Bitcoin Privacy: "Confidential Transactions" Feature Can Fix Some of CoinJoin's Problems
Andrew Poelstra is a mathematician at Blockstream and was recently part of a panel discussion on improvements for Bitcoin at the 2016 MIT Bitcoin Expo. During the panel, Poelstra discussed Confidential Transactions, which is a privacy-enhancing feature he has been working on with Blockstream co-founders and Bitcoin Core contributors Greg Maxwell and....
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A new Bitfury white paper aims to advance the study of how bitcoins sent using certain privacy-enhancing techniques could be traced back to participants. Released today, "Shared Send Untangling in Bitcoin" explores how bitcoins in this type of transaction can be "untangled", or sorted, into their original value flows. Shared send transactions originate when users organize into groups, by way of an intermediary, in order to obfuscate how funds may be moving between wallets. "We establish a theoretical approach to shared send transaction analysis, which formulates....
The Bank of Korea is considering the creation of a 'supernode' to help mitigate privacy concerns should it seek to adopt distributed ledger technology. Published as part of an overview of the central bank's future plans, the report titled "Present Status and Key Issues of Distributed Ledger Technology" further details policy issues that it believes could hinder the growth of distributed ledgers. Notably, in a section titled "Application Plan", the report's authors include several "solutions" to four key problems recommended by the Bank of Korea, headquartered....
It’s been referred to as a "revolutionary technology" by IBM, and a "once in a generation opportunity" by PricewaterhouseCoopers. But perhaps the most descriptive title came from The Economist when they dubbed blockchain "the trust machine". It is a breakthrough in computer science that holds the promise of reducing the cost of establishing and maintaining trust for both individuals and organizations. "Blockchain" is a relatively new term that refers to a specific type of computer database. The Oxford English Dictionary defines blockchain as "a....
Over the last several years, the number of digital currencies has skyrocketed. While some of these have developed substantial market capitalizations and carved out their own unique niches, few have shown promise for offering users a high level of privacy and fungibility. Bitcoin, which had its genesis block mined in 2009, was the first digital currency to scale. While many early adopters took interest in bitcoin because of its promise of privacy, the digital currency failed to provide this benefit, as interested parties can examine the transactions recorded on bitcoin’s blockchain to get a....
XCurrency is set to launch its eagerly awaited Rev 2 technology this week which will allow nodes to earn revenue for trustless mixing of transactions. The new technology, Xmixer, will enable the boosting of network security, scale up the processing of private transactions and provide revenue streams for users of XC. To understand why this is a "killer-app", it is necessary to understand what is meant by coinjoin. Coinjoin is a protocol that enhances the security and privacy of transactions by enabling users to build shared transactions that prevents unscrupulous individuals from tracing....