Privacy Protection in Blockchain-Based Crypto-Currencies

讲座内容：Research in crypto-currency cash dated back to the early 80s.Thanks to the growing popularity of bitcoin, the first crypto-currenciessuccessfully deployed in practice, research in this area has become very activerecently.

In this talk, we are going to review existing results oncrypto-currencies and the recent research trend. First, we will go through theconcept of blockchain, and discussed how it can be used to address some of themajor challenges in crypto-currencies. Then, we compare the privacy levelsoffered by various constructions such as bitcoin (XBT), Zcash (ZEC) and Monero(XMR). After that, we review the concept of ring signatures. Originallydeveloped for whistleblowing, we show that there is a surprising connectionbetween ring signatures and blockchain-based crypto-currencies.

We conclude the talk with other potentialapplications of blockchain and some open problems related to the use of ringsignatures in crypto-currencies.