What would be the best way, if any, that one could change their address/account in order to make themselves unknown or hard to identify by people they traded with? More specifically, if I send ETH to someone, is there a way to prevent them from knowing exactly how much ETH I own?
Obviously I could create another account and transfer my ETH there, but it wouldn't be too hard for someone to "follow the money", especially if I use it to store ether and that only one transaction leads to it.
I could also create multiple accounts and split my ETH among them, but it doesn't seem efficient, is there anything better?
Best Answer
As far as I know the ideas in this article are not implemented yet, but take a look at it. It's an idea developed by Gav and Vlad when they were both on the Ethereum c++ core team.
Basically the idea is to have a smart contract that given two sets of address sources: source and destination, guarantees exactly one of the following two possible outcomes:
For each address in source the owner of the address controls an address in destination. The smart contract does some "magic" to ensure there is no way to track who's controlling which address. Thus you have your privacy.
If any address tries to tamper with the inner workings of the smart contract the address will be punished and the others rewarded. Thus making it very unappealing to cheat.
Because the credible threat of punishment, very few attempts to cheat are expected and thus normal operation will lead to the first guarantee only.
source.