Read about Bytecoin (BCN) - it is completely anonymous scheme as it is based on cryptonote technology.
https://cryptonote.org/inside.php#untraceable-payments - read this general info about the method they use to provide anonymity.
Topic: What current anonymizing technology is better than Darkcoin Darksend? (Read 912 times)
April 16, 2014, 06:49:06 AM
March 05, 2014, 09:59:37 PM
I have been reading alot about the anonymity of the blockchain and the different methods for attempting to make transactions anonymous.
The technologies that help to keep a users anonymity seem to be two fold.
The first is to prevent a wallet from being associated with a person. The methods for preventing wallet association are focused on using an address a limited number of times, and preventing an address from being associated with an IP. Anoncoin helps to do this by making the use of the TOR network native to the wallet, but the TOR network could be used with any cryptocurrency it is just the functionality is not native. Also, I find it very interesting that everyone in the internet world seems to trust that the government doesn't monitor TOR even though it was originally funded by the Office of Navel Research and the TOR foundation continues to receive approximately 80% of its funding from the US government. As far as I understand TOR, if enough of the nodes are controlled by one entity the origin and the source of encrypted the traffic can still be ascertained. But I digress...
The second method is to make it difficult to trace the movement of coins from one wallet to another, so that it is hard to draw connections between people to eliminate the possibility of a persons identity being determined through the identity of a person with whom they have transacted. This is the whole concept of a mixing service. You send you coins to a pool of addresses and they sit there for a period of time and get mixed about with other people who sent there coins to the mixing service. The coins are then sent to a receiving address(es) over some period of time to prevent the sending and receiving addresses from being associated. This is what darksend is using. The primary advantage of darksend is that you do not have to trust any of you coins to a mixing service so there is no counterparty risk. Also, if darksend is used for every transaction rather than just one or two were you want to "anonymize" your coins, it will be many order of magnitudes harder to use network analysis to identify people in the network.
The last option that people have talked about is using the method purposed by Zerocoin. This uses some pretty advanced mathematics which I haven't honestly dug into but involves using zero-confirmation proofs... Anyway, the biggest problem with Zerocoin beside the fact that the method is very data intensive, so it will make for in impractically large blockchain, is it doesn't currently exist.
Therefore, I was wondering if there are any technologies that are better than Darkcoins Darksend at this point in time for anonymizing transactions?
The technologies that help to keep a users anonymity seem to be two fold.
The first is to prevent a wallet from being associated with a person. The methods for preventing wallet association are focused on using an address a limited number of times, and preventing an address from being associated with an IP. Anoncoin helps to do this by making the use of the TOR network native to the wallet, but the TOR network could be used with any cryptocurrency it is just the functionality is not native. Also, I find it very interesting that everyone in the internet world seems to trust that the government doesn't monitor TOR even though it was originally funded by the Office of Navel Research and the TOR foundation continues to receive approximately 80% of its funding from the US government. As far as I understand TOR, if enough of the nodes are controlled by one entity the origin and the source of encrypted the traffic can still be ascertained. But I digress...
The second method is to make it difficult to trace the movement of coins from one wallet to another, so that it is hard to draw connections between people to eliminate the possibility of a persons identity being determined through the identity of a person with whom they have transacted. This is the whole concept of a mixing service. You send you coins to a pool of addresses and they sit there for a period of time and get mixed about with other people who sent there coins to the mixing service. The coins are then sent to a receiving address(es) over some period of time to prevent the sending and receiving addresses from being associated. This is what darksend is using. The primary advantage of darksend is that you do not have to trust any of you coins to a mixing service so there is no counterparty risk. Also, if darksend is used for every transaction rather than just one or two were you want to "anonymize" your coins, it will be many order of magnitudes harder to use network analysis to identify people in the network.
The last option that people have talked about is using the method purposed by Zerocoin. This uses some pretty advanced mathematics which I haven't honestly dug into but involves using zero-confirmation proofs... Anyway, the biggest problem with Zerocoin beside the fact that the method is very data intensive, so it will make for in impractically large blockchain, is it doesn't currently exist.
Therefore, I was wondering if there are any technologies that are better than Darkcoins Darksend at this point in time for anonymizing transactions?
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