I’ve been thinking a lot about how Spark minting handles transparent amounts and how it stacks up against the trackability issues in more transparent cryptos like Bitcoin. In Bitcoin, if you send your entire balance to a new wallet address, it’s often a red flag that points back to the same owner. Transaction graphs can make it pretty obvious that the funds are still under the same control, which defeats the purpose of privacy. With Firo, once you burn your transparent coins and mint new Spark coins, it’s a fresh start. Similar to how sending Monero in the past from Binance to your own self-custody setup makes it very hard to near impossible for them to follow where it goes afterward if you used KYC in my opinion.
But here’s the catch: when you anonymize your whole transparent balance at once, could that create patterns that make it trackable? Not everyone’s transparent balance is the same size, so if a bunch of users are minting their full amounts, an analyst might spot outliers or correlations. For example, if most people have odd-sized holdings (like 5.67 FIRO vs. 10 FIRO), minting it all at once could inadvertently link back to the original wallet history through on-chain analysis. Is my understanding is It’s not foolproof privacy if the transaction amounts stand out?
Now, on the idea of making this less trackable: Could we use some kind of algorithm to standardize how users burn and mint? Math folks in the comments – what do you think? For instance, if everyone aimed to burn coins in similar set amounts (say, rounding to the nearest 1 FIRO or using a predefined bucket system), that might blur the lines and make all minting transactions look more uniform. Or, what about setting a minimum percentage threshold for each Spark mint? Like, require at least 25% or 50% of your balance to be anonymized per transaction. This could encourage users to break up their minting without forcing it, potentially making the network’s transaction set more homogeneous and harder to fingerprint.
That brings me to my main suggestion: Why not give users more flexibility beyond the current “Anonymize All” approach? I’d love to see an option to anonymize smaller portions of my transparent balance, like 1/3 or 1/2 at a time. This way, I could spread out my minting over multiple transactions, reducing the risk of linking everything back to my original holdings. Of course, keeping “Anonymize All” as an option for those who want a quick full privacy boost would be ideal – it’s all about choice.
What do you all think? Has anyone done any analysis on how minting patterns affect trackability?
Developers is adding partial anonymization of transparent balances feasible in future updates?