Topic: Can someone really explain which coins are truly anonymous? - page 3. (Read 3101 times)

"You actually didn't intend to ask but asked nevertheless".


It is quite simple, in fact.

In bitcoin-like currencies, your transaction links a previous transaction or a set of previous transactions (where you received the coins) and the future transaction(s) of the receiver(s).  This is pseudonymous, in the sense that nobody knows (apart from you broadcasting your transaction with your IP, on your computer, etc...) who you are, you are just a bitcoin wallet address.... UNLESS they find out who was ONE of the previous transaction owners or they find out who was one of the FUTURE transaction owners.  For instance, if a previous transaction owner was an exchange, then this exchange knows of course that YOU (Jack Smith) have withdrawn the funds to THAT address, or you bought a smartphone with your bitcoins at THAT store, and they know of course that it was YOU (Jack Smith) who paid them with those coins.

As coins hop from transaction to transaction, and this is fully traceable on the bitcoin block chain, it is sufficient to have SOME "real world identities" along that chain, to be able to resolve most of the identities along.  This comes about because you have to combine several of your own addresses to arrive at the right amount of coins to pay someone, and to get back some change.

Imagine you have withdrawn 5 bitcoin from exchange A, to address J1.
Imagine you have done a shady deal with Joe, and got 3 bitcoin to address J2.

Now, imagine you pay a gaming computer for 7 bitcoin at store B.  Your wallet will combine addresses J1 and J2 into 8 bitcoin, and send 7 of them to store B, and you get 1 back in change address J3.

Suppose now that you pay a coffee at starbucks C for 0.01 coin.  You will use address J3 (and get back 0.95 at address J4), and they know it is you.

Now, suppose that law enforcement caught Willy, the guy with whom Joe did affairs, and got his coins from.  Willy doesn't say anything, but they found his bitcoin wallet on his computer and found his addresses (they didn't even need to have the secret key for that).  Suppose that the coffee shop works regularly with law enforcement too.

Now, they see that from one of Willy's addresses, after a few hops, the coins (YOUR coins) arrived at the coffee shop:

In fact, the hops were: (Willy) - (Joe X) - your J2 - your J3 - the starbucks C address.

Law enforcement now needs to resolve X, J2 and J3.  They know J3, because starbucks tells them: it is yours !
They know that Willy's coins went through you to buy a coffee.  But you could have gotten those coins J3 "honestly" from the guy owning J2.  So they now have to resolve J2 and X.  They know that J2 was combined with J1 to do a transaction (to store B, but they don't even have to know that).  There are hence chances that J1 and J2 belong to the same person.  Now, J1 is known by an exchange, it is YOUR address.

This is sufficient to know that J2 is yours, and hence that you got money from a guy that did business with Willy.  That's reason enough to come and ask you some nasty questions.  You cannot deny that you are the owner of J2.  You mixed it with J1 which is definitely yours, and you were still the owner of J3 which came out of a transaction.  So you MUST be the owner of J2.

The only thing that law enforcement knew, where your interaction with an exchange, your interaction with a coffee shop, and Willy's interaction with Joe.

At no point they knew anything about Joe's wallet (the don't yet know who Joe is, but you are going to tell them if they use rubber hose cryptography), nor about your wallets.

This is the fundamental problem with traceable coins like bitcoin, ethereum, and all the rest.

Now, for mixers.  The trick is that many people wanting to hide their addresses from their identities, put their coins in a big transaction where they get them out again.  Whether that is a good, or rather a bad idea, depends on how often and by how many people it is actually used.  If you mix your coins J2 with S1 and S2, where S1 and S2 are also shady people, then 1) it is somewhat more work to trace the network, but they payoff is that 2) they will catch more shady guys along !

You need more "contact points" to resolve the mixer, but you will also catch more fish !

It is only if mixers are used regularly, by MOST (innocent) people, that mixers help.   If they are MOSTLY used by people wanting to hide their transactions, then mixing is actually a bait for law enforcement/TPTB.

Also, mixers are specific entities that KNOW of course the mixing.  In as much as they are centralized entities like exchanges, they are more dangerous than not mixing, because you don't know what they do with this knowledge ; if they are distributed entities, you might very well be mixing on an FBI node without knowing.

This is BTW why OPSEC and anonymity go together and you cannot just consider them two different problems.

