Collaborative Deanonymization
This addresses the problem of balancing privacy and law enforcement in cryptocurrencies, offering a novel solution for enabling accountability without central control.
The paper tackles the tension between anonymity and accountability in cryptocurrencies by proposing overlay protocols that enable peer-to-peer deanonymization for prosecuting publicly recognized crimes, illustrating applications to Monero rings and Bitcoin CoinJoin transactions.
Privacy-seeking cryptocurrency users rely on anonymization techniques like CoinJoin and ring transactions. By using such technologies benign users potentially provide anonymity to bad actors. We propose overlay protocols to resolve the tension between anonymity and accountability in a peer-to-peer manner. Cryptocurrencies can adopt this approach to enable prosecution of publicly recognized crimes. We illustrate how the protocols could apply to Monero rings and CoinJoin transactions in Bitcoin.