According to Blockstream mathematician and research director Andrew Poelstra, modern Internet companies have gone too far. He thinks that companies are simply now sucking up customer data, to sell it to third parties without the owner’s consent. All this is considered bad from an ethical point of view in terms of privacy, it can even be considered as collective espionage.

Security experts predict that with this data, Artificial Intelligence systems will be able to predict what a person will do next by following the data traces. Even more alarming when compared to the dystopias of real-life science fiction books and films.

Poelstra is trying to combine her love of math and the Bitcoin (BTC) ecosystem to try to give more privacy to online money. The mathematician has been formulating mathematical equations and writing code, to hide the bitcoin “trails”. The trails are the traces of personal information – who you are, what you buy, for how much – that can be collected when you make online transactions using bitcoin.

Scriptless Scripts Privacy Project

Poelstra’s recent work revolves around a project called “Scriptless Scripts”, which allows for smart contracts for bitcoin that do not use as much data.

More complex smart contracts can sometimes require a large amount of data. These offer the ability to perform more complicated types of transactions. But this becomes an obstacle to smart contract platforms if more privacy is to be sought in the future.

According to Poelstra, scriptless scripts can help improve the privacy of lightning payments, those that take place in bitcoin’s layer-two scaling technology that pushes transactions out of the blockchain.

Coming Soon….

Scriptless scripts could be implemented very soon. As such, they would only need to officially ally themselves with the Schnorr platform, a technology initiated by veteran bitcoin developer Pieter Wuille, to be implemented. Both parties are aware of this and have affirmed their cooperation in the future.

Among the plans of potential allies, Poelstra is also targeting Taproot. Created by Greg Maxwell, longtime senior contributor to bitcoin. The idea is that Scriptless Scripts provide the even larger private Lightning Network (LN). Making all bitcoin transactions look the same, as they could not be difference between on-chain and lightning’s off-chain transactions..