Author: Gregory Maxwell 2012-12-03 15:51:41
Published on: 2012-12-03T15:51:41+00:00
In an email exchange, Alan Reiner suggests improving anonymity in the bitcoin network by cleaning up dust from any address by default (not just ones already included in the transaction) while still allowing users to disable that feature. He notes that most users don't care about anonymity and reducing it in exchange for a cleaner network makes sense. However, this could trigger an infrequent amount of change to fresh addresses. The 5 input limit is also questioned, and it's suggested that it be handled as a pure post-processing step. Another possibility is using input taint tracking information to gather coins from all inputs which are already cross-linked, but this may require maintaining cross-link history for each address in the wallet, making it a lot of changes for a modest optimization.A third suggestion is to not apply the privacy rule to very small inputs or to addresses that have only ever received a small sum total. However, defining "very small" in a robust way is difficult, and ignoring the address association even for small inputs can make transactions rapidly identifiable, which would be a privacy concern. Alan states that privacy, even in a basic form, is an important element of the bitcoin system. Additionally, he mentions that he has seen people trying to catch troublemakers by paying tiny amounts to their extortion addresses with the incorrect expectation that it would taint their other transactions, demonstrating that even when it doesn't usually work, people have tried using this to attack others.
Updated on: 2023-05-19T16:15:41.671017+00:00