BitcoinCash for anonymous payments

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Fungibility and anonymity are themes that currently cause a lot of controversy in the universe of cryptocurrencies. By design cryptocurrencies would be anonymous and fungible, but with the popularity of this market, Blockchain analytics companies also focused exclusively on tracking transactions with cryptocurrencies, these analytics companies, which are usually funded by official research funds, were great in unraveling the identity of users.

The Search for Anonymity

Just as tracking services have evolved, it is also necessary to evolve cryptocurrency technology to keep it as fungible and anonymous as possible, just like a dollar bill. This has been a major challenge for developers today.

Before proceeding to explain the innovations that BCH has made to become, in addition to the best electronic money in the world, an anonymous currency. It is necessary to understand that such measures of anonymity and fungibility are not developed in essence for criminal activities, but for the maintenance of people's privacy and freedom. Like weapons, at first no one manufactures weapons for murders, but for people to defend themselves or practice sport. So money essentially needs to be fungible and anonymous.

Faced with the enormous challenge, cryptocurrencies of all types began to focus on anonymity. In this field we can highlight the currencies: Monero, Zcash and Dash. Although Monero has done a great job, unfortunately so much attention on the anonymity aspect has impaired its functionality as a means of payment. Therefore, Monero became uncharacterized as a currency and became an intermediate asset to overshadow transactions for other currencies. Hardly anyone would feel comfortable using Monero as a means of payment, unless their main objective is only anonymity.

One risk for those who invest in Monero is that without anonymity the currency loses its sense of existence, and there are already two patents from an analytics company that claims to break the privacy of transactions with Monero, although no practical evidence has yet been seen.

As for Zcash, and Dash, although they are more functional currencies than Monero, unfortunately, they offer risk to their users, as both allow their transactions to be of the private or non-private type. And that ends up causing coins, which are not guaranteed privacy, to contaminate private coins. So, users have their transactions exposed and sometimes they don't know! Causing a greater risk due to the false feeling of being safe.

The beginning of Coinjoin

BCH, like BTC, did not want to limit the payment functionality, although BTC is no longer functional money today, both opted for Coinjoin, a system that outshines the real recipients of transactions, so they could offer some kind of privacy , without having to change its basic characteristics. Which is to be a viable means of payment..

Coinjoin example. Source: wasabiwallet.io

In a very simplified way, Coinjoin allows the joint receipt of coins, which overshadows anyone trying to determine who is the real holder of a certain currency. For example, suppose that; Alice, Bob and Charles have in their wallets respectively (1, 2, 3) coins, and let's say you know this just by recognizing their addresses in a block explorer. Now, suppose that Alice, Bob and Charles jointly decide to send the coins to other addresses of their possessions. And you follow the joint transaction in the block explorer, which results in 5 addresses with the amount of coins distributed in this way (1, 1, 2, 1, 1), would you know what Ana's currency is? In fact the most you can do is apply a probabilistic calculation, with the possibilities, for example:

(1 Alice, 1 Bob, 2 Charles, 1 Bob, 1Bob) or (1 Alice, 1 Bob, 2 Bob, 1 Charles, 1 Charles) or (1 Bob, 1 Alice, 2 Charles, 1 Bob, 1Bob) or ( 1 Bob, 1 Bob, 2 Charles, 1 Alice, 1 Bob) or (1 Bob, 1 Bob, 2 Charles, 1 Bob, 1 Alice) or (1 Charles, 1 Charles, 2 Bob, 1 Bob, 1 Alice). So in this example there is a possibility that 1 in 4 (25%) of you can set the address where Alice's currency is. Now imagine this on a larger scale, in an extremely short way this is Coinjoin.

Bitcoin Core's (BTC) limited anonymity

Bitcoin Core's Wasabi wallet is the most popular offering the Coinjoin service. On the Wasabi website, it states that the wallet performs trusted CoinJoin transactions through the Tor anonymity network. The CoinJoin coordinator cannot steal or violate the participants' privacy, and that you currently pay a 0.003% fee multiplied by the amount set for anonymity. If the currency anonymity set is 50, you pay 0.003% * 50 (= 0.15%). If you set the desired anonymity set to 53, Wasabi will continue to mix until it is achieved, so you can end up with an anonymity set of, say, 60, and you will pay 0.003% * 60 (= 0.18%).

