I was reading through Dusk’s docs and one thing stood out to me that I hadn’t really thought about before.
Privacy on Dusk doesn’t necessarily mean hiding everything from everyone.
There are actually different ways transactions can work. Moonlight is the transparent account model, while Phoenix is designed for shielded transactions. With Phoenix, details like who sent funds, who received them and how much was transferred aren’t simply sitting there for everyone to see.
But there’s another part that I found more interesting: view keys.
They basically create a way for transaction information to stay private publicly while still being accessible to an authorized party when there’s a legitimate reason to see it.
At first that sounds like a small technical detail, but for financial applications it makes quite a bit of sense. A person probably doesn’t want their financial history visible to random people on a block explorer. At the same time, a company dealing with regulated assets may still need to provide certain information to auditors or other authorized parties.
I can see why Dusk has taken this middle-ground approach.
The confusing part is that someone hearing “privacy blockchain” could easily assume everything on Dusk has the same level of privacy automatically. That’s not really how it works. The transaction model and the way an application is built still matter.
Maybe that’s actually the more useful way to think about blockchain privacy: not “can anyone see this?” but “who should be able to see it, and under what circumstances?”
Curious whether that distinction will matter more as regulated assets continue moving onchain.
$DUSK #dusk @Dusk
Privacy on Dusk doesn’t necessarily mean hiding everything from everyone.
There are actually different ways transactions can work. Moonlight is the transparent account model, while Phoenix is designed for shielded transactions. With Phoenix, details like who sent funds, who received them and how much was transferred aren’t simply sitting there for everyone to see.
But there’s another part that I found more interesting: view keys.
They basically create a way for transaction information to stay private publicly while still being accessible to an authorized party when there’s a legitimate reason to see it.
At first that sounds like a small technical detail, but for financial applications it makes quite a bit of sense. A person probably doesn’t want their financial history visible to random people on a block explorer. At the same time, a company dealing with regulated assets may still need to provide certain information to auditors or other authorized parties.
I can see why Dusk has taken this middle-ground approach.
The confusing part is that someone hearing “privacy blockchain” could easily assume everything on Dusk has the same level of privacy automatically. That’s not really how it works. The transaction model and the way an application is built still matter.
Maybe that’s actually the more useful way to think about blockchain privacy: not “can anyone see this?” but “who should be able to see it, and under what circumstances?”
Curious whether that distinction will matter more as regulated assets continue moving onchain.
$DUSK #dusk @Dusk