed upon price. OTC desk addresses are not giant labelled hot/cold exchange wallets that everyone watches on a block explorer. So when you are following a transaction on chain, lets say it was bitcoin you felt was stolen because thats a circumstance where people watch the transactions, you and others would assume that the transfers to new addresses are all the thief attempting to hide their tracks, and then everyone waits until some of that bitcoin is transferred to a known exchange wallet to then notify the exchange, hoping to freeze the assets as well as identify a KYC'd user. What nobody knows is that the actual bitcoin changed ownership amongst distinct humans 10 addresses ago. The "thief" being followed already received a completely different cryptocurrency from the OTC desk, ages ago and there is no way of knowing that. If the person actually committed a crime, then in this model the OTC desk has records if anyone identifies the OTC desk instead of simply inconveniencing or framing the person that received tainted bitcoin to their KYC'd account.
I wouldn't be surprised if the wrong people are getting inconvenienced or even charged with their tainted cryptocurrencies more often. Don't use surveillance coins.
I often transfer digital assets to Monero for any reason, and then when I want fiat I sell the Monero to an OTC desk.
Or if the amounts are too small (OTC desk minimums are often $100,000), I convert the Monero to another large cryptocurrency and cash that out on an exchange.
We conduct AML on everyone who is onboarded, but we're of the opinion that trades should not be public information.
The same time-locked hashes which make atomic swaps safe, permanently tag both sides of a completed atomic swap transaction with a unique hash making it easy to link them together.
Atomic swaps are not designed to prevent tracking of funds.
If you have large sums in bitcoins you have anonymized and want to start withdrawing it as USD or some other currency, it can be confiscated unless you can proof it's origin (yes, there is reverse burden of proof).
Anonymize only bitcoins you use on the internet as anonymous user. Don't anonymize bitcoins you want to withdraw or convert into legal tender someday.
Every time you try take larger sum of cryptocurrency into the financial system, anonymity becomes a legal burden.
Not every time. Maybe for some countries or some people. I am a US Citizen and use the US-based exchanges Kraken and Coinbase and have not had a problem with depositing significant amounts of cryptocurrency. (Of course I verified and requested higher limits and reported the capital gains to the IRS).
The problem rarely happens during depositing as the source of money is known. It's the withdraw you must worry about, especially if you have deposited significantly less than what you withdraw.
In the US FinCEN is extra strict and US money laundering regulations are tough.
Further anecdata: I bought those coins and withdrew those same coins from those exchanges first.
Even at banks when I've withdrawn more than $10,000 cash, and have made $10,000+ wire transfers, no one cares.
Where are you getting these ideas from?
This is certainly false; the whole point is to invalidate money transmission laws.
If all the transactions being done wouldn't be forbidden by money transmission laws even if they were transmitting money normally, then the transactions aren't doing anything to negate the effects of the money transmission laws.
On the other hand, if a transaction would go against money transaction laws if it were going by some other method, even if it would currently be legal if done with bitcoin (which I doubt is the case, but even supposing), the money transmission laws could just be amended to also forbid the analogous transactions which use bitcoin instead of whatever other method, therefore then making it a crime.
A plan to invalidate a law by making a technology that fits through a loophole in a law, and hoping the loophole never gets patched, seems, an odd plan.
A plan to make a law practically un-enforceable by making a technology, seems like a more reasonable plan to me, and is also inherently facilitating a crime.
Of course, it wouldn't be desired that it be made illegal, but I think the desire would be that, if possible, even if it was illegal, people would still be successful in attempting to use it.
I don't think so. Satoshi included the headline of bank bailouts in the first block. It's been a decade since I scanned over the whitepaper, but I think it was to create a currency that people couldn't manipulate.
Bitcoin may be censorship resistant, but it is not censorship proof.
Sidenote: The original author of CryptoNote which Monero is based on, Nicolas van Saberhagen, is also an anonymous identity like Satoshi.
Though the singular "they" has been in the English language since something like the 14th century, for the past hundred-and-fifty or so years, some prescriptive grammarians have been advising against it, insisting that it's an error. I is perhaps due to the efforts of these grammarians that "they" has come to be regarded as informal, giving text a colloquial or conversational flavor.
How you can avoid sexism is my sometimes using "he" and sometimes "she" as a meta-variable for some unspecified person (consistently for the same person).
If you make the he:she ratio exactly 50% in your corpus, you're above all accusation of sexism.
I don't like reverse-sexism/racism/etc because adding the term "reverse" doesn't stop it from being sexist/racist/etc itself, but Hacker News guidelines say we should "respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith."
This is what I was referring to:
https://blog.chainalysis.com/reports/introducing-chainalysis...
> the exact same techniques that can be used to analyse CoinJoin transactions performed using Bitcoin can be used on Dash.
Perhaps a better illustration of the taint issue is "change". Whenever you need to send an amount of bitcoin that does not exactly match one of the UTXOs ("unspent transaction output") in your wallet, you will
- potentially need to use multiple UTXOs as input (thus linking together the past transaction that produced them)
- very likely have a "change" output that sends the excess amount back to a new address in your own wallet. Which output is change can be guessed with heuristics, and that UTXO will eventually be used in a future transaction, linking it to the current transaction.
Basically, all transactions associated with a wallet tend to become linkable over time.
If you want to move to a new device without having access to the master key, you need to make a transaction that connects all addresses (both inputs and change addresses).
It's not just ,,linkable over time'', it means that you link all UTXOs in 1 transaction.
What you are wrighting is also a problem, but different from what I had in practice.
I'm talking about the UX itself trying to make me lose privacy, and you suggest a solution that is even more complicated and especially expensive. Also what you suggest needs to be done slow enough so that the transactions can't be joined by the time of sending.
I'm writing about a real problem that happened to me just a few days ago and getting answers without practical real solutions that would be better than what I have done.
Privacy can be had in obfuscating your Bitcoin by sending them using the Lightning Network. You have your own LN Channel and then send them to yourself routing through as many other channels as possible. Bitcoin cleaned.
https://bitcoinmagazine.com/articles/how-the-lightning-netwo...
Another way is to use ZCoin. Zcoin uses zero knowledge proofs which burns the minted coin and redeems a new coin. SO I convert my 0.5 Bitcoin to Zcoin, the orginal transaction iin Zcoin is burned and new equivalent Zcoin is minted. No trace.
Monero is good but it is now under attack by Chainalysis to crack it on behalf of the IRS.
https://cointelegraph.com/news/chainalysis-and-texas-firm-wi...
When it comes to anonymity from the solutions available; coinjoins, Monero or Zcoin, personally Zcoin seems the most private way to obfuscate one's blockchain trail.
That is why privacy-by-default is very important, and why right now Monero should be considered more private.
Monero has been "under attack" for a long time now, well before the IRS started giving money out. There are possible attack vectors and subsequent remedies. The Monero people made a series called Breaking Monero where they talk about all of that stuff.
The poster was talking about Zcoin, and you responded with a canned line about Zcash.