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Blindcoin: Blinded, Accountable Mixes for Bitcoin

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Financial Cryptography and Data Security (FC 2015)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNSC,volume 8976))

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Abstract

Mixcoin is a Bitcoin mixing protocol proposed by Bonneau et al. which provides strong accountability guarantees [13]. However, in the Mixcoin protocol, the mapping from a user’s input to output address is visible to the mixing server. We modify the Mixcoin protocol to provide guarantees that the input/output address mapping for any user is kept hidden from the mixing server. In order to achieve this, we make use of a blind signature scheme [14, 23] as well as an append-only public log. The scheme is fully compatible with Bitcoin, forces mixes to be accountable, preserves user anonymity even against a malicious mix, is resilient to denial of service attacks, and easily scales to many users.

B. Rowan—This work originated as a project in a computer networks course at the University of Maryland.

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Acknowledgements

We would like to thank the anonymous reviewers, as well as Nadia Heninger, Andrew Miller, Dave Levin, and Bobby Bhattacharjee for their helpful comments and input.

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, PA, USA

    Luke Valenta

  2. University of Maryland, College Park, MD, USA

    Brendan Rowan

Authors
  1. Luke Valenta
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  2. Brendan Rowan
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Correspondence to Luke Valenta .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Leibniz Universität, Hannover, Germany

    Michael Brenner

  2. Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, USA

    Nicolas Christin

  3. Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, USA

    Benjamin Johnson

  4. New Jersey Institute of Technology, Newark, New Jersey, USA

    Kurt Rohloff

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© 2015 International Financial Cryptography Association

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Valenta, L., Rowan, B. (2015). Blindcoin: Blinded, Accountable Mixes for Bitcoin. In: Brenner, M., Christin, N., Johnson, B., Rohloff, K. (eds) Financial Cryptography and Data Security. FC 2015. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 8976. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-662-48051-9_9

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-662-48051-9_9

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  • Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-662-48050-2

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-662-48051-9

  • eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)

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