By What’s that? A new technology designed to enhance blockchain features by making the technology more scalable is up for testing phase soon.
This new technology has been dubbed “bulletproofs” and was invented by Benedict Bunz & Jonathan Bootle, two cryptographers and promises to notably decrease the weight of confidential transactions and this Thursday 18 October will see the privacy-savvy Monero put it to the test.
This makes monero the first big player in cryptocurrency to deploy this tech and they’ve been focussed on finding ways to implement bulletproofs for the last year. This is all in an effort to cut the size of their transactions by as much as 80% as their minimum goal.
Monero, as we know, already deals with their fair share of scalability setbacks which are faced by most blockchains and in their case, their platform which features additional privacy layers which require hefty computing power. The scalability of their confidential transactions has been a notable hurdle for this $1 billion blockchain company. Users have succumbed to exorbitant transactions fees as well as inceasingly costly fees for the storage of running a full node
Sarang Noether, monero cryptographer who assisted with the bulletproof integration had this to say:
“Blockchain bloat was definitely an issue for monero.”
Bulletproofs will become the replacement to monero’s current zero-knowledge range proofs which their transaction currently work on.
The cryptocurrency will activate this new tech during their next system upgrade or during their next hard fork. Hard forks are upgrades which require all nodes to adopt a new software & have in the past been painted as a risky affair but in this scenario, the upgrade forms part monero’s bi-annual cycle in which new features are introduced.
Sarang continued:
“We’re excited about it, Part of the reason we do the upgrades is so we can be safely on the cutting edge, and I think this is a really, really good move forward.
A Bulletproof “Black Box”
Before you, our reader jumps to any conclusions, we must point out that bulletproofs don’t add to privacy itself. What they do is, ensure that information stored within confidential transactions don’t contain any false information.
Sarang had this to say:
“They’re not about anonymity; they are about assuring that the other stuff we do for anonymity works correctly,”
Monero’s anonymity is achieved by three different mechanisms. Stealth addresses, ring signatures & ring confidential transactions which work in unison to achieve this. Bulletproofs come in and target ring confidential transactions AKA RingCT and this is how monero provides their sough-after obscurity on quantities which are sent in transactions.
Due to RingCT being a cryptographic operation utilising ring signatures which obscures data by mixing it up with different outputs, monero has to make sure that these transactions are balanced correctly in order to make it impossible for money to be printed in the process.
Right up until today monero has made use of a variation of zero-knowledge proofs to achieve this known as a bitwise Borromean range proof.
As noted earlier, these range proofs are “a very slow and large operation,” explained Sarang to the point that “the vast bulk of our transactions, size wise, on the blockchain are these existing range proofs.”
Bulletproofs on the other hand work through a process of aggregating information into new data structures which scale logarithmically as opposed to linearly which means that scaling becomes far more notable for bigger transactions which bare mulitple outputs:
Sarang explained:
“It does the same thing, this nice, black box, zero-knowledge proof idea, but is much, much, much smaller and much, much, much faster to do”
Equipment Upgrade:
The upgrade rolling out on today will also introduce other changes to monero’s codebase. Ring signatures will be targeted, as monero relies on these to conceal sender identities and this upgrade will ensure that the mandatory ring size is increased which will increase the anoymity set for monero ,thus making it less vulnerable to any linking attack.
A second tweak to monero’s mining algorithm will also be added in the upgrade which will deter the arrival of ASICs which are a form of highly optimized mining hardware from being implemented on the network. This follows an upgrade that rolled out in March which disabled a particular line of ASIC hardware which was developed specifically for monero and this move has been hailed by many as the beginning of the war on miners.
With all of these upgrades of course, it must be noted that bulletproofs are the most anticipated due simply to the fact that their introduction adds to monero’s privacy system.
Sarang said:
“It’s not often you can basically take a cryptographic instruction, yank it out and put a new one in, but this was one case where we could do that,”
The focus being mainly on bulletproofs means that the code also modifies monero’s fee structure in a way that “more accurately reflects the fact that bulletproofs scales so well,” explained Sarang.
This upgrade as said earlier is set to rollout today and will happen in two parts. Today will the enabling of bulletproofs on the platform and as early as tomorrow will see the tech being made compulsory.
Relief Lies On the Horizon
Moving forward, monero researchers are on the hunt for more out of the box ways to scale the platform and this may very well include moving away from ring signatures completely in the long run.
Sarang along with Surae Noether another cryptographer work within the Monero Research Lab which is a section of monero development which is dedicated to the analysis of academic innovations in cryptography & the selection of innovations which can be utilised by monero.
Sarang explained
“We’re taking all this new stuff and saying what if anything can be feasible in the future for our community. We’re always looking at new ways to move away from ring signatures inorder to get better anonymity sets, or at the very least ring signatures that scale better.”
To top off all that Sarang also claimed that cross chain atomic swaps, payment channels and networks, as well as “fundamentals like refund transactions” are all on the labs hot to-do list
However, it must be noted that Sarang was in a hurry to draw attention to what he aptly named the “mitigation horizon” of the difficulty found within the implementation of radical ideas which could cause rippled effects on monero’s community, assets & other features.
He explained
“You have the new technology that you’re interested in investigating, but what happens at that transition point where you have to bring everyone over with you?
But he also claimed that bulletproofs remained unique in this regard stating:
“Bulletproofs was this cool example of something that was a nice self-contained entity that we were able to deploy in a way that is working great.”
Have you or do you plan to invest in Monero? What are your thoughts on bulletproofs? Let us know your thoughts by commenting below?
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