A New Proposal Called ‘Dandelion’ Hopes to Redesign the Bitcoin Network for Anonymity
Dandelion is a concept designed by the Zcash advisor and developer Andrew Miller and a team of University of Illinois researchers. A few months ago the team released its white paper ‘Dandelion: Redesigning the Bitcoin Network for Anonymity.’ The project is a new type of transaction broadcasting method that aims to stop people snooping and locating Internet Protocol addresses (IP). Essentially transactions relayed to nodes go through a few hops followed by a symmetric broadcast sent to other nodes which cannot identify the original IP source.
According to the recently submitted Github proposal Dandelion works in two phases.
“[The first phase] is the “stem” phase, and then “fluff” phase,” explains the Dandelion BIP. “During the stem phase, each node relays the transaction to a *single* peer. After a random number of hops along the stem, the transaction enters the fluff phase, which behaves just like ordinary flooding/diffusion. Even when an attacker can identify the location of the fluff phase, it is much more difficult to identify the source of the stem.”
Read more: https://news.bitcoin.com/dandelion-bitcoin-anonymize-transaction-broadcasts/