The War On Financial Privacy Is Escalating
The stakes have never been higher. The state is losing its grasp of control over the people and it is doubling down on utter incompetence and nefariousness.The below is a direct excerpt of Marty's Bent Issue #1248: “The privacy wars have escalated.” Sign up for the newsletter here.The U.S. Treasury decided to come out of the woodwork and send a shot across the bow of the “crypto” industry yesterday by adding the open-source privacy project Tornado Cash that runs on Ethereum to the list of sanctioned entities. In the process, the department highlighted a few things: The U.S. federal....
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Although one may assume that the demand for privacy in Bitcoin and other blockchain-based systems is coming from crypto-anarchists and libertarians, the reality is that a huge push for concealing transactions on the blockchain is coming from the traditional financial industry. During a recent cryptocurrency event at the Cato Institute, Zcash CEO and longtime cypherpunk Zooko Wilcox-O’Hearn made the point that banks, clearinghouses, payment processors and everyone else he’s talked to in the financial industry are the ones who are asking for more privacy on the blockchain. During a panel....
When a random person on the street in the United States is asked about bitcoin, he or she will usually respond that it is some sort of internet currency used to buy drugs online — if they’ve heard of it at all. While bitcoin is far from anonymous and private in its current form, the desire for enhanced privacy features is not just about buying drugs from AlphaBay. In a recent presentation at the Coinbase headquarters in San Francisco, California, Monero developer Riccardo “FluffyPony” Spagni described a variety of situations where financial privacy is desirable outside of breaking the law.....
How private is your bitcoin wallet? The Open Bitcoin Privacy Project (OBPP), a global, not-for-profit organization devoted to improving financial privacy in the bitcoin ecosystem, attempts to offer some guidance with its Bitcoin Privacy Rating Report. OBPP has released its second edition of the report, scoring 20 wallets on their privacy features. The top ranking in this report goes to Ledger, which earned a score of 50 out of 100 possible points, based on usability, quality and feedback. OBPP’s goal is to make financial privacy visible so that users can make informed choices about privacy....
South Korean financial watchdogs are about to start overseeing crypto-related activities in the nation, and additional barriers for exchanges keep appearing. Moreover, one of the South Korean regulatory bodies codified the measures announced last year on privacy coin listings. No Major Domestic Exchanges Can List a Privacy-Centric Crypto-Asset According to Electronic Times, the Financial Services Commission’s Financial Intelligence Unit (FIU) confirmed that all privacy coins would be delisted from the domestic cryptocurrency exchanges. The watchdog argued that difficulties in....
Bitcoin is often advertised as an anonymous digital currency that offers a high level of user privacy. People can hide their identities behind a wallet address, and generate additional addresses if needed. But is Bitcoin as anonymous and privacy-centric as uneducated people assume? The answers might surprise you. Right now, there is a decent level of customer privacy in business. But it only exists on a conditional basis. In the current financial infrastructure, any bank can and will disclose any personal information if the government requests it. While this may not be of great concern for....