Welcome!

Any privacy enhancement is welcome. I personally would love to see something inline wit Firo's solution but maybe that could be the next step.
Also wondering if this will/could cause issues with the ongoing work for getting our MiCA licensing ?

Keep up the great work!

Hey Dashers,

Your friendly neighborhood UX guy here—straight outta Eastern Europe, where the winters are so cold you’d trade your left boot for a bowl of borsch, and the pierogi (pies) are thicker than my cousin’s skull after he bet against me in a wine-drinking contest. No Nigerian princes or fancy titles in my lineage, just a babushka who’d become a president if she had some greater support (RIP babushka). So, let’s dive into this CT business—Confidential Transactions, not some sci-fi brain scan (though both have that mysterious vibe, don’t they?).

Why CT is like adding sprinkles—nah, a whole freakin’ layer—to our digital cash cake:
Dash is already the smoothest digital cash out there. It’s fast, it’s cheap, and it’s easier to use than convincing my uncle to stop haggling at the flea market. Think of it like my cousin’s “discount” electronics—except, you know, actually legal and reliable. But CT? That’s the turbocharger we’ve been waiting for. It hides transaction amounts, wrapping your financial business in a cloak of privacy tighter than a babushka’s secret recipe for cabbage rolls—everyone knows she’s got one, but good luck figuring out what’s in it.

Right now, we’ve got CoinJoin doing the privacy dance, and it works—sort of. It’s like waiting for babushka to knit you a sweater: you’ll get there eventually, but you’re freezing your butt off in the meantime. CT could flip that script, making privacy instant—like dodging a muddy splash from a Soviet-era Lada speeding through a pothole. Faster privacy isn’t just a nice-to-have; it’s a game-changer. More users hop on board, adoption spikes, and Dash moons harder than a SpaceX rocket fueled by Elon’s wildest tweets. We’re talking lambos-in-the-driveway territory, people—or at least a new tractor for my village back home.

Hold up, let’s not trip over our own babushka’s slippers. Before we pop the champagne (or the homemade cherry wine), we’ve got some work to do. Here’s the rundown:

Testing, Testing, 1-2-3 (and Maybe 4-5-6): We can’t just slap CT on Dash and call it a day. This needs to be tested like babushka tests her pierogi dough—pinch it, stretch it, boil it, fry it, make sure it holds up when the heat’s on. If it’s flimsy, it’ll fall apart faster than a cheap umbrella in an Amsterdam storm. CT’s gotta be bulletproof—think T-34 tank vibes—or it’s as useful as serving soup with a fork. Messy, embarrassing, and you’re still hungry.

Keep It Simple, Stupid (KISS—Not the Band):
Privacy features can get complicated quick.

Explaining crypto to your average Joe is already like trying to teach my vodka-soaked uncle about NFTs at a wedding—he’s nodding, but you know he’s not getting it.

CT needs to be so dead-simple that even my technophobe cousin—who still thinks “the cloud” is where rain comes from—can use it without accidentally broadcasting his beer money to the blockchain. User-friendly is the name of the game, folks. If it’s not intuitive, it’s just a fancy toy for nerds.

And Who’s This PUP Character Sneaking Around?
Power Up Privacy—PUP for short. Sounds snappy, right?

Like a superhero squad for blockchain geeks. But hold the pierogi— who are these guys?

Are they as legit as a Moldavian wedding, where everyone’s drunk on joy and hospitality? Or are they shadier than a KGB agent lurking in a trench coat, muttering about “state secrets”?

I’d love to dig into their funding, their track record, their whole deal. If they’re the real McCoy, fantastic—let’s team up and make Dash unstoppable.

If they’re sketchy, well, I’ve watched enough Cold War spy flicks to know when to keep my distance. Spill the tea, PUP—my babushka’s intuition is tingling.

The Big Picture (because i know you want the bottom line):
CT could catapult Dash to the top of the digital cash food chain—private, fast, and so user-friendly even my grandma could send me crypto for my birthday (instead of socks… again).

It’s the cherry, whipped cream, and extra sprinkles on top of what I’m building as your humble UX Product Designer.

I’m stoked to see this happen—just don’t ask me to explain it to my babushka in broken Polish over Skype. She’d probably tell me to stop playing with “internet money” and go chop some firewood instead.

So there you have it, fam. CT’s our ticket to the big leagues, but we’ve gotta do it right—test it, simplify it, and make sure PUP’s not pulling a fast one.

Let’s keep Dash rolling like a well-oiled Eastern European tractor: steady, strong, and ready to plow through anything.

Keep it real, bmd signing out

This does seem to be the winning solution to privacy. I'd like to see coinjoin remain as a choice, though.

Fake anonymity that can easily be broken by a 'compliance' masterkey, which will be given to tax authorities i.e. the last ones you´d want to look into a transaction?

And all implemented by unrelated third-party coders?

Who is going to audit the code they write, and who will take responsibility for merging their code?

CT has no master key. Individual private key holders must themselves give their own view keys in order for balances to become exposed.

The Core team oversees the codebase. All code merges would naturally be reviewed by them and merged. This proposal is simply for whether or not Dash should pursue CT.

Just makes absolutely no sense coming from a guy that promotes MiCA licensing and citing PYUSD which has a master key... so yeah, "private" if you exclude busybodies sticking their nose where it's not wanted.

Maybe the PO can explain how CTs are compatible with MiCA licensing because CoinGate - which was cited in the MiCA proposal - actually has ToS to confiscate funds coming from an anonymous address. I've checked but if you don't believe me, go look yourself.

AFAIK the PO went through KYC to get paid by the zcash foundation, feel free to declare or deny this. Quite the hypocrisy if true huh?

Are the Yes voters aware that the organization ("Power Up Privacy") website was registered in July 2024. We do not know much about this organization; it could well be a 3 letter agency honeypot. This is really quite important because CTs and ZKPs in general are entirely dependent on implementation... yes, the math is cool but a single bug in the implementation has the potential to break privacy. In fact, it is this very premise that DCG - and by extension MNOs - never did it before. It's nothing to do with "resources", the OGs here declared the utmost importance to being compatible with bitcoin's core philosophy of transparency RE: Ryan Taylor's efforts to defend dash from de-listings.

Are we saying that, once upon a time DCG was pro-transparency for reasons of compliance and de-listings, but dash governance is fluid and evolves to change it's mind? .. because if that's true, then I see absolutely no reason why the reverse decision wouldn't be made in the future, thereby shafting existing dash CT users.

With all that said, Samuel Westrich's support for this, plus his instigation of code to obfuscate voting - including from his own masternodes - frankly stinks. If he's such the hardcore privacy guy, why wasn't it at the core of Dash Platform? I predict his response will be "resources".. yet he's apparently willing to accept work from 3LAs?

Given that CT security is dependent on a rock solid implementation, why would ANYONE - apart from the obvious Yes voters here - use or trust dash CTs? People wanting financial privacy are already using well established coins like firo, beam and monero?

Just look at how these "decision proposals" work. They are basically polls for the PO that gets to choose what outcome they will accept. A model of influence and the ability to buy dash and vote. A single dashd daemon implementation, voting without mining and/or little-to-none expertise in the domain for any given proposal. I conclude with this paragraph because good governance should be front and center before any of this BS.

Very glad to see this finally come to a vote, and get some consensus on how the community feels on this topic.

Generally speaking, for myself only, I support adding CT.

Thanks for your support, and thanks for your guidance on this .

This is the way!

Splendid! YES !!!

Thanks for your support!

Fully support this — truly a powerful and important proposal for Dash. We can’t just focus on Platform; it’s time to keep moving forward.

Appreciate it!

As a digital cash coin, it is important for Dash to have the option to quickly 'privatize' our transparent funds before spending at merchants or doing a P2P transaction. CT allows us to do this instantly and then when we throw in non-standard denominational mixing rounds (CoinJoin) and you've got a very potent privacy upgrade with CT/CJ.

CJ has served us well for many years. With the addition of CT, we can InstantSend our privacy and likely beat out the likes of Monero, Zcash and Litecoin's MWEB in privacy chops.

Now think about this. Combine Dash's digital cash chops, a L1 instant privacy tech upgrade and our account-based system for DeFi (Evo Platform), we'll be unstoppable. So much winning, we won't know what to do with ourselves :-)

Voting YES (obviously)

Appreciate all your help with this!

One last thing I forgot, MNOs/eMNOs do not have to pay for the CT implementation.

Really great!
Thanks for all your efforts, Joël!

Appreciate it!

I support this proposal and I think it will improve the user experience for our users. While DCG does not have the resources to do this work I applaud the_desert_lynx's initiative and perseverance to get this done.

Appreciate it. Also thanks to Pasta for his initial suggestion of CT to improve CoinJoin and his guidance for the DIP.

With regards to OP statement 'CT is very time-tested cryptography, first proposed in 2013, implemented into mainnet cryptocurrencies since 2017. Of note, CT has recently become a favorite of top regulated stablecoin issuers Circle (USDC) and PayPal (PYUSD), both of which have CT features for their stablecoins. Circle in particular emphasizes CT as “confidentiality” as opposed to “anonymity,” a distinction top blockchain lawyers with whom we have consulted agree is increasingly pertinent with regulators.
'
ChatGPT : https://chatgpt.com/share/67e642ef-8de0-8004-b037-1a0a5af0dac3
DeepSeek : [img]https://i.imgur.com/CIRmSlc.jpeg[/img]

So i am not sure stablecoins USDC and PYUSD actually have CT features in them. Maybe the chatbots are not up to date, but both seem to indicate that PYUSD does not have CT features and USDC is exploring a (not full) CT feature for certain blockchains.

Having said that i do support this decision proposal.

Appreciate the support.

LLMs do have some trouble getting sometimes niche information. For PayPal, you can check their official whitepaper on page 8:
https://www.paypalobjects.com/devdoc/community/PYUSD-Solana-White-Paper.pdf

This was first made public at Consensus last August, where it was openly advertised. I'm not sure if Confidential Transfers is yet live in any PYUSD implementation, but it has been planned for numerous years and officially announced.

Circle's Confidential ERC-20 framework is much more specific: it outlines the hiding of balances and transfer amounts, and gives provisions for a view key which could be given to certain parties for compliance purposes. This is also a feature of every CT implementation I know of, where a blinding key can be given to third parties.
https://www.circle.com/blog/confidential-erc-20-framework-for-compliant-on-chain-privacy

Also with this, I'm not sure if it's currently live on any token, but it's clearly planned as part of a new extensive framework.