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22 votes

Is there something about Bitcoin that prevents us from implementing the same privacy protocols of Monero and Zcash?

I'm curious as to why Bitcoin has not perused a similar path to privacy. I want to start by commenting on the phrasing of this question. Bitcoin is defined by the consensus of its users, and isn't a ...
Pieter Wuille's user avatar
20 votes
Accepted

Are Monero Transaction Anonymous?

Short answer: yes, it will be anonymous Long answer: The following applies to all Cryptonote based coins, unless stated otherwise: On the blockchain, all addresses are one time addresses. In ...
user36303's user avatar
  • 786
17 votes
Accepted

Is my account balance publicly visible?

If your business partner knows your address, they can learn the transaction history and balance of that address. Often it is possible to guess or deduce that other addresses also belong to you, but ...
Murch's user avatar
  • 73k
15 votes

Is my account balance publicly visible?

If I'm sending someone my wallet-address, am I making my account balance visible to him? Yes. all transactions are public, means if I know the wallet address, I can reconstruct the current ...
Roman Kiselenko's user avatar
11 votes

Why is the ledger public?

When Bitcoin was invented, Blockchain analysis was not as advanced as it was today and pseudonymous transactions were believed to be closer to anonymous than they are with Bitcoin today. Under the ...
Rudolf Harrison's user avatar
10 votes
Accepted

Can I send bitcoin to other address in my wallet to provide anonymity?

Let's assume you're the outside observer. You see 1 BTC go from aaa to bbb, then from bbb to ccc, then from ccc to ddd, and them from ddd to zzz (zzz being associated with service Z). Can you see how ...
UTF-8's user avatar
  • 3,224
10 votes
Accepted

Why is the length of the transport messages on the lightning network encrypted?

TCP and other stream based protocols do not have a 1-to-1 correlation of application level messages and IP packets. If you call send() 3 times, it might result in sending a single IP packet over the ...
Mark H's user avatar
  • 3,324
9 votes

What are tainted coins exactly?

The term "Tainted Coins" is often misinterpreted as a measure of provenance. That's understandable considering the traditional definition of the word "tainted" coupled with the reality that many ...
Rob Guthm's user avatar
  • 101
9 votes
Accepted

How does not practicing address reuse hurt my privacy?

There's a bigger attack surface for someone that wants to doxx you. They only need to link a single transaction to your real life person to know all the transactions you've participated in. A single ...
Jimmy Song's user avatar
  • 7,749
9 votes
Accepted

Privacy friendly payment processor

I'm pretty sure that all crypto payment processors that deal with fiat <-> cryptocurrency exchanges are doing AML/KYC routines including chain analysis. That's not only true for BitPay and Coinbase ...
stke's user avatar
  • 381
8 votes

Deanonymizing dust attack

A deanonymizing dust attack works by sending dust to large amounts of addresses. The assumption is that when people send transactions/perform consolidations in the future, dust from multiple addresses ...
Raghav Sood's user avatar
  • 16.9k
8 votes

What exactly is "privatekeys.pw"?

The site is a joke, or at best a confusing attempt to educate. It literally lists all private keys, from low to high, as private keys are just numbers. There are of course way more than can be ...
Pieter Wuille's user avatar
7 votes

How do Reusable Payment Codes work?

The gist of the reusable payment code BIP is that you can gain some measure of address privacy by combining BIP32 (hierarchical deterministic wallets) with Diffie-Hellman key exchange. To understand ...
Jimmy Song's user avatar
  • 7,749
7 votes
Accepted

Can you detect that the addresses generated by an HD wallet came from a single wallet?

No. All addresses generated by HD derivation are indistinguishable to someone who does not know the parent's master key (the private one for hardened derivation, the public one for normal derivation)....
Pieter Wuille's user avatar
7 votes
Accepted

Do confidential transactions produce an UTXO

In Confidential Transactions (as used in Blockstream's Elements and Liquid), there are still identifiable UTXOs. The only change is that instead of the amount, a homomorphic commitment to the amount ...
Pieter Wuille's user avatar
7 votes

Why do people claim that governments cannot confiscate Bitcoins?

