Sjors Provoost's avatar
Sjors Provoost
sjors@sprovoost.nl
npub1s6z7...wk4c
Physicist turned bitcoin developer aka "shadowy super-coder", author of Bitcoin: A Work In Progress
Sjors Provoost's avatar
provoost 1 year ago
Quite a few wallet fingerprints, which you can't really blame on the protocol. But it does seem that combining lots of funds in a single transaction undoes the benefits of decoys. Bad news for merchants. Hiding among N decoys is of limited use when law enforcement is really interested in you and just checks all N of them. Chainalysis has tools to make that easier. The video doesn't explain how they filter some of the decoys. Also Chainalysis once again admits they're collecting IP addresses without consent. And that they're running bait "RPC" nodes, though it's really insane that any wallets connect to them over clearnet (albeit sometimes with VPN). But there are very bad Bitcoin wallets too. Dandelion and 1-shot Tor broadcast (easier) remain good ideas. Perhaps increasing the number of decoys to hundreds would fix the issue for a while. Fundamentally though, it's better to not leave any bread crumbs on a blockchain, or other public spaces, to begin with. Which is why I think Lightning is a better design in theory. But beware of practice. If you e.g. use a custodial wallet, they know who you're paying (until blinded paths). As a recipient things are even worse. So I guess both Monero and Lightning still suck for merchants (charities), but might be good enough for individual customers (donors). Also note that the goal of chain analytics isn't necessarily to collect sufficiently strong evidence for conviction. Finding a (tractable number of) suspect(s) may be enough, then they know where to look for additional evidence. Being marked as a suspect by a black box algorithm should still be serious legal issue though. View quoted note →
Sjors Provoost's avatar
provoost 1 year ago
I was on the fence about going, eventually decided not to because the schedule wasn't very good. Now I'm glad I'm not going. Spineless organizers are not something I want to support. View quoted note →
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provoost 1 year ago
Dutch parliament voted for an interesting form of financial repression: revoking the tax exempt status for donation to Extension Rebellion. It was just a motion, which will likely be ignored because it's illegal. But the political message is clear: if you do something the politicians in power don't like, there will be financial consequences. Seems a matter of time before they'll find their bank account closed for unclear reasons.