Andrew Poelstra is a mathematician at Blockstream and was recently part of a panel discussion on improvements for Bitcoin at the 2016 MIT Bitcoin Expo . During the panel, Poelstra discussed Confidential Transactions , which is a privacy-enhancing feature he has been working on with Blockstream co-founders and Bitcoin Core contributors Greg Maxwell and Pieter Wuille .
One of the main reasons Blockstream is working on Confidential Transactions is to preserve the censorship-resistant properties of Bitcoin and other blockchains.
Scalability Is Not the Only Problem with Bitcoin
Although scalability solutions have been a major area of contention lately, Poelstra understands this is not the only real problem. During his recent appearance at the MIT Bitcoin Expo, Poelstra pointed out the issues related to the public nature of Bitcoin transactions:
“Lately, we’ve been talking about scaling and centralization, but that’s not the only problem with Bitcoin. This one may be a bit attractable, which is that all transactions are public and all of the information in all the transactions are public. This allows a lot of analysis to happen . . . [People] can infer a lot about transactions just from the amounts and also the shape of the transactions.”
Indeed, there are a number of different startups working to deanonymize the Bitcoin blockchain every day. In the past, Stash co-founder and Open Transactions creator Chris Odom has stated these companies could go out of business as more privacy-enhancing features are enabled on the blockchain.
Centralization of Mining Threatens Censorship Resistance
At the core of Bitcoin’s value proposition is censorship resistance. Bitcoin has value because it can be used to complete transactions that are likely to be censored on other payment networks. Andrew Poelstra is committed to preserving this aspect of the technology.The centralization of mining is one of the current weak points […]
