By Bitcoin 雜誌 - 1 年前 - 閱讀時間：7 分鐘
Bitcoin 正在失去暗網市場的青睞
A deep dive into how Bitcoin’s lack of privacy and, by extension, its insufficient fungibility has led to its loss of market share in darknet markets.
If you wanted to buy contraband online in the last five years or so, you may have noticed that the option to pay in bitcoin — once the most popular form of payment on darknet markets — is slowly disappearing.
You may ask why it matters to you or the average Bitcoin enthusiast. (You're presumably an excellent, law abiding citizen — good for you, but that is irrelevant.) Allow me to explain.
絲綢之路
The first major milestone of bitcoin was to be accepted as a form of money. This happened with small obscure merchants at the early stages, but as the word spread, bitcoin found itself as the “official” currency of the darknet, and allowed the creation of a market called “Silk Road.”
Silk Road was a revolutionary online marketplace. Merchants from all around the world could transact from the comfort of their own home, whenever they wanted, and could sell (and customers could buy) whatever they wanted, all with a new form of uncensorable, decentralized and easy-to-use form of money: bitcoin.
(資源)Bitcoin's adoption depended on markets like Silk Road to pioneer, and what was special about Silk Road is that it was an almost completely free (as in freedom) market. Free markets are excellent for adoption because they don't require bureaucracy, permits, regulations or any other form of permission to run. The less permission required, the better a market can function. Therefore, there is more adoption, more merchants and more bitcoin 使用。
Without markets like Silk Road, bitcoin’s adoption is at risk, and the network is not as efficient as it could be.
The importance of Silk Road in Bitcoin's history is, without a doubt, massive since it pioneered bitcoin’s use as a medium of exchange, and still remains the biggest bitcoin goods and services marketplace in history.
Now that you have a decent idea on why such markets are so important, I'll do my best to explain why bitcoin is not used there anymore.
可替代性的概念及其重要性
According to the Merriam-Webster dictionary, fungible means “being something (such as money or a commodity) of such a nature that one part or quantity may be replaced by another equal part or quantity in paying a debt or settling an account.” This is untrue of bitcoin.
每個硬幣都有自己的歷史，當用戶嘗試使用他的硬幣時，可以說明該歷史。 該歷史記錄還可能導致用戶在使用/持有以犯罪方式使用的硬幣時遇到麻煩，例如毒品交易或交易所黑客。
在暗網市場中，隱私非常重要。 買賣雙方都希望保護他們的隱私，以保證他們在交易時的安全。 執法部門對這些類型的市場不太友好，並不斷監控網站和商家是否存在隱私洩露。
默認情況下， bitcoin has weak privacy, and therefore is not fungible. Data and metadata from the Bitcoin timechain can be linked together with off-chain data to form solid evidence against a defendant in court. There have been cases that relied on bitcoin's lack of privacy as conclusive evidence of what the government sees as “wrong-doing.” Naturally, darknet markets were looking for solutions.
應該 Bitcoin developers add privacy via hard fork or would a soft fork be sufficient? Should privacy be on the application level rather than on the protocol level?
事實上，大多數人，尤其是暗網市場的管理員和商人，並不關心。 他們只是想要隱私。 That’s one of the reasons bitcoin is losing darknet market share to other cryptocurrencies that have figured this out already.
有沒有 bitcoin always equal one bitcoin?競爭
與其他行業不同，暗網市場競爭激烈，尤其是在交易方式方面。 市場漲跌，其中使用的支付方式也會漲跌。
在2015年之前， bitcoin used to hold most of the market share in darknet markets, followed only by fiat currency.
After the fall of many markets and their vendors because of bitcoin’s privacy flaws and bad operational security, the use of bitcoin was starting to drop. Other cryptocurrencies, like monero, started to emerge on darknet markets because they better fit the use case. They had something that bitcoin does not, privacy by default.
回想起來， bitcoin’s focus on being a store of value overlapped with the development of the required privacy for darknet market use.
