A New Paper Claims Zcash-Style Privacy for Bitcoin, No Fork Required

Alloc Init, a cryptography research shop that styles the name as [[alloc] init] on its website, published a paper Thursday that tries to put Zcash-style private transfers onto Bitcoin itself. Recipients, amounts, and the path between old coins and new ones would sit in encrypted notes rather than in the usual public UTXO graph. A key part of the pitch for Shielded Bitcoin is that none of this requires a consensus-level change to the Bitcoin network, which requires buy-in from…