AnonyÓðinn · @AnonyOdinn
13th Aug 2014 from TwitLonger
Recent Anonymity Developments ~ New Phase of "Revolution Action" to come in 2015
The following is a summary of recent anonymity developments.
History will remember 2015 as the beginning of the end of centralized government, much as 1789 marked the beginnings of today's governments.
1) SNARK-based unlinkable transactions via Zerocash (May 29, 2014), by Zooko Wilcox-OHearn. https://tahoe-lafs.org/pipermail/tahoe-dev/2014-May/009062.html
2) Output Distribution Obfuscation (posted July 16, 2014), by Gregory Maxwell and Andrew Poelstra. (Involves use of cryptonote-based bytecoin (BCN) ring signatures, described as a possibility for bitcoin.)
http://download.wpsoftware.net/bitcoin/wizardry/brs-arbitrary-output-sizes.txt
3) Bytecoin (BCN): Anonymity via ring signature (cryptonote-based software) and user-specified choice of degrees of obfuscation. (http://bytecoin.org/) (http://bytecoin.org/about) (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7765455)
4) Zerocash (http://zerocash-project.org/) model (the extended version ~ http://zerocash-project.org/media/pdf/zerocash-extended-20140518.pdf) to be released as an altcoin (https://twitter.com/matthew_d_green/status/401798811070107648), with anticipated release in November or December of 2014 (https://twitter.com/secparam/status/468784402558771200). The impact of this particular technology on the progression of decentralized society in 2015 should not be underestimated.
5) Anoncoin (https://sigterm.no/blog/7/) is working on a similar implementation to that described above, which is in testing (https://twitter.com/AnoncoinProject/status/446471085140082688). Some objections to Anoncoin’s approach were raised in late March 2014 by Zerocash developers, and work to improve Anoncoin is thus ongoing (https://twitter.com/secparam/status/449619152685522944).
6) Stealth transaction technology (https://sx.dyne.org/stealth.html), a strong privacy development, has been incorporated into Vertcoin (https://vertcoin.org/) and Shadowcoin (http://www.shadowcoin.co/), with the latter coin type also incorporating an implementation of zk-snarks, which provides anonymity.
7) Scalable Zero Knowledge via Cycles of Elliptic Curves (August 3, 2014)
http://eprint.iacr.org/2014/595 by Eli Ben-Sasson, Alessandro Chiesa, Eran Tromer, and Madars Virza. Makes zero knowledge proofs lightweight and accessible to all programmers, contingent on provable CPU.