Comment by nimbius | Hacker News Reader

Comment by nimbius | Hacker News Reader

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The whole article is a plug for Chainalysis, a company that sells its ability to trace crypto transactions to the US government who ironically gave them KYC, the most fundamental and lazy ability to start a business that traces stuff like this.

What I'd like to see Grigg admit to with a straight face is his companies ability to trace monero. his company got the US Government bid for a $625,000 bounty to trace it, and its been two years...so i suspect Grigg's releasing this presser to take some of the heat off the inevitable "no, we cant" he's going to need to admit sooner or later.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monero#Efforts_to_trace_transa...

Updated to reflect the thousands, not mil. bounty.

$625k seems like a lot but in the world of government contracting it’s often not. It may be motivating this, but I’m kinda skeptical.

Yeah $625K across two years is just like 3 developers in NYC. It's not a lot of money.

In government contracting, $625k is more like one whitepaper.

I suspect chainalysis is describing some "poisoned output attack" with respect to monero. See: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=iABIcsDJKyM

The problem is a well-understood but innate limitation to all sender-obfuscating cryptocurrencies.

> limitation to all sender-obfuscating cryptocurrencies

Only those that allow sending coins to recipients without their explicit approval. On pure Mimblewimble blockchains, the recipient must sign for receipt and is much less likely to accept poisoned funds.

It's irrelevant

Sorry, I didn't watch the video, but couldn't that be avoided by churning a few times?

Sort of, but not really. It is a very nuanced probabalistic attack. The problem is fundamentally that you need others to use your outputs as decoys in order to have plausible deniability.

Call me skeptical of any assumed ill intentions as $625,000 is not a big enough chunk of change to convince me that there is some form of grift going on here, as there's millions to be made elsewhere grifting crypto.

$625,000, not million.

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