Conclusion
The anonymity of Monero has evolved to a large extent in the recent few years. With the introduction of RingCT and the increase of mandatory mixins to 10, it is much harder to trace the transactions. We investigated the e ectiveness of three successful heuristics from the pre-RingCT era (i.e. before January 2017). The percentage of deducible transactions through zero chain analysis decreased to nearly 0% after the implementation of RingCT. The accuracy of the time heuristic has also reduced considerably to less than 40% with 10 mixins with a more realistic time distribution of mixins. The merging outputs heuristic still has good performance, but it can only be applied to a small portion of all transactions. We thus came to the conclusion that compared to the version three years ago, current Monero transactions can be conducted with superior anonymity with the introduction of new techniques like RingCT.
Alt-Coin Traceability Carnegie Mellon University 18 May 2020