Author: Antoine Riard 2023-05-18 06:08:46
Published on: 2023-05-18T06:08:46+00:00
The use of zero-knowledge proof cryptosystems, such as Bulletproofs, in the Bitcoin ecosystem can lead to privacy-preserving UTXO ownership proofs, which are already used in production across the Lightning ecosystem for channel announcements. Stakes Certificates, a protocol enabling the proof of a set of attributes about a UTXO in a privacy-preserving fashion, can be used to solve counterparty search in peer-to-peer marketplaces for decentralized Bitcoin financial contracts, such as coinjoins market-matching. With the help of Stakes Certificates, an entity can prove a set of attributes for a set of UTXOs across Bitcoin contexts through a Web-of-Stakes protocol. This can be leveraged to build counterparty and trades search among peer-to-peer marketplaces where the prover can selectively reveal attributes of its economic behavior based on the UTXO footprint in the chain. It can also be combined with modern techniques from Web-of-Trust like decentralized identifiers.Zero-knowledge proof systems have been designed under diverse cryptographic assumptions, each coming with a set of trade-offs in terms of size proofs, generation time and verification time. If multiple practical ZKP systems for the Bitcoin use-cases are available, the cryptosystems could be negotiated by the clients to suit their computational resources.The Stakes Certificate protocol can be used for other applications such as ensuring there has always been a 1-to-1 mapping between ecash tokens and the UTXOs ownership, replacing the plaintext Lightning gossip, and using UTXOs as DoS mitigations in peer-to-peer systems.
Updated on: 2023-06-01T16:53:07.531926+00:00