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Comment by tryptophan | Hacker News Reader

Nope. Monero is actually private and untraceable.

How many times are we going to learn that that's just not true.

There is no safe, only shades of safer.

Is the mathematical underpinnings of Monero sound? That's a good starting point. There are still implementation bugs, compiler bugs, architecture bugs, supply chain vulnerabilities, and state actors with unlimited $.

Is getting in and out of Monero private and untraceable?

Until someone cracks it, that is. If it becomes the crypto of choice for some of the bigger fish, you can bet the government will find a way to trace it.

>Until someone cracks it

This is certainly not a given. The government isn’t going to be cracking signal messages within any reasonable timeframe either.

There are ways to crack encryption that have nothing to do with math. It doesn't matter how good your crypto is. You could probably get by plain text as far as the FBI's effort to crack your crypto are concerned as they won't waste their time checking if you are that stupid.

This doesn't really make sense. In the case of a criminal laundering crypto, they don't know who the criminal is, so the rubber hose attack doesn't work.

Obligitory XKCD: https://xkcd.com/538/

Rubberhose cryptanalysis does not work with Monero because you don’t know who to whack.

There is at least $625,000[1] on the table already. Not to mention how many blockchain analytics companies and other actors would pay millions to have such a capability.

[1] https://www.forbes.com/sites/kellyphillipserb/2020/09/14/irs...

The main reason I bring this up is this is the same promise Tor brought- “completely private” etc. And we all know how that went down: https://www.vice.com/en/article/4x3qnj/how-the-nsa-or-anyone...

I'm with you, I don't trust it's private/secure at all, but until proven otherwise it's a very interesting technological feat.

I did a deep dive with a friend of mine (we’re both OS engineers) and its going to be a hell of a cookie to crack.

There is a literal virtual tumbler built into the transaction protocol called ring signatures.

Stealth addresses (an additional crypto key pair) obfuscate senders and receivers.

They also hide the amount transferred which blew my mind.

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