Monero Stack Exchange is a question and answer site for developers and users of the secure, private and untraceable cryptocurrency Monero. It only takes a minute to sign up.
Sign up to join this community
Can Monero's privacy features be integrated into (copied) by bitcoin? If so, to what degree given the current political gridlock?
By the way, I'm a true believer and I'm setting up a full node as I type this. I'm also buying a monster GPU to up the hashrate and increase the security.
The simple answer would be no. The codebases simply aren't in any way similar. Bitcoin devs would need to do a massive rewrite of the code to implement ring sigs with confidential transactions, it would require a hardfork and would likely break functionality with code outside of Bitcoin such as wallets and such.
The longer answer would be maybe. It could possibly be integrated as a sidechain, but even then, it would not be as private as Monero's implementation as it would not protect fungibility on the Bitcoin blockchain, so chainalysis would still be possible, albeit harder. Given that, it would likely be a huge amount of effort for little gain.
One of the key privacy features for Monero goes beyond the use of stealth addresses, ring signatures and confidential transactions (coming January '17). More so it's the fact that all of these features are default-on. That's a tremendous improvement over competitors today, all of which offer optional private transactions with the default being transparent. Integrating default privacy preserving transactions in Bitcoin is an essentially impossible hurdle to overcome without a complete rewrite. Bitcoin could incorporate some of these features in a side chain or through the lightning network but they'll always be optional, reducing the use and therefore the privacy of all Bitcoin users.
