Study Reveals Trading Trends That Gives Zcash Privacy A Negative Representation
A study was undertaken by a University College London research team concerning the trends discovered in “unshielded” and “shielded” transactions. The research discovered that when client move between these various forms of addresses secrecy is tainted. The group of researchers from the university revealed that it is likely to degrade privacy for instances in which usage trends are picked by the Zcash user, even though Zcash transaction can be private.
It is possible to shrink the Zcash Anonymity set says the researchers from London
The Team of researchers has concluded that Zcash secrecy may lead to the degrading as a result of certain usage trends. A paper is known as “An Empirical Analysis of Anonymity in Zcash” was published by Sarah Meiklejohn, Mary Maller, George Kappos and Haaroon Yousaf from University College London regarding the cause of the“shrink” of the cryptocurrency’s anonymity set as a result of certain patterns of Zcash usage. Critically, Zcash can be utilized in two forms namely the Unshielded type which involves making transactions completely transparent and the Shieldsd method which involves engaging in a transaction in a private manner.
According to the research paper, the movement of users form the Shield approach to the unshield approach and vice versa leads to a reasonable loss of secrecy they would have wanted.
The research paper elaborated that “We investigate all facets of anonymity in Zcash’s transactions, ranging from its transparent transactions to the interactions with and within its main privacy feature, a shielded pool that acts as the anonymity set for users wishing to spend coins privately”, as reported y newsbitcoin.com.
Moreover, the research paper was quoted that “We conclude that while it is possible to use Zcash in a private way, it is also possible to shrink its anonymity set considerably by developing simple heuristics based on identifiable patterns of usage” According to NewsBitcoin.com
The owners of Zcash commented on the research paper by University College London, saying that the paper was “Insightful” and they also advise their clients that a shielded address should be used to store Zcash.
The paper revealed that finally in efforts for Zcash to completely safeguard its secrecy set is to “….”. On the other hand, the paper also stresses that the Zcash network should seriously grow the usage of the shielded platform. Zooko Wilcox, the founder of Zcash and Josh Swihart, the team marketing director on May 8 made comments concerning the research paper, regarding it as an “insightful new paper”, according to NewsBitcoin.com. Additionally, another analysis was published a couple of months ago with similar findings according to the team members of Zcash.
As reported by NewsBitcoin.com, Swihart and Wilcox also detail that “This research demonstrates different ways to pierce the veil of your privacy if you, or the people that you transact with, move money from a transparent address to a shielded address and then move some of that money back to a different transparent address — Similar analysis was released several months ago — However, this research includes new techniques that can heuristically link patterns of ‘unshielded to shielded to unshielded’ transactions,”
Not everybody seem to have the same opinion about the research paper undertaken by the University College London, quoting one Zcash user on May 11 emphasizing that “I have read the original paper, I don’t think it will make a difference when all transactions are shielded, which is where we are headed to anyway — Furthermore, nobody is stopping anyone from using multiple shielded addresses now.”
