Transparency or Anonymity Leak: Monero Mining Pools Data Publication

Abstract

Monero is a cryptocurrency that provides anonymity by default for its senders and receivers. The recorded Monero transactions are infeasible to trace without additional information. Monero utilises Proof-of-Work (PoW) as its consensus method. Miners contribute their computing power in exchange for a reward. To stabilise their income, the miners join mining pools. Mining pools coordinate the miners’ mining power in order to generate more reward and distribute the reward based on each miner’s contribution to getting the reward. Some mining pools publish the list of won blocks and payout transactions to the miners to provide transparency of their business. In this work, we investigate anonymity leak in Monero system through analyses on mining pools’ data. We collect published data from ten mining pools’ websites and conduct traceability analyses on the data. We discover that 59.2% inputs of all Monero transaction inputs in our data set are traceable. We also identify that the age of the spent coins is between 2.5 h and 3.3 days. While we propose methods to improve the accountability of the published information, it is also questionable that the mining pools keep publishing such information which reduces the anonymity of their transactions. Our investigation shows that there is no relationship between publishing mining-related information and the success of a mining pool.