Back in September when we hard forked to re-enable anonymous transactions we included an additional privacy layer to the Ghost blockchain. This additional layer, Dandelion++, was a nightmare for development to say the least. Those who have had experience implementing this protocol into their blockchain are aware of the monumental task Dandelion endures. The protocol was originally developed for Bitcoin back in 2017 (BIP156), but was never implemented. Because of this, programmers have to develop a large portion of the protocol itself to be compatible with their blockchain. This is especially true due to there being three levels of bitcoin-core being released since the inception of this protocol.
In the early stages of implementing Dandelion, ghost-core was crashing upon boot and in some cases unable to even boot. This is because the protocol works at the consensus level and executes traffic scrambling throughout the network’s nodes. Once Dandelion was able to communicate with the nodes in a manner that wouldn't crash the core, it was deemed successful and thus included in the preceding hard fork.
After further monitoring of how Dandelion was reacting in the production environment, our cryptographers determined the protocol posed a risk to the network. It was discovered that some functional tests were not processed by our lead dev at the time, which, would have exposed any complications remaining with Dandelion. Because Dandelion operates at the consensus level and the risks it posed, we were not able to simply turn off the protocol and continue with re-enabling RingCT.
With that being established, the past few months have been dedicated to temporarily removing Dandelion++ from the core, improving syncing, node propagation, and a rework for the solution to the original RingCT exploit found last March. Also included is another blockchain upgrade, Taproot. However, at the time of launch, Taproot will be disabled until a later date this year. Moving forward with anonymous transactions again, we have decided to remove Blind transactions. While we offer users the choice between public and private transactions, Blind proved to be pointless for our blockchain.
It should be stated again that Ghost was not exploited during the time before anonymous transactions were turned off, meaning the…
