We value our privacy. It is a human right and it is not something wrong or shady to ask for. Governments together with social and mainstream media are on a crusade to reduce our privacy, expose our sensitive financial and private information, and the use of any online activity makes us vulnerable to threats coming from the leak of our private data.
Our financial status, our wallet balance, our wallet ID, our bank balances, and account numbers, are all sensitive private financial information. Would anyone be at ease showing to some random unknown on the internet his bank account details? The threats are countless and scammers have found ways we can't even imagine, to deceive and extract money from their victims.
Mass Surveilance
We are not asking for privacy because we are criminals and have something to hide from the authorities. This is the propaganda spread by governments and the message they send if you have nothing to be afraid of you shouldn't worry about surveillance.
Quite the opposite. I worry more when I hear someone saying this. We are living in times where scammers have databases with our names, addresses, phone numbers, emails, and perhaps connected crypto wallets and bank cards. We have to limit access to our information and make it as difficult as possible for anyone to connect our private data. We try to make it as difficult as possible and we have to avoid any KYC procedures.
There is no private company that we can trust with our privacy. They have all had problems with hacks and insiders selling this data to scammers or put it up for sale in darknet black markets.
Besides that, do we trust our governments with our privacy? What has this world turned into? This is a communist regime mechanism that spies on its people. Nothing good can ever come from these authoritarian procedures.
I thought we were living in the free world.
Privacy and anonymity in Crypto.
When the internet started gaining popularity at the end of the previous century, we became massively exposed to surveillance by private companies and government agencies. Who wants every search result we make, to be permanently stored and analyzed, and produce results about our personalities. VPNs, proxy servers, and the TOR anonymous network are tools used by privacy concerned individuals. However, can we have privacy when using cryptocurrencies?
The Bitcoin ledger is transparent and public, open for everyone to make research, link the transactions and find the course of money. Tracing can be done from the time someone buys with fiat until the Bitcoins are sold again. There are many ways to buy Bitcoin and all of them are tracked.
The field has many companies with hired researchers performing on-chain analysis and developing tools to track everything.
The centralized exchanges are giving access to their users' private information to any government that demands it, and with the recently created tools blockchain analysis has become easier than ever.
Soon these tools will fall into the hands of criminal networks too and will put our online wealth in jeopardy.
Bitcoin Cash privacy
Two applications already exist that increase our privacy when using the Bitcoin Cash blockchain. Because Bitcoin Cash has low fees (avg. $0.002/tx) it costs very low to enhance the privacy of our digital wallets.
Cashfusion
Roger Ver explains how Cashfusion works in his latest YouTube video:
Cashfusion requires the Electron Cash desktop wallet for the time being but there will be an integration of the service with the Bitcoin.com wallet too in the future.
Always download the Electron Cash wallet from the official source and not any other website. Protect your Bitcoin Cash by being careful as scammers are creating fake wallets and services that will steal your coins. Always be careful and not follow links coming from phishing emails or pop-ups. In the BTC version of Electrum, many BTC holders fell victim to phishing pop-ups demanding a software upgrade and lost their BTC.
CashFusion is a fully decentralized privacy protocol that allows anyone to create multi-party transactions with other network participants.
Read the FAQs before using.
Cashfusion works by communicating with other Electron Cash wallets that have the service enabled. It combines transactions from these wallets it is mixing them and gives different outputs making it impossible to be traced.
The service is also using the Tor network to hide the IP of the user, to assist with increased anonymity.
Cashsuffle
Once again the top Bitcoin Cash evangelist, Roger Ver, has a tutorial ready for this Bitcoin Cash service too:
Same as Wasabi for BTC but without the fees involved. Bitcoin Cash blockchain fees allow anonymity on the blockchain.
Conclusion
Privacy and anonymity are extremely important for our online security. The reasons governments and authorities give to trespass our privacy rights are not convincing anyone. Moreover, the increase of scam activities and the leaks of private data are a threat to our digital wealth, and we are those that need to take care of it.
With a non-custodial Bitcoin Cash wallet, we are the owners of our money, and not the banks, or third parties. The government has little to do with that, and all this breach of privacy is increasing the threat to our wealth. Protecting our wallets is as important as securing our home, locking our doors, and protecting our private information.
Cashfusion and Cashsuffle are two excellent services that increase our privacy and provide increased anonymity from just using the public blockchain alone.
Lead Image from: Unsplash
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I'm pretty sure cryptographic security firms are going to be among the biggest beneficiaries of this paradigm shift we're experiencing. Cybersecurity is already a huge business, but it is going to grow to a whole other level. Stay cool Casher Bro!