Twitter users have been traced back to Zcash's private transaction address for three days, raising fresh questions about its online privacy

Rhythblockbeats - July 11, A Twitter user named @MoneyKnowledge0 challenged "friendly attackers" to trace their private Zcash transactions. In this Zcash Community challenge, a user named @Brian Deep traced his ZEC address from the @MoneyKnowledge0 ZEC transaction in less than three days. This puts the privacy protection of Zcash into question again.

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But that doesn't mean Zcash's approach to privacy has failed; This only shows that some Zcash transactions are easily traceable. The incident revealed a serious misunderstanding of online privacy among users.

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How are transactions traced

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First of all, let's have a look at the privacy protection logic of Zcash. Launched in 2016, Zcash is a privacy coin with encryption algorithm at its core. It hasn't changed trading patterns to hide the user's information, but through a process known as shielding (shielding) to provide users with the possibility of encrypted block chain activities.

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Zcash provides protection through shielded pools, or a group of encrypted addresses, in which the balances and transactions in the pool are always encrypted. Transactions in and out of the pool, or between them, are transparent, but the addresses of the parties to the pool are always encrypted.

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Zcash relies on two types of addresses: z-addresses and T-addresses.

In this instance, @Moneyknowledge0 made a transfer from his shielded address to the recipient's shielded address. @Brian Deep was able to use this clue to determine which address @Moneyknowledge0 used to send the assets to his original shielded address.

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Rhythm understands that each of @MoneyKnowledge0's trades were closed in a short period of time, which made his trades easy to track. For better privacy, @Brain Deep suggests splitting your money into smaller pieces and keeping the time between transactions longer. This makes it harder to track,

As such, the traceability of the @MoneyKnowledge0 transactions can be attributed to user misconduct, not to Zcash itself. Or we can understand that the transaction of Zcash still USES a small number of users, resulting in too little information in the address and therefore easy to analyze and trace.

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Of course, after successfully completing the challenge, @Brain Deep got $100 worth of ZEC.

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Zcash CEO's view

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Zooko Wilcox, CEO of Zcash, believes that it is not a good idea to hide the money transfer "by means of privacy" and that the way to provide privacy is to store the money in the shielded pool. According to Wilcox, the longer the transaction, the less benefit there is to privacy. Instead, users who want privacy should store their money in a shielded pool of Zcash.

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Wilcox argues that if @Moneyknowledge0 USES blocked pools for money storage, transactions cannot be traced solely through information in the blockchain.

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ZEC privacy issues

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This is not the first time Zcash's privacy has been questioned, According to Rhythm.

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In May, Carnegie Mellon university reported that more than 99 percent of its users were not using ZEC's privacy and blocking features. Chainalysis, a data analytics company, says it will be available in June 2020 to track most Zcash and Dash transactions. According to Zchain's Zcash Block Explorer, only over 11% of ZEC trades were blocked as of July 2020.

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Zcash can encourage users to use masked addresses by default or by enforcing privacy, just like other privacy COINS such as Monero. While Zcash's developers have been thinking about setting privacy by default since 2018, the feature isn't in place yet. At present, if users want to open Zcash privacy protection, they need to select it manually during the transaction, otherwise the transaction will be accepted as the normal transfer mode by default.

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