Information Leak Through Traffic Analysis

Question

Is this statement true:-

"It is impossible to eliminate traffic analysis of transaction sources using the current architecture, in particular with effectively one node per wallet, and where the wallet addresses are necessarily fixed",

Obviously being able to determine the set of companies involved in a contract, and the frequency of such dealings, is something of great value. In the greater scheme, your prospective employer being able to find out that you've been to see a chiropractor recently might not be a massive issue unless you are applying for the role of pitcher, but you perhaps dont want them to know that you've been to see a consultant psychiatrist recently cos you are so worried about information leak on your block chain.

I noticed someone was trying to build a "truly anonymous" wallet. But this has yet to be deployed or proven.

Answer 1

The connection between nodes and wallets is not so much the issue, but rather the transaction graph which shows how money flows from one place to another. You might find this blog piece interesting:

http://www.multichain.com/blog/2016/01/moving-on-from-big-blockchains/

As mentioned at the end of that piece, some very smart people are working on ways to make blockchain activity completely untraceable, but these techniques aren't yet at a point when they can be deployed practically, because of the time and space requirements.