Teleport: a CoinSwap implementation alpha release, provides invisible private transactions for bitcoin
https://ift.tt/DaVBEWI
Imagine a future where a user Alice has bitcoins and wants to send them with maximal privacy, so she creates a special kind of transaction. For anyone looking at the blockchain her transaction appears completely normal with her coins seemingly going from address A to address B. But in reality her coins end up in address Z which is entirely unconnected to either A or B.
Now imagine another user, Carol, who isn’t too bothered by privacy and sends her bitcoin using a regular wallet which exists today. But because Carol’s transaction looks exactly the same as Alice’s, anybody analyzing the blockchain must now deal with the possibility that Carol’s transaction actually sent her coins to a totally unconnected address. So Carol’s privacy is improved even though she didn’t change her behaviour, and perhaps had never even heard of this software.
In a world where advertisers, social media and other institutions want to collect all of Alice’s and Carol’s data, such privacy improvement would be incredibly valuable. If even a small percentage of transactions were actually created by this software, anybody doing analysis on the blockchain would always have a niggle in the back of their mind: “what if this transaction I’m looking at was actually a CoinSwap? How would I know? What if these coins have actually disappeared into the mist?”. The doubt and uncertainty added to every transaction would greatly boost the fungibility of bitcoin and so make it a better form of money.
Over a year ago I wrote on [this subreddit](https://ift.tt/k2W78RC) about how undetectable privacy can be developed today by implementing CoinSwap. Today I release the first alpha version of this software:
https://ift.tt/sgZWbRd
The project is almost completely decentralized and available for all to use for free (baring things like miner fees). So far it is only really usable by developers and power-users to play around with. It doesnt have all the necessary features yet, but from now on I’ll be doing new releases very often as soon as every new feature gets added. It is possible to run it on mainnet, but only the brave will attempt that, and only with small amounts. I’ve personally made many coinswaps on the testnet and signet networks, and I’ll be running market makers on signet which will be available for anyone to create coinswaps with.
Right now it just uses 2of2 multisig for the coinswap addresses. Those address types are rare on the blockchain so the coinswaps stand out a fair amount (although protocols like lightning also use 2of2 multisig). However the next really big task on my todo list is to use ECDSA-2p which would make these multisig addresses look like regular single-sig addresses, which are overwhelmingly common out there and so provide an enormous anonymity set.
My aim is that the Teleport project will develop into a practical and secure project on the bitcoin mainnet, usable either standalone as a kind of bitcoin mixing app, or as a library that existing wallets will implement allowing their users with the touch of a button to send bitcoin coinswap transactions with much greater privacy than as possible before.
I want to thank everyone who has supported me financially over the last several months, without them this project simply would not have been possible. If bitcoin privacy and coinswap is something you find important, please consider supporting my work with a donation: https://ift.tt/FNeiRC3
Cryptocurrency
