Bitcoin, as the best ledger of all time, would be great at forever recording the details of all our transactions for personal accounting purposes. “Third installment to Ray Peterson on personal loan.” “Payment for monthly Viagra refill.” “Purchase of How to Save Your Marriage lecture series.”
But the Bitcoin blockchain is public, and any such notations on the transactions themselves would put a serious dent in Bitcoin’s excellent privacy offering.
Tapeke’s developers understand that you want the details of where you money comes from and where it goes to be as private as possible, while also needing to manage them. You need to delineate which bitcoins are salary, interest, donations, savings, dividends, living expenses, reinvestment—not to mention who sent them to you, where they’ll go next, and how each month’s balance sheets compare.
How can you track your bitcoins and keep your accounting private?
“Bitcoin favors the curious, and it has some very important lessons to teach. One of the biggest lessons is that privacy actually does matter, and preserving one’s privacy is not abjectly suspicious.”
So reads the announcement of Tapeke, the zero-knowledge Bitcoin accounting software, set to launch in private beta on December 8. Answering a question about the software’s “zero-knowledge” (submitted by Vitalik Buterin), a Tapeke project designer said on Reddit:
“We implemented our own protocol using a combination of AES encryption, window.crypto property and RSA keys. You can choose between three different levels of encryption for your account: with Medium and Advanced encryption we are not able to see your addresses/balances/transactions/statistics.”
It also never asks for your private keys.
Tapeke (pronounced tdah-PEE-key) is a Maori word meaning "total," "balance," or "sum of all leaving none behind." The software provides labeling for addresses (like “mom” or “Satoshi Nakamoto” or “Cindy, that awesome masseuse”). It also generates graphical analytics for expenditure/revenue categories.
The developers have also said they’d like to work on more features, including Mixed Transaction Awareness (for your CoinJoin transactions), multiple cryptocurrency support (hello, Darkcoin), budgeting tools, online exchange integration, trading portfolio analytics and even mining accounting.
“We are currently negotiating with respected members of the Bitcoin community who share our persistent advocacy for online privacy to independently audit the Tapeke code base and zero-knowledge process,” continues the announcement. “Any vulnerabilities or issues uncovered by the audits, as well as their resolution, will be shared transparently with the community.
“We’ll learn how to make trustless apps and services together.”
Did you enjoy this article? You may also be interested in reading these ones: