[Bitcoin-development] Stealth Addresses

[Ben Davenport]

Well, at least we don't have to worry about cache invalidation.

Ben


On Fri, Jan 17, 2014 at 6:46 AM, Peter Todd <pete at petertodd.org> wrote:

> On Fri, Jan 17, 2014 at 10:15:40AM +0100, Mike Hearn wrote:
> > I must say, this shed is mighty fine looking. It'd be a great place to
> > store our bikes. But, what colour should we paint it?
>
> I think we should paint it this colour:
>
>     They had uncovered what seemed to be the side of a large coloured
>     globule embedded in the substance. The colour, which resembled some
>     of the bands in the meteor's strange spectrum, was almost impossible
>     to describe; and it was only by analogy that they called it colour
>     at all.  Its texture was glossy, and upon tapping it appeared to
>     promise both brittle ness and hollowness. One of the professors gave
>     it a smart blow with a hammer, and it burst with a nervous little
>     pop. Nothing was emitted, and all trace of the thing vanished with
>     the puncturing. It left behind a hollow spherical space about three
>     inches across, and all thought it probable that others would be
>     discovered as the enclosing substance wasted away.
>
> I think it really gets to the core of my feelings about this naming
> discussion.
>
> > How about we split the difference and go with "privacy address"? As Peter
> > notes, that's what people actually like and want. The problem with
> stealth
> > is it's got strong connotations with American military hardware and
> perhaps
> > thieves sneaking around in the night:
> >
> >    https://www.google.com/search?tbm=isch&q=stealth
>
> WOW! AWESOME KICK-ASS PICS!
>
> Come to think of it, I could have called it "incognito addresses" - a
> term nice enough that Google and Firefox use it in their browsers - but
> what's done is done and any further discussion about this is just going
> to confuse the public. Remember that in the long run all this stuff will
> be hidden behind payment protocols anyway, and users *won't even know*
> that under the hood a stealth address is being used, making the name
> just a technical detail. For now though, lets use the good PR and get
> some early adopters on board.
>
> However, the term 'incognito' probably would be a good one to use within
> wallet software itself to describe what it's doing when the user clicks
> the "I want my transactions to be private" setting - there are after all
> fundemental bandwidth-privacy trade-offs in the threat model supposed by
> both prefix and bloom filters. In this instance the term isn't going to
> go away.
>
>
> Anyway, back to work: For the actual address format I strongly think we
> need to ensure that it can be upgrading in a backwards compatible way.
> This means we have to be able to add new fields - for instance if
> Gregory's ideas for different ways of doing the SPV-bait came to
> fruition. Given that "addresses" aren't something that should stay
> user-visible forever, thoughts on just making the actual data a protocol
> buffers object?
>
> Second question: Any performance figures yet on how efficient scanning
> the blockchain for matching transactions actually is? I'd like to get an
> idea soon for both desktop and smartphone wallets so we can figure out
> what kind of trade-offs users might be forced into in terms of prefix
> length.
>
> --
> 'peter'[:-1]@petertodd.org
> 0000000000000001c9b372ed519ecc6d41c10b42a7457d1ca5acd560a535596b
>
>
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