CoinSwap, a promising Bitcoin privacy technology, was finally put to the test on Tuesday.
Bitcoin is not very private, despite the perceptions to the contrary. The full history of every transaction on the Bitcoin blockchain is public for anyone to browse. CoinSwaps are a type of transaction that boosts a user’s privacy by making that history much less straightforward.
“A big day for bitcoin privacy and fungibility,” tweeted Bitcoin privacy developer Chris Belcher when announcing the transaction. Belcher claims it’s the first of its kind sent on Bitcoin’s testnet.
CoinSwap transactions look like transactions going from one address to another, but they’re actually being sent somewhere else. Further, CoinSwaps can be implemented in such a way that they look just like normal transactions, making them “invisible,” unlike the most popular privacy tools currently.
Belcher announced he was refocusing his Bitcoin privacy efforts on CoinSwaps in May with the mission to “massively improve” Bitcoin privacy. Over the summer, he was awarded two grants from Square Crypto and the non-profit Human Rights Foundation to support his work.
A different Bitcoin privacy technology
Right now, it’s easy to track where a bitcoin transaction came from. If the Bitcoin blockchain says that 0.1 BTC went from address A to address B, then that’s probably what happened.
Read more: How Do Bitcoin Transactions Work?
CoinSwaps use cryptography – math deployed for shielding digital information – to throw a wrench in these assumptions. They make it harder for blockchain viewers to know what’s going on.
“For anyone looking at the blockchain [Alice’s]…
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https://www.coindesk.com/first-coinswap-test-herald-era-stronger-bitcoin-privacy
