Oh damn, I can see that. This one e.g.:
Insane number of outputs (AKA actions)! That means this is only net bad. (Only possibly benefitting the entity doing this.)
I’m sure trying to hide in this particular noise - to emulate their exact pattern of transaction composition - is annoying to work out at best. Not worth it.
@nullius: The problem is probablistic ‘linkability’, based on timestamp analysis alone. (This piece of metadata carries great analysable meaning, until we have thousands of legit, completely indistinguishable fully shielded txs occurring per day, after which there is too much noise to draw statistically significant meaning to any given tx’s timestamp.)
Alongside security, privacy and anonymity, I’ve identified a fourth major vector of OPSEC which I call ‘unlinkability’ (or ‘untraceability’ - making sure one part of your activity cannot be traced to another - even if both are anonymous, private, or secure). Holistically, linkability is a problem that can undermine one of the other three pillars of OPSEC.
Perhaps ‘compartmentalisation’ is a synonym for it (or part of it). And this scenario is an example of this fourth pillar.
Somewhere in my post history I’ve gone over this, as have some others IIRC, but:
-
You may be anonymous, but if there are only 100 normal fully shielded txs per day, and you always transact at a certain time of day, they become probablistically linkable.
-
Two completely random, anonymous txs can be probablistically analysed to say: “65% chance these two txs are by same person because of X/Y/Z historical blockchain timestamp reasons”. (The more data gatherable, the more accurate it could become, or more data to build stories from.) It’s getting worse all the time due to machine learning / big data etc.
-
Pure blockchain analysis alone could eventually lead to meaningful linkability to off-chain vectors, after enough analysis. E.g. they probabilistically guess (even for txs inside one’s own churning): “This fully shielded tx has X% higher chance to be related to this other ZEC tx whose off-chain data we do have off-chain data on (because we secretly control, have successfully subpoaena’d, or have simply hacked into coin exchange Y to see their data) vs. this other one over there, because this tx was done only 3 hours after and the other one was done 3 days after” etc.
-
Furthermore, they could gather probablistic ‘profiles’ (a bit like Facebook shadow profiles) on certain users in the mix by building models like, “What is the statistical probability that these 50 transactions in the month of June, which all correlate to timezone X because they never occur within the average person’s waking hours of timezone Y or Z, belong to one person? or that 25 of them do?”
The sky’s the limit for this type of analysis. We should fear it as much as quantum computing.
Surely you would agree with that? We definitely need noise to plug this hole.
One day - and this is attainable for ZEC - Zcash will actually be more easily untraceable than physical cash (which has its own problems like avoiding CCTV for facial recognition, DNA traces left on the cash, etc). That day will be glorious.
Until then, I’ve concluded that to be as anonymous as cash, since the pool of legit transactions is still so small vs. Monero, you need to do your ZEC txs quite sporadically and patiently and thwart timezone probablistic analysis. Already possible, not fun, but doable.
REALLY? Is the network really grinding to a halt right now? I haven’t done frequent ZEC transacting during this current transition period after I turnstiled my ZEC into Orchard.