Ryan Sean Adams

When you do this process, they see that you touched the pile of somebody, something happened to the pile over here, right?

And when you do the third step, they, depending on all the details, can see something happened over here, right?

They can put two and two together because this emitted information and this emitted information.

In some cases, the attacker is going to be able to get both of those signals and they're going to be able to put it together, especially with AI, right?

So the point is, it doesn't matter how little information the middle step emitted.

If you take your Bitcoin or Ethereum, you move it into Zcash.

I'm getting worked up about this because...

So many people are so wrong about this.

Like 99% of people, it has never occurred to them that there's any other possible way to do anything than to do it this way.

But this way, it's like 100% fail, and they're still doing it.

Like they've been doing it since before Zcash.

No, Zcash existed.

Remember when Shapeshift, we're probably talking like 2017, Shapeshift was the most widely used coin swapping service for a long time.

Remember that?

Yep.

During those years, the most common use of ShapeShift was that people would bring Bitcoin or Bitcoin Cash or Litecoin to ShapeShift and they would swap it for either Zcash or Monero.

Then they would swap it back for Bitcoin Cash or Bitcoin or Litecoin.

So this is exactly the same pattern.

Anyone who has the ability to watch the blockchains can trivially link those two states with each other.

And this is true even if the middle thing, Zcash or Monero, did the best possible job of leaking no additional information.