How private is your bitcoin wallet? The Open Bitcoin Privacy Project (OBPP), a global, not-for-profit organization devoted to improving financial privacy in the bitcoin ecosystem, attempts to offer some guidance with its Bitcoin Privacy Rating Report .
OBPP has released its second edition of the report, scoring 20 wallets on their privacy features. The top ranking in this report goes to Ledger , which earned a score of 50 out of 100 possible points, based on usability, quality and feedback.
OBPP’s goal is to make financial privacy visible so that users can make informed choices about privacy risks. Change Comes Slowly
Since the first report, not much has changed for wallet providers, the report noted. Newcomers continue to adopt HD architecture to help users avoid address reuse, but the big privacy pushes during 2014 – such as “stealth” addresses and Tor support — declined during 2015. Wallets are largely in a holding pattern, waiting for competitors to take the lead on innovation.
Improvements are needed to keep bitcoin safe and independent. The report encouraged users to let wallet developers know that they care about privacy, and choose wallets that respond to this demand.
The project has made improvements to its privacy analysis in this year’s report. The threat model has evolved to take a more systematic approach, considering the ways that privacy attackers can work, and the countermeasures that wallet providers can employ to protect their users. More Criteria Used
The project has nearly doubled the number of criteria considered for each wallet from 38 points to 68. Also, due to the demand for more wallets, this edition has a total of 20 wallet clients, doubled from 10. That’s a 250% increase in the amount of data collected for this report.
All wallets were rated by at least two professionally-unaffiliated volunteers with cross-checking […]
