If I don’t have my own node and just use for example Cake Wallet, could Cake Wallet see all my transactions?
It’s quite private. Just use a VPN or Tor. If the node is malicious it can associate your Tx and your IP address.
High profile Monero users have been deanonymised using this method.
Any node you connect to can see:
Your IP address
The last time you synced your wallet
That’s about it.
For in detail answers I suggesting posting in monero.forum
This would be enough to gain a lot of information.
And the Transactions?
Cashu is more private then Monero if you dont have a node
Is the case with Dandelion ++ ?
edit: this appears to be the case for the node you are directly connecting to, but this IP and Tx link is not propagated to other nodes.
If this is the case why don’t people use it? Monero is the number 1 coin used by people who need serious privacy and have high threat models and the vast majority of users do not run their own node.
Yes, it depends on the trustworthiness of this node.
This is just argumentum ad populum
It depends on circumstances.
If you have to move high amounts and want self custody → Monero with Node is best
If you move small amounts → Cashu
As other users have already said, XMR is not identifiable/associatable from the blockchain ledger.
With connections - in CAKE wallet, for example, you can connect over Tor, or even a double-hop VPN (Proton?) is probably enough to help with IP tracking. A single VPN hop may be sufficient, but would be more susceptible to endpoint monitoring.
I’d say a single point VPN is fine.
If you think that it’s likely, based on your Tx or anything associated with it, the authorities will kick down a VPN providers door to get that information, you should use Tor.
The problem is not only IP tracking.
If you send enough transactions over one node then the not can learn mich about you just by observing the pattern.
And if you someday use that Monero to buy something linked to your real identity, the node could discover who you are under some circumstances
Dandelion++ is designed for sending transactions over nodes under your control. Instead of broadcasting your transaction to every node, you only do so to one random node. That node then repeats the process until the transaction is passed to a third node, after which it is published to everyone.
Cashu
I wouldn’t recommend Cashu; it’s not decentralised money. The issuer of the Cashu you received could suddenly disappear after you sent your Bitcoins. It’s not privacy-friendly; your privacy depends on how you interact with the minter.
This system just looks like a re-implementation of the banking system in Bitcoin.
Every transaction isn’t easily linkable from each other and they have to figure out which transactions belong to which person.
the node could discover that specific transaction belong to you, then what?
What if you use 3 adresses in Cake?
One is for incoming tx..
Second is for storage.
Third is for outgoing tx.
You receive either from swap or from dex or from other peoples XMR to incoming wallet.
You don’t move every tx to storage wallet, but wait for more tx in incoming and send it to storage in bulk.
Then, if you want to spend/send elsewhere you move some amount to outgoing wallet and all outside tx is done from outgoing wallet?
What’s your rationale for this
Dunno, asking what it could do, is that make any sense?
In my opinion, probably not necessary with good OPSEC and an understanding of how Monero works under the hood.
There are a some attacks this can protect against. For example, the Janus attack. This links two subaddresses to the same seed. Alice has one wallet, she has 2 subaddresses, one for her daily stuff, and one for her private stuff. Bob suspects that Alice is actually behind BOTH subaddresses, so he sends XMR to Alice at her private address and asks if she received the XMR. If Alice says yes, then he Bob knows that she is behind both subaddresses, with a shared seed, as Alice has just confirmed that she is behind that private address incidentally.
There’s also the poisoned output attack. This is when a KYC exchange (Bob) sends you (Alice) Monero. Since Bob is sending the Monero, he knows that the output he creates, will later end up as a ring signature in Alice’s future Tx. This output will serve as a decoy in other people’s outputs, but it will also be in Alice’s. So say that Bob sends Alice 10 outputs. If Alice then spends all those outputs, then those 10 outputs will appear in the ring signature AT ONCE. This makes it highly probable, almost certain, that Alice was the one that just sent the XMR. But even in that situation, all that Bob has discovered is that Alice sent Monero. Not how much, to whom etc. Where this can get dangerous is if Alice was anon and Bob and given anon-Alice those 10 outputs. When anon-Alice sends all that XMR to a KYC exchange, Bob will know it was Alice, as all those poisoned outputs are in Alice’s ring signature, and she’s just submitted her ID to a KYC CEX.
Please note: this poisoned output attack will no longer exist with full chain membership proofs come out, which should be in the next 12 months.
This can be mitigated by CHURNING, which is just sending yourself your entire XMR balance. This way, if you had 3 outputs from Bob, it gets consolidated into one. So then when you send your next Tx, you will have your one genuine output, amongst 15 decoys. So sending your entire balance to yourself, or churning, is the same thing as sending your XMR to a new wallet.
In any case, 3 wallets is certainly over-kill. You would not need anymore than 2. At least from a privacy / OPSEC perspective. Maybe if you had a bunch of different businesses that accepted Monero, it could make sense from an accounting perspective.
I guess having a mobile wallet for some smaller whatever Tx’s could be good, and then Feather Wallet on Tails or something for real protection from a potentially malicious node snatching your IP address. Because of this 2 wallet separation as well, it enforces churning and reduces the attack surface of a poisoned output.
I appreciate the ring signature stuff is pretty confusing, and honestly I’m not even sure I explained it well. If I got anything wrong someone please correct me.
The best thing to do is try to get a solid understanding of how Monero works, so you can then apply that knowledge to a given situation, rather than someone telling you yes or no. I highly recommend xenu from anti moonboy’s series Attack of the Poisoned Outputs, he goes into a lot of detail about how all this stuff works. He also goes over how real people were caught using XMR, it’s almost always to do with a KYC exchange and timing analysis. Studying how people get caught, IMO, is the best way to understand how the technology really works. I also recommend Breaking Monero, the high level developers of Monero (at least they were XMR devs then) go into how XMR can be attacked, and it gives you a good understanding.
I think the lattermost point is compartmentalisation. The most important part to anonymity is to never link any real data and minimise metadata.
It is literally free to create infinite crypto wallets. Just create more wallets. Its FREE.
IF you are using XMR regularly, I suspect then yes, pattern and habit can be a problem namely from a metadata approach; and may require different cosiderations, for a casual user with irregular use, I suspect it is likely less of a problem.
@not-wittingly that was a great post. Thank you. Churning in my view is one way (with both LTC MWEB and XMR) to create distance. Particularly if you split up Tx’s into different outputs and addresses and spread them out; even if they converge in one wallet via different Rx addresses.
Its painful; but not expensive, just time consuming. Probably only necessary at the very extreme end of a threat model.
Isn’t this just social engineering?
You could just deny having received something on the private address or do I get something wrong here?
If they are inside the same wallet app, couldn’t they connect to the same node from the same IP at the same time and link each other this way?
That’s exactly what it is. But this risk is mitigated by having 2 separate seeds.
always use your own node.
It’s really not providing any more protection than using a remote node via Tor.
A third party node can associate all you transactions, at least inside the same wallet.
You can try to mitigate this by using a bunch of different wallets and preventing the wallet software from loading them at the same time (not sure if this is possible with for exampel CakeWallet)
But if your use your own node, you dont have that problem. You could just use a single wallet and a still more anonymous then anyone with 100 different wallets.
Not true.
The only way a remote node would be able to correlate transactions is by IP address reuse. So as long as you are not using your bare IP you’re fine. The node does not see all the transactions a wallet has made, the view key stays on device.
You could use 100 wallets on your bare residential IP and a remote node could like those, or you could have 1 wallet, and make Tx with IP obfuscation and that would be unlinkable.