ChainAnchor is an MIT project that was brought to the attention of the Bitcoin community last week by Bitcoin Core contributor Peter Todd . In his blog post , Todd questioned whether this project may have been an attempt to bring Anti Money Laundering (AML) and Know Your Customer (KYC) compliance to Bitcoin.
MIT Connection Science Managing Director David L. Shrier responded to Todd’s blog post directly on Reddit, saying , “ChainAnchor was never intended for [B]itcoin.”
When first asked about why a preliminary version of the ChainAnchor paper discussed Bitcoin, Shrier pointed Bitcoin Magazine to another Reddit comment where he said, “[ChainAnchor] was never intended to apply to Bitcoin. In the course of seven subsequent drafts, we have sought to clarify this.”
When then asked why there are explicit references to implementing ChainAnchor as an overlay on top of the Bitcoin blockchain, Shrier told Bitcoin Magazine , “In a very early draft of the project, its focus on permissioned blockchains was not well explained, which is why we clarified.”
Shrier went on to point to the current version of the ChainAnchor paper , which is more explicit about its use in permissioned ledgers (as opposed to permissionless blockchains such as Bitcoin) and dated two days prior to Todd’s blog post; however, the preliminary draft provided by Todd on his blog stated: “In the second deployment mode – called the semipermissioned overlay – ChainAnchor is deployed as an overlay above the current permissionless public blockchain in Bitcoin. The goal of the overlay approach is not to create a separate chain, but rather use the current permissionless blockchain to carry permissioned-transactions relating to Users in ChainAnchor in such a way that non-ChainAnchor nodes are oblivious to the transactions belonging to a permissioned-group." Bitcoin Magazine reached out to David Shrier again in regard to […]
