Next Level Bitcoin Privacy with Alex Gladstein & Chris Belcher

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“The evolution of Bitcoin privacy has gone from creating doubt, to hopefully, in the future, making it impossible to link coins to a person. That is the key.”
— Alex Gladstein

SHOW DESCRIPTION

Location: Zoom
Date: Tuesday 16th June
Project: Human Rights Foundation & Bitcoin Developer
Role: Chief Strategy Officer & Independent Developer

Privacy is a fundamental human right, and with society migrating away from physical to digital cash, we are losing one of the remaining ways to transact privately. 

Bitcoin is an entirely public ledger, in that every transaction is broadcast to everyone running the Bitcoin software. Anyone can view these transactions, but there are ways to obfuscate your spends and make it more difficult, or even close to impossible to follow the trail of transactions.

Currently, the most widely used method for adding privacy to bitcoin is to use CoinJoin services like Wasabi or Samourai. These wallets allow you to add your UTXOs to a transaction along with numerous other participants. Coinjoin can significantly increase anonymity, depending on the number of other participants.

Originally put forward by Greg Maxwell in 2013, Coinswap is a somewhat different method of anonymising your footprint on the Bitcoin network. Chris Belcher recently took the idea and put together a proposal and has received funding from the Human Rights Foundation to develop it.

In this interview, I talk to Bitcoin developer Chris Belcher and Alex Gladstein, the Chief Strategy Officer at the Human Rights Foundation. We discuss financial privacy as a human right, Bitcoin privacy, financing devs and Chris’ work on Coinswap.

TIMESTAMPS

00:05:01: Introductions 
00:06:11: HRF Bitcoin dev fund
00:09:26: Importance of privacy
00:13:23: Who is responsible for privacy?
00:19:31: Risks around increased Bitcoin privacy 
00:21:05: Chris’ background
00:23:33: CoinSwap
00:28:38: Differences to mixers
00:31:51: Potential legal challenges
00:33:45: Current project status
00:39:25: Differences from CoinJoin
00:44:43: Future possibilities with CoinSwap
00:46:23: Potential blockchain congestion
00:50:03: Preventing mass surveillance
00:52:55: Project next steps
00:53:43: Sci-Hub
00:57:47: Chainalysis and blockchain surveillance
01:01:33: Bitcoin for donations
01:05:05: CoinSwap impact on Lightning 
01:08:06: Building on Bitcoin, not other privacy alt coins
01:14:54: Monero technological limitations
01:18:00: Final comments

 

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SHOW NOTES

PodcastPeter McCormack