Bitcoin logo on a smartphone with trading chart in background. Source: TechGaged / Shutterstock. Bitcoin could get real privacy without a single consensus change. Researchers published a new proposal this week. It borrows heavily from Zcash’s own playbook. No soft fork required. The paper sits directly on Alloc Init’s site, the cryptography research firm behind it. Published September 24 by Clara Shikhelman, Mikhail Komarov, and Aleksei Moskvin, it introduces a metaprotocol called Shielded Bitcoin.