Vitalik Buterin says that Ethereum Could Benefit From Stealth Address Implementation.
A blog post was published by Vitalik Buterin, the co-founder of Ethereum, through which he gives a comprehensive overview of stealth addresses and describes their benefits, and stealth addresses are a feature that is used to maintain privacy while conducting transactions. Anonymity is supported by other blockchain networks such as Monero (XMR) and one-time addresses from a network that is not tied to a user’s public address. In the blog post, Buterin adds that “one of the biggest remaining challenges in the Ethereum ecosystem is privacy.”
Of course Buterin describes different methods for generating cryptographically opaque public addresses with key-blind mechanisms, elliptic curves and cryptography as well as quantum resistant security. According to it he also shows “Social Recovery and Multi-L2 Wallets” and “Different Spending and Viewing Keys” and he notes there have been questions that could affect long term usability such as social difficulty of improvement. Certainly these problems can be solved in the long term, but as the long term stealth address ecosystem shows it will rely heavily on virtually zero knowledge proofs. According to Buterin, Monero uses stealth addresses and the technology is also featured in cryptocurrency networks such as Zcash, Dash, Verge, Navcoin and PIVX. Worth noting that some prior cryptocurrencies were published in different implementations of addresses. concluding their research detailing that stealth addresses can be easily implemented in the Ethereum network and that wallets will need to adapt to the change and overall the architecture of wallets based on Ethereum to support addresses And its current settings would require significant changes. For example, if we use a different address format for an existing wallet. Light clients will need to generate new addresses each time for each transaction and wallets will need to be strong enough to properly encrypt and decrypt transaction data. It concludes that “basic stealth addresses can be implemented fairly quickly today and could be a significant boost to privacy in practical uses on Ethereum”. Obviously some work needs to be done on the wallet side to support them and accordingly it is of the view that it may want to move Lite to a more natively multi-address model (eg. An alternative could be to create a new address for each of the applications interacted with) and start moving towards it.
