Paper 2014/077

Mixcoin: Anonymity for Bitcoin with accountable mixes

Joseph Bonneau, Arvind Narayanan, Andrew Miller, Jeremy Clark, Joshua A. Kroll, and Edward W. Felten

Abstract

We propose Mixcoin, a protocol to facilitate anonymous payments in Bitcoin and similar cryptocurrencies. We build on the emergent phenomenon of currency mixes, adding an accountability mechanism to expose theft. We demonstrate that incentives of mixes and clients can be aligned to ensure that rational mixes will not steal. Our scheme is efficient and fully compatible with Bitcoin. Against a passive attacker, our scheme provides an anonymity set of all other users mixing coins contemporaneously. This is an interesting new property with no clear analog in better-studied communication mixes. Against active attackers our scheme offers similar anonymity to traditional communication mixes.

Note: Extended version

Metadata
Available format(s)
PDF
Category
Applications
Publication info
Published elsewhere. Major revision. Financial Crypto 2014
Keywords
Bitcoin
Contact author(s)
jbonneau @ gmail com
History
2014-04-22: revised
2014-02-04: received
See all versions
Short URL
https://ia.cr/2014/077
License
Creative Commons Attribution
CC BY

BibTeX

@misc{cryptoeprint:2014/077,
      author = {Joseph Bonneau and Arvind Narayanan and Andrew Miller and Jeremy Clark and Joshua A.  Kroll and Edward W.  Felten},
      title = {Mixcoin: Anonymity for Bitcoin with accountable mixes},
      howpublished = {Cryptology ePrint Archive, Paper 2014/077},
      year = {2014},
      note = {\url{https://eprint.iacr.org/2014/077}},
      url = {https://eprint.iacr.org/2014/077}
}
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