Bitcoin can be one step closer to offering its users improved privacy. Famous cryptographers Dan Boneh, Peter Will and Greg Maxwell published an article " Bulletproofs: Efficient Range Proofs for Confidential Transactions ", which described a new technology that reduces the code size of so-called "confidential transactions". The latter, in turn, are considered as a possible way to protect transactions in public lockouts.
The idea of confidential transactions was first introduced at the popular BitcoinTalk forum in 2013. Its author was Adam Beck, the head of block-start-startup Blockstream.
Although this technology has undergone several changes, it is still associated with high costs. Transactions that use it take up to 16 times more storage space than regular transactions.
Therefore, the current version of this idea was rejected as too cumbersome for the "live" Bitcoin network, which already faces the widely discussed problems of scaling.
However, the new article, co-authored by Benedict Bunz, Jonathan Butle and Andrew Poelstra, argues that the technology described will reduce the amount of confidential transactions and make it even smaller than that of conventional transactions.
In a CoinDesk comment, Maxwell noted that while the idea of confidential transactions is moving forward, there are still few problems that need be addressed. So, the "bottleneck" is the time it takes to verify such transactions.
Although researchers have not yet announced the date of publication of the code, their work points to a growing awareness that public blockers lack confidentiality.
However, this problem is not unique to Bitcoin. It was also actively discussed at the conference for Ethereum developers this year, and for its solution it is proposed to integrate zk-snarks technology into the protocol, on the basis of which the anonymous crypto currency ZCash operates