Quote from: gmaxwell on October 15, 2013, 06:05:11 PM

Quote from: hashman on October 15, 2013, 09:12:39 AM

1) Coinjoin as I see it adds some plausible deniability but the taint is still there. Anonymity is probably not the right word. If one of the input addresses is considered a red flag,

This is really a question for how _much_ these tools are used. What you're pointing to is that there is an information leak whenever the anonymity set is less than all users of the system. It's actually even worse than that: only a very small fraction of the world uses Bitcoin at all: So even if every transaction were anonymous internally to Bitcoin there would still be an information leak from the fact that you used Bitcoin at all.

I guess I wasn't getting that deep, sorry. Just pointing out that in coinjoin there is still some fractional taint visible on the blockchain. If we trade private keys off-chain then we can control money with 0 taint. Well, 0 taint on blockchain anyway, but still taint in some other ways you describe. Anyway, more privacy is better so thanks for spelling it out for us

Quote

If, after you've exhausted the funds sent to a particular scriptPubKey, someone sends you a tiny amount of coin to that scriptPubKey and you spend it in a new transaction then whatever linkage they knew carries forward and your deanonymization grows as a sufficiently small payment will only be useful when spent in combination with other coins. After several applications of this its very likely that all addresses in that wallet become publicly interconnected. Turning a theoretical weakness ("You might not be very private") into an actual one.

OK, I hadn't caught the bit about sending the dust to empty wallets only. Still seems a bit odd but now I understand what y'all been talking about

Seems like coincontrol is getting more and more necessary.