This is why *optional mixing* such as in DASH or with centralized tumblers, is something that can make your anonymity decrease as well as increase.  There are two potential problems with it: 1) the "optional" part, if not enough people use it and 2) the fact that the knowledge exists somewhere out there, in the mixer and you don't know what they do with it (voluntary or even not voluntary, if their OPSEC is not OK).

So mixers on transparent block chains can help, but can also be a problem, depending on how distributed the mixers are, and how much they are actually used normally.

Monero type block chains are different.  You could say that at first sight, monero transactions "do a random mix" at every transaction.  That would already be nice, because 1) there are no centralized mixers 2) every user uses it automatically all the time.  That's already very very good and solves the issues we mentioned earlier.  But monero does in fact more.  A transaction is not a genuine mixing, but an obfuscation of WHAT is the real previous transaction amongst several.

In monero, you only know that this transaction got its input from SOME of these previous transactions, where only the owner of the previous transaction output knows which one it is, and the others got used (without their knowledge and without them doing what so ever) to obfuscate the signature.

So, when you pay starbucks, starbucks only knows that they got paid, MAYBE from output J3, maybe from output Q, maybe from output R, maybe from output S.  When looking into the chain, they see that J3 got a return, maybe from J2, maybe from T, maybe from U, maybe from V.

The anonymity is not total, in the sense that IF law enforcement gets Willy AND if law enforcement uses sufficiently their rubber hose so that Willy gives his secret key to them, THEN they can find out that Willy did the transaction Willy - Joe (X).
(remember that they didn't need the secret key to see what were Willy's transactions, only his unlocked wallet, for the bitcoin stuff).

Now, they can see that X was (maybe) used in a transaction to J2, or maybe in a transaction to M, or maybe in a transaction to N, or ... maybe not at all.  They don't know whether Joe spend his money or not, and whether his signature got only randomly used in other obfuscating transactions, or whether there was a genuine transaction.

But there IS an arborescence on the block chain that allows for a path from X to the coffee shop, that goes through J2 and J3.  This is still visible, although it could be a fake path, and there are many other paths.

The more transactions there are between X and the coffee shop, the more this web of potentially fake paths becomes dense, but it is not "total".

So this is the kind of anonymity you get with monero.

With Zcash, the anonymity is total.  Instead of having a finite set of random signatures at each step, you could say (although technically it is different) that ZCASH is like monero, where at each transaction, ALL signatures on the block chain are used.  There's strictly no relationship between X and the coffee shop.  If the anonymity is used each time in ZCASH, something I can't figure out.  I used to think it was not (that there are also transactions "in the clear" such as with zerocoin) but I don't know now.

And the answering is none because some coins just claiming if they're more anonymous just becoming their magical word for making the people is believe with them, and i think you're right never there are a things can fixing that. LOL

There is nothing sure in real life but which coin is anonynymous in most percent?
And why?

Some replies here are such bullshit. Not everyone lives in the US under the NSA. Of course if the coin is untraceable you can send end to end anonymously. Walk into any PC room in Asia and send for one thing. You sad sack of Yankee fucks.

ok i'll try, these are honest answers whether or not you're happy with them.


many, i haven't had time to coin but ones i've heard of atleast 10 (but there is probably more i've not bothered reading into).


there are none.


no.

VPN are Traceable, Tor has been compromised ,
To even Buy a Large Volume of BTC requires your ID, the exchanges track you.
PO boxes required multiple forms of ID including Photo.

What about the fact you are all living in a Police State / World , do you not comprehend.
Everything warned about in the Books 1984 & Brave New World has either already happen or happening as we type.

These Systems were engineer from the very beginning to Spy on you.
Internet protocol was designed by ARPANET but funded by Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA)
Tor was designed by U.S. Naval Intelligence

The only way to circumvent a system designed to track you is not to use it when you don't want to be tracked.  

 

most here in cryptoland are too.... well ....how do i say it all subtle like ....  ignorant, to see the anon ability is more about the user then the coin/platform.

 

Then your question has been answered already...
Didn't you read this?


Research on each of the alts!

Re: Can someone really explain which coins are truly anonymous?

Hey ASSHAT,
NONE OF THEM!

