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A very careful technology designed to make the privacy features of the most scalable blockchain will soon be tested in nature.
Called "bulletproofs", the tech, which was invented by cryptographers Benedict Bunz and Jonathan Bootle, promises to drastically reduce the weight of confidential transactions, and Thursday, October 18, the privacy-oriented cryptocurrency monarch will put it to the test.
The first major cryptocurrency to implement the technology, monero focused on implementing bulletproof projectiles for the past year, in an attempt to reduce the size of its confidential transactions by at least 80%.
In addition to dealing with scaling downs inherent in most blockchains, monero has additional privacy levels, heavy to calculate and unruly to file. The scalability of confidential transactions has been a significant obstacle to the $ 1 billion blockchain, with users who have long been suffering high transaction costs and an ever-increasing storage cost for executing a complete node.
In this regard, the pseudonym monero cryptographer Sarang Noether, who collaborated in bulletproof integration, told CoinDesk:
"Blockchain bloat was definitely a problem for the monero."
The bullets will replace the current evidence of the zero knowledge radius to which confidential transactions are based.
As such, the cryptocurrency will activate the technology during the next system-level upgrade, or hard fork. A sort of update that requires all nodes to adopt new software, hard forks are sometimes colored as a risky process, but this update is part of the biennial cycle of Monero to introduce new features.
"We are thrilled," continued Sarang. "Part of the reason we make updates is that we can be confident and at the forefront, and I think it's a big step forward."
The black box
It is worth noting that projectiles do not actually contribute to privacy itself. Rather, they simply ensure that the information stored in a confidential transaction does not contain false information.
"They do not concern anonymity, they are ensuring that the other things we do for anonymity are working properly," Sarang told CoinDesk.
Monero is based on three different mechanisms in combination: stealth addresses, ring signatures and confidential ring transactions to get anonymity. The bullets point to this, they ring confidential transactions or RingCT, which is the way in which they obscure the quantities that are sent in a transaction.
Because RingCT uses ring signatures, a cryptographic operation that obscures data by mixing it with different outputs, monero needs a way to ensure that transactions are correctly balanced, which is to make it impossible to print money in the process.
Up to now, monero has relied on a type of zero-knowledge test to fulfill this task, called the bit-bit Borromea series test.
The problem is that these proofs of scope are "a very slow and wide operation", Sarang said, to the point that "the vast majority of our size-wise transactions on the blockchain are these existing range tests".
Instead, bulletproofing works by aggregating information into new data structures that are sized logarithmically, rather than linearly, which means that resizing becomes even more noticeable for large transactions that contain multiple outputs.
Speaking of this, Sarang said:
"It does the same thing, this beautiful black box, a zero knowledge-proof idea, but it's very, very, much smaller and much, much, much faster to do."
Better equipped
The Thursday update will also introduce other changes to the monero codebase.
Aiming the ring signatures on which monero relies to hide the identities of the senders, the update will increase the size of the mandatory rings, which are announced as a way to increase the anonymity of the monero and make it less vulnerable to attacks connection.
The update also implements a second tweak for the monero mining algorithm – intended to dissuade the emergence of ASIC, a highly optimized mining hardware, to be used on the network. As detailed by CoinDesk, this is following an update in March that disables a line of ASIC hardware that has been developed for cryptocurrency – a move that has since been considered the genesis of Crypto's "war on miners".
However, among all the updates, the bullet-proof projectiles were the most anticipated, partly thanks to the simplicity of adding the technology to Monero's global privacy system.
"It does not often happen to take a cryptographic statement, extract it and insert a new one, but this was a case in which we could do it," Sarang told CoinDesk.
With the attention paid to the bullets then, the code also changes the structure of Monero's underlying commissions so that it "more accurately reflects the fact that the bullets fit so well," continued Sarang.
As mentioned, the update will start on October 18th but will take place in two parts. On the 18th, the bullets will be enabled on monero, and by Friday the technology will be made mandatory. Users who update their software should not notice it at all, said Sarang.
Mitigation horizon
Going forward, the monero researchers are looking for more experimental ways to scale the monero – which could one day include the removal of the ring signatures altogether.
Next to another cryptographer called "Surae Noether", Sarang works under the Monero Research Lab, a monero development section dedicated to analyzing academic innovations in cryptography and deciding whether they can be applied to the monero.
"We are taking all these new things and saying that if something can be feasible in the future for our community," Sarang said, adding:
"We are always looking for new ways to abandon ring signatures in order to get better sets of anonymity or, at least, the signatures of the rings that climb better".
And what's more, said Sarang, cross-chain atomic exchanges, payment channels and networks, as well as "fundamentals like repayment transactions" have been examined as part of the lab's work.
However, the developer quickly drew attention to what he calls "the mitigation horizon" – the difficulty of implementing cutting-edge ideas that could impact the community, resources and other features of the cryptocurrency.
"You have the new technology that you are interested in investigating, but what happens at that transition point where you have to take everyone with you?" Sarang Churches.
According to the developer, the projectiles were unique in this capacity.
He told CoinDesk: "Bulletproofs was an interesting example of something that was a nice autonomous entity that we were able to implement in a way that works great."
Bulletproof glass image through Shutterstock
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