A type of anonymous bitcoin transaction that privacy enthusiasts have been awaiting for years has finally been tested successfully. Sent on the bitcoin test network earlier this month, the transaction is possibly the first real-world implementation of CoinShuffle , a proposal that first generated excitement in April 2014 for building on existing privacy techniques in a way that doesn’t rely on third parties. Until now, it was just a proof-of-concept, but on 15th August, bitcoin developer Daniel Krawisz sent what he believes is the first transaction utilizing this tool. The big idea behind the technique is that it guards sensitive user information that may otherwise be visible on bitcoin’s public blockchain, but the short-term goal is to incorporate the technique into the bitcoin wallet service Mycelium, which is sponsoring the project. Launched in 2013, Mycelium recently released a roadmap with CoinShuffle scheduled for "phase 5", or the final step, of its development plan. Krawisz, who’s been working on Mycelium’s CoinShuffle implementation since late last year, chose the name Shufflepuff for the project as a way to soften the stigma that anonymizing bitcoin techniques often carry due to their abuse by illicit actors. Krawisz told CoinDesk: "It’s open source, I hope that eventually lots of wallets will use it." Anyone can now experiment with the tool and run it on their own computers, but so far there’s no way of bringing wallet users together to "join" their transactions, or mix them together so they can be anonymized. So, adventurous users need to find other participants to “join” with by their own devices. Another caveat is that Shufflepuff is alpha software, so Krawisz advised it’s not something users should trust with very much real money. Technical details Created by researchers at Saarland University, CoinShuffle is an implementation of CoinJoin , a […]
