Sweep/churn my Monero balance more or less often to improve anonymity? (self.monero)

submitted 6 months ago* (last edited 6 months ago) by hetzlemmingsworld to c/monero@monero.town

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When I am continuously receiving small Monero payments, should I withdraw my Monero account balance (always to the same secondary XMR account of mine) more often or less often in order to ensure lower traceability of the funds?

I have read that withdrawing "account balance more often can lead to lower traceability of the funds". Is it significant? azalty@jlai.lu mentioned that "after 1 churn, there is a 1 in 16 chance (6.25%) that this transaction is yours. After 2 churns, it’s a 1 in 16x16 = 1/256 = 0.39% chance that the final output of the route is yours" But I think that what he wrote applies on a subsequent churns of "same funds" (mywalet1->mywallet2->mywallet3 = 2 churns). But when i withdraw just once per year my received balance or twice per year, does it mayke any difference (how big) in terms of anonymity/traceability?

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[-] azalty@jlai.lu 1 points 6 months ago* (last edited 6 months ago)

I’m not exactly sure of what you meant.

I’ll try to answer the best I can, can you reformulate pls?

The text below is not directly related to the post

And yea sorry it’s pretty much always me that goes on the statistical things and traceability because that really interests me, but as you can see most people will tell you that it’s not really needed, and realistically, for 99% of people, no efforts will be made to monitor their transactions. It’s still nice to know that and churn if you’re extra paranoid like me, or you have a threat model that justifies you go this route.

XMR is a lot less traceable that regular crypto, and no one will follow a random person's transactions for no reason. But on the other hand, churned XMR is a lot less traceable than XMR used directly. It’s all about how far you need to go and you’re willing to go.

Do note that churning might harm the amount of decoys overall, as you’re creating 2 outputs, 1 of which is a 0XMR output that you’ll never use, so you’ll never generate a transaction with it, and as such, won’t blend it with 15 other transactions. It’s not significant, but if everyone churns, that might lower the average amount of transactions your output appears in. We’re still very far from that happening though. And no, statistically, generating a 0XMR output will not help other people find the real output with value (or know that you churned) because it’ll only on average reduce by 1 the amount of transactions your output will appear in. The current average should be close to 16, so that's not reliable enough to track you.

And again I spoke too much and talked about another subject that you didn’t ask for x)

[-] hetzlemmingsworld 1 points 6 months ago

what you meant.

You have not meantioned what you have not understood, so i can tell that my question was if i should be withdrawing my receiving Monero wallet often or if is ok to withdraw it rarely. (when it comes to privacy/anonymity, which way is better, how much better or even if you want to tell why)

[-] azalty@jlai.lu 1 points 6 months ago* (last edited 6 months ago)

I didn’t really understand anything x)

Either are fine, as long as you have churned enough. Typically, the more time between transactions, the better it is. Withdrawing once per month will probably be absolutely fine.

The recurring usage patterns of XMR are either spend outputs quickly, or wait a long time. Spending old outputs will stand out a lot, but spending newly created outputs (like 15 blocks old) will also stand out quite a bit.

More time also means more chance of your outputs being included in transactions of other people, so more decoys at the time of spend.

[-] hetzlemmingsworld 2 points 6 months ago* (last edited 6 months ago)

Ok, so spending received XMR within 15 blocks (block time seems to be 2 minutes, so half a hour) is too early and spending every 6 months incoming payments in one single tx to my secondary wallet i suppose is too long time.. hmm, that is all quite complicated, I can't asses/compare these times (30 minutes vs 1 month vs 6 months) significance of the impact on anonymity. But thank you.

[-] azalty@jlai.lu 2 points 6 months ago

It’s just that the decoy selection algorithm picks decoys in a specific way. Its patterns can be exploited, but don’t stress about it. Churning will make up for it, it’s not that big of a deal. Just avoid spending outputs exactly after 10 blocks as it’s waaaaay more common for real spends than decoys (we can see that the Monero blockchain has way more spends on <20 blocks old outputs than the decoy algorithm proposes), especially when churning. Wait at least a few hours to a few days between churns