Can XMR transactions really be traced?

[Abiky]

Most recently, I've seen a block explorer which claims that transactions made in Monero could be easily traced. How's that so? I've thought that XMR's privacy was strong enough to prevent this? Or am I wrong?

The site can be accessed here: https://monerolink.com

Of course, this applies to transactions made prior to February 2017. However, since it was possible to trace those transactions, there's nothing stopping them from doing so for future transactions.

Any thoughts on this? 

[vladaziya1]

I think she used to be strong, now it's a different time and everything changes. With each time, everything happens, only somewhere sad, but somewhere positive.

[Anycoin Direct Support]

Hello Abiky,

Yes, a good explanation of the vulnerability problem you are talking about can be found here. The claims you are making are indeed only true for the Monero blockchain before February 2017. Before this date the Monero community already stated that using more mixins would provide a higher level of security and anonymity on the network. Several members of the Monero community also published a reply to the link you are referring to the reply can be found here.

In 2016 a new solution was suggested by the community to make Monero even more anonymous, namely Ring Confidential Transactions. A video giving an easy explanation on how Ring CT works can be found here. A month after Ring CT was implemented, 98% of all transactions on the network were already making use of it. As of September it is even mandatory to make use of Ring CT in order to make the Monero network more secure. Finally, as a broker who has to deal with Monero transactions on a daily basis, we can state that for the normal users finding and tracing transactions are complicated enough to make sure there are no unwanted observers.

If in the future Ring CT will also appear to be traceable and unsecure we don't know, however we hope we provided you with enough information to get an understanding on the issue.

With kind regards,
The Anycoin Direct team  

[Abiky]

Hello Abiky,

Yes, a good explanation of the vulnerability problem you are talking about can be found here. The claims you are making are indeed only true for the Monero blockchain before February 2017. Before this date the Monero community already stated that using more mixins would provide a higher level of security and anonymity on the network. Several members of the Monero community also published a reply to the link you are referring to the reply can be found here.

In 2016 a new solution was suggested by the community to make Monero even more anonymous, namely Ring Confidential Transactions. A video giving an easy explanation on how Ring CT works can be found here. A month after Ring CT was implemented, 98% of all transactions on the network were already making use of it. As of September it is even mandatory to make use of Ring CT in order to make the Monero network more secure. Finally, as a broker who has to deal with Monero transactions on a daily basis, we can state that for the normal users finding and tracing transactions are complicated enough to make sure there are no unwanted observers.

If in the future Ring CT will also appear to be traceable and unsecure we don't know, however we hope we provided you with enough information to get an understanding on the issue.

With kind regards,
The Anycoin Direct team 

Thanks for clarifying me about XMR's level of confidentiality, mate. I've thought that the level of privacy within XMR was flawed, but thanks to the RingCT update, it cannot be traced further. The newest Monero hard fork has increased the ring size to 7, which will allow for greater privacy rendering such efforts to trace transactions "useless". As such, I believe that Monero is the best privacy coin around when compared to others such as ZCash and Dash.

Hopefully, XMR would continue to become an untraceable coin for years to come. It's dedicated community and development team will allow it to make strides in crypto land for quite a long time.

Nonetheless, I appreciate your time and effort towards helping me understand what happened with XMR transactions. It makes me eager to invest more into the privacy coin to hodl it for the long term when the price spikes. Considering that it is the strongest privacy coin around, it has a lot of potential to rise in value within the future. I hope that it cannot be traced at any point in the future to help preserve its privacy

[tinyhunter112]

I think she used to be strong, now it's a different time and everything changes. With each time, everything happens, only somewhere sad, but somewhere positive.