Ok so I just came across this article claiming that monero can now be traced. I’m not trying to spread fud or anything but I know that Incognito utilizes monero’s tech to achieve it’s privacy capabilities. I’m not very knowledgeable about about the tech of incognito but I am curious as to whether or not this affects the project or if this allows for tracing incognitos transactions or not. If so, can the code be changed to thwart attempts like this?
Monero transactions able to be tracked?
I’m watching this interview now to learn more info. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w5rtd3md11g
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I have it queued up now. Let me know what you get out of it.
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It doesn’t seem like the traced information given is super accurate. It seems they have their own methods of determining accuracy from statistical data. I feel like there is very limited information you can gain from that. However it is said that they take into account other third party information. You have to realize, the government had no information at all in regards to these transactions. Statistical information is much butter then nothing. If you throw in your own fancy method to determine which statistical data is good, i’m sure you could get a government contract.
Also, it’s interesting to note, that they seem to only be able to identify probalistically small pools and entity’s. In the interview, he said it takes a lot of data just to identify groups. They increase your risk score and and identify you as part of an illicit organization if your signers in the ring signature are from statistically probable illicit places. The more illicit signers, the higher your risk score is. This isn’t super helpful information as your one innocent transaction could have a bunch of illicit signers which would in fact raise the probability that your wallet is part of an illicit organization.
The goal with this tool seems to be to guestimate the money movements in a given targeted organization. They also potentially send their own transactions to illicit address’s to see where the money goes. This method can not work on Incognito. It seems to me that they gather most of their information from 3rd partys and try to generalize and identify risk factors, then associate it with your address. If you use a new Monero address every single time, i’m sure your fine.
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It seems as though, if anything, this increases the utility of incognito chain as it obfuscates the probabilities of traceability even more because it is cross chain 
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Exactly. This news seems to make Incognito more valuable.
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I think Incognito can’t be tracked until now
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I observe that most attacks aim at de-anonymizing ring signatures and we are going to sharpen current cryptographic techniques to amplify the size of the ring, i.e. the number of pseudo inputs to be mixed with the real input, for each signature without increasing too much in the size of transactions.
In fact, I think the existence of people who try to hack Monero and privacy technologies is good 
because they are reminding us that those technologies are still immature and we have to work harder and smarter to perfect them, btw we are on the way towards the world of perfect privacy.
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