Blockchair has released Privacy-o-meter in its public block explorer and API to measure the privacy level of Bitcoin transactions. The free feature makes use of 50 heuristics and allows visitors to look up how much information about their identity has been leaked. In a later stage, wallets and exchanges will be able to use the feature to notify users about how much information will be leaked before sending out a transaction.
While Bitcoin is considered to be a privacy-oriented system, the blockchain is open to be analyzed by anyone, and there are numerous transaction tracing tools like Chainalysis, Elliptic, CipherTrace, and Crystal. These are paid tools and often only available to a handful of individuals and companies. Bitcoin users thus rarely have the opportunity to see how deep the rabbit hole goes regarding their privacy loss.
Blockchair launched a simple transaction scoring tool and will expand this further in the upcoming months. It currently uses indicators that reveal user information such as:
- Is an address reused or not?
- Is one of the outputs a rounded number, thus the recipient?
- How many input addresses have been used?
But also more technical heuristics such as:
- Which script or multi-sig type has been used to sign a transaction?
- How are output scripts compared to input scripts?
- How are inputs or outputs ordered?
As mentioned by Blockchair, transaction tracing is relatively simple as most users aren’t concerned enough about their privacy and often make ‘mistakes’ like sending round BTC amounts. Wallet providers are often also not highly concerned about user privacy. Taking the previous example in context, there are no warnings if a user tries to send a rounded amount.
In comparison with protocols such as Zcash, Monero and Dash, in the Bitcoin network there are no transaction obfuscating implementations, and due to the lack of scalability so-called Mixers are expensive and cumbersome to use.
Blockchair provides the privacy-o-meter for free as it hopes it will help Bitcoin users take some of their privacy back.
About Blockchair
Blockchair offers a blockchain explorer and a wide range of professional tools for scientists and developers of multi-currency wallets and exchanges for 15 different blockchains. This includes APIs, a release monitor to track upcoming hard forks and core client updates, Data Dumps, an anonymous portfolio tracker and charts with blockchain and monetary data. The website is offered in 7 languages and no user data is gathered nor shared with third parties.