Taproot And FROST Improve Bitcoin Privacy – Bitcoin Magazine

This is an opinion editorial by Dan Gould and Nick Farrow. Gould is a developer who worked on TumbleBit, PayJoin and Chaincase App and has been sponsored by Human Rights Foundation and Geyser Grants. Farrow is an Australian Bitcoin engineer best known for his open source payment processor SatSale.

“Hey, I just got an invite to this hackathon in Malaysia,” said Evan Lin, interrupting my flow over my laptop in the Taipei Hackerspace. “That sounds magic,” I snapped back. “Can I come?”

I’d been smacking my head on the desk for weeks. Lin had been tearing apart my idea of what bitcoin privacy was. “It’s a private event, not your typical hackathon. I can ask.”

One flight, two weeks, and six minutes of voice message logistics later, we were walking down durian-lined streets of Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, with Lloyd Fournier, ruminating over a shared passion to make bitcoin privacy stick. Now we were a team. We set out to upgrade Fedimint using half-polished cryptography, some scribbled-down notes, and then demo it at the first-ever Malaysian BitDevs meetup five days later.

Fournier had joined Nick Farrow to develop FROST, a new threshold cryptography that takes advantage of Taproot, in the months prior. Being a fountain of Bitcoin human resources, Fournier had also been working closely with Lin who is a Bitcoin Dev Kit (BDK) contributor. He and I had spent the last few weeks upgrading PayJoin privacy under fluorescent lights during the wee hours in Taipei, Taiwan, so we’d established trust to jump in the deep end on a project together. Fournier’s invitation was a step to the edge. To demonstrate the cutting edge cryptography to the world, we had to put FROST in an app. Fedimint had everyone’s eyeballs for its new threshold custody model. It was fit for the quest.