Post
Topic
Board Service Discussion
Re: WARNING - Blockchain.info is NOT SAFE
by
ripper234
on 20/12/2012, 00:07:30 UTC
A technical questions:

So what if an address is a SHA 256? How does that remove any lookup ability? To lookup by address, just hash it and look up the hash. It removes the ability to lookup, per given wallet ID, what addresses it owns - not the other way around.

You'll find that Piuk has already answered this question.  The address is hashed with a secret key.  Without the secret key, you can't generate the right hash to look up:

. . . Addresses are hashed with a secret. With access to the secret it would be possible to hash every bitcoin address with a none zero balance and use that to compare against subscribed hashes to determine addresses in a wallet. The sacrifice of some anonymity when notifications are enabled has always been stated https://blockchain.info/wallet/anonymity. However it is no longer possible for admins to lookup an arbitrary wallet by address . . .

Thanks, these were a long couple of threads, didn't follow them both till the end.