Author: Gregory Maxwell 2016-06-29 01:01:50
Published on: 2016-06-29T01:01:50+00:00
In this email thread, Eric Voskuil and others discuss the benefits and limitations of BIP (Bitcoin Improvement Proposal) 151, which aims to improve privacy and security in SPV wallets. One participant argues that without BIP 151, network participants cannot have privacy for their transactions within the protocol against network observers, though it is noted that being a peer is easier than observing the network. The lack of link encryption has been used to argue against privacy-preserving relay behavior. The thread also discusses how authenticated links are not possible without BIP 151, but manually curated links cannot be counted on to provide protection against partitioning sybils. It is mentioned that retaining other links enables the attack described above. The discussion then turns to the fact that Bitcoin cannot be used unless users have secure communication channels to share addresses. While nodes will necessarily have to connect with anonymous peers, they are not required to only do so. Finally, one participant notes that defining an auth implementation is not a hard problem, nor is it the concern raised here.
Updated on: 2023-05-19T23:34:30.254744+00:00