Update 2017-04-19-an-unofficial-response-to-an-empirical-analysis-of-linkability.md

_posts/2017-04-19-an-unofficial-response-to-an-empirical-analysis-of-linkability.md

@@ -38,7 +38,7 @@ The following are the recommendations listed in the paper and responses to them:
 
 The Monero community would like to list several concerns with this research paper. They are documented below:
 
-1.  We believe that a large proportion of 0-mixin transactions are pool payouts. These transactions should come to no one’s surprise that they are traceable, since the pools themselves publish the payment amount to each address. Thus, we believe that the claims stemming from the traceability of transactions before 0-mixin transactions were banned to be misplaced. If, for example, 50% of non-pool payouts used a positive mixin and 0% of pool payouts did, then the traceability is less for the transactions that use these mixins and greater for pool payouts. We recommend that this is acknowledged in a later iteration of the paper. Ideally, the proportion of pool payouts can be found and compared to the proportion of non-pool payouts, with different traceability proportions for each. We acknowledge that these pools using 0-mixin transactions undermines the non-pool payout transactions, though these non-pool transactions would be better shielded than if they were using 0-mixins themselves ([source](https://www.reddit.com/r/Monero/comments/65dj7u/an_empirical_analysis_of_linkability_in_the/dga1rza/?context=1)).
+1.  We believe that a large proportion of 0-mixin transactions are pool payouts. These transactions should come to no one’s surprise that they are traceable, since the pools themselves publish the payment amount to each transaction hash. Thus, we believe that the claims stemming from the traceability of transactions before 0-mixin transactions were banned to be misplaced. If, for example, 50% of non-pool payouts used a positive mixin and 0% of pool payouts did, then the traceability is less for the transactions that use these mixins and greater for pool payouts. We recommend that this is acknowledged in a later iteration of the paper. Ideally, the proportion of pool payouts can be found and compared to the proportion of non-pool payouts, with different traceability proportions for each. We acknowledge that these pools using 0-mixin transactions undermines the non-pool payout transactions, though these non-pool transactions would be better shielded than if they were using 0-mixins themselves. Furthermore, all transactions are still unlinkable by the MRL definition of the word (see "Other Information" point 4) ([source](https://www.reddit.com/r/Monero/comments/65dj7u/an_empirical_analysis_of_linkability_in_the/dga1rza/?context=1)).
 
 2.  We think further emphasis should have been placed in the paper to explain that the claims are only minimally applicable with the state of Monero transactions since March 2016, with the relevance decreasing over time. Though it is mentioned that their first analysis method has little if any current or future relevance, the claims still include these transactions. Furthermore, the report incorrectly states that most transactions in 2016 are traceable with the 0-mixin method. This is largely untrue, since these were prohibited in March, and most transaction volume for the year occurred during and after August. Nevertheless, many of these post-March transactions have inputs that can be deducible, but the traceability typically is not as severe as with 0-mixin transactions. The transactions that are most vulnerable are those in 2014 and 2015.