Bitcoin To Get More Anonymous With The New BIP Called Dandelion

There’s always been some serious flaws and security vulnerabilities in Bitcoin especially when it comes to anonymity. As we all know, the Bitcoin network is very transparent and the users can see all the transactions happening in the network. Of course, there’s some level of anonymity as they can only see the public key or wallet address of the person who had just made a transaction. As a matter of fact, Bitcoin was rendered this kind of anonymity to prevent the network from fraudulent activities. But as it turns out, it’s getting more problematic as the time goes by. Many people are of the opinion that Blockchain alone was enough to cope up with the potential threats and cyber attacks. Then why do they have to jeopardise their privacy.

Well, the good thing is, we may soon have a change in picture as a new privacy concept called Dandelion may soon cast its spell upon the Bitcoin network. Originally introduced in a white paper that was published earlier this year, ‘Dandelion’ has now turned out to be a Bitcoin Improvement Proposal (BIP) quite recently. Not only that, it is continuously gaining attention from the Bitcoin community every passing day.

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How Anonymous Is Your Bitcoin?

To tell you the truth, ‘Anonymous’ is not the word you’d like to use when it comes to Bitcoin. Bitcoin is not anonymous as far as the user privacy is concerned. However, it’s also not completely transparent. So you may like to call it pseudonymous for that matter. However, you can make your Bitcoin transactions more anonymous by using many third party applications such as VPN and Tor (The Onion Router).

How Dandelion BIP Aims To Change It?

The concept of Dandelion was first introduced in a white paper titled, ‘Dandelion: Redesigning the Bitcoin Network for Anonymity’ that was published back in February. The concept was brought to light by Andrew Miller and few other researchers from University of Illinois. The Dandelion project is a new method for broadcasting transactions that aims on protecting the network against the people trying to snoop and locate the IP addresses of the Bitcoin users. The concept of Dandelion implies that the transactions that are relayed to nodes should go through several hops post which a symmetric broadcast is sent to the other nodes, thereby making it hard to identify the original IP source.   

At present, Dandelion is being tested on the Bitcoin’s testnet. So it would be interesting to see if it gets approval from the worldwide Bitcoin communities. Whatever be the case, one can’t deny that it seems quite promising for that matter. So let’s just hope to see a difference.