De-anonymization attacks against the privacy coin XMR

>right, don't do that. Withdraw to your wallet. Wait several days. Transfer elsewhere in different denominations.

Unfortunately, it doesn't work like that. The EAE attacks only require that the end destination is colluding with the start destination.

Like everything with decoys, privacy is stochastic. So I wouldn't go around making absolute claims about the privacy as many proponents of monero like to do. The developers advise against making these sorts of claims. Monero makes privacy a lot easier, but it's not perfect.

>There are court cases that give the confidence necessary. It is also something to stay abreast of. Always just ask yourself who the transaction is intended to be hidden from.

In the free world, we have the concept of innocent-until-proven-guilty and evidence-beyond-a-reasonable-doubt. Decoy-based approaches give you plausible deniability, but this often isn't enough for more domains where a lower standard of proof is needed.

Fortunately, all this and more will be fixed in FCMP++ upgrade.

"right, don't do that."

As a non-user of Monero, how do I find out what the security properties are and what information is leaked when various actions are taken? The OP's analysis is deeply lacking in this and the apparent rule against repeated transactions is non-obvious

"There are court cases that give the confidence necessary. " NO!

many times police will made up "plausible way" how they uncovered something, but this "plausible way" was constructed after the "secret" or illegal way was employed to do it.

rephrase : police will do illegal thing to obtain info where you stash your drugs. for example installing NGO Pegasus to your phone, gps tracker under car... so they already have that info. then they call anonymously 911 saying there is smell of gas on street. (maybe they even spray some of mercaptan to make it even more plausible) firefighters, etc will come investigate gas leak and police will say that they uncovered drug stash in investigation of gas leak... illegal way to obtain info, then brainstorming how to make that data available "lawfully". they will not tell in front of judge/court about first part... so no your assumption is not correct.

in computer world it is million time easier.

99% of youtube videos about criminals failing at operational security is intentionally bad information.

IF you are believed to be criminal / "bad person" police(men) will justify doing almost anything, because you are bad person IN THEIR EYES.

also they are trained to and expected to disinform :

For example, Ross Ulbricht. every news paper said that "closing his laptop lid will lock his computer and police will be unable to decrypt it" they pushed it and said it so many times that researchers jumped on LUKS and in 1.5 years there was almost complete rewrite of LUKS.... (not even talking about constant TOR effort)

Whole not closing his notebook also proves that they obtain data legally. It does not say they did not have that data already.

One info can mean multiple things to multitude of people.

Your point is correct, you sound like salty CIA spreading FUD because it is job of NSA to provide them with solution which did not came. :) So you are saying that ZKSnarks are CIA approved ? XD

It's massively common. USDT is the usual coin of choice because even though the ledger is public, the convenience and relative stability massively outweighs the security risks. In the jobs I've seen, the marks will be 'investing' in BTC but the criminals will be moving those funds out into USDT the moment it hits the bandit wallet.

exchanges that only support cryptos and not fiat money don't require KYC. In some cases, you don't even need to create an account at all. It is extremelly easy to swap from one crypto to another in a few clicks.

Alternatively, because they’re talking about banning it without actually banning it, it must be compromised.

> better piece of technology

Technology quality is uncorrelated with market cap. This would be like saying Frontier Airlines should have a higher market cap than United because one uses Linux and the other is still on mainframes..

It doesn't need a lot of speculative value in order to be useful. It just needs enough value to make the transactions meaningful. And that means people are a lot less likely to drive up the price via speculation.

BTC is not about usefulness. The Bitcoin community has abandoned all of the original principles that made them. It is now just about line goes up and make money.

Yes, it scales much worse:

* node resources scale with the size of the UTXO set (unspent outputs), which in Monero's case balloons to the entire TXO set (all outputs, orders of magnitude larger)

* a typical 2-input 2-output transaction is 4 times larger

* wallets have to track all outputs to choose random decoys for transaction inputs

One can argue that this is the price to pay for significantly better privacy, but the largest benefits come from having no visible amounts or addresses, which can be achieved with significantly better scalability than BTC [1].

[1] https://forum.grin.mw/t/scalability-vs-privacy-chart/8114

Mindshare and hype tend to be self reinforcing and create their own gravity. BTC has the largest market share because it has the largest market share. The moment it got derivatives and ETFs listed and traded on major US exchanges (e.g. CME futures), it became the clear winner because if you are a hedge fund and want to get on the crypto bandwagon, it's easily accessible, liquid and doesn't require extra paperwork. So you trade that instead of going on some unregulated exchange where you might end up as a news headline of "Hedge Fund loses money in crypto exchange exit scam".

