The future of privacy on Bitcoin

It’s possible, but difficult, to transact privately with Bitcoin today. Users who take advantage of CoinJoins and related techniques and exercise good operations security can retain their financial privacy. A variety of tools have emerged to facilitate transacting and trading privately. This process is becoming easier through improvements to tooling, layer-two networks, and the Bitcoin network’s core protocol.

One of the main avenues to improve Bitcoin’s privacy is through upgrades to the network’s base layer. Bitcoin has largely ossified, and consensus-modifying hard forks that are incompatible with legacy versions of the software are typically shunned. However, upgrades through backwards-compatible soft forks, which still allow legacy nodes to verify the validity of the blockchain, are generally accepted.