The Effects Of Surveillance On Society

This is the first in a 10 episode video series focusing on Bitcoin privacy, filmed at bitcoin++ Privacy Edition in Riga and elsewhere. Each episode will touch on some aspect of Bitcoin privacy, some tool to use Bitcoin privately, or surveillance techniques.

Privacy is heads, censorship resistance is tails. They’re two sides of the same coin. 

Everything people do together is inherently interactive. When those interactions cannot be conducted privately, when they become common public knowledge, the participants can be subjected to external pressure. They can be shunned, shamed, jailed, or penalized in many other ways. 

Without privacy you have no censorship resistance. Without privacy, most people will censor themselves. 

In this first episode, I sit down with Yuval Kogman from Spiral to discuss privacy in the modern digital era. Bitcoin is a digital money, and like everything else in our lives that has been digitized by computing technology and the internet it leaves bread crumbs everywhere by its nature. 

These bread crumb trails, in combination with the computing technology that created them in the first place, has radically changed the environment in which people interact with each other, particularly where some form of power asymmetry exists (i.e. the governing vs. the governed). 

Those with the capability to pick up and analyze those bread crumbs can apply technology to exert disproportionate control over other people. 

Click the image below to watch the talk: