hey

greetings all! I'm reporting on the recent Chainanalysis training video that did a kiddy investigation with internal tooling. This was picked up by CoinTelegraph which did terrible reporting on it (I don't think they even saw the video), and tried to make it seem like XMR is traceable. When watching the video its obvious tracing XMR is almost

impossible, and I'm hoping to do a better write up to set the record straight, including getting comments from you all:

You can find the full video here:

I would appreciate any comments from the community or Monero contributors on the issue and the following questions:

- Given that Chainanalysis is running Monero nodes, one could assume the IRS and other entities are running Monero nodes in the hopes that people connect directly to them (or reverse proxing them), exposing their IP address. Is this a valid threat, and is there anyway to identify malicious nodes and get them blacklisted from the network?

- The video at around 20:00 minutes refers to the Chainanalysis tool ruling out decoy transaction using different heuristics, such as previously being spent. In the video, it ruled out many decoy outputs and the instructor says to 'ignore' those. How feasible is it for Chainanalysis to do this? Does it get easier over time as other outputs are

recognized as being spent elsewhere?

Thank you in advance!

<r​ucknium:monero.social> G​uest28: Could you identify the media outlet that you work for? Or are you purely freelance?

m-relay: I'm the founder of takebackourtech.org - an independent educational initiative.

Personally, i always connect to the chainanalysis or IRS nodes. Their uptime and QoS are fantastic.

lol, they used to be quality but now they're just proxies D:<

flippin leeches

putting those tax dollars to work!

Next govt budget: Increasing tax by 0.3% to pay for extra spying on you. You're welcome.

Thank you for paying for your own privacy invasion.

Oh crap, thought this was #monero. /me leaves

<r​ucknium:monero.social> G​uest28: Let me give you my comments. Anyone else can chime in, too.

<r​ucknium:monero.social> G​uest28: Can you connect to #monero ? That's a better channel for this.

sure let me hop over. I'll repost the question there.

Thank you.

m-relay: its posted there now!