Subject: [bitcoin-dev] A thought experiment on bitcoin for payroll privacy

From: "Mr. Lee Chiffre" <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 2 Oct 2020 22:21:17 -0700

Lets pretend that I have a company. I'll call it cut throat industries. We
are a box cutter testing firm. HR pays the employees biweekly Fridays. In
the current way. Cut throat industries pays a single transaction with the
company's  treasury as the input and each employee payroll as an output.
There is no address reuse because HR has a xpub provided by each employee
for their payroll wallet. I have 120 employees.

The problem

The concern is the competition of my precious company and employees seeing
our worth and amount in our treasury account. This also exposes how many
employees we have and an idea of what the average payroll is. One of my
employees is Frank. Frank gets paid then a couple days later he buys some
random thing that should not be talked about from a coworker. The coworker
can observe Franks input and know what Frank makes. There is another time
where cut throat industries is in a temporary financial clamp down. To
save money my company is not giving bonuses for the rest of the fiscal
year. But one employee of mine has done a very good job at cutting and I
was afraid he was going to leave my agency if I did not make an exception
for him. So I gave him a raise but not others. Employees notice that one
of the 120 biweekly outputs is higher than usual. So they know someone got
a raise.

Problem summary

I am paranoid because I run a company with my finances transparent to my
competition and my employees. And my employees are starting to get
concerned because their income is transparent to everyone also. These
employees are dangerous and professional cutters. I don't want to upset
them. What can I do to use bitcoin with privacy to eliminate these
concerns? Lightning network is not much an option because they do not have
inbound balance to get paid. I cannot front up funds of my own to give
them inbound balance because it would consume all of my treasury to lock
up funds. So it seems that I have to do payroll on chain. What do I do?

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