Author: Peter Todd 2014-06-06 17:05:24
Published on: 2014-06-06T17:05:24+00:00
On June 6, 2014, Gregory Maxwell and Peter Todd discussed the privacy of blockchain data. They talked about the difference between bloom filters and prefix filters which are used to make transactions against. Bloom filters have O(n) scaling while prefix filters have O(log n) scaling with slightly higher k. However, if brute forcing is not used in conjunction with prefixes, they have no different transactional graph privacy than bloom filters. Maxwell questioned how something that gets put in transactions and burned forever into the blockchain, that lets you link txout ownership statically, is "no different" from something which is shared directly with a couple of peers, potentially peers you trust and which are run by yourself or your organization. Todd explained that you don't have to use brute-force prefix selection, you can give your peer multiple prefixes, each of which corresponds to at least one address in your wallet with some false positive rate. Todd also mentioned that he had explained all this in detail in his original blockchain data privacy writeup months ago.
Updated on: 2023-06-08T23:45:20.980212+00:00