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Paper 2021/206

WabiSabi: Centrally Coordinated CoinJoins with Variable Amounts

Ádám Ficsór and Yuval Kogman and Lucas Ontivero and István András Seres

Abstract

Bitcoin transfers value on a public ledger of transactions anyone can verify. Coin ownership is defined in terms of public keys. Despite potential use for private transfers, research has shown that users’ activity can often be traced in practice. Businesses have been built on dragnet surveillance of Bitcoin users because of this lack of strong privacy, which harms its fungibility, a basic property of functional money. Although the public nature of this design lacks strong guarantees for privacy, it does not rule it out. A number of methods have been proposed to strengthen privacy. Among these is CoinJoin, an approach based on multiparty transactions that can introduce ambiguity and break common assumptions that underlie heuristics used for deanonymization. Existing implementations of CoinJoin have several limitations which may partly explain the lack of their widespread adoption. This work introduces WabiSabi, a new protocol for centrally coordinated CoinJoin implementations utilizing keyed verification anonymous credentials and homomorphic value commitments. This improves earlier approaches which utilize blind signatures in both privacy and flexibility, enabling novel use cases and reduced overhead.

Metadata
Available format(s)
PDF
Category
Cryptographic protocols
Publication info
Preprint. MINOR revision.
Keywords
Bitcoinanonymityprivacyfinancial privacy
Contact author(s)
adam ficsor73 @ gmail com,nothingmuch @ woobling org,lucasontivero @ gmail com,istvanseres @ caesar elte hu
History
2021-03-01: received
Short URL
https://ia.cr/2021/206
License
Creative Commons Attribution
CC BY
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