By
Godfrey Benjamin
April 20th, 2024
In order to offer users with improved confidentiality for their transactions, renowned cryptographers propose for a new scalable privacy tech for Bitcoins.
With Bitcoin becoming a mainstream digital currency with each passing day, developers and miners are making every effort to keep investors attracted to Bitcoins, and to ease to up things, a lot of development plans like faster and cheaper transactions, scalable solution etc. are in the pipeline. Off lately, there have also been talks to provide users with better privacy facility and keep their transactions safe and confidential.
In a recently proposed paper that has been authored by some very famous cryptographers like Greg Maxwell, Dan Boneh and Pieter Wuille, a new technique with the name “Bulletproofs” has been proposed that aims at reducing the size of the confidential transaction code. This technique has been floated and been in talks for quite some time now and is currently considered as one of the desirable options to shield the transactions amounts that are currently public on the blockchain network.
The idea about confidential transaction was first proposed fours year back in 2013 by the Adam Back, CEO of bitcoin startup Blockstream, and now, although there have been several iterations about this technology it is still not a desirable method to be implemented as it comes at a big cost of occupying huge space in the blockchain network. Transactions using this proposed method take up to 16 times more space in the blockchain network in comparison to the existing normal transactions.
Considering the fact that miners and developers are juggling for space in the heavily crowded blockchain network, such a technology would choke up the network further and is certainly not a viable option to be implemented. However, as per the “Bulletproofs” technique proposed in the new paper, such confidential transactions will reduce in size and space occupancy even in comparison to the existing normal transactions.
During the announcement of this technique, Maxwell said: “This cuts the bloat factor down to about 3x for today’s traffic patterns.” However, Maxwell admitted that even though developers have overcome this issue of the size of confidential transactions, one more “bottleneck” that still persists in the way is the amount of time these confidential transactions take to be executed.
At this point in time, it can’t be said when will the code go live but this team is actively working to promote awareness to an increasing number of blockchain participants about the lack of privacy in transactions. This year, during Ethereum’s annual developer conference Devcon3, privacy was a much-debated topic as the Ethereum protocol seems to be implementing zk-snarks which are a technology backing cryptocurrency zcash.
With increasing interest in cryptocurrencies and blockchain technology, privacy-related matters need to be handled with utmost care at the preliminary level in order to witness scalable growth in the coming time.