Editor's Note: This article comes fromStar Media STARMEDIA (ID: Star_Media1), Author: Xuesui, reproduced by Odaily with authorization.
Editor's Note: This article comes from
Star Media STARMEDIA (ID: Star_Media1)
, Author: Xuesui, reproduced by Odaily with authorization.
On the Internet, each of us has a parallel world. In this world, there are all your action trajectories, what you bought, where you went, and what you did. These trajectories can clearly portray you as a digital body, which is the digital twin.
The digital twin in the parallel world of the Internet is still in the "baby age", it has no clothes to protect the body, that is to say, each of us is running naked online. Therefore, in reality, we are often betrayed by our own "digital twin".
The emergence of the privacy chain puts an invisibility cloak on the "digital twin".
secondary title
Carp jumps over the dragon's gate, privacy coins are promoted to upstarts
Frequently receiving harassing calls, mobile phone numbers being registered for no reason, and identity information being stolen. I don’t know when it started, and personal information data leakage has become the norm. While enjoying the convenience brought by the Internet, we ignore the hidden dangers caused by the leakage of personal information. And only when you suffer from it will you realize it's too late.
When there are rumors that there is technology or it is possible to improve this situation, vigilant speculators take advantage of the opportunity to rush up, and the related blockchain privacy projects also double their value.
On January 27, 2019, the privacy coin Grin, which focuses on the concept of privacy, was released. On the first day of listing on the exchange, the currency price increased by 50 times, which became a fire that ignited the 2019 bull market. For a time, a large number of miners and developers were crazy about it.
If Bitcoin was the darling of the virtual currency market in the first 10 years, then starting from 2019, privacy coins have become an upstart in the market.
Therefore, anonymous coins are favored.
In order to support the development of privacy coins, some people even initiated donations. On November 12, 2019, the Grin team received a donation of 50 bitcoins. The donor left an anonymous message saying that he hoped to use the funds for the healthy development of Grin. rise.
According to the data from Feixiaohao, the three originators of privacy coins are Monero, Dash and Zcash, all of which have good market capitalization, ranking 14th, 15th and 24th in the world respectively. . Some people even believe that the increase in the market value of privacy coins is the general trend, and it is also the most noteworthy currency type in 2019.
But is that really the case? Whether the privacy coin is a false concept or really protects privacy, we need to find out.
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50 BTC can't save false facts
Wang Lei, who came from an investment bank, said that in the past, investors would invest in every currency, no matter whether it was ICO, IEO, IFO or IMO. But now, more people have been harvested, and leeks have become smarter. Before entering the market, we will first pay attention to the possibility of landing.
The market is buzzing about the concept of privacy, and privacy coins have naturally received a lot of attention.
As a dark horse in 2019, the privacy coin Grin is particularly eye-catching. A week after receiving donations, some people questioned and attacked Grin's privacy. On November 18, 2019, Ivan Bogatyy, a researcher at Dragonfly Capital, a cryptocurrency investment fund, issued a document stating that MimbleWimble, the encryption protocol used by Grin, has irreparable flaws.
In order to prove that the privacy of Grin does not exist, Ivan specifically demonstrated the attack on the Grin network. In the end, 96% of the transaction data on the Grin network was cracked. Although the specific transfer amount cannot be known, the sender and receiver can be traced The exact address of a person, he said, and more user data could have been uncovered with the same technique with more effort.
Within an hour, Ethereum founder Vitalik Buterin (V God) echoed Ivan, who commented that only zero-knowledge proofs such as ZK-SNARKs and other global anonymity sets can achieve true anonymity. It implies that protocols such as MimbleWimble adopted by Grin can only anonymize part of the information, and do not have real robustness.
This is not the first time that questions have been raised about the safety of privacy coins.
As early as 2018, Monero, known as the originator of privacy coins, was also pointed out to have serious flaws in user privacy. A paper by researchers from MIT, Boston University, Carnegie Mellon University, Princeton University, and the University of Illinois says that Monero is not as secure and untraceable as it is advertised. The paper points out that the ring signature mechanism used by Monero to confuse the public and hide the real identity of users is not indestructible. By extracting and analyzing the signature data individually, 90% of the sender user identities can be identified.
Although the Monero team later stated that this vulnerability has been fixed through hard fork upgrades, the outside world stated that this is not the case, and the possibility of successful user identity tracking is still 50%.
Finally, Riccardo Spagni, lead developer of Monero, admitted that achieving privacy security is indeed difficult. He responded that achieving complete privacy is not an easy task, like cat and mouse is a constant battle, there is no way to completely eliminate it, but there are some steps we can take to improve it.
Privacy coins confuse the public and defraud with privacy and security gimmicks
Privacy is the future, but privacy coins are not
Laziness, greed, vanity, fear, lust...everything in the world that makes money in the long run must take advantage of these human weaknesses. The hot privacy coin project in 2019 also took advantage of this point, attracting countless investors to "bow down".
However, in less than half a year, privacy coins were banned. Beginning in 2018, news broke out one after another. Under the pressure of government supervision, exchanges in various countries successively delisted Monero and other privacy currencies. In 2019, this intensity continued to intensify.
This has to make people think: Do we need privacy security technology or privacy coins?
Privacy is the future, but privacy coins are not
Gongxinbao reselling user data, Facebook broke out a large-scale trust crisis...personal privacy cannot be guaranteed, which has become a pain point for the whole society. Although the government continues to increase the cost of breaking the law, the speed of information leakage far exceeds the pace of the law. In other words, today when the value of personal information is becoming increasingly prominent, not paying attention to the protection of personal information is "suicide", and the need for personal privacy protection is becoming increasingly urgent.
This demand is becoming more and more obvious in the hype of the virtual currency capital market. Confuse the concepts of privacy security and privacy coins, and mislead public opinion towards "privacy coins are the future". And when the passion faded, we realized the reality—the privacy technology behind it is the future, but privacy coins are not, just like the blockchain is not equivalent to Bitcoin.
