Is there reliable way to estimate how big the anonymity set of your Monero is?
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I think its 16 per transaction you make.
You can do multiple transaction to increase it or wait for other people to include your Monero in their transactions
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16 doesn’t sound like that much
It’s enough for plausible deniability in most cases. Your output will also show up in other people’s Tx’s that you never made, so it all mixes in. Even if it is yours and they can see it on the blockchain and KNOW it’s yours, it only tells them you sent Monero. Nothing else. Not to whom, not how much. Just that you sent Monero. So if they know the output, all an adversary can tell from a blockchain with 1 poisoned otuput is there’s a 1/16 chance you sent Monero.
Besides, even if you buy from a KYC and they know the output, once you send it once, you’ll never have that same output again. If you’re concerned about that, just churn once, and you’ll be sorted. You can do this as well by having a second wallet. So you could just do:
buy XMR from KYC exchange > withdraw to wallet A > withdraw to wallet B
Soon, FCMP will solve this entirely. Until then, churn. Or don’t use KYC at all.
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Plausible deniability is a very low bar for information exposed to the public
How much time does this takes on average?
What if the service I send to is also compromised?
But I have an output from my output?
So if I make one additional transaction to increase the anonymity set, my anonymity set goes from 16 to 32. Until some other outputs also make new transactions or get picked.
Yeah, but what is actually being exposed to the public? It’s only your output, it’s not your wallet address or something. Even if you bought XMR on Kraken and withdrew it and did nothing at all with it, that output will show up as a decoy in other people’s ring signatures. So a ring signature that shows your output (only the KYC exchange or it’s partners could know that’s your output) but they can’t reasonably suggest it’s your transaction. It could be anyones transaction. The real problem here is co-spends. If you get 15 XMR outputs from an exchange and then you send them all at once, the KYC exchange will see that 15/16 are yours. So that will hold up that you just sent Monero. If you send it all to the CIA and it’s the same amount and lands at the same time then yeah, it could be deduced that you are the sender. Monero is all probabilities, or heuristics, as they call it. I’m not saying ring signatures are perfect, they definitely aren’t, which is why the devs have been working hard to get FCMP sorted, but they are good enough for almost any situation when used with proper OPSEC.
I recommend just looking into cases where Monero users have been deanonymised to learn how to best protect yourself. The TLDR is avoid KYC exchanges if you can, and churn your Monero to reduce on chain heuristics.
Not sure what you mean, the service you send to only gets information on their end about themselves, as the recipient, nothing about the sender. Apart from the fact that someone just sent X amount of Monero to their address or subaddress.
Each ring member branches into its own ring of 16, so the possibilities grow exponentially. 16 > 256 > 4096.
I saw you made a post about LTC MWEB. If you seriously need anonymity just don’t. There’s a reason that people in high threat situations whose lives depend on not being de-anonymised choose Monero every time.
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Does this happen if I withdraw 15 from the exchange or could one withdrawal also give me 15 outputs if the amount is high?
You’d have to withdraw 15 times from the exchange, and never spend it, and then spend it all at once. So with one withdrawal, you’re fine.
See this short video which goes into co-spend heuristics
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How often does this happen on average?
If someone wait 1 week, how often will his output get included in other people TXs
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not precisely. ring size is fixed at 16 but the real anonymity set is larger because decoys compound across transactions,an observer can’t tell which ring members were already spent elsewhere. No tool gives you a clean number, network volume is the best proxy. FCMP+ will replace rings with a global set anyway, so the question becomes moot when it ships..