Oddbean

The point wasn't that they were choosing specific transactions, but that they were such a high percentage of the whole network that it resulted in that. The extent to which that participation was useful in undermining the network was undetermined.

I was wrong, or at least, passing on unverified info. Sorry. The info I shared was not from an article, but from a twitter account that has since been deleted. The post did include a link to this article: https://www.wired.com/story/monero-privacy/ That's a different thing altogether.

Thanks, I remember this article, though it is quite out of date. Monero has 3 distinct privacy layers protecting sender, amount, and receiver. Admittedly, sender privacy has always been the relatively weakest part in Monero and vulnerable to these statistical attacks. Like the article says, this attack only effects senders (an adversary can potentially know you sent monero, but not how much or to who). It also brings up Central Exchange transactions being traceable, but of course they are, that has nothing to do with Monero. Even though ring signatures have been robust enough in practice so far (to date no one has ever been busted because of ring signatures) Seraphis upgrade will make sender privacy much better with full membership proofs.