Herrera Sufán, R. (2021). Speeding up Monero’s balance computation. Unpublished M.S. Thesis, Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile.
Added by: Rucknium (24/02/2022, 22:40)
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Abstract
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Cryptocurrencies have established themselves as relevant digital assets that aim at becoming the main medium of exchange for the coming decades. With the fast adoption and increased user base, usability and privacy have become crucial aspects for their success. Monero is a digital currency that offers properties required for any asset to be considered a viable money replacement, especially with regards to privacy and security. However, to offer those features, Monero compromises usability in day-to-day operations, such as the balance computation. This particular operation is slow due to the mandatory need to scan the whole Monero blockchain in order to perform it. In this work, we provide ways to decrease the time taken for the balance operation while minimally compromising non-critical private elements. Specifically, we first introduce a procedure to generate multiple consolidation transactions that allow users to avoid a full scan of the blockchain each time they need to retrieve their balance, reducing computation times significantly by only spending minimal amounts of money. We also provide schemes that use indexing techniques to retrieve one user transaction history in less time and therefore enable to compute the balance faster, only revealing the number of transactions to outside observers. We finally show how to take advantage of the proposed schemes by outlining third-party services and wallets that help the user offload part of the balance computation in new and secure ways. Throughout all our work, we discuss the compromises and trade-offs incurred when modifying the current state of Monero’s protocol by introducing our various improved proposals since we aim to keep most privacy guarantees while offering usability improvements.
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