Mining and staking privacy
Your miner payout and your finalizer are not the same thing. The chain never links them.
Miner
Transparent payout
Coinbase pays a Zcash address. A t-address history is public.
Finalizer
zfinv1 key
An ed25519 key. It signs votes. It is not a Zcash address.
Bond
Shielded stake
Lives in the staking pool. Names a target finalizer.
The order that matters
1 Mine→2 Shield→3 Bond
Skip the shield and the private step never happens. A bond does not erase a transparent coinbase.
What is public
| Thing | Public? | Why |
|---|
| Miner t-address and coinbase history | Yes | Normal transparent outputs |
| Finalizer key and zfinv1 | Yes, once on the roster | It has to be, to verify votes |
| Voting power and reward bank | Yes | Published against the finalizer key so stake distribution can be audited |
| Which transparent address funded a bond | No, after a shield | The bond spends shielded notes |
| Link from your miner to your finalizer | Not on chain | Nothing in the protocol writes it |
Staked amounts are revealed on purpose. The design needs the total staked and the distribution across finalizers to be publicly checkable. Quantization (powers of 10) and fixed staking windows limit how much individual timing or pattern information leaks while still allowing that audit. Unstaked Orchard balances stay private; staking is the intentional disclosure.
Stake to yourself, or to someone else
Bond to your own finalizer
Simplest. You keep the operator role and the bond. An observer still cannot prove the t-address and the zfinv1 are one person from chain data alone.
Bond to another member
The voting power shows under their key. They earn the 10% active-finalizer commission. You keep the 90% that accrues on the bond. This breaks the obvious guess that the miner receiving the transparent payout is the same person operating the finalizer.
A group can mine on separate payout addresses, shield, and bond across members. That makes "this miner is this finalizer" much harder to claim from chain data. It does not hide who the finalizers are, and it does not hide the mining.
What this does not do
Not hidden
- Who the finalizers are
- How much voting power each one has
- Your transparent mining history
- A link you create off-chain: one IP, one payout pattern, one operator
The target zfinv1 is inside the staking action. Privacy here is about the source of the funds, not about hiding the destination key.
Short version
Mine. Shield. Then bond. The miner address and the finalizer key stay unrelated unless you connect them yourself.
