"Mining pools announce their blocks. When they later announce a transaction that uses one of their blocks' outputs as a ring signature member, it is possible to deduce which is the real one spent.

By identifying an output as real in one transaction, its suitability as a decoy is degraded elsewhere, reducing the effective ring size of other users' ring signatures when included in rings after they are revealed to be known spent."

Last I heard, one thing that could help was to coordinate pools to stop announcing their blocks

Is this still true? As in if you scrape announced blocks per pool, connect with them directly, and see tx being broadcast directly from them, that certain outputs can be shown as known spent?

> RPC pay has been around for a while, is there any evidence it's being used?

I just created a python script which takes the p2p peer list from your local daemon and connects to each one, checking if RPC payment access is enabled, so far its at 7 enabled, 239 not enabled. This doesn't even check if payment is required, just if the feature is toggled on

sneurlax p2pool tends to create a public of public outputs (128 per block IIRC) which can definitely degrade ring efficiency over time

> Last I heard, one thing that could help was to coordinate pools to stop announcing their blocks

If they didn'

That could help, but if pool operators didn't announce their blocks afterwards, that would make it harder for miners in pools to calculate rewards. Also, announced blocks serve as sort of "advertisement" of pools so good luck getting them to stop publishing that data

and as I understand it, it's a relatively small issue ... it only applies if you can also identify tx spending coinbase outputs as coming directly from that same pool's node, right?

jeffro256[m]: maybe you can add the irc chat from yesterday to the github issue?

.merges