There is a need to increase privacy in bitcoin transactions. So says Bitcoin Core developer Gregory Maxwell disclosed some methods to improve the privacy in his recent post on GitHub.

Maxwell reminds, that the privacy and security were the issues that cause the creation of bitcoin

“The importance of privacy was recognized in the original Bitcoin whitepaper, but the only approach available at the time (pseudonymous addresses) provides only limited privacy and what it does provide is highly brittle. Advanced monitoring capabilities have substantially undermined this protection in practice, but at the same time technology has improved tremendously and we can now do much better than pseudonymous addresses.”

In the discussion Maxwell said that some methods are available with Bitcoin Core version 0.11.

“The idea is that a daemon could run along side your Bitcoin Core and submit your transactions via a high latency privacy network, or the like. If widely used this would greatly discourage the common practice of running spy nodes that suck up everyone's connection slots watching for TX broadcasts”

Maxwell highlighted that Bitcoin Core developers should develop new methods to defend the privacy of transactions.

“Bitcoin Core should have a comprehensive plan to give users state of the art technology in this regard, but we must respect the challenges of deploying new technology in an already existing ecosystem. Progress can be made in a series of larger and smaller initiatives” says Maxwell

The discussion on GitHub coincided with the renewals discussion on the size of bitcoin block. This spring key developer Gavin Andresen works to change bitcoin’s block size to 8MB. The new block size will be introduced in 2016. And from 2016 onwards, the size is expected to double every two years.

The new size of the block caused lengthy discussions on Reddit. Some people are worried that the new size of the block will delegate more power to the bitcoin mining firms and will affect the privacy of transactions in a bad way.



Roman Korizky