Anonymity in Digital Currencies

 Bitcoin is the first digital currency to see widespread adoption.  While  payments  are  conducted  between  pseudonyms, Bitcoin  cannot  offer  strong  privacy  guarantees:  payment  transactions   are   recorded   in   a   public   decentralized   ledger, from which  much  information  can  be  deduced.  Zerocoin  tackles  some  of  these  privacy  issues  by unlinking  transactions  from  the  payment’s  origin.  Yet,  it  still reveals  payments’  destinations  and  amounts,  and  is  limited  in functionality. In  this  talk, I will present the basics of digital currencies and walk though the main steps proposed by the authors of Zerocash to construct  a  full-fledged  ledger-based  digital currency  with  strong  privacy  guarantees. Zerocash is a decentralized anonymous payment scheme that enables users to directly pay each other privately: the corresponding transaction hides the payment’s origin, destination, and transferred amount.

Introductory papers

Advanced papers

Eli Ben-Sasson et al. : Zerocash, Decentralized Anonymous Payments from Bitcoin

Ian Miers et al. : Zerocoin, Anonymous Distributed E-Cash from Bitcoin