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Anon Shop 📦

Feb 15 • 10 tweets • 4 min read

In 2021 the IRS paid 1.25 Million dollars 💰 to contractors for a tool to track and crack Monero. Did they succeed🤔? Keep reading to find out! #monero

In 2020 the IRS was looking for contractors that could crack Monero, Zcash, Dash, Grin, Lightning Network and other privacy projects. Their first proposal was very broad, but in the IRS's second proposal they were very specific in what projects they really wanted cracked...

Monero and Lightning network were the only two projects mentioned in the IRS's 2nd more specific proposal. They cited ransomware as a reason for this focus, "Sodinokibi stated that future ransom request payments will be in Monero ... due to transaction privacy concerns."

Chainalysis and Integra FEC were awarded contracts for 625,00 each to work on cracking Monero and Lightning Network. Chainalysis is known to work with agencies like ICE, DEA, and Coinbase 🤮. Some real scum. But they seem effective and around a year later they announced...

that they had tracking software built for ... Lightning Network. The IRS contract allowed them to attack either Lightning Network and/or Monero and they would still receive the funds. It appears Chainalysis likely went after just Lightning Network since they announced...

a Lightning Network tool 3 months after the contract ended. We can't be 100% sure that they were not successful in their attacks but the contract specifically says that Chainalysis can sell the software and do not have to keep any secrets about this development.

So we can assume that if they had cracked Monero they would tell everyone about their new ability since that would be great for business. Integra FEC also has not made any announcements, but Chainalysis still probably has software that can expose some Monero transactions.

@xmroutreach

There are some well-known attacks against Monero that involve KYC'ed places like exchanges. The EAE attack uses statistics and a user must use KYC'ed places over and over again for this attack to work. There is a full video from
@xmroutreach
detailing this attack. This...

is not new, but it does require exchanges to share information about its users, and Chainalysis probably just facilitates this info-sharing amongst its clients. Monero is very private and if you use good opsec this privacy is well protected.

@hyc_symas

Most of my information came from this great thread by @hyc_symas : reddit.com/r/Monero/comme…

Here is the EAE article also:
monerooutreach.org/breaking-moner…

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Anon Shop 📦

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Feb 14

https://twitter.com/AnonShopApp/status/1625163407195541504

Yesterday we posted about how you can make NFT's on Monero and today we will cover big 3 reasons you should NOT do this 🧵
#monero #xmr

https://twitter.com/AnonShopApp/status/1625163407195541504

1. NFT's Hurt Monero's Privacy

Monero is a crypto project that is focused on privacy and NFT's on Monero could reduce this beloved privacy. The basic NFT system that we have created yesterday relies on the ability to track UTXO's.

If people began to publicize and track their UTXO's this would hurt everyone's privacy on Monero due to Monero's Ring Signatures. Ring Signatures pick random UTXO's to mix in with your transaction. This mixin hides the actual coin you are spending.

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Feb 13

Here is how you can build NFT's on Monero 😎
#monero #NFT

You need the ability to do these 3 things to make a NFT on any blockchain:

1. Hash an image
2. Embed that hash into the blockchain
3. A rule set and platform to track that hashed image across the chain.

Here is how those steps would look on Monero

1. Image Hash
We need to find an image to hash. A hash takes in arbitrary data and outputs a random and unique string.

You can use this website to hash any image that you want: md5file.com/calculator.
When I plug my image from the first tweet into this hash generator, I get:

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Feb 2

Here is How Monero was secretly pre-mined 🧵

People are very suspicious of new cryptocurrencies being launched so most cryptocurrencies are open source when they are launched and Monero is no different in this aspect. But what happens when people don't read the open-source code closely? What can people hide in the code?

You can hide a whole lot of things in a large and complex codebase. In the Monero codebase, the mining code included in the official initial release was made around 50 times slower than a reasonably optimized version could have been made. This is the most insidious attack vector

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Feb 1

Here is how a Zcash Founder helped find a major bug in Monero's Privacy 🧵

Monero uses Ring Signatures to hide which coin is actually being spent in a transaction. When you send a transaction, your wallet chooses 15 other coins from the blockchain and includes them in your transaction. In theory, this hides which coin your transaction is actually

spending, but this process can have many problems. One night Ian Miers (a ZCash founder) was posting graphs of Monero's decoy selection algorithm in a Monero dev channel and something seemed off. The decoy selection algorithm is how Monero wallets decide which coins, or decoys,

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Jan 12

Will Quantum Computers Break Bitcoin?

The answer is more complicated than most people realize, so here is a nuanced but concise thread on the issue👇

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Quantum computers are powerful computers that can make cracking cryptography easier. They are still in development, but scientists believe that they can easily break elliptic curve cryptography (ECC). Whenever someone sends a transaction they are using ECC to sign and...

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authorize the transaction as being valid, using a private key. Quantum computers will be able to find bitcoin addresses on the blockchain and extract the private key and steal the funds. So this means Bitcoin is done right. Well no, most Bitcoin addresses are actually...

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Anon Shop 📦

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Dec 22, 2022

@monero

🚨How Scammers Helped Create Monero🚨
Here is an exposé about the dark history of the beloved cryptocurrency Monero. Get ready for a wild ride that all starts with Monero's White Paper 📝. #monero #xmr #crytpo #privacy @monero

1/15

But a fun fact about Monero is that it doesn't have an OFFICIAL white paper, because Monero was cloned from Bytecoin. Bytecoin launched in 2014 and is based on the CryptoNote protocol. It was heralded as fixing all the privacy issues that plague bitcoin and it SEEMED legit.

2/15

Even prominent Bitcoin core devs were impressed with the privacy created by Bytecoin and the Cryptonote protocol:

“The privacy achieved by Bytecoin is better than any existing-in-production privacy tools " - Gregory Maxwell - Bitcoin Core Dev - 2014

3/15