2. No it's not, it is a huge security risk. Even if the BCN Devs planned on doing it to thwart attackers, it paints a huge and centralized target for law enforcement--once they had them, they would have the whole network. Intentional or by accident this would be one of the worst ways to secure a coin's anonymity.
Did you have chance to read my post on this page above? Removing untraceability
does not destroy anonymity since the unlinkability property holds. What it does is allow to link exact inputs to exact outputs. However good luck identifying the people behind the transactions with stealth addresses for each output.
An observer would not be able to even link any two transactions that were made to the same wallet (even if it the recipient and the sender are the same), not saying about the balance. How is that a security risk exactly?
If you can link inputs to outputs, then you can track the money. The public wallet address is irrelevant.
Say you're the police and bust a drug dealer and see his wallet has incoming money in an address (output of a drug money transaction). Now if you can link to an input of the transaction that created that output, you have one of the buyer's addresses (behind the wallet's stealth address).
Then, you check Poloniex's wallet which user (KYC) has withdrawn to that address, and you can go make another bust.
Or am I missing something?
yes (as far as I understand it) because each time you make a transaction, it goes to a one-time stealth address, coming from one-time stealth address ring signatures. So when I'm sending you money, I take one of the outputs that I own and sign it with my private key and some other private keys in a ring signature, but all of these signatures are obfuscated through one-time stealth addressing, and then I send it to your stealth address. So, as mentioned by Rias (and the monero labs research bulletin)
. If the unspent transaction output (UTXO) set is filled with a lot of transactions that
aren’t really anonymous, there are fewer ways to make untraceable ring signatures.
At this point it must be noted that, even in this scenario, the one-time key pairs
(so-called “stealth addresses”) used in CryptoNote protocols are not violated in
this scenario, and so the anonymity of users is still not directly violated. Rather,
this attack violates the untraceability between one-time ring signatures, but this
development is still somewhat worrying. Hence, even non-malicious entities can
execute this attack on accident, malicious entities can spam the network to own
lots of the UTXO set, and malicious entities can break untraceability for others.
So I think it'd be interesting to have it explained why traceability between one-time key pairs .... means anything. My head goes in and out of this game so refreshers are always useful.
And again my nascent understanding of all things crypto shines brightly here, but in my mind, if I send money from stealth address b to stealth address d, and then d's new owner sends it from stealth address f to stealth address g..... still, no one knows what the hell is going on. Right? Gah. I need to do more reading.