Introducing CoinDesk’s Privacy Week

Cryptocurrency was expected to beryllium astir privacy. It’s close determination successful the prefix "crypto" (meaning “hidden” oregon “secret”), a nickname the exertion shares with cryptography, the subject that spawned it.

“We person to spot [banks] with our privacy, spot them not to fto individuality thieves drain our accounts,” Bitcoin creator Satoshi Nakamoto wrote successful 2009, explaining the impetus to make a new, peer-to-peer monetary system.

Yet 13 years later, portion BTC and its assorted knockoffs and descendants person go a $2 trillion plus class, privateness remains hard to travel by, either for cryptocurrency users oregon mundane people.

Corporations and governments proceed to cod mountains of idiosyncratic data, often without the subjects’ cognition oregon consent. This delicate accusation is often guarded poorly (one word: Equifax) and/or abused (two words: Wells Fargo).

Far from fulfilling the dreams of the cypherpunk question that inspired Satoshi, cryptocurrency has arguably created a caller panopticon connected apical of the aged one. To bargain oregon merchantability integer assets, astir consumers person to place themselves to regulated online exchanges, which sometimes inquire for much information, specified arsenic selfies and biometrics, than accepted banks. While nationalist blockchains obscure users’ real-world identities, an manufacture of on-chain sleuths has sprung up to link the dots, aiding instrumentality enforcement but undermining the pseudonymity Satoshi’s plan relied on.

From Bitcoin’s Taproot upgrade to alternate privateness coins to innovations similar mixers and zero-knowledge proofs, assorted communities are moving to reconstruct crypto’s original, namesake committedness – adjacent arsenic planetary regulators demand the collection and sharing of ever-more data.

Outside cryptocurrency, activists are warring to claw backmost long-lost privateness for net users broadly, whether done blase tech tools, legal reforms oregon immoderate combination.

Coinciding with planetary Data Privacy Week, CoinDesk’s Privacy Week bid is simply a postulation of articles that research this battleground from a scope of perspectives – technological, regulatory and cultural.

We survey the authorities of play for integer and fiscal privateness successful 2022, successful crypto and beyond, and wherever it mightiness beryllium headed successful the years and decades to come. It's the 4th "theme week" from Layer 2, CoinDesk's mag of ideas; cheque retired our erstwhile collections, Policy Week, Future of Money Week and Culture Week.

We anticipation you bask the premix of features, sentiment and research. Let america cognize what you deliberation and what we missed.