Author: Henning Kopp 2016-08-08 15:47:07
Published on: 2016-08-08T15:47:07+00:00
In an email thread on the bitcoin-dev mailing list, Tony Churyumoff proposed a new design that would hide the entire content of Bitcoin transactions. The proposal involves hiding all inputs and outputs and only publishing the hash of inputs and outputs in the blockchain. The plaintext of inputs and outputs is sent directly to the payee via a private message and never goes into the blockchain. This means all validation work must be done by the user who receives the payment. To protect against double-spends, the payer also has to publish another hash, which is the hash of the output being spent, called a spend proof. Churyumoff proposes a way to issue new private coins, called black bitcoins (BBC). Users can burn regular BTC to issue an equal amount of BBC. Then BBC can be transferred from user to user by creating a private transaction, which consists of one input and several outputs; storing the hash of the transaction and the spend proof of the consumed output into the blockchain in an OP_RETURN; and sending the transaction, together with the history leading to its input, directly to the payee over a private communication channel.Churyumoff acknowledges some limitations of this design, such as users will know when the coin was spent by the recipient but nothing more, larger outputs will likely be split into many smaller outputs whose amounts are not much greater than their denominations, and exchanges and large merchants may accumulate large coin histories. However, there is no need for a hard or soft fork, and the same private keys and addresses are used for both BBC and the base currency BTC.
Updated on: 2023-06-11T19:23:56.517039+00:00