One important factor is that Monero are printed at a constant rate, unlike BTC that are printed at an exponentially slowing rate.

A constant rate of printing means the supply is uncapped but the inflation rate will approach zero.

Monero's choice is arguably better for actual use as a currency, as the printing will prevent deflation from lost coins. But it makes it less attractive as an investment.

Isn't BTC privacy achievable these days with coinjoin, lightning network etc.? In that case no much reason for monero.

> Are there scaling issues with Monero, similar/worse than BTC?

While there are scaling issues with BTC it's severely worsened by the fact that BTC had refused to scale on-chain.

Monero is technically much harder to scale but since it doesn't have the same self-imposed restriction it can handle more transactions than Bitcoin can.

>It has to be inertia related right?

Consider that a lot of Bitcoin is assumed to be locked up.

If an old satoshi wallet started moving funds, the price would probably halve.

You just used some bullshit AI tool to call my work, that took me several weeks to research and write, "AI slop".

That's after getting a degree and spending over a decade in financial journalism.

You will read this but still insist you are smart.

People like you are the reason people are falling for "AI slop".

> Generate fucked up shit without restrictions? No, that already exists and is not relevant IMO. My comment has nothing to do with what kind of content you generate.

The USA in specific has had a similar problem before with encryption being classified as a munition making very problematic to import or export encryption. That's actually pretty well documented in various pieces of Java code from Sun if you're curious, because different algorithms could not be part of the JRE/JDK that was distributed publicly.

Your mention of "highly centralized billion dollar compute operations" is actually related to the training of the models not the inference. Doing inference for many of these models is readily available at modest consumer hardware availability. There are many different ways to break up models (MoE) etc. The notion that you need a large super computer to do inference is unfounded.

Also, as a reminder, cryptocurrency mining has already proven this to be a thing. Some stay above ground, some go to geopolitical areas for shelter and some stay underground entirely.

For your entertainment I will also include a more simplified play-by-play of how this can play out in the near future:

1. OpenAI or some other USA based AI company continues to get outplayed by foreign models (Qwen, Deepseek)

2. Company cries to government

3. Government does a similar munitions or tariff to what we saw with encryption. Requires at the least anyone wanting to use AI gets one from the good boy list etc.

Now you either (a) use only AI from the good boy list and get outplayed in the global marketplace where our main export is global technology or (b) start acting like a Chinese citizen and using a VPN to access AI services not available only on the approved good boy list.

I will stop here because the rest is already very well documented with how this progresses and you get the same result as the darknet marketplaces (DNM). DNS censorship for AI services not on the good boy list. DNS censorship and legal pressure for VPNs that allow non-good-boy-list services, etc.

Why wouldn't someone change a few .com endpoints to .onion and keep it moving while you send some coin to a wallet?

Not the OP, but Zcash's privacy feztures are optional and seldom used in practice, whereas monero is secure by default. It helps with blending in the crowd.

Monero doesn't have a dev tax.

Though Zcash proponents will say the tax is a good thing. The tax is so good, that instead of getting rid of the tax after half of the coins were mined like the developers originally promised, the devs kept the dev tax for all of the mined coins.

IDK about this particular administration, but the government did place Tornado cash on the sanctions list (now removed). Which does operate differently than monero, but from the view of a bureaucrat I think similar effect.

Yes. I would bet on it. Certain Democrats don't like Monero because of the criminal activity around it. If the king told Republicans to ban it, they would be able to get enough Dems on board to avoid any filibuster problems.

I long used to think that private money was a good thing for freedom helping the little guy living under state repression, but I'm recently starting to worry that it will do the opposite, by helping the ultra-rich engage in corrupt schemes.

The rumors that people bought Trump-coin for the sole purpose of currying favor got to me.

The latter is arguably the more important of the two.

I remember a scare some years back around a Monero developer that turned out to be a nothingburger, but it goes to show how important it is that the core development team is trustworthy, or at least sticks to their beliefs and don't capitulate to third-parties (whether public or private in nature).

Monero is the one coin I can confidently say I trust the core developers on, it's had a strong history of making the right decisions where it counts in my opinion (breaking ASICs w/the monero-classic situation, making the official client default to downloading the entire chain, etc)

How much of the Monero development team is actually known? Last I checked some of their core team were anonymous but that might have changed

Good to know. Thank you!