Re: [bitcoin-dev] LN & Coinjoin, a Great Tx Format Wedding

[ZmnSCPxj <ZmnSCPxj@protonmail.com>]

Good morning waxwing,

> ‐‐‐‐‐‐‐ Original Message ‐‐‐‐‐‐‐
> On Friday, 21 February 2020 22:17, Antoine Riard via bitcoin-dev bitcoin-dev@lists.linuxfoundation.org wrote:
>
> > How can a Bitcoin tranaction leak protocol usage ?
> >
> > -   the output type (p2sh, p2wsh, ...)
> > -   the spending policy (2-of-3 multisig, timelock, hashlock,...)
> > -   outputs ordering (BIP69)
> > -   nLocktime/nSequence
> > -   RBF-signaling
> > -   Equal-value outputs
> > -   weird watermark (LN commitment tx obfuscated commitment number)
> > -   fees strategy like CPFP
> > -   in-protocol announcements [0]
>
> Good list.
> Another one, usually wouldn't be protocol as much as wallet leakage, but could be: utxo selection algorithm (which of course may be difficult to deduce, but often, far from impossible).
> (Also trivial and increasingly irrelevant, but nVersion).
>
> With regards to coinjoin in this context (I know your points are much broader), my comment is:
> For existing protocols (joinmarket's, wasabi's, samourai's), in the equal-outs paradigm, I don't see much that can be done in this area.
> But I would ask people to consider CoinJoinXT[1] more seriously in a taproot/schnorr world, since it addresses this exact point. With a short (not cross-block like swaps or LN setup) interaction, participants can arrange the effect of coinjoin without the on-chain watermark of coinjoin (so, steganographic). The taproot/schnorr part is needed there because multisig is required from transaction to transaction in that protocol, so doing it today is less interesting (albeit still interesting).

CoinJoinXT is indeed something I am interested in at some point: https://zmnscpxj.github.io/bitcoin/coinjoinxt.html
The above writeup is a client-server model, with multiple clients mixing.
If none of the participants reveal that a CoinJoinXT was done, then the graph is difficult to detect as such.
However, if any participants reveal that a CoinJoinXT was done, it has a fallback such that it is almost as good as an equal-value CoinJoin (but takes up more block space).
At least it is not immediately obvious that it is in fact a CoinJoinXT from *just* a simple transaction analysis, which we hope is enough to deter simple policies like "check N transactions back for a transaction with more than one equal-valued output".

Regards,
ZmnSCPxj