Re:Mastering Monero: The future of private transactions [pdf...
by fastball on Friday May 26, 2023 @10:53AM
(#36084982)
> I never formalized the math
Formalizing the math seems very important to underpin a bold claim such as this one.
Re:Mastering Monero: The future of private transactions [pdf...
by lordofgibbons on Friday May 26, 2023 @11:03AM
(#36085114)
If that's the case, why does the IRS still have a $625k bounty for anyone who can defeat monero's anonymity features?
And why have you not collected your money?
https://www.forbes.com/sites/kellyphillipserb/2020/09/14/irs...
Re:Mastering Monero: The future of private transactions [pdf...
by __alexs on Friday May 26, 2023 @11:23AM
(#36085361)
PoC||GTFO
Re:Mastering Monero: The future of private transactions [pdf...
by dachri on Friday May 26, 2023 @01:47PM
(#36087436)
This problems have already been solved.
Zcash is far away from being full privat its just opt-in privacy and not privat by default. And the structure that Zcash is a company is not good
Re:Mastering Monero: The future of private transactions [pdf...
by vitehozonage on Saturday May 27, 2023 @08:14PM
(#36099810)
I solved the P versus NP problem too but I didn't bother to formalise the math. Do you believe me? That's what you sound like.
If what you write is true then please write the paper; it would be tremendously important. Until then it's impossible to take you seriously.
Unfortunately, techniques to break Monero's anonymity have been known since 2018, and these techniques are effective at breaking essentially any partial-mixing based cryptocurrency. (Monero, Lelantus, CoinJoin, Wasabi, etc).
Initial attacks (famously The Flashlight Attack) were capable of breaking the anonymity of targeted individuals, but this attack was later generalized (by me) to break everyone.
These attacks never got a lot of coverage but they are highly effective. The only way to get strong on-chain privacy is to use a full-anonymity cryptocurrency like Zcash.
https://slideslive.com/38911785/satoshi-has-no-clothes-failu...
https://gist.github.com/DavidVorick/0dbd4906bfa50b7d8dba23f7...
The general idea behind each of these is that you can identify people by doing math that essentially asks "what is the likelihood that these N outputs are this close together in the transaction history graph" - and the answer ends up being "cryptographically unlikely" after just a handful of transactions from the same party. The privacy decays unexpectedly quickly. I never formalized the math but iirc you can get enough evidence to be convinced that two different transactions were by the same person after they spend something like 3 outputs total. The math is really nasty.
The only fix we know of is to switch to full anonymity systems. The privacy break is exponential in strength, and therefore even systems like Lelantus that use mixin sizes of >50,000 outputs fail to provide meaningful anonymity.