chris-belcher

Design for a CoinSwap Implementation for Massively Improving Bitcoin Privacy and Fungibility

25/5/2020

Abstract

Imagine a future where a user Alice has bitcoins and wants to send them with maximal privacy, so she creates a special kind of transaction. For anyone looking at the blockchain her transaction appears completely normal with her coins seemingly going from address A to address B. But in reality her coins end up in address Z which is entirely unconnected to either A or B.

Now imagine another user, Carol, who isn't too bothered by privacy and sends her bitcoin using a regular wallet which exists today. But because Carol's transaction looks exactly the same as Alice's, anybody analyzing the blockchain must now deal with the possibility that Carol's transaction actually sent her coins to a totally unconnected address. So Carol's privacy is improved even though she didn't change her behaviour, and perhaps had never even heard of this software.

gubatron

DHT Walkthrough Notes

I've put together these notes as I read about DHT's in depth and then learned how the libtorrent implementation based on the Kademlia paper actually works.

What problem does this solve?

400,000,000,000 (400 billion stars), that's a 4 followed by 11 zeros. The number of atoms in the universe is estimated to be around 10^82. A DHT with keys of 160 bits, can have 2^160 possible numbers, which is around 10^48