Someone challenged me to trace his transaction to its source yesterday on Bawdy Anarchist's twitter space and I denied the ability to do so. I want to build more automatic decoy eliminators because without them you need lots of off chain data that I don't know how to get or that is expensive to acquire. I am not sure how far you can get using only chain heuristics to identify the true spender; I suspect it's higher than 1 in 15 but lower than 100%.

One monero dev offered a helpful cli tool that detects all instances when a stealth address has appeared in a ring; this is something my tool is currently missing and would greatly help with building taint trees. I hope that through community effort my tool continues to improve in effectivelness. The bad guys shouldn't be the only ones with a tool like this, and before yesterday only ciphertrace had a tool like this (that I know of anyway) 

 >"they always have been (traceable)"

>"Someone challenged me to trace his transaction to its source yesterday on Bawdy Anarchist's twitter space and I denied the ability to do so"

wtf bro 😂

I listened to part of your conversation with Bawdy and enjoyed it. Agreed with almost everything you said there. I just think you claim too much on social media, or use terms in an unorthodox way which is why you get all these reply guys like myself.

Looking forward to you and Luke talking on Seths pod next 👌 

 "they are traceable" and "I personally have the resources to trace them" are different things 

 Thats a pretty large claim with not much to back it

You can find cases where users were caught because they sent it to exchanges and the exchanges cooperated with law enforcement, or because they naively hopped to transparent chains like Bitcoin, etc, but not really anything that was directly attributed to Monero itself

P2P transactions that dont leave Moneros blockchain give you very strong privacy guarantees 

 My monero tracing tool automatically identifies the sender of this transaction: c97d96fe61b2aee18a04fdb0975594c7e6d3334036e0e57e70666b9e5fe309b3

Try it here: https://supertestnet.github.io/examiner/

It seems to only be able to identify the sender in about 1 out of 15 transactions, but that's not nothing. I suspect tools with more data (like Ciphertrace's monero tracing tool, linked on my examinr github repo) do a better job of this, but it's silly to claim monero can't be traced in the face of two tools that at least sometimes trace it 

 You didn't trace anything. How does this identify the sender?...Did you narrow it down to a single sender? There are always 15 decoys and 1 true spend. You can't tell us which one is the true spend (unless this is your personal transaction then of course you know.)

Thats how rings work.

And mind this is a single transaction. As time goes on, you transact more, and it's chosen as decoys for other transactions, your probability for tracing rapidly falls off.

original 16 = ~6%
1 hop 16^2 =  ~0.4%
2 hops 16^3 =  ~0.02% 

 > You didn't trace anything

I did. I identified this pubkey as the sender: 23396ea4b0ab93e3417c3650d47b1c8414bb593d7fc9cdb1b27244e139645302

The rest are the decoys. My tool uses on-chain data and two heuristics to identify the true spend. The two heuristics are explained on my github:

https://github.com/supertestnet/examiner/

Someone told you monero can't be traced by they were wrong. Ciphertrace has a tool for tracing them and now I've released a free and open source alternative. 

 OK, so how do you know you've got the right sender? Like others are saying, if you can only trace the sender correctly in 1 of 15 transactions, you're not beating randomly guessing. You'll guess correctly 1 out of 15 tries, and you'll have no way to verify you were right. What's your methodology for verifying correctness on that 1 of 15? If you have that then you might have something, because if not then you've got no way to know which out of 15 was the correct guess. 

 Dude that isn't tracing...

You could already do that with any Monero block explorer. Click any tx hash in a block and you can see a pubkey. See this is what I mean about you using terms in unorthodox ways.

By the way is that your transaction? I see it was made yesterday 

 > in the context of a cryptocurrency a "transaction tracing tool" would be able to identify the source, destination and amount of transactions

I don't think it has to automatically do that. A tracing tool is good if it helps automate some parts of the tracing task even if other parts remain manual.

> random chance identifies the sender in "about 1 of 15 cases"

But random guessing uses no data. This tool uses *data* to identify the sender. A random guess would not be grounds for doing anything. A statistical analysis is worth a lot more.

> the recipient that is published on-chain is a one time stealth address. not useful for tracing since SAs break the transaction graph.

They do not break the transaction graph. Stealth addresses do not appear just once, they appear again whenever the recipient spends his money and possibly in other transactions as decoys. Filtering out the decoys leaves you with only the true spend tx. You can do that *because* there is a tx graph that stealth addresses appear multiple times in.

> and amounts remain opaque

Except part of the amount is visible (the fee) and gives you info about the amount in the outputs as well as in the inputs

> additionally, if it takes "a considerable amount of off-chain information" to *actually use* NOBODY is tracing monero transactions

Seems like you contradict yourself here. First you say "nobody" and argue that the data doesn't exist, then you admit some people might do it and governments might have that data.

Not a good look. 

 sorry
forgot you lack the ability to process nuance.

but if you don't understand that the off-chain data your "tracing tool" relies on
may be attainable by the NSA when investigating certain individuals,
but be nonexistent in the VAST number of cases,

I can't really help.