While it is true that Bitcoin can still be physically taken away from you, it is still much harder to do that than it is for a government to confiscate your fiat stored in a bank account (as most fiat ...
Andrew Chow's user avatar
  • 68.6k
7 votes

What are the advantages/disadvantages to using the same Wallet Address?

Questions about altcoins are off-topic here, but the answer is essentially universal: if you re-use addresses, especially because of a desire to think of them as a long-term identity, you're ...
Pieter Wuille's user avatar
7 votes
Accepted

Is it possible to identify UTXOs signed by HD wallets?

Almost every wallet today uses HD key derivation. You'd need to go back to software from 2016 or earlier to find any that don't. So I'd say your question is moot. That said, there certainly are ...
Pieter Wuille's user avatar
6 votes

What are the privacy implications of filtered blockchain downloads?

I know it is an old question, but it deserves an updated answer. Since the introduction of BIP37 (=SPV with bloom filters) a number of serious privacy vulnerabilities have been discovered. By using ...
nopara73's user avatar
  • 806
6 votes

Will Confidential Transactions allow us to reuse addresses safely?

My understanding of confidential transactions is that it only hides the amounts, not the addresses involved (someone please let me know if this is not the case). Since only the amount is hidden, ...
morsecoder's user avatar
6 votes
Accepted

Bitcoin node Decentralization

Yes, independently operated nodes help decentralization more than the same number of nodes operated by a single entity. That's basically the definition of "decentralization" in this context. That is ...
Jestin's user avatar
  • 8,822
6 votes
Accepted

Would quantum computing be able to deanonymize CoinJoin transactions?

No. CoinJoin does not rely on any cryptography to hide transaction flows. It merely combines multiple transactions into one, and randomizes the order of inputs and outputs. Of course, as you point ...
Pieter Wuille's user avatar
6 votes
Accepted

Is It Possible to Prove Ownership of Public Key Hash without Public Key?

The simple answer is no. A hashing algorithm is ment to be a one-way function. If it is possible to recreate the public key from the hash, this means that the hashing algorithm is broken. However ...
user44404's user avatar
  • 546
6 votes
Accepted

Are there any risks of publicizing a Lightning network invoice?

Does it affect -most importantly- the safety of the funds? It does not. Funds are not affected by publishing a LN invoice. Does it negatively affect the privacy or something else? If a lightning ...
Andrew Chow's user avatar
  • 68.6k
6 votes
Accepted

How can I hide my bitcoin transactions to protect anonymity from others?

Your address is a classical 1 (Pay-to-public-key-hash) address. Your friend has a newer Bech32 Pay-to-Witness-public-key-hash-type address. The block explorer you referenced is partially compatible ...
MCCCS's user avatar
  • 10.1k
6 votes
Accepted

What is the rationale for the Lightning network's path length limit (20 hops)?

The onion routing in Lightning is based on the Sphinx Mix Format described in this paper. The situation is different from Tor We don't have entry and exit nodes in Lightning as all nodes are inside ...
Rene Pickhardt's user avatar
6 votes

Why is it impossible to get a straight answer as to whether Bitcoin is anonymous or not?

Why is it impossible to get a straight answer as to whether Bitcoin is anonymous or not? Because privacy is not binary in nature. It is not as if there is some moment at which your information flips ...
chytrik's user avatar
  • 18k
5 votes

What is the most advanced technology for anonymous transactions?

CoinShuffle has improved upon CoinJoin, but active mixing it not advanced compared to the solutions below. ZeroCash and CryptoNote have advanced significantly since you asked this question. ...
dontmindme's user avatar
5 votes

Why is the ledger public?

The ledger has to be public in order for Bitcoin to be decentralized. The designers of Bitcoin didn't want to need anyone to play the role of a "bank" who keeps all the records, and whom everyone ...
Nate Eldredge's user avatar

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