Author: James MacWhyte 2016-08-08 21:41:27
Published on: 2016-08-08T21:41:27+00:00
A new proposal has been put forward to conceal the content of Bitcoin transactions. The plan involves hiding both inputs and outputs, and only publishing the hash of these in the blockchain. This can be published as OP_RETURN. The plaintext of inputs and outputs will be sent directly to the payee via a private message, bypassing the blockchain entirely. The payer must publish another hash, known as the spend proof, which is the hash of the output being spent. This measure is designed to protect against double-spends. To prove that the outputs being spent are legitimate, the payer must send the plaintexts of the earlier transaction(s) that produced them. Each subsequent owner of the coin will have to store its entire history, and when the coin is spent, the entire history must be forwarded to the next owner and extended with the latest transaction.The proposal acknowledges some limitations such as privacy leakage, but suggests that this can be avoided by using multiple addresses and storing a relatively small amount on each address. It requires no hard or soft fork and constitutes a separate, privacy-preserving currency known as BBC, built on top of the Bitcoin blockchain. The same private keys and addresses are used for both BBC and the base currency BTC. Every BCC transaction must be enclosed within a small BTC transaction that stores the OP_RETURNs and pays for the fees. Dr. Fabian Kopp is a member of the Institute of Distributed Systems at Ulm University in Germany. He is actively involved in researching distributed systems and security, with a specific focus on blockchain technology. Dr. Kopp has contributed to the development of the Bitcoin protocol and is an active member of the bitcoin-dev mailing list, hosted by the Linux Foundation. His contact information can be found on his website at http://www.uni-ulm.de/in/vs/~kopp. So far, there has been no feedback on the proposal.
Updated on: 2023-06-11T19:26:42.937852+00:00