@Dusk_Foundation
At first I assumed privacy systems mostly try to erase traces of past activity.
But the more I looked at Phoenix, the more I noticed that spent notes are never removed from the Merkle tree. They stay there permanently, even after their value has already been used elsewhere. Double spending is prevented through nullifiers, not by deleting old records.
What caught my attention is that this design separates two ideas that are usually tied together: proving that something once existed, and proving whether it is still spendable. The network keeps the first part forever and tracks the second part somewhere else.
Maybe that is simply the cost of private accounting. A system that hides relationships between transactions may still need a growing memory of everything that ever happened, even if much of it is no longer economically active.
It made me think that privacy often doesn't remove information. It just moves where information lives and who can connect it.
So maybe the question isn't how much data a private system reveals. It's how much history it has to keep in order to stay private.
@Dusk_Foundation #dusk $DUSK
At first I assumed privacy systems mostly try to erase traces of past activity.
But the more I looked at Phoenix, the more I noticed that spent notes are never removed from the Merkle tree. They stay there permanently, even after their value has already been used elsewhere. Double spending is prevented through nullifiers, not by deleting old records.
What caught my attention is that this design separates two ideas that are usually tied together: proving that something once existed, and proving whether it is still spendable. The network keeps the first part forever and tracks the second part somewhere else.
Maybe that is simply the cost of private accounting. A system that hides relationships between transactions may still need a growing memory of everything that ever happened, even if much of it is no longer economically active.
It made me think that privacy often doesn't remove information. It just moves where information lives and who can connect it.
So maybe the question isn't how much data a private system reveals. It's how much history it has to keep in order to stay private.
@Dusk_Foundation #dusk $DUSK