Privacy in Blockchain Systems
This review addresses privacy issues in blockchain systems, which is critical for users and developers, but it is incremental as it synthesizes existing research without introducing new methods.
This literature review examines the challenge of achieving privacy in blockchain systems, analyzing various strategies from Bitcoin-based approaches to advanced techniques like secure multi-party computations and zero-knowledge proofs, and concludes that current privacy solutions are still unreliable despite rapid advancements in the field.
In this literature review, we first briefly provide an introduction on the privacy aspect of blockchain systems and why it is a difficult quality to achieve, especially using traditional methods. Next, we go over a wide range of different strategies and techniques, along with their respective empirical implementations. Starting with approaches that attempted to provide privacy on Bitcoin/existing blockchain systems, then going into more advanced techniques, such as secure multi-party computations, ring signatures, and zero knowledge proofs, that construct a more advanced blockchain system from scratch with the objective of preserving privacy. Finally, we conclude that the current state of privacy on blockchains still needs work for it to be reliable. Nevertheless, the field of privacy in this domain is developing and advancing at a rapid rate.