One Mathematician's Mission to Boost Bitcoin's Privacy

According to mathematician and Blockstream research director, Andrew Poelstra, the answer is unequivocally yes.

Poelstra is using his two passions - math and bitcoin - to try to bring added privacy to online money.

To this end, Poelstra has been tinkering away, formulating mathematical equations and writing code, to hide bitcoin's "Trails." Trails being the traces of personal information - who you are, what you buy, for how much - that can be gleaned when transacting online when using bitcoin.

Unlike many privacy advocates, who to describe the point of creating a private money system typically point to extremes, Poelstra isn't focused on these edge cases, he's focused on his friends and family.

Poelstra's recent work revolves around a project called "Scriptless scripts," which allow for bitcoin smart contracts that don't use so much data.

According to Poelstra, scriptless scripts can help improve the privacy of lightning payments, those that take place on bitcoin's layer-two scaling technology that pushes transactions off the blockchain.

They merely require Schnorr signatures, a technology pioneered by veteran bitcoin developer Pieter Wuille - which Poelstra has also contributed to - to be implemented, and that technology is getting close to being ready for deployment.

Poelstra would like to see the recently unveiled and much-applauded Taproot, which was created by long-time bitcoin core contributor Greg Maxwell, also implemented.

In short, bulletproofs helps to decrease the size of another privacy technology called confidential transactions, which is a cryptographic way of shielding bitcoin user balances.

Because that's happening today, Poelstra thinks there's a "Whole pile" of other promising ways to shield various pieces of bitcoin.