Proving a Number Is In A Given Range Without Revealing The Number: Meet Bulletproofs
We live in a 1980s viewpoint of data.
Very little of our data transactions and logs can be truly trusted. Along with this, we also reveal a great deal of information in the records that we keep.
We thus need to move to a more trusted world, and where we can trust each transaction, but make sure they are privacy-preserving. We now see cryptocurrencies rushing to protect the details of transactions — such as with Ethereum using zkSnarks, Monero implementing Ring Signatures and Bulletproofs, and Bitcoin looking towards Mimblewimble. Our ledger will thus increasingly look like an anonymised list of transactions, and where the sender, the receiver and the transaction detail will be anonymised. At the core of much of this work is the CT (Confidential Transaction) and where we use Pedersen Commitments to blind the data.
Overall our data world of the future could look like this, and where we have an anonymised lowest layer, and then reveals parts of it to implement things like finance and health care:
