Towards the end of May 2020, we made you freaks aware of the fact that Chris Belcher had released the first ever design spec of a CoinSwap implementation; a way for individuals to preserve privacy while transacting on the Bitcoin network by confusing common heuristics used by chain analysis companies. In December, we were there to inform you of the fact that a CoinSwap transaction had been successfully executed on Bitcoin's testnet. And today, late into the nigh on the East coast, we are here to celebrate the fact that Chris Belcher has officially taken to the bitcoin-dev mailing list to unveil Teleport Transactions: a CoinSwap implementation for Bitcoin.

The technology is still too early to be released on mainnet and tried in the wild. However, significant progress has been made to formalize the implementation and button it up on the road to being implemented via popular software wallets if they deem it valuable. This is very encouraging to see.

For those of you freaks who may be new to Bitcoin and this rag by extension, it is important to point out that the network's current privacy assurances are subpar. Contrary to popular belief, Bitcoin is not (yet) a private digital currency. Currently, it is relatively trivial for individuals and companies with certain forensic skills to track bitcoin transactions throughout the blockchain. They depend on certain heuristics and shared information from trusted third parties like exchanges to tag certain bitcoin transactions and make assumptions about who possesses certain UTXOs as they are sent around the network.

Luckily for us, individuals like Chris Belcher working on CoinSwap and others building out similar heuristic bursting tech like Samourai Wallet's Whirlpool are actively attempting to turn the tide against those who would like to unmask every bitcoin user as they transact on the network. Over time, the efforts of these disparate teams has improved the ability for individuals to attain privacy at Bitcoin's protocol layer and any user should be actively supporting them in their efforts to improve these tools. On top of support for these particular projects and teams, bitcoin users should be championing upgrades like Schnorr signatures and Taproot that add to the tool belts of these teams by making it easier to break the heuristics used by chain analysis companies.

Bitcoin's fundamentals grow stronger by the day. The future is bright!

Final thought...

Sorry for the delay, had to take my beautiful wife to dinner.