Live data from Hacker News

Chainalysis: A startup that helps governments trace crypto

bloomberg.com

31–40 of 104 posts

Re: Chainalysis: A startup that helps governments trace crypto

#31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

by that logic, so is every fiat payment processor, bank, what have you.

The privacy characteristics of the lightning network are probably worse than that of the traditional banking system, but this depends on implementations.

Re: Chainalysis: A startup that helps governments trace crypto

#32

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.

Most of the transactions with Bitcoin happen offchain, depending of course how you define "transaction". Definition for transaction can be stricter or more lax but for sure it is not only onchain transactions.

For example Bitcoin onchain transactions are routinely compared to Visa network - fairer comparison would also include transactions from lightning network and offchain transactions within services.

Re: Chainalysis: A startup that helps governments trace crypto

#33

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 equivalentl…

When using one’s own lightning node it doesn’t matter if individual nodes on the path to your destination node keep logs, they can’t collect much information besides who the last and next node are in the route. The original and final destination (as well as any other useful payment information) are obscured through onion routing and the information you can learn from traffic analysis is limited and difficult to perform well.

Re: Chainalysis: A startup that helps governments trace crypto

#34

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)

I built a tool for myself for Algorand that's (maybe?) somewhat similar to their Reactor offer.

It's called Ballet and it's open source, too!

- Quick demo video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7hnNzSf2-Ak

- Live application: https://alexisrondeau.me/algorand-ballet/

- Github repo: https://github.com/akaalias/algorand-ballet

Re: Chainalysis: A startup that helps governments trace crypto

#35

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 equivalentl…

Can you explain the entry/exit thing of monero? I always thought i’m fine when using monero, but never looked into what ring signatures imply.

It's about how you purchase and sell it. If you sell Monero for USD on a centralised exchange, they might ask you for your ID, the source of the funds, source of the funds of your source of the funds (really!) and similar.

AFAIK ring signatures hold. It's like a mixer on every transaction so trying to track more than a few transactions back, the complexity explodes.

Re: Chainalysis: A startup that helps governments trace crypto

#36

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 equivalentl…

Can you explain the entry/exit thing of monero? I always thought i’m fine when using monero, but never looked into what ring signatures imply.

If you do BTC-XMR-BTC in a specific amount, you can get traced through that. Tornado cash is the same. All the exit points from Monero are non-anonymous, so you need to be careful that you don't enter and exit in ways that can be correlated.

Re: Chainalysis: A startup that helps governments trace crypto

#38
post #3

Let's see what they can do for Zero-Knowledge proofs.

Recent ZK Knowledge podcast recently discussed a lot of this, how you can determine IP addresses inside blockchain transactions, and DDoS, and Chainanalysis usage of IP for KYC.

https://zeroknowledge.fm/246-2/

I'm not clear if the conversation concluded with zk is impervious, or whether it is an active question of research.

Re: Chainalysis: A startup that helps governments trace crypto

#39

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 equivalentl…

When using one’s own lightning node it doesn’t matter if individual nodes on the path to your destination node keep logs, they can’t collect much information besides who the last and next node are in the route. The original and final destination (as well as any other useful payment information) are obscured through onion routing and the information you can learn from traffic analysis is limited and difficult to perfo…

If you use your own lightning node, the other nodes on the path to your destination can still tell which node the information came from, and that can be used to de-anonymize your transaction. If you are the only user of your lightning node, it is trivial for the next person in the chain to attribute transactions to you.

Re: Chainalysis: A startup that helps governments trace crypto

#40

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 equivalentl…

Can you explain the entry/exit thing of monero? I always thought i’m fine when using monero, but never looked into what ring signatures imply.

He may be referring to opsec more generally (onramps, offramps), or he may be specificially referring to poisoned output attacks: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iABIcsDJKyM

TL;DR Ring signatures, like all sender-obfuscation methods, have a limited anonymity set: it limits you to a pool of possible senders. If Alice frequently sends funds to Bob, who frequently sends funds to Carl, who frequently sends to Alice, she can see that Alice->Bob->Carl->Alice is one possible outcome. She does this because she can trace the coin she associates with Bob to a coin she associates with Carl. There is a ton of plausible deniability at first, but the relationship between Bob and Carl becomes more obvious the more Alice->Bob->Carl->Alice continues to happen.

Alice can be multiple exchanges collaborating using KYC.

How to resist poisoning: limit your risk, churn, bigger ring-size/anonymity set, do atomic swaps (this severs chain of ownership, but is not generally sybil-proof), do multi-output transactions if you are sending to multiple people at once who can co-ordinate (this reduces the number of coins they can co-ordinate).

Post reply on HN