When I first started to cultivate my interest on the blockchain technology, it was immediately clear that the main goal of the entire movement was to provide people with a modern and innovative tool, to store and transfer their own assets without anyone or any institution being able to track them. Just think – today you don’t really own the money you store in your bank; a local government, a judge or the police can freeze or take your money and you cannot do anything to stop that.
In order to fulfill this need, the new tool had to include full privacy and anonymity. This is the only way to avoid insights into your assets.
This was indeed the vision of Bitcoin’s creator, Satoshi Nakamoto – the “legendary” creator of the Bitcoin Protocol, but it was never fully achieved.
Bitcoins are stored in an unmodifiable blockchain ledger that constantly proves the ownership of the coins. This ledger is verified, tracked and confirmed 24/7, 365 days a year by thousands of nodes spread across the world. After your first transaction is done your key is then permanently conserved on the public blockchain and the only thing that can change is the balance. But as you may have noticed, it is tracked and while it provides anonymity, it isn’t built to provide privacy
Security experts call it “pseudonymous privacy”, like writing articles under a pen name. You will preserve your privacy as long as the pseudonym you used will not be linked to you. In fact, as soon as the link between the pseudonymous and your name is made public, everybody will be able to track your entire bibliography. Similarly, as soon as your personal details are linked to your Bitcoin address, your purchase history will be revealed as well. (To get more info on how the Bitcoin Protocol really works, click here)
Once you understand the logic behind the pseudonymous privacy technology, the following question will be quite immediate and natural: how easy is it to link me to my Bitcoin transactions?
Well, this will be quite easy once you will do a transaction to purchase goods or services that are linked directly to your identity – such as an online service, like a domain purchase.
So, if Bitcoin doesn’t guarantee us full privacy, which cryptocurrency does that?
There are in fact other currencies in the blockchain space that self-declare themselves as fully private and anonymous, but none of them meet such criteria, except Bitcoin Private (BTCP).
You may ask yourself what differentiates BTCP from the other Bitcoin protocol based coins and the answer is quite intuitive and goes back to the initial goal of Satoshi or whoever hides behind that name (many believe it is actually a group of developers and not a single person); the privacy element that will protect you and your wealth from ever being tracked or targeted – by anyone.
Bitcoin Private, born as the first double fork ever done in the arena, took the best of Bitcoin and merged it with the best protocol in terms of privacy today available: the zk-SNARKs, implemented by Zeta Classic (ZCL).
The two technologies merged together provide a robust and sound proof coin that is faster, cheaper and 100% private.
In a nutshell, the strong privacy guarantee of BTCP is derived from the fact that shielded transactions can be fully encrypted on the blockchain, yet still be verified as valid under the network’s consensus rules by using zk-SNARK proofs.
In conclusion BTCP protocol doesn’t let your public wallet address number floating around – exactly as it happens with your account stored in traditional banks. For this reason no one will ever be able to track back the history of your transactions or to acknowledge what is your current balance, providing the community with a coin that really protects privacy and anonymity.
A fully comprehensive technical overview can be found in the whitepaper of BTCP.
Disclaimer: As a personal investor of cryptocurrencies and as someone directly involved with BTCP initiative anything that I write in connection with cryptocurrency represents a potential conflict of interest. I wish to remain transparent and impartial to the cryptocurrency community at all times, and therefore, the content of my posts are for general information purposes only and reflects my personal opinion only. They must not be taken as financial advices, suggestions or recommendations to invest in any cryptocurrency. Some paragraphs of this article may have been partially taken and adapted from other sources or articles. Any rights belong to the legit owner.