1 hour ago
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The short answer: the proposal could hide the contents of a payment inside an overlay, but it leaves Bitcoin’s ledger public and moves important verification, entry and exit questions outside Bitcoin itself.
Bitcoin is pseudonymous rather than private. Its ledger preserves amounts, timing and the path coins take between addresses. Those records can be combined with exchange records, merchant data and address-clustering techniques to connect activity that initially appears separate. The Bitcoin white paper itself describes a public transaction history.
A September 24 paper from cryptography firm [[alloc] init] asks whether users could gain stronger payment confidentiality without changing Bitcoin’s consensus rules. Its proposed answer, Shielded Bitcoin, uses Bitcoin as a publication and ordering layer while separate software reconstructs and verifies private transfers.
Bitcoin could confirm the carrier without confirming the payment
That is the central distinction. A Bitcoin transaction could be ...
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