Comment on Are there any payment aggregators (Like Paypal for instance) that prioritize user privacy?

• ImgurRefugee114@reddthat.com ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

  Except for crypto, and then only I’d you put in a lot of effort to make it so.

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  • litchralee@sh.itjust.works ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

    Is this correct though, in terms of a confidentiality or non-repudiation guarantee? For a ledger system – blockchain or not – every unit can be traced back through the history, to one or more sources. Yes, multiple transactions can serve to obfuscate the sources, but the real source is within that subset of all possible sources. So unless obfuscation takes place by involving all possible addresses, there’s still going to be some amount of knowledge revealed about the relationship of some source and some destination address.

    But I think non-repudiation could be more damaging in a cryptocurrency context. Imagine a corrupt politician that takes a cash bribe. Unless the briber recorded the serial numbers, the politician can plausible repudiate any connection with the briber, because the cash could have come from anywhere else.

    Whereas with cryptocurrency, if the briber’s wallet address is ever revealed (eg. by hack, by change of heart, by blackmail, or by cryptographic collapse), then there’s a line which can connect the briber to the politician. They cannot deny that it’s possible to have received the bribe, which is itself a scandal unto itself. Probably not good enough to convict of a crime, but enough to do political damage.

    Ultimately, I’m of the opinion that a ledger system still isn’t as strong on confidentiality as cash, because cash records nothing at all, so there’s nothing to accidentally reveal. To be clear, bribery is a stand-in for any sort of payment that would cause adverse effects if revealed. Other examples include secret child support, for a secret pregnancy, for a secret abortion, or anything else that people don’t want to reveal to the world. The whole point of privacy, I maintain, is to have a choice on what other people get to know.

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    • prole@lemmy.blahaj.zone ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

      Monero is untraceable because it uses zero-knowledge proofs and ring signatures.

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• prole@lemmy.blahaj.zone ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

  Monero

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  • MnemonicBump@lemmy.dbzer0.com ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

    You’d be surprised how public your crypto transactions are

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    • prole@lemmy.blahaj.zone ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

      “about as close as you can” = literally untraceable lol

      Monero is legit. The technology is fucking impressive.

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      • MnemonicBump@lemmy.dbzer0.com ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

        It’s not literally untraceable (unless you mean figuritively literally) it’s just effectively untraceable.

        Also important to note that your transaction is essentially as private as you are, which assume that the user is taking precautions to not broadcast to the world what website they are going to and at what time and for what. So obviously the biggest flaw is still user behavior (using a sketchy exchange, using the same Monero wallet for multiple transactions, connecting your Monero wallet to another non-private wallet, and leaking metadata outside of the block chain are all things that can and do happen and make this not literally untraceable.

        But yes, it gets about as close as you can.

        Another heuristic examined in the study is the Coinbase output heuristic. This method identifies mining-related outputs in transaction rings and assumes that these outputs are less likely to be actual spends. Since regular users rarely mine Monero, researchers can often use this strategy to eliminate decoys. While it’s not a foolproof method, when combined with other techniques, it can sometimes improve traceability in investigations.

        trmlabs.com/…/the-rise-of-monero-traceability-cha…

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