Zerocoin: Anonymous Distributed E-Cash from Bitcoin

By Ian Miers, Christina Garman, Matthew D. Green, Aviel D. Rubin. 2013

1,032 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Bitcoin is the first e-cash system to see widespread adoption. While Bitcoin offers the potential for new types of financial interaction, it has significant limitations regarding privacy. Specifically, because the Bitcoin transaction log is completely public, users' privacy is protected only through the use of pseudonyms. In this paper we propose Zerocoin, a cryptographic extension to Bitcoin that augments the protocol to allow for fully anonymous currency transactions. Our system uses standard cryptographic assumptions and does not introduce new trusted parties or otherwise change the security model of Bitcoin. We detail Zerocoin's cryptographic construction, its integration into Bitcoin, and examine its performance both in terms of computation and impact on the Bitcoin protocol.

Subfields: Artificial Intelligence, Information Systems

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Citations in the corpus

Ekiden: A Platform for Confidentiality-Preserving, Trustworthy, and Performant Smart Contracts (2018, neutral): “Zerocash [13] as well as Cryptonote [84, 89], Solidus [21], and Zerocoin [64] provides stronger confidentiality guarantees by concealing identities.”
Zerocash: Decentralized Anonymous Payments from Bitcoin (2014, methodology): “Compared to Zerocoin, our system (at 128 bits of security): • Reduces the size of transactions spending a coin by 97 .”
Blockchain challenges and opportunities: a survey (2018, background): “In Zerocoin (Miers et al., 2013), a zero-knowledge proof is used.”
Bitcoin and Beyond: A Technical Survey on Decentralized Digital Currencies (2016, background): “Zerocoin [Miers et al. 2013] is a protocol extension to Bitcoin by which Alice can prove to others that she owns a bitcoin and is thus eligible to spend any other bitcoin.”
Supply Chain Finance Innovation Using Blockchain (2020, neutral): “knowledge proof [30]–[32], and homomorphic encryption.”
An Overview of Blockchain Technology: Architecture, Consensus, and Future Trends (2017, neutral): “In Zerocoin [46], zero-knowledge proof is used.”
CryptoNote v 2.0 (2013, methodology): “Recently, a more creative scheme was proposed by I. Miers et al. [28]: " Zerocoin " .”
An Analysis of Anonymity in Bitcoin Using P2P Network Traffic (2014, background): “Miers et al. [13], arguing that Bitcoin is not truly anonymous, proposed an extension to the protocol that uses cryptography to make transactions fully anonymous.”
Secure Multiparty Computations on Bitcoin (2014, methodology): “One example of a task that can be implemented using our techniques is b We use “B”; for the Bitcoin currency symbol. c For example the main transaction (Compute) of the three-party lottery is available here:…”
Permacoin: Repurposing Bitcoin Work for Data Preservation (2014, methodology): “Our scheme only affects the SOP solution (this is in contrast to other proposed Bitcoin modifications, such as Zerocoin [17], which leave the SOP unchanged but change the procedure of transaction validation).”
Demystifying Incentives in the Consensus Computer (2015, background): “, miners will verify and agree on correct transactions [15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21].”
Zether: Towards Privacy in a Smart Contract World (2020, background): “Unfortunately, almost all known ways to transfer confidentially [59, 67, 64, 30, 3] are in the unspenttransaction-output (UTXO) model (popularized by Bitcoin), where the inputs to a new transaction are the unspent outputs of previous transactions.”
Chainspace: A Sharded Smart Contracts Platform (2017, methodology): “Then, generalizing the approach of [25], the checker runs the verifier part of the proof or SNARK that validates the invariants of the transactions, without revealing the secrets within the objects to the verifiers.”
BitIodine: Extracting Intelligence from the Bitcoin Network (2014, neutral): “Rubin proposed a cryptographic extension to Bitcoin that augments the protocol to allow for fully anonymous transactions called Zerocoin [15].”