A BTC Mixer is just as safe as Monero, because neither is truly safe.
If you don't want an honest answer , be sure to Place Lie to Me in your Topic Title Next Time  


 

But surely there is a way to circumvent them? Use a VPN that does not log your activity, use Tor or I2P, use a darknet email or a fake email, stop using banks and use only bitcoin, and then get a PO box. I know there will be holes where the authorities could catch you but if you are careful and keep track of your anonymity religiously you can do it.

Thanks everyone for answering a question I didn't actually ask.


Is it so hard for people to put aside their agenda to answer a fucking question. I asked about the actual transaction nothing about IP addresses and postal addresses...damn. Did you think I thought a crypto currency would magically make my home address disappear? And who said anything about using a bank account?

These reasons are why all anon fails.

Your IP address is not anon,
Your Browser info is not anon,
Your Email Address is not anon,
Your Bank Account which you linked is not anon,
Your address where you mailed or received goods is not anon,
there are no guarantees the person that did business with you did not sell your identifiable information.

All anon solutions will fail til they can solve all of the above.

 

Check this out: https://moneroforcash.com/monero-vs-dash-vs-zcash-vs-bitcoinmixers.php

As always, do your own research. The link above has many links to others sources and is a good place to start. Note that this comparison does not include Bitcoin since Bitcoin is not and has never claimed to be anonymous. It does compare Bitcoin mixers to other privacy-centered coins, just not Bitcoin itself.

Using "100%" in your sentence is the main problem here.

You can use "100%" only when you have proof about it. If i cant trace your transaction to someone that doesn't mean i have proof one coin is 100% untraceable.  I just have proof it is untraceable  over my ability to trace your transactions.


Bitcoin transaction is not  100% secure. There can be 51% attack and many others. But in generally that dont really happen. So you can say BTC transactiosn are secure. But you can not say are 100% secure.

Then why do anonymous coins have such high market cap when their main feature doesn't work?

There is so much competition and slander in this area of crypto is hard to work out what's true and what's BS.

I think bitcoin may still be considered truly anonymous if mixed/tubled properly  
Monero is claiming to be more anonymous than bitcoin but it may take few more months to prove that claim.

Really? Dash, Monero, shadow cash, vcash,   None of them?

Keep off the drugs my friend.


My end privacy is of course an issue but I want to know about the actual transaction, if it is traceable etc.

That question doesn't make sense.  Imagine that you are alone on this world with your family, and that *everybody else* is part of a big single enemy entity (the super state and most citizens are also their spies - somewhat like former Eastern Germany, but on steroids).  No single cryptographic system can ever be "totally anonymous", as the computer or smartphone you buy from just anybody is loaded, every single communication you make with "the outside world" is with your enemy and every keystroke you make is registered through those loaded devices.  The partners you think you are anonymously dealing with are one and the same cooperating enemy and they all know of course that it is you because all other communication is known to the enemy as it is theirs.  

This extreme example of "you are alone and all the others are part of one big conspiring enemy against you" shows you that there's no such thing as 100% anonymous and untraceable, because it should then be applicable in that extreme case too and obviously, it can't, whatever it is.

So there's no such thing as "100% anonymous" in ALL cases.

So you have to say in what cases you want your anonymity to work because obviously it is not going to work always.  The cases you enumerate are then your "threat model".  
You also have to know that cryptocurrencies are usually NOT taking into account certain evident threats, such as compromised hardware.  You can have the best cryptographic system in the world, if you run it on compromised hardware, the enemy can probably do and know everything you do and know on that machine, including passwords, secret keys and everything.  This is probably the biggest, and most realistic, threat to anonymity: compromised hardware.  If you buy your hardware from the enemy (that could be just as well a company like Apple or Dell), you are probably already done.  If you buy hardware containing *components* made by the enemy (that could be Intel or AMD), you might already be done.  If you have system software made by your enemy, you are done.

So once you have excluded all these realistic threats from your threat model, because they are not potentially your enemies (imagine you work for the US government, then Intel and Apple will not be part of your enemies), or because you "take the risk and accept it", you start considering the cryptographic part.

If you already accepted a 5% risk on this part, there's no point requiring a 0.0001% risk or less on the crypto part, is there ?

You should hence think of your question in this light: what is my threat model (what kind of attacks and enemies am I facing) ?  Where do I accept to take risks *because I know that the solutions I'm using are not entirely protecting me* ?

none.