Exactly, I'm not sure why people continually try to add privacy to bitcoin when there's a better alternative. With all of the blockchain monitoring services it's nearly a lost cause.

Monero's trading volume is not that great - you can reveal information through relatively-large movements, a sort of side-channel attack.

That's the first time I've heard that claim before.

I know its volume is way higher than Zcash's shielded transactions.

Do you have any details on how it might work?

I assume you're just not talking about simple timing correlation combined with trading BTC->XMR->BTC (poor opsec).

As far as I know, you can't reveal XMR amounts, receipent, or sender if you're just remaining in XMR and not going through a third party (exchange, conversion service, etc). So I'm really curious about the details of your claim.

Mostly just simple timing correlation, because coiners turn out to talk a much better game about opsec than they practice.

Monero has a ton of issues that make it not nearly as private as you might believe.

https://www.wired.com/story/monero-privacy/

FYI, that's outdated now. Monero has made improvements, and researchers continue to make more improvements.

Previous HN discussion about article: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16687008

r/Monero discussion: https://old.reddit.com/r/Monero/comments/87hr28/hn_discussio...

Only one of those particular issues is outdated, as the article tells you up front. Monero still has issues that remain and continue to be found as time goes on. It's not a good protocol and not a safe one for privacy.

It's digital, so it or any other digital currency can never be perfectly-perfect. It's private which is it's main goal. If others want to be anonymous, just like any other digital currency, they need to take additional steps that can never be solved by any digital currency.

There are much better people to discuss any problems you think it might have over at r/Monero, including people with PhDs (I'll never be as smart or have as much dedication as they do). I suggest using the search function about your concern, and if you don't see it, create a post or make a comment in their Skepticism Sunday threads.

I learned about Monero here on HN years ago, understood its limitations then, and keep mostly up-to-date. I won't claim that any thing in the world won't have its limitations or problems, but I do still believe that Monero is the best project currently and still looks promising going forward in terms of user financial privacy.

Nothing is ever going to be perfect. Saying "it's not perfect but it's private" is claiming that it's doing the job it purports to do. It's not. It's been broken from the beginning.

Most of reddit is self-aggrandizing cliques who believe they are much smarter than they really are -- especially in the cryptocurrency space. My concerns are not obscure or unknown, everyone who pays attention knows that Monero has issues.

There are multiple projects that are better in terms of financial privacy -- Monero is primarily an ugly hack to barely obfuscate transactions.

> Most of reddit is self-aggrandizing cliques who believe they are much smarter than they really are -- especially in the cryptocurrency space.

I highly encourage you to visit r/Monero. Those devs are the first to say it isn't perfect. They've never promised the moon or hype themselves. They acknowledge that people's lives could balance on whether or not their finacial transactions are private, so they don't overpromise and always continue to look for ways to improve.

It seems like you have an agenda and a viewpoint that doesn't line up with reality.

(And a lot of people seem to criticize Monero because it's not anonymous (which is not the goal), so that's why I say it isn't perfect. And of course there will always be an attack vector for everything: people could track serial numbers of physical cash, the NSA could track every keystroke/tap on every device, etc, but realistically it's very good and getting better about blockchain analysis attacks.)

I've been there. I've spent significant amounts of time reading reddit cryptocurrency boards.

I don't have an agenda. My "viewpoint" is reality. You don't have to like it, and feel free to put your trust in technology that does not deliver what you believe it does.