> All of those cases involve KYC exchanges, colluding with swap services when they swapped to transparent chains like Bitcoin, and opsec mistakes where they revealed their IP address. Nothing to do with transacting on Monero.
You named 3 elements of the traces in the cited cases and then said that "nothing" involved the targets' XMR transactions. But you ignored the other elements of the traces, some of which *did* involve the targets' monero transactions.
- In the case of the Columbian drug dealer, they were unable to get his ip address until *after* they traced his monero from the initial address, past an additional hop (possibly a churn), and *then* he leaked his ip address in a subsequent transaction. To trace the flow of funds through the possible-churn, they had to use the decoy elimination attack, which would not be possible except that monero opts to use decoys instead of encryption to protect sender privacy. That's "something to do with transacting on Monero."
- In the case of Incognito Market, they used (1) the tx time that is revealed in every monero transaction and (2) the amount information that is revealed to the two parties involved. That allowed them to correlate his "buy" transaction with his "sell" transaction despite him moving the funds through a monero wallet before selling them. That's "something to do with transacting on Monero."
- In the Finnish case, the Japanese case, the Archetyp case, and the Bitfinex case, the authorities acquired the targets' private keys. Then they could simply look up their transaction history on the blockchain and trace the flow of funds that way. Why? Because monero provably and permanently links the history of all of your transactions to your private keys. Unlike lightning, monero does not let you delete your transaction history. That's "something to do with transacting on Monero."
So you're wrong. All of the cited cases involve the things you mention *as well as* other things that do involve transacting on monero, and the data leaked by doing so.
