@smooth. I am sure that you have already read this whitepaper on Monero's traceability.
https://arxiv.org/pdf/1704.04299/I went to the Monero subreddit and what I saw was some Monerotards calling FUD quickly without properly thinking about how this seriously affects Cryptonote coins.
Can you give us your thoughts on the situation and how that affects Aeon? Would a simple
sub addresses feature help?
A subaddress feature does not directly address any of the issues in the paper however it is still useful for some privacy enhancing use cases outside the scope of the paper.
The paper itself is a slightly-modified rerelease of the same one that was released last year. Both were and are heavily backed and promoted by Zcash supporters and can't in any way be considered as objective third party analysis. While some of the findings are legitimate, a lot of framing and promotion of the paper is actually very misleading (whether you want to call that "FUD" is a personal choice but I don't find it to be a terribly inaccurate label).
For example, there are many tweets etc. repeating the talking point that X% (some high number, various different numbers have appeared) of Monero transactions were found to be traceable, rarely is it explained in these attention grabbers that even the paper itself explains (if you read the whole thing) that:
1. Older versions of Monero, 2016 or earlier have some high number of traceable outputs.
2. More recent versions have essentially 0% traceable outputs.
3. Newer data from 2017 and 2018 is excluded from consideration by the paper at all, skewing the total percentages a lot higher.
4. That the paper horribly conflates percentages of actual traceability and percentages derived from heuristic guesses that skew probabilities somewhat (and even that is mitigated in recent versions) but aren't able to trace any transactions at all.
AEON is similar to Monero post-2016 but pre-RingCT (and before other mitigations, some of which will arrive with the rebase), so somewhere in between. There is some degree of traceability but nowhere near as bad as the earlier Monero versions with unlimited (and large majority in practice) 0-mixin transactions.
Users can best protect themselves by performing some degree of churn (resend to self, preferably with unpredictable delays) in high risk situations. This is especially effective in AEON since the transaction fees are much lower than Monero (post-RingCT), making churn relatively inexpensive.
