Bitcoin Forum

Forgive if I misunderstand how monero and ring sigs work, but am I right in thinking that:

Mon offers pseudo anonymity by mixing your transaction in with 3,5,10 others so anyone looking cant say that one walllet specifically transferred XMR to another.

If however, one wallet sends several transfers to another, those two wallets will be in the same ring each time and therefore obviously the ones that have some connection.

Is that correct?

Monero uses one time addresses

ahhh, clever. That would solve that problem then yes. So why bother with ring sigs and mixing at all if theyre one time addresses?

Ring signatures are not equivalent to mixing.

One time addresses/stealth addresses do not provide anonymity. The issue with only using them for non-ring signature transactions will result in each user having many addresses with small balances within their private key. If the user consolidates all of their holdings into 1 address, every transaction can be historically linked back to them.

I think the words untraceable and unlinkable are used to describe the function of stealth addresses and ring signatures, respectively, though I might have them reversed...

That is reversed, but which is which isn't that important. What is important is the two functions are synergistic. If you can link addresses you could infer spending paths (as stated by OP). But also, if you can see spending paths you can infer linkages, because usually all inputs to a transaction are controlled by the same sender (excluding cooperative schemes such as coinjoin). With a mechanism to prevent both linking and tracing the blockchain becomes highly resistant to analysis.

I think this video from one of the Monero core devs does a good job explaining the basics:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GEVm1dMn5Ks