Re: Gold collapsing. Bitcoin UP.

It seems reasonable, and afair TPTB have cracked down on exchanges for game currencies because they do realize this threat.

Is Monero ready to resist such crackdowns? Does it have decentralized exchanges? Can the authorities not track down IP addresses and make examples to discourage others from subverting a ban?

Might work.

My idea is an area that is more targeted to the market of those who need anonymity and thus might be more willing to fight. Not sure if game players want to pick an unnecessary fight with the government.

I like your posts but IPs is one of the least worries for privacy in a coin, the "worst" they could ascertain is that you made a transaction to... somewhere, a Monero crackdown would only Straisant effect it, they can't even block torrents, how would a ban take place? They can't ban it everywhere in the world at same time.

I may have forgotten the specific details of the unlinkability (been away from that for some months) but afair the IP address can be associated with a total payment amount and the output addresses. The unlinkability only creates a new address for each payee for each payment, but doesn't hide this new address. Thus on the next spend of the change, the input to the ring it likely known. It is these sort of combinatorial attacks (other variations) that I think might breakdown Monero's anonymity. Smooth please do correct me if my recollection has failed me.

It does hide every new address (in the sense that it is just a random number), and the change is blinded just like any other payee. You can't tell by monitoring at the network level which outputs are change and which are not. You also can't tell by monitoring at the network level which outputs are being spent, so you can't ever be sure that change is being spent.

Wallets do have to be careful how they select coins to avoid skewing probabilities. The best is probably to spend a change output by itself without combining with other outputs (this could be spent back to yourself, but at that point it no longer can be identified as change). It's probably still okay to spend it with other outputs of yours that don't share a near ancestor.

But my point was that if the IP is the same (or different IP correlated to the same individual) for transaction that created outputs and that spends any of those outputs (without needing to know which is the change), then analysis can presume the output(s) being spent in the ring are those which match the correlated IP address.

Note I am presuming the NSA can obtain the records from your ISP to ascertain it was you on shared IP address and not another user of the same ISP.