If you monero reddit gone the world of cryptocurrencies, you probably know that Monero is a privacy-centric cryptocurrency that has surged in the market since late My coauthors and I, from Princeton and UIUC, have just released some research showing that its privacy claims, particularly for transactions made prior to Februaryare significantly overstated.
Based monero reddit gone the invective response our research has generated, the Monero community would much prefer you focus only on their newest offering, while ignoring the monero reddit gone promises from their recent past. For a bit of background: Just like in Bitcoin, each Monero transaction has some inputs and some outputs.
Each input is a link to the output of a previous transaction, forming a graph. In Bitcoin, these linkages are transparent and explicit. Every block explorer website like blockchain. These linkages have also been the basis for graph analysis, clustering, and deanonymization analysis. A typical users' mental model of Monero transactions is informed by this illustration. In Monero, however, the links between transactions are obscured.
You may have formed a mental model based on the popular illustration shown to the right. Furthermore, if you visit any Monero block explorer website, you'll see the transaction graph is presented as a dead end. You can't tell where each input comes from, and you can't tell where each output goes. Just as an example, have a look at how typical block explorers render this transaction monero reddit gone MayChainRadar and MoneroBlocks. This transaction has 5 inputs and 5 outputs.
Each monero reddit gone has 6 mixins 7 links in total, including the real oneindicating a high level of privacy is desired. The outputs are dead ends, and you can't tell which of the 7 links is the real one. After all, Monero is the "opaque blockchain". In our research paper, "An Empirical Analysis of Linkability in the Monero reddit gone Blockchain," we show that in fact for most of Monero's blockchain history, the mixins haven't done much good.
Most transactions made prior to February actually are linkable. In the past, most coins were spent by 0-mixin transactions those that opt-out of privacy altogether were commonplace. Including these coins as decoys doesn't do any good, because it's already obvious where they've actually been spent. However, the Monero wallet does not take this into account. The Monero blockchain has provided little more privacy than Bitcoin.
To illustrate the problem and make its impact crystal clear, alongside monero reddit gone paper we've launched a block explorer, called MoneroLink, that reveals the hidden linkages in Monero transactions.
If you visit the MoneroLink page for the transaction mentioned aboveyou'll see we are able to identify the correct incoming link for 3 of the 5 inputs, and we're able to identify the correct outgoing link for 2 of the 5 outputs, despite the large number of mixins. The MoneroLink block explorer reveals the hidden linkages among Monero transactions from through We readily note that for transaction made since Marchthe rate at which we can link transactions has steadily decreased, although the correct link can still be guessed with higher probability than you would hope.
In this post I'm eliding almost all the technical details, but a more detailed analysis can be found in our technical paper. If the existence of a link-revealing Monero block explorer comes as a surprise to you, then you're not alone. This is the first block explorer of its kind. Monero reddit gone date, there has been no indication that the Monero blockchain is vulnerable to such wide analysis.
And it clearly contradicts the privacy claims in Monero reddit gone marketing and popular media. Neither of the MRL reports conveys that this is an actual problem affecting actual transactions. Instead, the papers are abstract, describing mathematical models of marbles in urns and hypothetical attack scenarios involving Simpsons characters.
Most importantly, no prior report has made any empirical analysis based on actual blockchain data. The contribution of our work is to show that 1 the parameters have been poorly chosen, 2 there doesn't need to be any attacker, the problem manifests all on its own, and 3 we confirm that indeed the result has been a monero reddit gone loss in untraceability.
I'd like to call attention to a particular pattern of discussion, in which MRL reports monero reddit gone been used unintentionally to quell further investigation. At various points in Monero's history, several forum posters have stepped right monero reddit gone to the threshold of this revelation, but have been gently steered away from proceeding further, using the MRL reports to end the discussion.
Zero mixins forgo all the privacy advantages of Monero, right? But do they damage or interfere significantly with other transactions? This doesn't do a bit of good for anyone who relied on the privacy of prior transactions! Here's another example showing how the MRL reports have been interpreted:. Our research clearly shows that this attack is not theoretical, but absolutely affects actual transactions.
