Ethereum could benefit from the implementation of stealth addresses, says Vitalik Buterin-Technology

Ethereum could benefit from the implementation of stealth addresses, says Vitalik Buterin-Technology

The co-founder of Ethereum, Vitalik Buterin, published a research contribution that suggests the use of stealth addresses to protect privacy. Buterin stated that stealth addresses can be implemented on Ethereum pretty quickly today and that the privacy of the users in the blockchain network would significantly improve.

butterin suggests stealth addresses as a solution for the data protection challenges in the Ethereum ecosystem

Three days ago, the co-founder of Ethereum, vitalik butterin publishes a blog entry which gives a comprehensive overview of stealth- addresses. Stealth addresses are a function that from other blockchain networks such as Monero ( xmr ), about the privacy and anonymity when performing Increase transactions. The network creates unique addresses that are not connected to the public address of the user. The blog post insists that "one of the greatest remaining challenges in the Ethereum ecosystem is data protection".

Buterin describes a number of different options to generate cryptographically opaque public addresses with a key-blinding mechanism, elliptic curve cryptography and quantum-resistant security. He also appeals to "Social Recovery and Multi-L2 Wallets" and "Separation of output and display brains". Buterin notes that there are some concerns that could affect long -term usability, such as the difficulty of social relaxation. "In the long term, these problems can be solved, but the stealth address ecosystem looks like it is really dependent on zero-knowledge evidence," said Buterin.

While Monero uses stealth addresses, the technology is also used in cryptocurrency networks such as ZCash, Dash, Verge, Navcoin and Pivx. It is worth noting that some of the above cryptocurrencies have different implementations of stealth addresses. At the end of his research contribution, butterin explains that stealth addresses could easily be implemented in the Ethereum network and Wallets would have to adapt to the changes. Overall, the support of stealth addresses would require significant changes to the underlying architecture of Ethereum-based wallets and its current settings.

For example, current wallets use a different address format. The lite client would have to generate new, unique addresses for each transaction, and Wallets would have to be able to encrypt and decrypt the transaction data correctly. "Basic stealth addresses can be implemented pretty quickly today and could significantly improve the practical privacy of users on Ethereum," concludes butterin. "You require some work on the wallet page to support you. However, I think that Wallets should also begin for other data protection-related reasons to move in the direction of a more native additional address model (e.g. creating a new address for any application with which you can interact, be an option).

What do you think of the implementation of stealth addresses in the Ethereum network? Do you think this would significantly improve the privacy of users in the blockchain network, or do you have any concerns about long-term usability? Share your thoughts in the comments below.

Jamie Redman

Jamie Redman is the news manager at Bitcoin.com News and a Journalist for Financial Technology living in Florida. Redman has been an active member of the cryptocurrency community since 2011. He has a passion for Bitcoin, open source code and decentralized applications. Since September 2015, Redman has written more than 6,000 articles for Bitcoin.com news about the disruptive protocols that arise today.


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