A recent Reddit post shows that Monero has implemented yet another privacy enhancing feature called the Blackball. An XMR contributor who has been working on the project made the announcement saying that the feature is meant to enhance security as well as privacy.
The post said,
“thanks to moneromooo’s hard work, the tool is now much more usable than it has been in the past.” The post highlighted that the project is still a work in progress saying, “some parts are still clunky, especially the conversion from the LMDB database to a wallet-readable format. It’s worth pointing out that moneromooo had the patience to walk me through this process also, which took several hours to get right.”
There have been situations in the past when Monero outputs has been known to be spent on particular transactions. This used to happen in Monero’s past when people sent 0-decoy transactions, and it can still happen with chain splits as people reuse their key images without selecting the same output set for both operations. The Blackball database avoids this by telling user wallets to avoid including the outputs in their ring signatures, explained the contributor.
The Monero team is also working hard at implementation of the Bulletproofs to its protocol. The community has already funded three audits conducted by two security companies and Benedikt Bünz, a Ph.D student at Stanford University.
A tweet by Coinchurch that was retweeted by Monero said,
“The first audit (by Kudelski Security) of Monero compatible Bulletproofs has, bearing a few minor issues, been successfully completed!”
According to a blog post by Oracletimes,
“Bulletproofs are zero-knowledge proofs which allow users to hide the transaction amount from the public blockchain which definitely results in increased privacy.”
Details say that only the amount being transacted stays hidden while the wallet addresses of sender and receiver will still be visible in the technology that is still under development. Bulletproof has been part of the Monero vision as can be seen from a 2017 blog post which said that it was an option that would be explored by the organization.
Sarang Noether, a researcher at Monero Research Labs said that Bulletproofs implementation would reduce transaction sizes by 80 percent thereby cutting down the cost of transaction by that percentage.
An official blog post said,
“bulletproofs represent a huge advancement in Monero transactions. We get massive space savings, better verification times, and lower fees.”
The implementation of Bulletproof and Blackball will trigger a faster validation time for Monero transaction while ensuring that security is enhanced.
