To add more to my previous post, the core weaknesses of all UTXO privacy chains (TXOchains) are that 1) user balances are split among different outputs that can be spent only once and when spent a receipt is published onchain, 2) in every transaction new outputs (or commitments) are created and 3) related outputs (or commitments) can be detected via onchain or offchain heuristics. This kind of blockchain (TXOchain) cannot be private beyond obfuscation, and its privacy is broken through pattern analysis. The vast majority of users (in any blockchain user pool) always spends shortly after receiving. This behavioral trait deanonymizes most outputs in a TXOchain because most transactions combine a recent output with old outputs the same user controls. Each multi-input transaction (number of inputs is known) is checked against recent TXOs that have a related set that could fit that specific transaction. Additional metadata such as fees, IPs and other user behavioral traits make the process even more accurate. Since most TXOs (or commitments) are mapped to their spending transactions this way then outliers (outputs that are not spent shortly after being created, or outputs of users with impeccable opsec) become a small minority traceable by exclusion or extrapolation. And for a TXOchain that uses rings (Monero), which limits the possibility of real spends only among the TXOs present in the rings, the deanymization process becomes completely trivial.

In a new interview to Coindesk, Chainalysis's lead cybercrime researcher Eric Jardine has come out to admit that Bitcoin has become again the primary cryptocurrency of Darknet markets. This means Chainalysis crime marketing has officially failed. It is great news for all those of us who care about privacy because it definitively refutes Palantir's narrative that only criminals care about privacy. In case you missed it, Chainalysis is being sued by the Celsius Network debtors over their fraudulent $3.3bn audit of Celsius. In this channel I've also presented multiple pieces of evidence of how InQTel funded Chainalysis funds Monero's dead end development (through Magic Grants) and also engages in crime marketing (eg: 1, 2, 3) aggressively encouraging users to commit crimes on Monero. Chainalysis is a cancer that wants to antagonize privacy by associating it with crime. The fact that even low IQ DNM criminals are no longer falling for its Monero honeypot (probably because of stories of other Monero only users getting arrested), proves the number 1 privacy coin by market cap (as Chainalysis funded shills love to label Monero) might be ready to implode.

Understanding the different privacy protocols can be challenging for the average person because optics are often distorted by inflated market caps that gloss over fundamentals. In this cheat sheet I have summarized the raw reality of privacy protocols today beyond any narratives driven by agendas that prioritize corporate profitability over individual privacy and freedom.

Monero privacy: You've received money from one of these 5 Venmo usernames. The transaction lists 5 usernames. (UTXO + RingCT)

Zcash privacy: You've received money from an existing Venmo user. The transaction doesn't contain any usernames. (UTXO + zero knowledge proofs)

Dero privacy: You've received money from a person outside Venmo that goes by the monicker BOB98. (Account Model + HE)

396 XMR raised in less than 24h, "by our generous community". That's $100k. If you believe all that, then I got a bridge to sell you. Where does the money really come from though? The money comes from the government contracts Chainalysis gets to trace all the brainwormed Monero users that have fallen for Palantir's crime marketing that "Monero is the best privacy coin". Chainalysis/Palantir funnel their marketing funds into Monero through their proxy Magic Grants. Justin Ehrenhofer is the proof of connection between Magic Grants and Palantir/Chainalysis.

EdgeWallet posted an embarrassing thread on Monero that is nothing short of a paid ad, like those ads with actors dressed as doctors claiming cigarettes are good for your health. They say XMR is so incredibly difficult to trace that the IRS even offered a bounty in 2020. In 2020 maybe, but today we've proof that XMR is traceable:
1) a video of a Chainalysis investigator pitching Monero tracing to the IRS in Aug 2023;
2) XMR traced after 3 hops with perfect opsec;
3) XMR traced by Finnish police: hacker swapped btc for XMR (add1), sent XMR to add2, deposited on Binance from add2, was still traced;
4) XMR traced by the Japanese Police;
5) MRL admitted that just by analyzing TXO age the anonymity set in each XMR transaction is reduced from 15 to 4 and that it wasn't disclosed to the public because there was no fix. I discussed it here.
6) Chainalysis Monero crime marketing.

The truth is that XMR is as traceable as BTC, like explained here, here, here & here. Even FCMP doesn't fix it, as explained here & here.

After EdgeWallet, Zachxbt wants us to believe that some mysterious entity got hacked for $300M and the hackers bought XMR. This pumped XMR 50% today. As shown by Bybit, most instant exchange freeze suspicious funds. Changelly, Paraswap, FixedFloat, ChangeNow are all in the list of good actors that froze Bybit's funds. Why weren't these funds frozen? If this was a hack, why is there still no victim despite the institutional grade amount at stake? I think this is just a Palantir Monero buy masqueraded as a "potential hack" to fuel their narrative that criminals use Monero. The last known criminal to have been so low IQ as to think Monero is private was Rui Siang Lin. RSL (23) made $4.5M in 2 years risking it all in the DNM (and lost it all in the end). Occam's razor: anyone so sophisticated as to hack a $300M wouldn't be so dumb as to buy XMR, therefore this is most likely a crime marketing ploy by Chainalysis, a bunch of surveillance criminals that fuelled scams like Celsius with fake audits.

