S2024:E21
New updates to the Jamtis addressing protocol would allow for a tier of light wallets with even greater privacy guarantees and scaling benefits. Before these changes, light wallet servers could tell a client received funds if those funds were sent twice to the same Jamtis address. They could also tell if a client received funds if those funds were sent to a Jamtis address known to the light wallet server. Finally, a light wallet server could identify churning and pocket-change style transactions of the client with high probability. Recent developments to Jamtis fix all those privacy issues, hopefully paving the way for (almost) totally non-deterministic light wallet implementations. In addition to privacy boosts, the addition of “flexible view-tags” provide the ability for the community to react to scaling concerns regarding light wallets, adjusting the balance between privacy and computation demands, without requiring network updates. We discuss the pros/cons of these changes in detail, what is theoretically still left to solve, as well as how these changes could enable real-world use cases.