New research vindicates my analysis of the vulnerabilities of Monero

Research has proven my blog to be correct. Page 11 even mentions “chain reactions on the CryptoNote protocol [8]”, where [8] is the MRL-0001 (Monero Research Labs first report), which was created because of what I explained to @smooth in 2014. See above in my blog the relevant sections Combinatorial Blockchain Analysis Deanonymization and Overlapping Mix Sets . I also previously wrote some additional comments on this blog about that.

Note the research is not even using the ability of miners to pay themselves the transaction fees as posited in my blog above, which would amplify the results in the research.

Monero’s Secret ASICs

So the following combined with the post I’m replying to, the recent vindication about my prior warnings to Monero not being able to attain ASIC resistance, I’m now entirely 100% vindicated.

I read today:

A few months ago, it was publicly exposed that ASICs had been developed in secret to mine Monero. My sources say that they had been mining on these secret ASICs since early 2017, and got almost a full year of secret mining in before discovery. The ROI on those secret ASICs was massive, and gave the group more than enough money to try again with other ASIC resistant coins.

It’s estimated that Monero’s secret ASICs made up more than 50% of the hashrate for almost a full year before discovery, and during that time, nobody noticed. During that time, a huge fraction of the Monero issuance was centralizing into the hands of a small group, and a 51% attack could have been executed at any time.

So this probably means 100% of Monero’s anonymity mix sets were probably entirely compromised.

I have always said Monero is a honeypot. Lots of people are going to prison because they thought they were anonymous.

P.S. Privacy and anonymity are very difficult in this modern, highly statist era:

https://medium.com/s/story/a-modest-privacy-protection-proposal-5b47631d7f4c