When caught lying, double down. First 'he' (Zach) reports a 'likely' hack of $300M, then 'he' confirms it. Attributes it to some made up identities and identifies the victim as an 'elderly individual in the US'. Convenient to justify why nobody reported the hack & how 'hackers' were able to swap $300M BTC to XMR through swap services that are known to freeze suspicious transactions. Was this elderly individual also in charge of compliance in all the swap services that cleared $300M of swaps into XMR in less than 12h w/o raising any red flags? Also, from the way he moved/shuffled coins prior to the hack, 'this elderly individual' definitely has no cognitive deficits. Let's say he slipped up & got social engineered, why didn't he report the hack on time? The thing with social engineering is that you realize you got hacked as you get hacked, as coins move. Yet our elderly victim just went to sleep. What if 'Zach' is not an individual but a Chainalysis PR persona currently employed to promote their honeypot XMR?

The former lead maintainer of the Monero repository (the guy who hijacked Bitmonero from TFT 2 weeks after launch), and founder of scam Tari, a to be launched coin with 30% premine, attempts to manipulate a naïve Zcash user into believing Monero has a bigger anonymity set than Zcash. Well, the thing is that even if only 5 people were using Zcash, Zcash would still have better privacy than 1 million people using Monero. The reason is simple, in Monero it doesn't matter how many people use it because the real spend is included among the inputs of each transaction and obfuscated with 15 decoys. Of these 15 decoys, 11 can be eliminated just by looking at decoy age. Therefore the real anonymity set of every XMR transaction is AT MOST 4.2 (source: Monero Research Labs, for one). Zcash, OTOH, uses zk proofs & zk-SNARKs. Which means the anonymity set is equal to the total number of shielded outputs onchain. Ricardo Spagni is being charged with 378 counts of fraud and forgery in SA.

Coinmarketcap never updated Dero's supply when Stargate hit mainnet in 2022, it kept showing the Atlantis based supply. Today CMC still shows the circulating supply of ~2 years ago but has also added a warning over "an anomalous" spike. FUDers must have paid some good money to get CMC to show that warning. As a reminder, Dero is in alpha and has randomness reuse in place that allows auditing all transaction amounts. If there was a proofs bug, there would have been other signs and CMC, which is not a CEX and doesn't run a Dero node, definitely has no way of detecting "an anomalous spike". If you wanted proof that Dero FUDers are getting desperate, this CMC warning is it.

Have you heard of QUBIC? I hadn't until last year. It's a new AI coin created this cycle, $160M mcap. The founder is a crypto legend, CfB. Some seem to think Cfb could be Satoshi (I don't think so personally, but the cult is strong). While I'm not familiar with Qubic's tech in depth, they definitely could be making it to the cypherpunk history books. Contrary to all the fake OG cypherpunks cowering in fear and bending their knee to Palantir, scared to say/explain how Monero is trivial to trace and obsolete because "Palantir & Chainalysis work with law enforcement and could create me trouble", these Qubic guys DGAF. Knowingly or unknowingly, Qubicans are probably on track to expose the biggest crypto scam since Bitconnect (Monero). In true cypherpunk fashion and just like Satoshi would have done, they're voting with their CPUs by mining XMR (because they can, and the valuation is outrageously high) and selling it for QUBIC (because they believe in decentralized AGI). Monero is a huge instance of the market being lied to, as the tech is 100% obsolete and trivial to trace (as they even admitted themselves with OSPEAD). Chainalysis inflates its valuation artificially and probably controls most of the hash. If someone who is not aligned with & brainwashed by Chainalysis starts mining Monero, the game changes. This is why I think Qubicans are absolutely right to believe that QUBIC is worth more than Monero, and if by accident they end up controlling enough hash they might even make it unsustainable for Chainalysis to artificially inflate XMR's market cap to keep scamming with it. A high market cap is key to their crime marketing strategy to label Monero as the biggest privacy coin and to attract more victims into their honeypot. Some Monero crybabies are already screaming for help on Reddit, by the way.

A few words on Tari, Spagni's latest scam: Tari utilizes Mimblewimble protocol for privacy and launched with a 30% supply premine. This has the same effect on tokenomics as an inflation bug exploited on day 1, so I'd expect it to pump hard early on and dump non stop thereafter. Privacy: think Monero but without rings, where inputs and outputs (Pedersen Commitments) of all transactions happening in a certain block are aggregated together to make it difficult to map a specific input to output. But, OTOH, you know exactly when a commitment is spent, and also by logging everything you trace everything. Tari also has no smart contracts, no VM. Just Tariscript similar to Bitcoin's script. All Monero scammers are shilling this in full force.

Serial scammers from the Solana trenches Jake Gagain (1, 2) and Crashiusclay (1, 2, 3) are now shilling Monero. What's going on here? Let's see...Solana is owned by the so called Paypal mafia, just like Ethereum. David Sacks (Trump's crypto tzar and former COO of Paypal) was one of Solana's early investors. Chamath, a friend of Sacks, has been one of Solana's biggest promoters. Palantir was funded by (among others) Paypal co-founder Peter Thiel (Vitalik was awarded a Thiel Fellowship in 2014) and David Sacks (Craft Ventures). Palantir's mission has always been "data analysis tools for intelligence and law enforcement" (a honeypot like Monero is a great fit) and originally used Paypal's fraud prevention algorithm. Today Palantir has a product called Foundry for Crypto, which maps offchain identities to onchain activity. Palantir and Chainalysis were both seed funded also by In-Q-Tel (CIA's Venture arm). Jaka Gagain shilled Saitama in 2021, a scam that was infiltrated & exposed by an FBI Trojan horse crypto project. Later, Jake Gagain turned into full time Solana pump and dump promoter/serial scammer. Why are these Palantir KOLs promoting Monero now? Is it because Monero is private (we know it's not), or because it feeds grants to their Chainalysis/Foundry for Crypto business (it has to be this one)?