It has taken empirical blockchain analysis to show this. In fact, VedadoAnonimato again in late even highlighted the need for this monero reddit gone empirical approach:. The thread, of course, ends immediately on that cliff hanger.
The blockchain data has always been there for anyone to take a look at, but it's only now that we've done the work. The Monero cryptocurrency and community will undoubtedly survive this revelation. The best response now would be to acknowledge that this result comes as a surprise and no one knew just how many prior transactions were vulnerable to linkability analysis. Even if some folks have had a suspicion deep down that this might monero reddit gone the case, no one has particularly wanted to look into the data and see the unpleasant truth.
It means that the community's leadership has knowingly allowed users to be misled about the privacy of prior transactions. The right thing to do would have been to issue an advisory monero reddit gone communicates the problem very clearly:.
This is exactly the message that the MoneroLink block explorer conveys. It's better late than never! The MRL reports have served as a form of dog-whistle communication. The reports are written unintentionally, but perhaps subconsciously in densely coded language that avoids alarming monero reddit gone.
Developers have been working in earnest to improve future versions of the software, but have not sought to empirically quantify the existing problem or to clearly warn users about the privacy implications. Real users today can easily be impacted by a loss in privacy of yesterday's transactions. This is plausible, and hopefully it's true, since it would mean the potential harm caused by this vulnerability is limited. However, even if only a small number of users relied on Monero for privacy in and earlier, then their privacy matters, and this warning is intended for them.
As anticipated, this release stirred up a flurry of shitposting and character attacks, on reddit and on twitter, from a loud minority of grumpy folks. I'm resisting the urge to curate the worst of these for a cheap vindictive pleasure. Most of the rest are editorial quibbles about how we present our results. We take your criticism seriously and will incorporate it in updates to our paper.
I also want to thank SamsungGalaxyPlayer and KaroshiNakamoto for insightful but still very critical posts, including a great thread calling for a more rational and level-headed public response to a research release monero reddit gone this. I've been involved with Zcash for years as well as for several other cryptocurrency projects, like Tezos, Ethereumas a consultant and recently as a founder of its community-supporting Foundation.
This is transparently and appropriately disclosed on the front page of our technical report. It's also clear to see from my websitetwitter profile socratesand is duly reported to my employer, the University of Illinois. My research is not funded by Zcash, and the other coauthors have nothing to do with Zcash at all.
Many of the initial reactions to our research predictably focused on questioning our motives as a way of drawing attention away from the substance of our report. By all means, be skeptical of our findings, and ideally reproduce them independently. We monero reddit gone our paper within a few hours of a planned hard fork flag day. Maybe no one will believe me, but this timing was entirely coincidental, and I was not aware that Monero was going to monero reddit gone then.
This is totally my fault, because in hindsight there were plenty of places I could have read about this. I've been reading lots of monero reddit threads recently while preparing our article, but only by monero reddit gone search, not by reading the front page. In particular, Monero has established the admirable policy of scheduling hard fork upgrades regularly, on April 15 or on monero reddit gone other predictable days of the year, and has committed to this policy for over a year.
I can see how this timing looks like hostility. If I were paying more attention and noticed, I absolutely would have waited until after the monero reddit gone fork to release news that that would likely distract the developers and broader monero reddit gone. Originally we hoped to release this work two weeks ago, but I got distracted by the Financial Cryptography conference and didn't finish the website until now.
I'm relieved this hard fork upgrade went fine, as have all of Monero's hard fork upgrades to date. Revealing the hidden links in the Monero monero reddit gone monero zcash April 19, at Is this a surprise?
On the soothing quality of the MRL reports. The truth hurts, but time heals. More responses from the Monero community As anticipated, this release stirred up a flurry of shitposting and character attacks, on reddit and on twitter, from a loud minority of grumpy folks.
Isn't this a paid hit piece for Zcash? On the timing of our release coinciding with the Monero hard fork upgrade Whoops.
Also agree with Tbone, the trading UI needs to be improved. Well there's my problem, without the clear step by step tutorials, I was unable to have a strategy nor did I make any money.
But, itвs a currency that will remain even if the dollar, the euro, or other currencies hit rock bottom, which means that youвll still have money in order to buy things. 1 btc.