Privacy News (January 12, 2020)

2 min readJan 12, 2020

Privacy is a delicate matter and often news never reach the front pages. For this reason, we are here to help you follow all the latest developments. Read on to find out what were the most important developments related to privacy in the past week.

Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong Says 20s Will See an Anoncoin Go Mainstream

Brian Armstrong, co-founder and CEO of United States-based cryptocurrency exchange Coinbase, said that he believes a “privacy coin” will go mainstream in the 20s.

In a post published on Coinbase’s official blog on Jan. 3, Armstrong said that he believes in the 20s we will see the integration of privacy features into one of the major blockchains. He also foresees a cryptocurrency with such features to go mainstream in the following years:

“Just like how the internet launched with HTTP, and only later introduced HTTPS as a default on many websites, I believe we’ll eventually see a “privacy coin” or blockchain with built-in privacy features get mainstream adoption in the 2020s.”

Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong Says 20s Will See an Anoncoin Go Mainstream

Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong believes that a "privacy coin" go mainstream in the 20s.

cointelegraph.com

Monero’s Triptych Research Could Vastly Improve Its Anonymity

The Monero Research Lab (MRL) has released Triptych in a Jan. 6 paper proposing trustless logarithmic-size ring signatures. As Monero’s core anonymity mechanism, research aimed at decreasing their size could improve the coin’s privacy significantly.

Monero (XMR) is a privacy coin that uses several distinct mechanisms to obfuscate parts of a transaction. The primary line of defense against transaction tracing comes from ring signatures. These work by aggregating a sender’s true coins with a set of decoys picked semi-randomly from other points in the blockchain. There are currently 10 decoys added by default to any transaction, an amount that has been fixed for all users since late 2018.

Triptych’s primary innovation is making the byte size of ring signatures scale logarithmically with the number of decoys, instead of linearly. This would allow a dramatic increase in ring size without major performance issues. Despite being a major innovation, verification time for ring signatures remains linear. Increasing size too much could overwhelm nodes that have to verify transactions.

According to preliminary tests, this is comparable to verification times currently implemented in Monero — while increasing the number of decoys by an order of magnitude.