Research Area: Blockchain Technology
We propose Mixcoin, a protocol to facilitate anonymous payments in Bitcoin and similar cryptocurrencies. We build on the emergent phenomenon of currency mixes, adding an accountability mechanism to expose theft. We demonstrate that incentives of mixes and clients can be aligned to ensure that rational mixes will not steal. Our scheme is efficient and fully compatible with Bitcoin. Against a passive attacker, our scheme provides an anonymity set of all other users mixing coins contemporaneously. This is an interesting new property with no clear analog in better-studied communication mixes. Against active attackers our scheme offers similar anonymity to traditional communication mixes.
Keywords:
Author(s) Name: Joseph Bonneau, Arvind Narayanan, Andrew Miller, Jeremy Clark, Joshua A. Kroll & Edward W. Felten
Journal name:
Conferrence name: International Conference on Financial Cryptography and Data Security
Publisher name: Springer
DOI: 10.1007/978-3-662-45472-5_31
Volume Information: pp 486–504
