Privacy in Blockchain Systems

TL;DR

This paper reviews various strategies for enhancing privacy in blockchain systems, highlighting the challenges, existing techniques, and the need for further improvements to achieve reliable privacy solutions.

Contribution

It provides a comprehensive overview of privacy-preserving methods in blockchain, including empirical implementations and advanced cryptographic techniques, highlighting current limitations and future directions.

Findings

Current blockchain privacy methods are still unreliable.

Advanced techniques like zero knowledge proofs are promising.

The field is rapidly evolving with ongoing improvements.

Abstract

In this literature review, we first briefly provide an introduction on the privacy aspect of blockchain systems and why it is a difficult quality to achieve, especially using traditional methods. Next, we go over a wide range of different strategies and techniques, along with their respective empirical implementations. Starting with approaches that attempted to provide privacy on Bitcoin/existing blockchain systems, then going into more advanced techniques, such as secure multi-party computations, ring signatures, and zero knowledge proofs, that construct a more advanced blockchain system from scratch with the objective of preserving privacy. Finally, we conclude that the current state of privacy on blockchains still needs work for it to be reliable. Nevertheless, the field of privacy in this domain is developing and advancing at a rapid rate.