Bitcoin Privacy
Date: January 08, 2018 19:00 - 21:00
Location: Garage Society, 19/F, 199 Queen’s Road Central, Sheung Wan, Hong Kong
(Short walk from Exit A2, Sheung Wan)
Speaker:
Howard Wu (Dekrypt Capital)
Imagine wiring money to a friend, only to learn their account balance and entire transaction history as a result. This is how Bitcoin works today. The Bitcoin blockchain makes publicly available the entire history of transactions and replicates it across all nodes in the network. For the benefits this architecture achieves, Bitcoin comes with fundamental costs to privacy.
In this talk, we will discuss recent research in de-anonymization, transaction linkability, coin fungibility, and blockchain forensics. With legislators and regulators scrutinizing this cryptocurrency, Bitcoin’s anonymity guarantees have far-reaching consequences and legal implications. We will dive into current techniques used to make Bitcoin untraceable, determine its level of anonymity, and discuss recent work to achieve Bitcoin’s privacy guarantees.
Howard Wu is the co-founder of Dekrypt Capital, a leading blockchain investment firm for privacy-preserving protocols and early-stage ventures. Howard began mining Bitcoin in 2011, and has contributed to cryptographic libraries that are used in Ethereum and Zcash. He serves as Advisor to Blockchain at Berkeley, the first university ecosystem for blockchain, and works with Professor Alessandro Chiesa, co-founder of Zcash, and Professor Dawn Song, faculty member of the Initiative for Cryptocurrencies and Contracts (IC3).
