Zerocoin
| Zerocoin | |
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The Zerocoin logo
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| Demographics |
| Zcoin | |
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| ISO 4217 | |
| Code | XZC |
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Zerocoin is a proposed by Johns Hopkins University professor Matthew D. Green and graduate students Ian Miers and Christina Garman as an extension to the bitcoin protocol that would add true cryptographic anonymity to bitcoin transactions. Zerocoin was first implemented into a fully functional cryptocurrency released to the public by Poramin Insom, as the Zcoin. Zerocoin provides anonymity by the introduction of a separate known as zerocoin that is stored in the bitcoin blockchain. Though originally proposed for use with the bitcoin network, zerocoin could be integrated into any .
Bitcoin transactions are all stored, by design, in a public ledger (the blockchain) that is accessible to everyone. These transactions provide privacy through pseudonymity, in that while each transaction is associated with the public address of the sender and receiver, the names of the owners of these addresses are at no time made known to the bitcoin network. To increase privacy, each person could create as many public addresses as they like, making it difficult to link transactions to the same person. If additional privacy were required, it is possible to launder bitcoin through a trusted third party, where the input coins are mixed in a large pool and output to a new address.
Regardless of the best precautions, by data mining of the blockchain, it becomes possible in certain cases to link a set of public addresses to a specific (unnamed) individual. For example, this could be done by the analysis of spending habits, or by having the change of a transaction from one public address being sent to another. Furthermore, by utilizing information external to the blockchain, such as public bitcoin addresses posted on a web site, or the postal address used with a bitcoin purchase, the possibility exists that every single bitcoin transaction of a given person could be determined.
Zerocoins are purchased with bitcoin in fixed denominations by a zerocoin mint transaction. Later, these zerocoins can be redeemed for bitcoin to a different bitcoin address by a zerocoin spend transaction. Through the use of cryptographic accumulators and digital commitments with zero-knowledge proofs, it is not possible to link the bitcoin address that was used to mint the original zerocoin to the bitcoin address used to redeem the zerocoin.
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Wikipedia