Research corpus PrivacyBLC-STUDY-0071

Confidential Transactions

Hide the amounts on a Bitcoin-style transaction with Pedersen commitments, and use range proofs so a commitment cannot stand for a negative number. The graph of who paid whom stays visible.

Official external source only
Design paper
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Record

Authors: Gregory Maxwell
Date: 2015
Publisher: Gregory Maxwell
Version: Source cited by the 2015 study. The study is the reading. This page does not add a second essay.
Document ID: BLC-STUDY-0071
DOI: None recorded
Last reviewed: 1 October 2026
Licence: No licence recorded. Rights status under review.

No hash is published. This build does not store those PDF bytes, so a checksum would be invented. Where a legacy path exists, it points at the Internet Archive copy of the old library.

Direct answer

Hide the amounts on a Bitcoin-style transaction with Pedersen commitments, and use range proofs so a commitment cannot stand for a negative number. The graph of who paid whom stays visible.

Where to read

Official source — Elements Project
Blockchain Lab study, the canonical readingOriginal commentary. Not a transcription of the paper.

Metadata and commentary only. The reading is the study page.

Full text

Full text is not published on this page. Public availability is not a licence to republish a document. Blockchain Lab has not recorded a licence that permits an HTML transcription, a training set, or a retrieval corpus of the paper. Text on this page is Blockchain Lab's own wording, or a pointer to a study that is also Blockchain Lab's wording.

What changed

The study separates the text from later network behaviour. This bibliographic page does not repeat that essay.

Relationships

Canonical readingConfidential Transactions study
Related paperBulletproofs
Related paperMonero
Related paperZerocash

Cite this record

These citations point at the source document. They are not a licence to copy it.

Author–date

Maxwell, G. (2015). Confidential Transactions. Gregory Maxwell. https://elementsproject.org/features/confidential-transactions

BibTeX

@techreport{confidentialtransactions2015,
  title = {Confidential Transactions},
  author = {Gregory Maxwell},
  year = {2015},
  institution = {Gregory Maxwell},
  url = {https://elementsproject.org/features/confidential-transactions},
  note = {Rights status: Official external source only. Blockchain Lab record: https://blockchainlab.com/research/corpus/papers/confidential-transactions}
}

RIS

TY  - RPRT
TI  - Confidential Transactions
AU  - Gregory Maxwell
PY  - 2015
PB  - Gregory Maxwell
UR  - https://elementsproject.org/features/confidential-transactions
N1  - Rights status: Official external source only
ER  -

CSL-JSON

[
  {
    "type": "report",
    "id": "BLC-STUDY-0071",
    "title": "Confidential Transactions",
    "author": [
      {
        "literal": "Gregory Maxwell"
      }
    ],
    "issued": {
      "date-parts": [
        [
          2015
        ]
      ]
    },
    "publisher": "Gregory Maxwell",
    "URL": "https://elementsproject.org/features/confidential-transactions",
    "note": "Rights status: Official external source only. Not a licence to republish the paper."
  }
]

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Rights record

Source status: Official source
Use status: Metadata and commentary only. The reading is the study page.
Rights: Official external source only
Training and retrieval: Not permitted from this site. There is no rights-cleared full text to retrieve or to train on.

Rights and licensing Corrections