增強 Bitcoin的隱私
Still, there are many attempts at enhancing bitcoin’s privacy, and I’ll do my best to list the most prominent of them:
水杯
Custodial tumblers were an early solution to bitcoin's lack of privacy. There will usually be a centralized server that gathers bitcoin from customers and dispenses them randomly to unlink the customer from the bitcoin 他們派了。
Those have multiple flaws and massive third-party risks, and they are also often honeypots set up by law enforcement to catch dirty bitcoin and surveil on users.
There’s also tumbling with services that are not aware of it: This is a long process where the user will mix their bitcoin with other users' bitcoin by sending funds to exchanges, online casinos and other sites that hold a large amount of bitcoin. This has the same flaws as custodial mixers.
(資源)CoinJoin
A CoinJoin is a collaborative transaction that combines users' coins in order to create a large anonymity set for them. This increases the privacy of all participants.
This is by far the most effective method for privacy on Bitcoin and has been used heavily on darknet markets as well as outside of them.
This one is a very important tool in the tech stack of a Bitcoiner, and I encourage you to learn about it and use it.
(資源)還有一些“偽造”的 CoinJoin，他們利用啟發式方法混淆鏈上分析，以為只有一個人進行的交易實際上是精心設計的 CoinJoin。
(資源)隱形地址
Bitcoin stealth addresses, prominently BIP47, introduced a way to have a stealth, reusable address that only discloses the real address of the user when a notification transaction was made.
這創建了一個新的 Bitcoin address for each user you connect with to ensure privacy. This was never widely used in darknet markets, but it’s decent tech nonetheless and a personal favorite of mine.
一種隱身地址的示例：PayNym閃電網絡
閃電網是一個 Bitcoin Layer 2 with a focus on providing fast, cheap and arguably private payments with instant settlement. Currently, the privacy on Lightning is great for senders, partially solving Bitcoin’s fungibility issue on-chain.
Unfortunately, Lightning has privacy flaws when it comes to receiving money. For instance, the receiver needs to provide his “channel point” when creating an invoice. A channel point is the UTXO on the blockchain that is used to back the channel with on-chain bitcoin; that means that the sender can view the receiver’s on-chain transaction history.
商家，尤其是在暗網市場等環境中的商家，正在尋求簡單性，這是閃電網絡目前無法提供的。
可以說，上述原因是閃電網絡目前尚未融入任何暗網市場的原因。 還有一個問題是作為商家運行閃電網絡節點會帶來的複雜性。
不過，仍有一些樂觀的餘地，因為目前有一些團隊正在致力於增強收件人和發件人的隱私，以及上述用戶體驗問題。 這可能會使其在未來對暗網市場更具吸引力。
(資源)我們能做些什麼來解決這個問題？
I can not stress enough how important it is that we have decent privacy on Bitcoin that everyone can take advantage of. The solution is within Bitcoin’s culture and community. There are app-level privacy upgrades that can be standardized to improve overall privacy on the network.
各種各樣的 CoinJoins，隱形解決方案，如靜默支付和 BIP47，並鼓勵用戶運行自己的節點並儘可能使用非託管和開源軟件。
When transacting, make sure it’s peer-to-peer and not through an exchange or other intermediary. Never use a custodial wallet — you can not ensure your privacy if you count on a third party to take care of it for you. Also, when acquiring bitcoin make sure to use a non-KYC (know-your-customer) exchange. Otherwise, your data and privacy could be at risk.
My advice is to do your own research and make sure to take every precaution when using bitcoin to ensure your own privacy.
使用的人越多 bitcoin privately, the better privacy everyone gets, and the more likely it is that bitcoin will emerge again as the prominent currency of the darknet markets, and consequently of other markets too.
這是 Wildsnow 的一篇客座文章。 表達的意見完全是他們自己的，不一定反映 BTC Inc. 或 Bitcoin 雜誌.
原始來源： Bitcoin 雜誌