I'm confused. So someone gave you money and you were able to determing that someone gave you money, and how much money they gave you?
In my latest challenge, I identify the sender pubkey, recipient pubkey, and amount of a monero tx: https://x.com/SuperTestnet/status/1942082587192602801
I also identify the change pubkey and the amount it received: https://x.com/SuperTestnet/status/1942083538406223907
Monero bros: “That’s not a real trace!”
Discussion
No, they gave me an XMR address, I sent money to it, and then traced the transaction that I created
I often do this in order to demonstrate that monero has worse receiver privacy than lightning
Receiver privacy means not leaking info that should be known only to the receiver, including what address he received money into and how much money he received.
Monero leaks this data to the sender but lightning doesn't. And this data is very valuable to chain analysts, who commonly use it to trace monero in Eve-Alice-Eve attacks. That is where Eve, the attacker, sends money to Alice (the victim), and then watches the blockchain to see what happens to the money next.
If Alice ends up sending the money to someone who knows Alice's identity, Eve can sometimes collude with them to deanonymize two transactions: Eve -> Alice and Alice -> Eve. This attack has been used to successfully trace the monero of three criminals and convict them of crimes, as seen in thr first three case studies on moneroleaks.xyz.
There are many kinds of XMR addresses. The fact is that it's impossible to send money to someone without them giving SOME kind of address. That doesn't compromise privacy in the slightest, so long as that money is anomymously transferred to a private address afterward. Last time I used Monero I created a burner wallet to recieve a single person's transaction. The idea being to immediately transfer it to my real wallet so I can throw away the burner.
According to my research, most wallets have a feature to do this automatically every time you ask someone for a transaction. If you send money to an XMR address are you able to determine where it goes afterward?