IEEE Consumer Electronics Magazine - September/October 2019 - 24

Cryptocurrency Anonymity

amount of coins sent, and IP addresses of the
peers. It, thus, does not provide any privacy,
untraceability, and fungibility for its users. Monero and Zcash, which provide the features for
hiding the addresses of sender and receiver and
the amount of coins sent, are considered as the
cryptocurrencies providing privacy, untraceability, and fungibility for its users.
Dash provides the features for hiding the sender's and receiver's addresses. However, this cryptocurrency is questionable regarding the privacy,
untraceability, and fungibility supports, due to
the partnership for the antimoney laundering
(AML) and know your customer (KYC) compliance with Coin-firm, which is a company selling a
solution for cryptocurrency AML/KYC compliance. Verge uses Tor and I2P so that it provides
the IP addresses hiding, but as presented by
Biryukov and Pustogarov,12 there are a couple of
attack vectors through which an attacker can link
user's transactions and in certain cases the
attacker can recognize the user's IP address.13
PIVX provides the features for hiding the address
of sender and receiver. However, PIVX has its rich
list visible to anyone examining the transaction,
so its privacy and fungibility supports are questionable. Moreover, the master nodes of PIVX can
be used for tracing transactions, and therefore,
its untraceability support is also questionable.
It is obvious that anonymity is not free and
often comes with a high price attached to the
cryptocurrency. In other words, cryptocurrencies focused on providing anonymity for users
usually require additional things to do that make
them less desirable, e.g., this may be a reason
why about 6.3 percent of Zcash coins are in the
shielded pool as of January 2018.

and Zcash-have been examined. According to
the comparison results, only Monero and Zcash
are considered to be the cryptocurrencies providing privacy, untraceability, and fungibility for
its users. The others are not (or questionable)
providing all the three requirements.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
This work was supported by the Basic Science Research Program through the National
Research Foundation of Korea (NRF), funded by
the Ministry of Science, ICT, and Future Planning
under Grant NRF-2017R1A1A1A05001405.

& REFERENCES
1. S. Nakamoto, "Bitcoin: A peer-to-peer electronic cash
system," Oct. 2008. [Online]. Available at: https://
bitcoin.org/bitcoin.pdf
2. [Online]. Available at: https://coinmarketcap.com,
Accessed on: Feb. 22, 2018.
3. J.-H. Lee and M. Pilkington, "How the blockchain
revolution will reshape the consumer electronics
industry," IEEE Consum. Electron. Mag., vol. 6, no. 3,
pp. 19-23, Jul. 2017.
4. P. Koshy, D. Koshy, and P. McDaniel, "An analysis of
anonymity in Bitcoin using P2P network traffic," in
Proc. Int. Conf. Financial Cryptogr. Data Secur.,
Mar. 2014, pp. 469-485.
5. E. Duffield and D. Diaz, "Dash: A privacy-centric
crypto-currency." [Online]. Available at: https://github.
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Feb. 22, 2018.
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Available

at:

https://getmonero.org/

resources/research-lab, Accessed on: Feb. 22, 2018.
7. [Online].

Available

at:

https://vergecurrency.com/

assets/Verge-Anonymity-Centric-CryptoCurrency.pdf,

CONCLUSION
The recent interest in cryptocurrencies
extends beyond information technology to politics, society, and economy.3,14,15 Since Bitcoin
was released in 2009, more than 1,500 cryptocurrencies have been developed, but only some of
them are focused on providing anonymity for
users. The developers had noticed the increasing demand for financial privacy and there are
already several cryptocurrencies claiming they
provide enough anonymity for its users. The five
cryptocurrencies-Dash, Monero, Verge, PIVX,

Accessed on: Feb. 22, 2018.
8. [Online]. Available at: https://pivx.org/what-is-pivx/
white-papers, Accessed on: Feb. 22, 2018.
9. D. Hopwood, S. Bowe, T. Hornby, and N. Wilcox,
"Zcash protocol specification (version 2018.0-beta-9),"
Feb. 22, 2018.
10. [Online].

Available

at:

https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/

CoinJoin, Accessed on: Feb. 22, 2018.
11. N. Saberhagen, "CryptoNote v2.0," Oct. 2013.
12. A. Biryukov and I. Pustogarov, "Bitcoin over Tor isn't a
good idea," in Proc. IEEE Symp. Secur. Privacy,
May 2015, pp. 122-134.

IEEE Consumer Electronics Magazine

https://www.bitcoin.org/bitcoin.pdf https://www.bitcoin.org/bitcoin.pdf https://www.coinmarketcap.com https://www.github.com/dashpay/dash/wiki/Whitepaper https://www.github.com/dashpay/dash/wiki/Whitepaper https://www.getmonero.org/resources/research-lab https://www.getmonero.org/resources/research-lab https://www.vergecurrency.com/assets/Verge-Anonymity-Centric-CryptoCurrency.pdf https://www.vergecurrency.com/assets/Verge-Anonymity-Centric-CryptoCurrency.pdf https://www.pivx.org/what-is-pivx/white-papers https://www.pivx.org/what-is-pivx/white-papers https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/CoinJoin https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/CoinJoin

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