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If you’ve cracked Monero encryption or have a general deanonymization attack, you should submit a solution to the IRS’ multi-year, $600k bounty. There have bee

If you’ve cracked Monero encryption or have a general deanonymization attack, you should submit a solution to the IRS’ multi-year, $600k bounty. There have been a few instances of specific payment patterns causing de-anonymization (which just means payments are correlated and identified as not-spoof, due to the way the Monero blockchain works). But to be honest if you think Monero in general can be broken you probably don’t know how it works well enough to make that statement.

acdha 5y ago
I’m not saying I know it’s broken. I’m saying it’s a hard problem and given the stakes I would treat it like a new cryptographic construct where it takes the community many years attacking the entire system before people start making confident statements about it. One of the big concerns here is retroactivity: if you make decisions because you _think_ you’re anonymous but that changes for any reason in the future (compromised exchanges, insecure clients, sophisticated new analysis techniques, etc.) you can’t pull that history. That necessitates more caution than something where the stakes are lower if an attacker finds something clever to try.
- ziml77 5y ago
  This is exactly why I can't bring myself to put anything on any blockchain, no matter how anonymous it claims to be. I assume that someone will end up finding a flaw. When that happens, I may as well have been broadcasting everything without any security and privacy mechanisms at all. Not only can the person who's broken it see my history, anyone who knows the flaw can. I realize that things get leaked from centralized services, but there's a barrier to seeing that info. You put yourself at legal risk if you download one of those leaks and get caught. But there's no such risk with a public blockchain since the data was intended to be received by anyone who wants it.
  - lrvick 5y ago
    Remember that every time you withdraw or deposit cash at a bank all serial numbers are logged to you. When you buy something with cash at a business and that cash is later deposited at a bank then a link is logged between you and the vendor. Banks happily sell this sort of information and report it to various government agencies. It is also why most bank/ATM robbers and amateur money launderers get caught. Credit and Debit processors likewise directly log everything and sell it to marketing agencies to target you in detail. If your reason to not use crypto-assets is that they are not private enough then you certainly should not use cash or credit cards either.
    - acdha 5y ago
      The difference is that nobody is running around selling credit cards by saying they’re anonymous. Monero is much better than Bitcoin in that regard but it still requires a leap of faith to trust that a complicated tech stack is working. Even if it’s true that banks log serial numbers pervasively - most public sources say the opposite, except for things like money given to robbers - the many businesses which accept cash do not. Again, not perfect but the threat model is much easier for most people to reason about.
      - lrvick 5y ago
        Imagine one needs to make a life or death, but illegal, purchase like a life saving drug for someone unable to meet hospital prices. You would trust cash from your bank before Monero because some public sources you read promises banks never log serials? I do not know what public sources you have read but FWIIW my interactions with financial fraud investigators in private sector and multiple government agencies have convinced me cash transactions and those that make them can be logged in great detail for people of interest if nothing else. While complex I would recommend Monero or tumbled Bitcoin for people that require high privacy over anything else today. It also avoids the major risks of having to meet in person to transact as with cash.
        acdha 5y ago
        > can be logged in great detail for people of interest if nothing else. That’s the key part: this is very different than all activity being routinely logged. Most of us never need to worry about this and someone in a hypothetical situation like you describe is presumably not a person of interest until afterwards, where that public blockchain history is a risk for the rest of their life. Similarly: > It also avoids the major risks of having to meet in person to transact as with cash. This wouldn’t matter in your hypothetical scenario where physical goods need to be exchanged. Again, my point is that this comes down to the marketing push. Even if the system works as planned, the number of people who made other opsec mistakes is high enough that in practice cash is not less safe.
yifanl 5y ago
This is an aside, but is 600k a meaningful bounty compared to the potential payout of all that data? I suppose I wouldn't know how much that data is worth unless I do have a crack for it, so I guess the point is moot :P

acdha 5y ago

I’m not saying I know it’s broken. I’m saying it’s a hard problem and given the stakes I would treat it like a new cryptographic construct where it takes the community many years attacking the entire system before people start making confident statements about it. One of the big concerns here is retroactivity: if you make decisions because you _think_ you’re anonymous but that changes for any reason in the future (compromised exchanges, insecure clients, sophisticated new analysis techniques, etc.) you can’t pull that history. That necessitates more caution than something where the stakes are lower if an attacker finds something clever to try.

ziml77 5y ago
This is exactly why I can't bring myself to put anything on any blockchain, no matter how anonymous it claims to be. I assume that someone will end up finding a flaw. When that happens, I may as well have been broadcasting everything without any security and privacy mechanisms at all. Not only can the person who's broken it see my history, anyone who knows the flaw can. I realize that things get leaked from centralized services, but there's a barrier to seeing that info. You put yourself at legal risk if you download one of those leaks and get caught. But there's no such risk with a public blockchain since the data was intended to be received by anyone who wants it.
- lrvick 5y ago
  Remember that every time you withdraw or deposit cash at a bank all serial numbers are logged to you. When you buy something with cash at a business and that cash is later deposited at a bank then a link is logged between you and the vendor. Banks happily sell this sort of information and report it to various government agencies. It is also why most bank/ATM robbers and amateur money launderers get caught. Credit and Debit processors likewise directly log everything and sell it to marketing agencies to target you in detail. If your reason to not use crypto-assets is that they are not private enough then you certainly should not use cash or credit cards either.
  - acdha 5y ago
    The difference is that nobody is running around selling credit cards by saying they’re anonymous. Monero is much better than Bitcoin in that regard but it still requires a leap of faith to trust that a complicated tech stack is working. Even if it’s true that banks log serial numbers pervasively - most public sources say the opposite, except for things like money given to robbers - the many businesses which accept cash do not. Again, not perfect but the threat model is much easier for most people to reason about.
    - lrvick 5y ago
      Imagine one needs to make a life or death, but illegal, purchase like a life saving drug for someone unable to meet hospital prices. You would trust cash from your bank before Monero because some public sources you read promises banks never log serials? I do not know what public sources you have read but FWIIW my interactions with financial fraud investigators in private sector and multiple government agencies have convinced me cash transactions and those that make them can be logged in great detail for people of interest if nothing else. While complex I would recommend Monero or tumbled Bitcoin for people that require high privacy over anything else today. It also avoids the major risks of having to meet in person to transact as with cash.
      - acdha 5y ago
        > can be logged in great detail for people of interest if nothing else. That’s the key part: this is very different than all activity being routinely logged. Most of us never need to worry about this and someone in a hypothetical situation like you describe is presumably not a person of interest until afterwards, where that public blockchain history is a risk for the rest of their life. Similarly: > It also avoids the major risks of having to meet in person to transact as with cash. This wouldn’t matter in your hypothetical scenario where physical goods need to be exchanged. Again, my point is that this comes down to the marketing push. Even if the system works as planned, the number of people who made other opsec mistakes is high enough that in practice cash is not less safe.

yifanl 5y ago

This is an aside, but is 600k a meaningful bounty compared to the potential payout of all that data? I suppose I wouldn't know how much that data is worth unless I do have a crack for it, so I guess the point is moot :P