More $ONIONs in AirDrop and Stealth Address upcoming

Some interesting news going on this week for DeepOnion. The developers hinted that "Stealth Addresses" will be coming very soon to DeepOnion to protect your anonymity when sending/receiving $ONIONs.

Another piece of news is that, starting next week, the amount of $ONIONs in the AirDrop is going up to 300k $ONIONs every week. So next week all participants can expect a slight rise in their $ONION distribution. That is something I am looking forward to!

Going back a bit, what are Stealth Addresses you might wonder?

Stealth Addresses is a way to do transactions "outside the public BlockChain". To try and explain it, a stealth address is something you can use to receive $ONIONs without it being linked to you. The stealth address you use to receive funds is used by each sender to generate a new, completely unique, address on the blockchain. Even though the sender creates the new address, the funds inside can only be accessed by you. An outside observer will not be able to link that address to your wallet or "original" stealth address.

An example

I have seen numerous people to try and explain it but it always left me a bit confused. So I ventured out to try and give a more complete view of it through and example:

So let's say you have some $ONIONs in a wallet address (Original Address) but due to postings on forums and previous transactions done you feel that people know that this is your address and people can see what you are doing with your $ONIONs. Maybe you also want to receive some new $ONIONs to your wallet (from Sender 1 and Sender 2) but don't want it to be linked to you. Here is where Stealth Addresses can come in. For an illustration see the figure below.

You start by sharing your Stealth Address "New" with Sender 1 and Sender 2 (No need to share the address with yourself, you already know it). Based on "NEW", that you shared Sender 1 and Sender 2 each generate unique addresses: "Gen 1" and "Gen 2" and send the $ONIONs to the respective address.

To follow up you yourself generate three separate addresses (based on "NEW"): "Org Gen 1", "Org Gen 2" and "Org Gen 3" to which you split up your existing $ONIONs (in some random distribution for obscurity). Only you yourself will know that "Gen 1", "Gen 2", "Org Gen 1", "Org Gen 2" and "Org Gen 3" are all connected to "NEW" and accessable only by you. Why this is the case is basically due to the fact that only you have access to the private key of "NEW" and the private keys of the generated addresses all are based on "NEW".

Who knows what?!
From the BlockChain perspective the transactions all went to these "generated addresses" but only you as a recipient knows that these are all linked to you. Each sender only knows about their own generated address and that it is linked to you. But Sender 1 won't know about "Gen 2", same for Sender 2 about "Gen 1". Neither Sender will know about: "Org Gen 1", "Org Gen 2" and "Org Gen 3".

An outside observer that has been monitoring your "Original Address" will know that you have sent $ONIONs to "Org Gen 1", "Org Gen 2" and "Org Gen 3" but they can't be sure if those addresses are all linked to you or to some friend you gave something to (or something else entirely). But the observer will know nothing of "Gen 1" and "Gen 2" so he will have no idea of the total amount that is linked to "NEW" or even the address of "NEW".

As you can see it is not fully anonymous yet but at least you can make your $ONIONs "unlinkable" to your ID and any single address.

The great part is that you can easily make it even more abscure by generating another Stealth Address "New 2" and send funds from "Gen 1", "Gen 2", "Org Gen 1", "Org Gen 2" and "Org Gen 3" to newly generated addresses from "NEW 2". It will then be even harder for an outside observer to link which addresses belong to you.

I hope this shed some light on what Stealth addresses are and how they can be used to "unlink" the connection of your $ONIONs to your personal identity/wallet address. Share the likes if you enjoyed the read and look forward to further updates on DeepOnion!