On the Privacy of Transactions in Account-Based Cryptocurrencies
Mikerah Quintyne-Collins
HashCloak Inc., Canada
Abstract
Cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin and Ethereum are have a collective market capitalization in the billions of dollars. These cryptocurrencies provide a transparent and auditable, public ledger in which anyone can see any transaction. This brings with it a host of privacy issues as more users and organizations start using cryptocurrencies for important use cases. These privacy issues are differ depending on the underlying data model used by the cryptocurrency. Much work has been done to characterize privacy in UTXO-based cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin and there have been many proposed solutions in the literature. However, relatively speaking, there has been less work into looking at the privacy issues and guarantees for account-based blockchains like Ethereum. The goal of this tutorial is to introduce the audience of the problem of achieving privacy in account-based blockchain systems, the current solutions and the open research problems in this emerging field of research.
