25 Mar 2022 [culture] [editorials]

Andreas Antonopoulos: Bitcoin's 'anonymity set is much bigger' than Monero's

According to Andreas Antonopoulos1, Bitcoin’s anonymity set is much bigger than Monero’s:

Because Bitcoin is a store of value, it has more liquidity. Because it has more liquidity, more value and broader acceptability and is easier to exchange. It’s more useful as a currency and therefore it also means it’s used by more people, which means the anonymity set is much bigger. (0:16)

This is a rather peculiar statement, since an anonymity set intrinsically implies indistinguishability. Thus, it is unclear how one could seriously propose Bitcoin as a valid part of this equation, since BTC is clearly not fungible.

In other words, what is the privacy value of a theoretically infinte anonymity set if the entities that comprise the set can be easily distinguishable from each other and tracked by most decently capable adversaries?

Watch the full Q&A clip (Should You Use Monero for Privacy?2) on aantonop’s video channel3.


  1. https://aantonop.com/about/ 

  2. https://yewtu.be/watch?v=pC5vHoTX6fE 

  3. https://yewtu.be/channel/UCJWCJCWOxBYSi5DhCieLOLQ