By The payment tycoon which is known as Mastercard recently claimed that they might have the solution to ensuring that cryptocurrency transactions are kept private.
According to a patent application which was published on Thursday by the US Patent and Trademark Office, the payments company has proposed a new system of conducting transactions across a blockchain which would ultimately conceal both the point of origin as well as the amount of the transaction.
This proposed system would work by utilising an intermediate address during a transaction which will interact with a system key. All the transaction data is stored thereafter, while a new transaction & digital signature are generated by use of a private key. This new transaction data which contains the destination address and payment amount gets sent on.
The patent filing states that the method:
“would result in showing the user only transferring funds to and receiving funds from a small number of addresses that are also involved in a significantly large volume of transactions with various other users, thereby rendering the data innocuous.”
The amounts could also be obscured through the use of multiple transfers which utilise multiple addresses.
The patent application also goes on to mention the fact that blockchain platforms are being increasingly utilised to carry out transactions with many consumers flocking to various digital currencies such as BTC.
Certain people prefer using digital currencies “for the anonymity that blockchain transactions can provide,” stated Mastercard, explaining that “specifically, it is often extremely difficult to identify the user behind a blockchain address, meaning that an individual can transfer or receive funds utilizing a blockchain while keeping a high level of anonymity.”
However, as most of us know, most blockchain ledgers are in fact, not anonymous. Mastercard’s application principally notes that transactions can indeed be tracked as a result of “the nature of the blockchain as an immutable ledger.”
As a result of this, we know that it’s possible to identify any transactions that are associated with a particular blockchain wallet by use of public data.
In a nutshell, users can be identified in the following manner the patent states:
“For instance, such data may, as it is accumulated and analyzed, eventually reveal the user behind a wallet or at least provide information about them … However, the existing communications and attribution structure of blockchain technology such as bitcoin require identification of where the transactions are emanating and terminating, in order to maintain the ledger.”
The application concludes:
“Thus, there is a need for a technical solution to increase the anonymization of a wallet and the user associated therewith in a blockchain.”
The Mastercard application also denotes comments made by advocates of the privacy-savvy digital currencies such as ZCASH and monero, both companies which incorporate certain features in order obscure the source and destination of transactions as well as the amount being transferred.
Of course, while many crypto enthusiasts prefer anonymity when conducting their transactions, the rise of coins such as MONERO or ZCASH has risen in such a massive fashion that many government authorities such as U.S. Department of Homeland Security are seeking new ways to trace funds sent by use of these privacy tokens.
The US agency earlier this week, published a pre-solicitation document which includes a proposal for the study of forensic analysis techniques in order to properly track all privacy coin transactions.
Could Mastercard truly bring about a privacy shift with this patent? Is this what we need? Let us know your thoughts.
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