anesthesia

Well as always, depending on your use case and your threat model, using those swap services might not be the best idea, specially if you want to be "stealthy" when purchasing or selling xmr.

If you buy or sell XMR in simpleswap and use a KYC'd coin (like BTC that you withdrew or deposited from/to a CEX like kraken or binance), then authorities can ask the simpleswap owners and they will show them that you traded Monero.

Again if this is not a concern to you, then perhaps those swapping services are "good enough", even though I have read countless stories of them performing shotgun scams and shotgun KYC where they will randomly select you and make it very difficult for you to recover your funds, especially if those funds do not come from "trusted" sources aka another CEX.

But again as always, that is up to you and your use case / threat model, and the risks you are willing to take.

I would say depending on who is asking you...

If you have there some xmr valued many hundreds of euros, it is pretty unlikely you actually mined it unless you have some very powerful setup.

If I am the government, then I will ask you: Show me this mining setup. Prove to me that you at least owned or had access to this setup.

I think when we talk about plausible deniability it's not in the context or "Where did this money come from", but more along the lines of "I cannot prove it was actually you who bought this item".

Imagine you buy an item that is restricted or sanctioned in your area, plausible deniability makes it so it is very difficult for me to prove in a court it was you who bought it, and very easy for you to evade these accusations.

If someone forces you to open your wallet, you can just have a second hidden wallet where you keep your stash, and then just open another wallet with, let's say, 5 or 10 euros worth or XMR that you can actually mine in a reasonable amount of time with some old machines.

Used it on two occasions already. One trade took 2h (I guess the trading peer was busy) and the other one was less than one minute after blockchain confirmation finished (10 blocks as usual).

What else "working normally" do people need? There are already very good offers from time to time. If you check once or twice a day you can get pretty decent offers (0% markup or very close). Also I heard people say that liquidity is now upwards of 1400 xmr in the platform.

Just try it out, its way simpler than people make it sound

That is a very cool mechanism. Thanks for the info!

Just watched the 3 available episodes.

Quite impressed with the quality so far, and really excited for you to make more episodes!

This is a very nice continuation to Breaking Monero, nicely updated to the current times.

Hopefully it will not stop without closure like Breaking Monero though, all my luck to you! Keep up the good work :)

Yes you are right, it was too early in the morning for me to process properly...

Statistically you should see each output used an average of 16 times, that makes sense.

Cheers!

I didn't know the protocol tried to use every output in around 16 transactions. I know about the 16 ring size, but I didn't know it also tried to use each output 16 times. If so, that is very smart and interesting. You learn something new every day!

The idea of sweeping them and then churning the merged output is also smart.

Oh well I guess we just have to wait for FCMP++ where theoretically all this will be no longer relevant :)

I remember watching the breaking monero series, when it was mentioned that (paraphrasing) "Rings are what give security to Monero but I really hope we get rid of them"... That time is finally getting closer :)

I think there is one very good usecase for churning though.

And before anything, yes I know that one should not use CEX but in some cases it is just much more convenient. Although I am now starting to use Haveno, I get not everyone is up to it, and CEX is just plain easier.

Imagine the following scenario:

I buy a shitcoin over at a KYC'd CEX.

I send that coin to a centralized swap, or trade it with a compromised person, in exchange of XMR.

Lets say I repeatedly do that procedure with the same person or CEX. Then I end with multiple "small" outputs on my wallet, all from the same entity. Let's say for example 10 outputs of 0.1 XMR, which all have been sent to me by the same entity.

Now I want to buy something that costs 1 XMR. I need to use my 10 existing outputs. I make a transaction that takes 10 inputs and 2 outputs (what I buy + change). The transaction has 10 inputs, and all of those inputs have a ring, where one of the members of each ring is an output controlled by the compromised entity.

The likelihood of someone making a transaction with 10 inputs, where those 10 inputs happen to contain a member in the ring that was sent by that specific exchange and that is linkable to my identity is near zero, unless it is me who is spending those 10 outputs.

Therefore, the person that sent me those 10 outputs can make a very well educated guess that it was me who bought that item for 1 XMR.

This "vulnerability" is actually talked about in the Breaking Monero series, and as far as I know, it will be solved when FCMP++ comes, since we will get rid of rings altogether.

However let's say I do one step of churning with all those outputs without mixing them with eachother. That is, I send to myself 10 transactions of 0.1 XMR, so I just "forward" each output to myself once, without making any transaction that contains two poisoned inputs at the same time.

Then I will still end up with 10 outputs of 0.1 XMR, but all the "poisoned" outputs are present in different and unlinkable transactions, and the negative actor does not know whether they are truly spent or not.

Then I can actually join those 10 outputs into one 1XMR transaction safely, knowing that I am the only person who knows where those 10 outputs come from.

Am I wrong in this thought process?

Am I understanding this correctly?

https://moneromarket.io/listing/911d9a4a-c4a0-446c-a155-4efdfaf7002f

86KwquavD1THnRG5iuBDyJ5fEbJECY8Cmjfp68Kpx3TM4HXXpuMy3RvBbwM7DWnBXETSg3iSuTK2PTuxh3mXacFd1Zqt6GD

Am I understanding this correctly?

https://moneromarket.io/listing/911d9a4a-c4a0-446c-a155-4efdfaf7002f

86KwquavD1THnRG5iuBDyJ5fEbJECY8Cmjfp68Kpx3TM4HXXpuMy3RvBbwM7DWnBXETSg3iSuTK2PTuxh3mXacFd1Zqt6GD