This is the first of a series of 10 episodes focused on Bitcoin’s privacy, shot at the Bitcoin ++ Privacy Edition in Riga and elsewhere. Each episode will touch some aspects of Bitcoin privacy, a tool for using Bitcoin privately or surveillance techniques.
Privacy is responsible, censorship resistance is a tail. These are two sides of the same coin.
All that people do together is intrinsically interactive. When these interactions cannot be conducted privately, when they become common public knowledge, participants can be subjected to external pressure. They can be avoided, shameful, imprisoned or penalized in many other ways.
Without privacy you don’t have censorship resistance. Without privacy, most people will censor.
In this first episode, I sit with Spiral’s Yuval Kogman to discuss privacy in the modern was digital. Bitcoin is a digital money and, like all the rest of our life that has been digitized by computer technology and the internet leaves bread crumbs everywhere by its nature.
These crumbs of bread, in combination with the computer technology that created them first, have radically changed the environment in which people interact with each other, in particular where some form of asymmetry of power exists (i.e. the government against the governed).
Those with the ability to collect and analyze those crumbs of bread can apply technology to exercise disproportionate control over other people.
Click the image below to look at the speech:
