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Chainalysis: A startup that helps governments trace crypto

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11–20 of 104 posts

Re: Chainalysis: A startup that helps governments trace crypto

#11

>Chainalysis software puts the lie to the idea that Bitcoin guarantees anonymity. I, for one, am shocked that moving decentralized currency to a centralized service that knows your identity de-anonymizes said currency.

Almost any use of bitcoin will de-anonymize you through some heuristic.

Re: Chainalysis: A startup that helps governments trace crypto

#12
post #9

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ring_signature sorry, federal government. Keep up

As much as I appreciate the sentiment, ring signatures are not a perfect solution for sender privacy at the moment given current ringsizes. Almost every cryptocurrency with sender-obfuscation features bumps up against "poisoned output" attacks for low enough anonymity sets: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iABIcsDJKyM But it is good enough for many purposes. The goal is to provide a high level of plausible deniability…

You'll be glad to hear Monero increased its ring-size from 11 to 16 last month making such attacks less feasible.

I sure was.

Re: Chainalysis: A startup that helps governments trace crypto

#14

Imagine the outcry if government announced that every transaction you ever do will be recorded in a publicly available database. Bitcoin as it currently exists will never be a replacement for fiat --- not even close --- for a multitude of reasons.

Transactions are moving to layer 2 solutions like the lightning network.

Individual lightning transactions are not recorded on the blockchain and are not subject to chain analysis.

Re: Chainalysis: A startup that helps governments trace crypto

#15
post #14

Imagine the outcry if government announced that every transaction you ever do will be recorded in a publicly available database. Bitcoin as it currently exists will never be a replacement for fiat --- not even close --- for a multitude of reasons.

Transactions are moving to layer 2 solutions like the lightning network. Individual lightning transactions are not recorded on the blockchain and are not subject to chain analysis.

They are not subject to chain analysis, but they are still subject to analysis.

Re: Chainalysis: A startup that helps governments trace crypto

#16
post #14

Imagine the outcry if government announced that every transaction you ever do will be recorded in a publicly available database. Bitcoin as it currently exists will never be a replacement for fiat --- not even close --- for a multitude of reasons.

Transactions are moving to layer 2 solutions like the lightning network. Individual lightning transactions are not recorded on the blockchain and are not subject to chain analysis.

But aren't lightning transactions limited to 0.5 BTC?

Re: Chainalysis: A startup that helps governments trace crypto

#17
post #14

Imagine the outcry if government announced that every transaction you ever do will be recorded in a publicly available database. Bitcoin as it currently exists will never be a replacement for fiat --- not even close --- for a multitude of reasons.

Transactions are moving to layer 2 solutions like the lightning network. Individual lightning transactions are not recorded on the blockchain and are not subject to chain analysis.

Lightning is a lot less untraceable than people think. Settlement payments on a lightning channel are still traceable, and can be matched up. Also, lightning nodes get a lot of information about transactions that they don't publish to the blockchain, and you can bet that most lightning nodes that are around today keep logs. Most of them are run by big crypto companies, several of which are US-based.

Re: Chainalysis: A startup that helps governments trace crypto

#18
As far as I know, the state of crypto privacy is that everything is directly traceable except:

* Bitcoin lightning transactions when the lightning nodes involved are trusted to not keep logs

* Transactions through mixers with a lot of users

* Monero transactions

* Zcash private transactions

And everything is de-facto traceable except:

* Tornado cash users who use standard-size amounts (or users of another equivalently large smart-contract-based mixer)

* Monero users who are careful about their entry/exit

Zcash privacy doesn't have enough users for anonymity, most mixers are too small, and lightning users generally use nodes from exchanges which do log a lot of information that isn't kept on chain.

Am I missing anything? This seems kind of bad for cryptocurrencies in general if everything is basically traceable.

Re: Chainalysis: A startup that helps governments trace crypto

#19
post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Transactions are moving to layer 2 solutions like the lightning network. Individual lightning transactions are not recorded on the blockchain and are not subject to chain analysis.

Lightning is a lot less untraceable than people think. Settlement payments on a lightning channel are still traceable, and can be matched up. Also, lightning nodes get a lot of information about transactions that they don't publish to the blockchain, and you can bet that most lightning nodes that are around today keep logs. Most of them are run by big crypto companies, several of which are US-based.

It's not meant to be "untraceable". But it's fast, and as mentioned not a public ledger.

If you want untraceable, you can go out of your way to achieve that using something akin to tornado.cash

I think the point is that the technology is already here and available - it's just not evenly distributed yet.

Re: Chainalysis: A startup that helps governments trace crypto

#20
And aren't there any open source tools to do roughly similar analyses?

I'd be surprised if there aren't any. Any large-scale criminal action can be strategically simulated and analyzed on those to make these guys' job harder up to the point that it's no longer feasible for many situations.

(clarification: while I do not support any criminal action, I equally hate government survelliance)

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