Author: Peter Todd 2014-01-10 10:10:51
Published on: 2014-01-10T10:10:51+00:00
The email conversation discusses the trade-off between privacy and bandwidth in Bitcoin wallets. The idea is to generate addresses with a fixed prefix, which would determine the anonymity set and associated privacy/bandwidth tradeoff for the wallet's lifetime. However, this method expands the universe of potential spies from 'the global attacker' who watches SPV queries to anyone with a copy of the blockchain. Therefore, using non-specific filters and prefixed addresses for incoming payments is suggested for better privacy. Also, prefix filters would be matched against all txouts in blocks rather than UTXO. Furthermore, change txouts are not recommended to have prefixes to prevent obvious identification of spend versus change addresses in a transaction.
Updated on: 2023-06-07T23:29:43.286995+00:00