Crypto 360°: Reasons to use CashShuffle

Saturday, 11 May 2019

Reasons to use CashShuffle

This is my first post in r/btc trying to add some content of value. After the amazing welcome from the community, I decided to compile a list of reasons to actively use CashShuffle.

What is CashShuffle?

CashShuffle is a feature available in some wallets (currently only in Electron Cash) that lets users join transactions to generate similar outputs that are practically indistinguishable from each other. This helps improve overall privacy of the users and makes bitcoins more fungible by obfuscating the source of the future inputs.

What are the reasons to use CashShuffle?

Bitcoin Cash is not a private currency. Because it has a transparent ledger, anyone can see who are the parties involved in a transaction. Even if there is no direct connection to the people using Bitcoin through their addresses, chain analysis (the techniques used to understand and trace the transactions in the blockchain) is already is a concern. For that, very good reasons to use it are:

It improves the privacy of the users. The people who use CashShuffle might not be succesfully tracked or even not tracked at all if there is not a good amount of resources to unveil the transaction history of a particular user.

It improves the privacy of the network. More people using CashShuffle mean more fungible and pseudo-private coins in circulation. Even if a user does not want to use CashShuffle himself (although not recommended), he has less chance of being paid with tainted, less valuable coins. Also, it makes chain analysis difficult, expensive and less reliable.

It makes bitcoins more fungible. Even if it is not entirely possible to wipe the history of a coin, its path through the blockchain can be obscured and obfuscated efficiently thanks to this approach.

It can be easily implemented on the network. CashShuffle can be easily implemented because it operates using the current rules of the blockchain and follows the protocol without needing a hard or soft fork. It is a smart solution to the privacy and fungibility problems of Bitcoin without needing to change anything.

It is already implemented. ;-) CashShuffle is already working and implemented. The Electron Cash wallet has already implemented this feature and it is not hard to start using it.

It is cheap. Every shuffle cost about 270 sats, which is the transaction fee. Also, no one gets paid for it; servers only join transactions toghether. Of course, it is cheaper when implemented on the Bitcoin Cash blockchain.