Snowball: The Effort to Bring Privacy to Every Bitcoin Wallet

To solve this, Woosley created a Bluetooth-based network, Snowball, to make it easier to make private bitcoin transactions, and based his technology on the concept of CoinJoins.

CoinJoins are one of the main bitcoin privacy technologies.

The Wasabi bitcoin wallet makes CoinJoins easy to use but, since CoinJoins are more difficult and expensive than normal bitcoin transactions, they only make up a small portion of the total bitcoin transactions despite having been around for years.

The goal is to get the technology to "Snowball" - hence the name - ensuring that every transaction will at least have the option of traversing the mesh network if the internet is unavailable.

The result is something Woolsey and team call Pay to EndPoint or P2EP. It's a new idea for achieving bitcoin privacy.

"It's a property that impacts everyone. But it's a public good in a sense. As more people make private transactions, it increases the privacy of everyone else," he said.

Plus, Woosley wants to "Undermine Chainalysis people." Right now, it's not so hard to figure out what transactions are owned by which people by using "Blockchain analysis," or looking through the history of bitcoin transactions to find patterns.

It might not be so easy to make private bitcoin transactions simple.

Some experts question whether it's the best way forward for private bitcoin transactions.

"It's not hard to see why P2EP and PayJoin doesn't really see any adoption. Every implementation is limited. JoinMarket only for JoinMarket users, BustaPay only for merchants, Snowball only for smartphones," said Adam Fiscor, developer of Wasabi, a leading privacy-minded bitcoin wallet that uses normal CoinJoins.