Confidential Transactions on Particl Testnet

In our last development update we communicated the tremendous amount of lines of code (LOC) the Particl developers had already added to Bitcoin Core 0.14. Many of these were privacy enhancements to an already robust codebase that will lay the foundation for our upcoming decentralized, person to person marketplace. Nestled in those lines of code is the inclusion of Confidential Transactions (CT).

Confidential Transactions keeps the amounts transferred visible only to participants in the transaction (and those they designate), while still guaranteeing that no more coins can be spent than are available in a cryptographic way.

An example of Confidential Transactions working on Particl Testnet:

Tx 5ee11e3…

In this example, Transaction 5ee11e3… obfuscates the sent and received amounts of PART.

Note: (U) = Output is unspent \ (S) = Output is spent

Blinded = One can tell if output is spent but won't know the amount

An example of a typical non-CT transaction (detailed view):

An example of a Confidential Transaction (detailed view):

An example of a Confidential Transaction within a PART address:

So why are Confidential Transactions necessary?

In Ido Kaiser’s whitepaper for the marketplace he describes the 2-party, trustless escrow system (MAD); Mutually Assured Destruction. Without CT, one could make an educated guess on the escrow amount and potentially trace transactions. With Confidential Transactions, this attack vector is no longer effective.