According to CoinMeta, as reported by Coin Bureau, a new paper proposes that Bitcoin could achieve privacy transfers similar to those of Zcash without undergoing a soft fork. This protocol, named “shielded bitcoin”, aims to directly hide the amount, sender, and recipient of each transaction on Bitcoin while using zero-knowledge proofs to maintain the verifiability of each transfer. The white paper points out that Bitcoin’s transaction history is permanently public, and on-chain analysis can usually associate addresses with their owners. With the use of “shielded bitcoin”, users can still share read-only keys with auditors to prove payments.