Businesses Track Transactions, Bitcoin Privacy Matters – Bitcoin Magazine
Below is a direct excerpt from Marty’s Bent Issue #1260: “They use debit and credit card purchases to create lists.” Sign up for the newsletter here.
Jewish Population in Europe – note prepared for the Wannsee Conference. (Source)
via Reuters
Nothing highlights the need for bitcoin more poignantly than attacks on transactional privacy. Last week, a global standards body based in Geneva approved the ability for payment processors to issue a new trade code for companies that sell firearms to consumers. The idea behind the merchant code is that it will give law enforcement agencies the ability to more easily track down criminals who use these firearms to commit crimes, but one can be sure that creating a list of this kind sets the stage for abuse by despots in the future.
The fiat system that has been erected over the past five decades makes this kind of unfettered surveillance possible. The nature of KYC/AML (Know Your Customer/Anti-Money Laundering) injected into every layer of the financial stack that people are forced to interact with on a daily basis has made it impossible for the individual to escape the eye of Sauron . There is no way to fix this problem from within. The chance that governments and their corporate partners will one day wake up and decide they have a moral obligation to stop spying on people is rooted at 0%. The only way out is to build an entirely new financial system that doesn’t allow this kind of surveillance to be forced on the public, and this is exactly what Bitcoin provides.
Yes, bitcoin’s privacy assurances are subpar, and most people buy bitcoin by interacting with trusted third parties that engage in KYC/AML monitoring. However, I believe these secondary assurances and user behavior will change over time. As the tool improves, people will become smarter bitcoin users. Creating a culture without address reuse, coin control, and leveraging tools like Samourai’s Whirlpool will make the ability of chain monitoring companies to identify end users much more difficult, if not impossible. As bitcoin adoption increases and people start moving their UTXOs into wallets they control because it’s easier and they understand that’s where their bitcoin is strongest, the circular economy of bitcoin transactions that never hit services like introducing KYC/AML monitoring increase significantly. . Exacerbating the problems for chain monitoring companies.
Imagine a world where it has become completely normalized for merchants to accept bitcoin using BTCPay servers they control from customers using Samourai Wallet, BlueWallet, Muun Wallet or any other non-custodial solution on the market. The volume of transactions that will be facilitated that are completely untethered from the yoke of KYC/AML will at some point hit a critical tipping point, and the type of labeling that current payment processors attach to gun purchases will be impractical.
This is the future we should work towards. This is why it is extremely important to educate current and future bitcoin users on best practices when it comes to receiving and sending bitcoin as privately as possible. Although it is relatively easy to track certain transactions on chain today due to people linking their UTXOs to KYC services, I am sure that the spread and normalization of this type of bitcoin use will go a long way to fight diseases that KYC-linked use has caused to date.
Financial privacy is not a bad thing, no matter how hard the powers that be would have you believe otherwise. Fortunately, we have the opportunity to build a future where financial privacy is possible. The only thing standing between humanity and the future materialization is action. Go ahead and educate yourself, start accepting and sending bitcoin using the right tools and work to improve those tools so they are as easy as possible for others to use.
