[bitcoin-dev] Making Electrum more anonymous

[Slurms MacKenzie]

Keep in mind this is the similar premise as claimed to be offered by BIP37 bloom filters, but faulty assumptions and implementation failure in BitcoinJ have meant that bloom filters uniquely identify the wallet and offer no privacy for the user no matter what the settings are. If you imagine a system where there is somehow complete separation and anonymization between all requests and subscriptions, the timing still leaks the association between the addresses to the listeners. The obvious solution to that is to use a very high latency mix network, but I somehow doubt that there's any desire for a wallet with SPV security that takes a week to return results. 


> Sent: Friday, July 24, 2015 at 4:26 AM
> From: "Eric Voskuil via bitcoin-dev" <bitcoin-dev at lists.linuxfoundation.org>
> To: "Stefan Richter" <richter at cs.rwth-aachen.de>, gb <kiwigb at yahoo.com>, "Thomas Voegtlin" <thomasv at electrum.org>
> Cc: bitcoin-dev at lists.linuxfoundation.org
> Subject: Re: [bitcoin-dev] Making Electrum more anonymous
>
> 
> From our perspective, another important objective of query privacy is
> allowing the caller make the trade-off between the relative levels of
> privacy and performance - from absolute to non-existent. In some cases
> privacy is neither required nor desired.
> 
> Prefix filtering accomplishes the client-tuning objective. It also does
> not suffer server collusion attacks nor is it dependent on computational
> bounds. The primary trade-off becomes result set (download) size against
> privacy.
>