Flutterby™! : Monero de-anonymized

Blockchain, baby! An immutable ledger of everything you've done...

Researchers figure out how to de-anonymize Monero.

The researchers' paper, which will be presented at the Privacy Enhancing Technologies Symposium in July, takes special note of a period starting in July 2016, when Monero was first adopted as an alternative to Bitcoin by the then-largest dark web black market for drugs, AlphaBay, and ending in February 2017, when Monero completed an upgrade to its privacy protections known as Ring Confidential Transactions. Roughly 200,000 Monero transactions occurred during that period, the researchers point out, many of which likely involved purchases of illegal narcotics or other sensitive payments made by users who believed their payments were fully untraceable.

Although even transactions made after that patch are still vulnerable, if less so...