New Bitcoin Stealth Transaction Idea May Promote Broader Retailer Acceptance

January 15, 2014 11:30 AM EST
Bitcoin, the virtual currency that made news following its meteoric rise in 2013, might see even more upside as transactions become more secure.

Recently, a post was made to SourceForge which highlighted a new type of security for Bitcoin transactions. The abstract reads:

A Stealth Address is a new type of Bitcoin address and related scriptPubKey/transaction generation scheme that allowers payees to publish a single, fixed, address that payors can send funds efficiently, privately, reliably and non-interactively. Payors do not learn what other payments have been made to the stealth address, and third-parties learn nothing at all. (both subject to an adjustable anonymity set)

Viewed generally a Bitcoin address is a mechanism by which a payee instructs a payor to create a transaction such that the payee can spend one or more of the transaction outputs. Of course, typically the address is simply the hash of a pubkey, and the mechanism by which the funds are made available to the payee is to simply create a scriptPubKey of the following form:

DUP HASH160 EQUALVERIFY CHECKSIG

The problem however is address reuse: it is convenient for payees to give one or more payor a single address and use it multiple times for various purposes. This results in all those payments becoming trivially linkable to each other by an attacker - a threat not only to the privacy of the user, but also to all users of Bitcoin.


The author gave credit to ByteCoin, among other contributors.

You can read the entire post at the provided link above as it is extensive and many users have contributed ideas. Should something like Stealth transactions takeoff, it might open the door for a vast number of larger retailers to seriously consider accepting Bitcoin.

Below is a diagram found on Reddit explaining how the system might work.



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