0 sats \ 2 replies \ @e819bba 8 Sep 2021 freebie \ on: SLP297 Ergo – Chain Surveil Yourself! bitcoin
I think that surveillance on Bitcoin is all just pure guesswork and FUD. Example: someone first sends a transaction from any exchange that requires KYC. They receive the funds on their wallet (let's say Bitcoin Core) and they send just this UTXO on-chain to yet another address. By surveillance this could have been decoded as:
  1. Buying bitcoin and sending it to themselves with one extra hop.
  2. Buying for a third-party without disclosing their identity.
Surveillance can also correlate different UTXOs (some of them with a clear KYC trace) if they appear as multiple inputs in a single transaction. But still they can just guess on what happens to the transaction output.
Practice: One can buy no-KYC straight from a friend or move only whole UTXOs or use coinjoin.
No idea what peel chains or wallet clustering means.
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0 sats \ 1 reply \ @g4ala OP 8 Sep 2021
While I don’t think that it’s “pure guesswork”, one does have to apply some basic assumptions, which may or may not be correct, so I’ll grant you that.
For me, it’s about the privacy: anyone can see both the inputs and the outputs of any given transaction and as such could build a picture of what coins are being controlled by which wallet addresses – I no more want anyone knowing how many coins I control, than I would want anyone knowing what my bank account balance is.
I think (but I’d have to check) that ‘wallet clustering’ is about the tell-tail signatures that wallets have; that is to say that any given wallet will construct a transaction in a given way. I (like so many others) use a particular wallet. If you read my posts, you’ll very easily discover which wallet that is, (or one of them, least ways) so that’s just another bit of intel that could be used to track me. There are ways around that and I do use a mitigation technique which, together with so-called ‘mixing’, would make it very difficult for anyone to trace which coins I control. The idea is to create enough confusion and doubt about which transactions are mine and which are not, that it becomes too time consuming (and as such too expensive) for any agency to pursue.
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0 sats \ 0 replies \ @e819bba 8 Sep 2021 freebie
Yes, nicely said with the basic assumptions.
Yes, creating enough confusion and doubt may be enough. That is why I am offering people to send on-chain to my C-Lightning node so that I will open a channel and send it all back to them over LN. See https://ln.anyone.eu.org/ but I also understand it will need to start with someone that knows me in person or me sending some on-chain funds to a 2of2 multi-sig wallet with the party that wants to enlighten and recycle their UTXO. No hurry :-)
Like many other things in game theory, others will think of the same and will just start doing it at some point if it is a good idea. So I just wait.