Getting to know the Decred blockchain I started exploring the Decred blockchain in more depth at the end of 2019 as I scoped out a plan for the third phase of the Open Source Research Program. With a local instance of dcrdata up and running, I watched it whizz through hundreds of thousands of blocks worth of data, creating tables representing every address, transaction, input, output, and vote - the origins and destinations of all the DCR in existence.
The Decred community considers privacy to be a fundamental human right.
Protecting the privacy of Decred users has been a core tenet of the project since it’s inception. To quote the Decred constitution:
Privacy and security are priorities and shall be balanced with the complexity of their implementations. Additional privacy and security technology shall be implemented on a continuing and incremental basis, both proactively and on-demand in response to attacks.
In late 2019, Jake Yocom-Piatt revealed a much anticipated privacy solution for Decred - CoinShuffle++ (CSPP). The introduction of CSPP enables users to anonymize their Decred by mixing with the steady stream of ticket transactions which flow through the network as part of …
Decred’s privacy features and plans are ready to be revealed. The goal of our privacy features is to be simple, adaptable, and creative.
Rather than take the routes established by privacy-focused projects, e.g. ring signatures, zk-SNARKs, or Mimblewimble, we decided to take a mixnet approach, where we have integrated the mixnet with our Proof-of-Stake (“PoS”) governance system. Currently, just over 50% of all decred in circulation participate in PoS, which requires a steady flow of ticket purchases. This existing transaction flow, unique to Decred, functions as the natural basis for a mixnet. Per the approach with Decred’s PoS governance system, this yields a “many birds, one stone” scenario: stakeholders gain anonymity and they …
In this article I will discuss my views on the existing privacy technology in use in the cryptocurrency space. Since several projects have a primary focus on privacy, I will explain the various privacy technologies, which will help in understanding the route Decred has taken and I will advocate we take. A second article will follow that goes into more detail on how Decred plans to approach privacy. The projects I will cover here are:
- Monero
- Zcash
- Grin/Beam
- Bitcoin
- Dash
Note that I will only be discussing the on-chain privacy technologies used in each of these cases, not the entire project. At the end of the article, I have assembled a table comparing the various projects and technologies they use.
A lot has happened since we announced our 2017 Roadmap on January 9th, so we figure a progress update is in order. We expect to complete the majority of what was laid out in the roadmap before the end of 2017. Here is a very brief summary of our progress on the roadmap:
- Convert Decred into a stakeholder-directed DAO
- Hard fork voting - Complete, In production
- Public proposal system - Work-in-progress, ETA late Q3 2017
- Decentralized control of DHG funds - Work-in-progress, ETA early Q1 2018
- Lightning Network support - Work-in-progress, ETA Q4 2017
- Improved GUI wallets - Work-in-progress, ETA early Q4 2017
- RFP process change - Complete, In production
- Presence at events - Work-in-progress, talks in Q3 and Q4 2017
- Enhanced privacy - …