porcine-flight

Monero uses special techniques to obfuscate activity on its chain, increasing the cost of chainanalysis significantly. However, for an attacker that is well funded (e.g. NSA) it's likely a very small challenge to overcome.

Besides brute-force tracking of the chain, a clever way to track cryptocurrency users (including Monero users) is to add backdoored cryptocurrency wallets/apps into app stores and capture the data at the point it is created, just as Facebook/Whatsapp capture keystroke input in realtime. This is probably even cheaper than breaking Monero's obfuscation techniques, and also works well against better privacy technologies such as Zcash.

The key assumption which underlies tracking UTXOs is that the people sending UTXOs to each other have some sort of real-world relationship and they are both using the same blockchain.

But this is not necessarily true. Two strangers could meet anonymously in an online chat and agree to trade e.g. Bitcoin for Ethereum using a cross-chain atomic swap. In this case the transactions occur on two separate chains, and any available metadata is likely very hard or perhaps impossible for a third party to discover.

An important aspect of Ham radio culture, which I think underlies this discussion around the morse requirement, is the degree of self-reliance that you have to demonstrate in order to get a license.

What happens if the power goes out? What happens if you suddenly can't get those cheap PCBs, laptops, and phones from China? How are you going to communicate with someone a long distance away if you can't access a computer or an internet with all the bandwidth you could ever desire?

I think many people (younger hams included) have grown up now with the assumption that all of these things will just always be available. That's a risky approach, and doesn't make for a society that is resilient to external shocks.

This problem can be avoided if the parties use digital signatures and require a phone call for final confirmation of the instructions.