I can’t speak to monero specifically
But:
- Why aren’t they catching more criminals? They are. They just are finding alternate sources of evidence. Dick Wolf shows love to talk about how cops need to protect themselves from any poison fruit and blah blah blah. The reality is that they immediately go to the poison fruit and use that to make a plausible excuse for why they investigated something else that can confirm information they got from the illegal source. If you’ve ever wondered why they would think to investigate a random unrelated company that ends up being the smoking gun…
- Why didn’t anyone claim the bounty? Because the CIA and the like don’t want people to know they compromised it?
Back in my pure research days it was always fun to guess what the latest “big thing” was actually about. It was especially fun when you would be looking for funding opportunities and see really weird stuff that made no sense for the org sponsoring it but would have made perfect sense for a different 3LA.
Like, for the better part of a decade The Big Thing was graph analysis techniques. And the number of kids who had no idea they were basically writing algorithms to process social media (especially twitter) was downright sad. And the people who DID realize what their work was geared toward? They applied for jobs where they got paid a lot more to do exactly that without needing to pretend it is actually about data storage technologies or optimizing cell tower load.
No. There is every reason to “defend yourself”. The key is to actually be aware of what research and efforts are out there and minimizing your risk profile any time you are dealing with a black box.
I mean, it is known that people can pick locks. Do you plug your ears every time you hear someone talk about how doors can be compromised? Or do you give up on everything and remove every single deadbolt in your home?
Or… do you do a bit of research and figure out what you can do to make your home harder to break into. Whether it is sturdier screws, a reinforced doorjam, or other methods?