Can Bitcoin payments ever be as private as, say, Monero? I mean obviously not. Monero was designed from the ground up to enable true anonymity along with untraceable transactions. Bitcoin... wasn't. But there are ways to make Bitcoin transactions private - kind of. The newest idea is to disguise the payments as gambling. Adam Gibson's Babilonia scheme hides a coinjoin, the usual way of mixing bitcoin for privacy, inside a two-party bet. This way, the tx doesn't carry the on-chain shape that an exchange or an analytics firm would flag. His reasoning is that a coinjoin is easy to spot. It has a recognisable shape on-chain, so analytics firms can flag it and an exchange can treat it as suspicious. #Babilonia gives it a different shape: two people settling a wager. Two parties fund a shared output and run a bet between them, settled with adaptor signatures and simple Sigma-protocol zero-knowledge proofs, not the heavier proof systems that bigger privacy protocols usually need. The winner learns the key that spends the payout, and the loser gets a refund. The on-chain exchange resembles a gambling payout rather than a coinjoin. BUT... There's a downside, which Gibson himself notes. Because the payouts sit in fixed ratios to the stakes, an analyst can try the plausible multiples until they match, which in turn reveals the coinjoin. He has a fix lined up for version 2 though: volume. Stack ten or more bets into one transaction and the payouts no longer stand out as an observable pattern - leaving nothing tidy for an analyst to solve against. Despite the drawbacks, it's still pretty good - considering it's kind of a stopgap, something that'll run on #Bitcoin as-is without any core changes. But it sure ain't #Monero! #Cryptography #Privacy