CipherTrace develops Monero-tracing tool to aid US DHS investigations
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Nice, now coinbase can list Monero. lmao
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Here is their interview.
Honestly, this is the same as some crypto promising private transactions but not providing source code. There is very little evidence of their capability to trace monero transactions.
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Yep, I wonder how this can be taken seriously at all by anyone since it is a close source tool and that they aren’t willing to fully share their models.
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That is true Kurt, but on the contrary the enemy is closing in. Regardless of the fact that Grin is not even all in on privacy and it lacks in truly developing new privacy features. It often looks Grin does not want to be private but more something in the middle. With new laws which the federal bank is already putting in to place I can tell with some certainty that my government already sees Grin as a private coin. This is going to get banned in the NL. Companies are not allowed to use it F.i. bitcoinmeester.nl came up with this news feed that all privacy coins are banned. Link
I would advocate that we need to go all in on privacy and find the true ambition to bring freedom to the people. We lack features, we lack (anonymous) marketplaces and frankly we are under attack.
If they truly can trace Monero and it is of interest of governments it is very likely they signed a contract already with a government, including an NDA. In that case they wouldn’t be sharing the source code either.
This seems unlikely, since it would probably mean they wouldn’t be allowed to even reveal the existence of the tool.
Another “leak”
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Looks like this only works when the transaction goes from adversary > you > adversary, and if you’re connecting to a malicious node with your real IP. Churning to yourself once significantly diminishes the effectiveness of their tracing, and using a VPN or mixnet overlay basically nixes the rest of the threat.
What is interesting here - and I haven’t seen it mentioned in direct Monero community discussions about this - but a few months ago the Monero node count dropped on one of the main mapping services from ~24K to ~12K. Most people who saw that assumed the service had changed how it was counting available nodes, but it wouldn’t be surprising if chainanalysis was doubling the global node count as part of this effort…
EDIT: this article has a decent summary with links to some further discussion: No, Monero’s privacy didn’t suddenly break in this viral video
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