Topic: What's the situation with Bitcoins privacy/anonymity? - page 2. (Read 537 times)

DeepOnion (DO) provides all three.
The contents are obfuscated with obfs4 on top of Tor.
The transactions are obfuscated through coinjoin and multi-sig.

Privacy/anonymity consists of:

A. unlinkability (can't tell two transactions are to the same recipient): stealth (or just not reusing addresses)
B. untraceability (can't trace paths between tranasctions): ring signatures (or coinjoin, coinswap, though with many complications and hazards, etc.)
C. content privacy (can't see amount being spent): CT (or limited ambiguity of which outputs are change)

I'm not sure if there is any existing crypto which satisfies all three of these requirements.

Well basically bitcoin is not a private coin and your transactions will always be recorded on blockchain with ur address, permanently.

Which is technically correct. The tx leave only hashes and pubkeys in the blockchain. Not addresses. But: the pubkeys can easily be hashed, checksum’d and base58check encoded, to finally have the same thing as the addresses in the wallets. so there is no big distinction between what is in the blockchain, and what is in the wallet. This holds true for P2SH as well.
When forensic analysis is done, what does it matter, if you use the hash, the pubkey or the address.you don‘t even need the addresses, and could work through the tx and create a picture of their relationship(s). To see how bitcoins are assigned from pubkey to pubkey or hash to hash. Essentially it will be the same as saying „address to address“.
Hence I see the need for anonymization or programs/extensions to provide more privacy.

The privacy of Bitcoin has nothing to do with updates of wallets.
Addresses technically don't exist in the bitcoin network. Its just a form of representation in an (accepted) human-readable format.

Additionally 'addresses' should be used as a form of invoice number. Thats effectively the best way regarding any possible trade-offs.
The way the bitcoin protocol is used has no influence on the privacy of the technology (and the coin) itself.

Bitcoin has never been anonymous, only pseudo-anonymous. Addresses are completely traceable identifiers. You could make an argument that Bitcoin may have gained privacy due to changes in wallets (generating a new address for every receipt of coins instead of re-using them). Excluding exchanges, which aren't directly a part of Bitcoin, I think the privacy situation may have gotten slightly better.

However, with the rise of Bitcoin there's been the rise of chain analytics groups trying to trace coins. So I think it's important that privacy improvements to Bitcoin on a protocol level are still being considered.

Over the years Bitcoin has lost a great deal of privacy and anonimity. I would dare to say that it isn't almost anonimous at all. Therefore the need for bulletproof transactions has emerged. But at the moment I'm not sure how efficient this will function if it will at all. And if you want to trade and use exchanges you can't stay anonimous because exchanges are legaly obliged to collect users data in order to keep legitimate business.
But for some deal of anonimity you can always try to use Bitcoin mixers.

The idea behind bulletproof transactions is that the content of the transaction is encoded in a way that only the sender and the receiver know the amount being sent, with an external observer merely being able to verify that no money has been generated out of thin air (ie. input minus output equals zero). Since the balances are only the sum of inbound and outgoing transactions it follows that the balance of addresses that receive / send bulletproof transactions will not be known to an external observer.

For MimbleWimble, which uses a similar technique, not even the sending and receiving addresses are visible to external observers. To be honest I'm not sure if that's the case with Bitcoin bulletproofs as well. Either way it will probably still take a while until we see bulletproof transactions coming to Bitcoin, if this approach will actually be pursued at all.

A bit closer to real life usage is the privacy that comes with Lightning Network. In this case it's more of a side-effect and the settlement balances of each respective address is still public, but at least the transactions that lead to the final state are not. Given enough data an adversary could probably correlate at least part of the transactions that are happening, but it at least gives slightly more privacy than mere on-chain transactions.

There's also CoinJoin btw, which is basically a built-in tumbler / mixer for Bitcoin transactions. Not sure what the state on that front is though.

You are not even answering my questions... I am asking for bitcoin and bulletproofs, confidential transactions and not other coins.

We are going to see different blockchains for different use cases this also applies to anonymity / confidentiality.

Something we might see are dedicated decentralised services designed to mix Bitcoins. We have had existing ones but these have been centralised and often shut down by governments. BTC-e for example was involved in these kinds of activities and have been taken down by the FBI some time ago.

When the dev's are asked this question the response is 'we don't care'

Most ppl just want to pump&dump btc to the moon, and don't consider privacy as means to the end of 'getting rich quick & easy'

As to the nature of your question, there is MONERO ( which claims to be secure ), and there is the z-cash coin family which have z-obfuscated addressses to backup the public address scheme, the thing with MONERO is its choice of ECDSA is known to be weak and have a back-door, while MONERO may be 'secure', its not secure from the ppl you should fear ( NSA wrote the ecdsa curves for monero ), like NSA wrote Secp256k1 for btc, like NSA wrote sha-256 for btc, ... THE ONLY real privacy is a coin that has no link to NSA, I think zen-cash fits that case

Again, over the years when dev's have been asked its always "We don't care about privacy"

That's ok, it opens the market up for other coins that DO CARE ABOUT PRIVACY

For people to be able to answer those questions we need first to make some definitions:

Define Anonimity?
Define "levels" of anonymity?

Bitcoin in itself is pretty anonymous i.e. you don't really need to identify yourself (by any other means besides you bitcoin address) to send or receive bitcoins (unless you want to). However being anonymous does not mean untraceable.  I.e. anyone can see the your transaction can follow the funds. So in order to deanonymyze you investigator need to deanonimyze people you sent transaction to first and then it will still be tough to get to you (unless you gave away your privacy at a transaction step it will be hard to bind your identity to your address). In most cases this gives pretty good "level" of anonymity. If you are looking to have more then that you may be want to check Zcash or Monero - coins that provide additional layers of anonymity to transactions, making it harder to track back to you.

Blockchain architecture won't allow complete anonymity in trustless system because of how it's designed to function. All it can offer is a way to use network without need to actually identify yourself - so biggest chunk of your anonymity is your own responsibility.

So yeah i've read some things about confidentional transactions to enhance privacy in Bitcoin, but i don't really know what it means.

Will Bitcoin enable anonymous transactions&addresses? So you could have an address and nobody knows how much Bitcoins you have/nobody can see your transactions/worth of transactions...?

What level of privacy/anonymity will these implementations provide?