Covering bitcoin's tracks

One Mathematician's Mission to Boost Bitcoin's Privacy (And Soon) 

CoinDesk Daily is sponsored by  June 19, 2018 "Arguing that you don't care about privacy because you have nothing to hide is like arguing that you don't care about free speech because you have nothing to say."  – Edward Snowden Got this from a friend? SUBSCRIBE HERE THE FEATURE One Mathematician's Mission to Boost Bitcoin's Privacy (And Soon) Have modern internet companies gone too far? According to mathematician and Blockstream research director, Andrew Poelstra, the answer is unequivocally yes. In his view, companies are simply now vacuuming up troves of customer data, which they then sell to others without the owner's knowledge or benefit. (Think how Instagram owns user images, or Target acquires huge amounts of data on what products people buy). Not just a bad deal for customers, though, security experts even worry that with all this data, AI systems will be able to predict what a person will do next by following data trails, conjuring up concerns about real-life dystopias like those of sci-fi books and movies. As such, Poelstra is using his two passions – math and bitcoin – to try to bring added privacy to online money. To this end, Poelstra has been tinkering away, formulating mathematical equations and writing code, to hide bitcoin's "trails." Trails being the traces of personal information – who you are, what you buy, for how much – that can be gleaned when transacting online when using bitcoin. Read more Tweet Share ⭐ CoinDesk Weekly Sponsor ⭐   Your Data. Your Life In the current system, your personal data is sourced, held, used and swapped by third-party providers. The Pillar Project is an ambitious project to return ownership of personal data to you. 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