New Tech is Ensuring Greater Privacy for Bitcoin

By Kapil Gauhar

Spying on bitcoin users is going to become difficult on each passing day. Recently a number of privacy enhancing technologies have launched and more are expected to release in near future.

Lack of privacy was always a problem for bitcoins. Most of the bitcoin users do not want the world to know how much they are earning and where they are spending. Businesses even do not want to disclose their transaction details to its competitors. Though in the white paper Satoshi Nakamoto suggested that bitcoins are designed to provide privacy to its users but now they are not solving the purpose of privacy. Privacy is an essential requirement for cryptocurrencies and lack of privacy can lead to loss of fungibility.

To enhance the privacy of bitcoins several projects have already launched and several more are expected to launch next year. Some projects which are working on enhancing the privacy of bitcoins are:

Tumble Bit

Tumble Bit is one of the best privacy solutions for bitcoins. It is a coin mixing protocol which uses a centralized tumbler to create off chain payment channels between participants in a mixing session. Via Tumble Bit all participants send coins and receive different coins of equal amount in return. This whole process breaks the trial of ownership and nobody can know who paid to whom. Though Tumble Bit charges a higher amount of fee but it is becoming popular among the bitcoins users because of its privacy feature. In 2016 Tumble Bit was proposed by a group of academic research from Boston University and last month it was officially released.

ZeroLink and Chaumian CoinJoin

CoinJoin was proposed by Bitcoin Core contributor Gregory Maxwell. The idea behind CoinJoin was to combine several transactions so that nobody can know who are sending the bitcoins to whom. There were some issues with the transaction processing via CoinJoin and these issues were resolved and the improved version of CoinJoin, Chaumian CoinJoin implemented in Ficsor’s privacy-focused Wasabi Wallet.

STONEWALL

STONEWALL is another wallet which provides privacy to bitcoin transactions. The transactions of STONEWALL are similar to CoinJoin. STONEWALL was introduced in May this year by Samourai Wallet.

There are even some other technologies which are providing a privacy feature to bitcoin users. Tumble Bit is the best solution to maintain the privacy but other solutions are also trying to improve themselves and launching their improved version. With the development of privacy technology, we hope there will be no privacy threat for bitcoins in the future.