Confidential Asset Demo

Introduction

The Confidential Transactions / Assets feature of Elements Core allows competing parties to interact within the same block chain without revealing crucial information to each other, such as how much of a given asset was transferred in a given period.

This is a simple demonstration showing a scenario where a coffee shop (Dave the merchant) charges a customer (Alice) for coffee using a given type of asset, which the customer does not presently hold. To facilitate the purchase, the customer makes use of a point exchange system (Charlie) to convert one of their other assets into the one Dave accepts.

Bob is a competitor trying to gather info about Dave's sales. Due to the CT/CA feature of Elements Core, the idea is that he will not see anything useful at all by processing transactions on the block chain.

Fred is completely uninteresting but necessary as he makes blocks on the block chain when transactions enter his mempool.

Prerequisites

The demo uses the following libraries/tools:

Installation (Go and jq):

(linux) using apt as golang-1.7 and jq
(macOS) using brew as golang and jq

Installation and set up

The demo is written in Go with some HTML/JS components for UI related stuff.

The demo must be built. This can be done using the build.sh script.

There are five nodes, one for each party mentioned above, as well as several assets that must be generated and given to the appropriate party before the demo will function. This can be automated using the start_demo.sh script. For this to work, you must have elementsd, elements-tx, and elements-cli in the path. E.g. by doing export PATH=$PATH:/home/me/workspace/elements/src or alternatively by doing make install from elements/src beforehand.

start_demo.sh essentially does the following: