The
article.
What do you think of this? Cambridge scholars who seem to think the law tells us FIFO is the way to go in tracing Bitcoin theft.
Taintchain website doesn't seem to work anymore. My first impression, looking at the slides, is that it seems to completely ignore that FIFO doesn't necessarily work with more advanced clients. I mean, I've used coin control ever since I started using my client, and with all kinds of ways to spend UTXOs, I don't see how it's very reliable.
You're right, the analysis seems wrong. Anyone manually choosing UTXOs won't spend that way, and it would be really naive to assume that thieves will always spend using wallet defaults. Is FIFO even part of the default spending logic in any prominent Bitcoin wallets? I've never looked into it. I always choose UTXOs manually for privacy reasons.
Yeah, I'm thinking now of all the types of wallets, and the ones mainstream are most likely to use. Based on my experience:
1. Most people use clients like mine, but probably never choose utxos to spend. But even with defaults, wallets I think try to spend the biggest inputs first, and combine only when the spend is bigger. FIFO may have been a thing when coin age and priority levels were calculated for picking txs out of mempool but not any longer.
2. Many people use exchanges and other web wallets... any deposits they accept are almost immediately consolidated by the web wallet, and any spend users make are coming from batched transactions.
But maybe they know something I don't.
