Why Privacy?
And why it should be important to you!
This is the start of a series on Privacy going through probing questions about its importance and how Conceal Network aims to address those points.
The advent of blockchain technology can unarguably be traced back to Bitcoin as one of the initial players in the space to leave its mark and continue to grow. One thing that isn’t apparent about Bitcoin is that it does have a lack of privacy within its protocols and at best provides pseudo-anonymity. In short, you can almost be anonymous. With enough data points and analysis on UTxOs movements, if someone wants to know more about you they probably could. Even Satoshi himself identified some core principles around which a privacy-based framework could be used to instill privacy into the protocol, but they were never integrated directly within Bitcoin itself.
One of the first and most famous attempts to implement privacy within a blockchain was done by Nicholas van Saberhagen. Like Satoshi Nakamoto, NvS is a pseudonymous person or group who came up with a whitepaper on the CryptoNote protocol to come up with ways that enabled privacy. Since the release of the CryptoNote paper, various implementations of how to achieve privacy on a blockchain have been developed.
Privacy as a Basic Human Right
With a little background aside, now the question to be asked is why? Why is it important to maintain privacy? Why should anyone’s financial activity be kept private? A common retort to this is, “Well if you don’t have anything to hide, then don’t worry about it!” or “Privacy is only meant as a way to shield illegal activity”. A myopic take on these two things is that they place guilt on the user before any information is provided and leave it to them to prove why they need it. Unfortunately, this is a bad and biased take on having people prove the need for privacy. Similarly, like in the meme below, if you look at the bathroom stall door, it represents privacy at a core human level and people would never question that. Privacy extends beyond this basic need too many facets of our life and respect as to why someone would need privacy is ultimately the choice of the individual. Understanding these concepts will help engrain that at the root and basis of most human rights, privacy is a foundational pillar.
What privacy gives each individual person is the ability to be who they are without fear of repercussions, feel the way that they want to without guilt or shame, and live the way that they want to live without social pressures. Privacy enables freedom on so many levels, that even in financial contexts, it is even more imperative to preserve the right to privacy.
In the world before blockchain, like Bitcoin, many people were (and still are blind) to the fact that the privacy we think we have about our own life is not truly private. From our bank accounts to social media, and to even the public domain it’s amazing how many different entities know so much about anyone. Try googling your own name or looking up yourself on a social media site and it’s usually a surprise every time how much is out there about yourself. Bank accounts and credit cards that people have are maintained and held by companies that with a hack, leak, and/or subpoena can be made public. In the modern world, it is actually harder to keep and maintain your life private and outside the watch of the public. Diligence is necessary to ensure that personal information isn’t leaked out and discipline is required to ensure that secure measures are in place to maintain it so.
Applying this concept of privacy to blockchain technology should be a foregone conclusion to help maintain things under the control and guidance of the person who is transacting with a network. No one walks around with their bank account casually left open in the public, nor do large corporations allow other to know how they spend and use their money on each and every transaction. With most non-privacy-preserving blockchains this is the state that most participants live in. Public information about spending habits, knowledge of how much wealth you have, and linking you to other parties are completely out there in the open.
Fundamental Principals of the Conceal Network
- Privacy
- Decentralization
- Social Inclusion
- Censorship Resistance
For Conceal Network, one of the key principles is enabling privacy by default in the design and implementation of the protocol. This allows for privacy-preserving methods to ensure that no one’s information, transactional history, and accumulated wealth are available to anyone outside the owner of their own wallet. Preserving the freedoms that privacy enables. In this interview (LINK) Krypt0x, one of the core members of the Conceal Network details the history and decisions that were key to developing Conceal as well as providing insight about the team and privacy in general. Overall, the whole Conceal community is a very inclusive bunch all striving to help build privacy and self-sovereignty in the blockchain space.
