Our community's vision for Tari is to create a protocol capable of supporting default private transactions from the beginning. Why is privacy a mission-critical feature for blockchain transactions?

Privacy for financial transactions

A critical element of a free society → In free societies, people are innocent until proven guilty, and probable cause is required for law enforcement to pursue search or arrest. An individual’s financial transaction histories should not be in plain view because doing so may erode or negate the presumption of innocence that people in free societies expect.

A requirement for business use cases -> Businesses require discretion for financial transactions in order to successfully compete in the marketplace, and comply with disclosure laws. Any system that doesn’t support this cannot legitimately be used for business purposes.

All coins are fungible → No longer are freshly minted coins more “valuable” than older coins, enabling friction-free commerce. And no longer is a coin’s transaction history an attribute of the coin itself.

User control of personal information → One’s financial transaction history cannot be monetized without explicit consent.

How Tari will achieve privacy by default

Using a relatively new blockchain design called Mimblewimble, Tari will enable the transaction sender and receiver to remain private, not just pseudonymous. If you look at any Mimblewimble block explorer you will only see inputs and outputs with no value associated with them. Privacy is more than just hidden values on a blockchain. The process in which a transaction is created and sent can reveal one’s identity to a passive adversary. The Tari community devised a novel decentralized comms layer that connects nodes and clients together. Node discovery is accomplished through distributed hash tables and once a node knows the TOR address of their counterparty, they only use encrypted channels to communicate. Tari aims to provide strong privacy along with great scalability. The Tari community is choosing to make a different set of trade-offs to Monero, but hopes to provide users with the ability to seamlessly switch to Monero if they desire stronger privacy.

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