In this way, it is necessary to consolidate currencies from scrambled exits, and this is a limitation of this system, note that it is possible to not find the necessary amount, for example 53, so the portfolio can use another value like 60, and this generates a slowness in exchanges ... (typical of BTC, isn't it?). Another problem with BTC's Coinjoin is that there are costs to simply overshadow transactions.

In the beginning BCH also decided to adopt Coinjoin to overshadow transactions, it is at this moment that the fantastic work of BCH developers, like Jonald, Mark and certainly many others, comes in. Jonald Fyookball was responsible for creating the CashShuffle, which had a proposal very similar to the Wasabi wallet, but with a fundamental difference, he could work on a protocol that aims to really be a means of payment, fast, cheap and scalable, and that makes it easy! Because it is possible to carry out Coinjoin at virtually no cost.

CashFusion - "The functional anonymity for payments"

Jonald was one of the members of the Big-Blockers movement that resulted in the fork of bitcoin, and is therefore one of those responsible for BCH being the best cryptocurrency for payments. However, when he created CashShuffle, even though it was more economical and viable than Wasabi's Coinjoin, Jonald realized that consolidating shuffled coins was problematic and this led to the investigation of something better.

So, another important participant in creating anonymity in BCH transactions enters the story, is the Phd in Physics from the University of British Columbia, Mark B. Lundeberg, in which Jonald defines him with a genius! Mark has over two thousand citations of academic papers, in which he works with studies on; graphene, electronics, spintronics, electrodynamics and plasmonics, but currently is dedicated to Blockchain technology.

Mark's contribution, according to Jonald, was to think in the following way: "Although the actual amounts of bitcoins add more decimal precision, making matches rarer, we will more than make up for it, because the total number of partitions will be simply insane" he realized that it was no longer necessary to consolidate currencies, but to increase the number of partitions with an astronomical value! (Believe me, the astronomical adjective here it is not a figure of speech).

Thus comes CashFusion, a system that offers a practical way to recombine fragmented anonymous transactions in a secure environment, without the server being able to steal funds or reveal users' anonymity. Currently, this system can be found in the popular Electron Cash wallet by activating it with a simple click, and that's it! Your wallet will begin to participate in a transaction with many entries and exits provided by several other CashFusion participants, running in the background, with the number of possible combinations of incomputable size, making it essentially impossible for anyone to know which entries and exits belong to a particular user.

Want to better understand how CashFusion works? Luckily for us, Jonald is also a writer for read.cash and made two excellent articles on the topic, which were used as a source to build this article:

Analyzing the combinatoric math in cashfusion

More CashFusion Math

Some interesting details about Cash Fusion can be read in this post on Reddit. The CashFusion system has undergone a rigorous audit and you can read about it by clicking here.

Conclusion

In this article we present the importance of anonymity in cryptocurrency transactions, and show the challenges of keeping cryptocurrencies anonymous. We present Coinjoin and its most advanced evolution, produced by the incredible developers of BCH, which is CashFusion. We also present how CashFusion enables secure anonymity for BCH users in a simple way, with just one click, in the popular Electron Cash wallet.

Free! And quickly! Thus BCH offers transactions with a high level of anonymity for simple users, without losing its fundamental characteristics of decentralized electronic cash. Democratizing access to privacy and cash, and helping the unbanked.

To learn more about CashFusion visit the website: https://cashfusion.org/ if possible collaborate so that this fantastic project continues to provide freedom and security for people.

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Special thanks to @jonald_fyookball , for his generosity in giving up some of his precious time to clear my doubts.

This article was originally written in Portuguese for the BCH community in Brazil. The text may present possible errors in grammar and spelling, any suggestion of correction will be highly appreciated. Thanks...

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