How far are we from rendering efforts like "chainanalysis" useless?
Every single wallet should be sending transactions that by default obfuscate things so no one is liable of this bullshit idea of having "tainted coins", in other words, actual fungibility.
Every single wallet should be sending transactions that by default obfuscate things so no one is liable of this bullshit idea of having "tainted coins", in other words, actual fungibility.
obviously, schnorr signatures are on deck. that'll allow for cross-input aggregation to make coinjoins indistinguishable from regular transactions. that's a pretty massive development given that exchanges are beginning to target coinjoin users. estimating based on segwit's activation timeline, that could happen by early 2021 or maybe even the end of this year, optimistically.
but "useless"? that's quite a strong word.
confidential transactions (CT) to obfuscate transaction amounts seems like an attractive next step. but my understanding is it requires extension blocks or a hard fork. so.....probably not gonna be implemented at the consensus layer. there's always sidechains though. liquid (blockstream's sidechain) supports CT for example.
These things have to run at layer 0 to get any traction imo. We should have had better fungibility since day 1. Things should be mixed by default, what should be optional is making a clear A to B transaction. If we are going to have privacy, we want it to be as close to default state as possible. The internet went throught this already. We would have avoided the spying clusterfuck that it has become if it ran private by default. Only now ages later Tor is becoming more known as well as VPNs, but thats far from ideal. It's still nothing in the grand scheme of things.
Looking at the title of BIP 341 (Taproot: SegWit version 1 spending rules), does that mean we'll see address with prefix bc1p?
yes. in a Bech32 encoding when you set the witness version to 1 the first character after the separator (ie. 1) is going to become letter "p".
BIP 173 doesn't mention this but it is easy to use one of the libraries to encode an arbitrary length byte array to see what the first character is. https://github.com/bitcoin/bips/blob/master/bip-0173.mediawiki
empty 32 bytes= bc1pqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqq5us4ke
Can't regular bech32 addresses begin with a p?