This is the first in a 10-episode video series focusing on Bitcoin privacy, filmed in Bitcoin++ Privacy Editions such as Riga. Each episode touches on some of Bitcoin’s privacy, tools that use Bitcoin personally, or surveillance techniques.
Privacy is the head and censorship resistance is the tail. They are both sides of the same coin.
Everything people do together is interactive in nature. If these interactions cannot be done personally, participants are subject to external pressure once they become general public knowledge. They can be shunned, shamed, imprisoned or punished in many other ways.
Without privacy, there is no resistance to censorship. Without privacy, most people censor themselves.
In this first episode, we sit down with Spiral’s Yuval Kogman to discuss privacy in the modern digital age. Bitcoin is digital money, and by its nature leaves bread crumbs everywhere, like everything else in our lives, digitalized by computing technology and the Internet.
These crumbs, combined with the computing technology that created them in the first place, have fundamentally changed the environment in which people interact with each other, especially when there is some form of power asymmetry (i.e., governor vs. ruler).
Those with the ability to pick up and analyze these crumbs can apply the technique to provide disproportionate control over others.
Click on the image below to see the lecture.
Source: https://bitcoinmagazine.com/technical/bitcoin-privacy-the-effects-of-surveillance-on-society
