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“Who Thinks Privacy Is Easy?”
This is what Bitcoin inventor Dr. is Craig S. Wright’s opening question. This session looks at the current privacy infrastructure based on centralized digital notary certificates and how they can achieve better security in a structure like Bitcoin.
All sessions from Day 2 can be viewed here and full sessions for both days of the Bitcoin Masterclass are on the CoinGeek YouTube channel. Future Bitcoin Masterclass events are planned in other cities.
A few audience members believe that secrecy is easy, although Dr. Wright points to examples of problems that can arise in specific cases. As discussed in previous sessions, there are questions about who can access what information (about themselves or others), for what purpose, when, and how much other information is exposed, including that information. For example, “Is this person old enough to be here?” is to get a simple true/false answer to questions like or “is this person an employee of Company X?” without revealing the actual date of birth or employment date.
Why is Bitcoin better than Certificate Authorities?
“X.509 is bad,” he says, referring to the SSL/TLS X.509 standard digital certificates widely used on today’s Internet to “secure” many websites. These certificates are theoretically issued by trusted Certificate Authorities (CAs) that follow strict guidelines for issuing certificates. There are several types, including Client Authentication and Code Signing.
The problem with this model, as Dr. Wright has pointed out several times in the past, is the issuer’s compromise. This violates every certificate the CA has ever issued, which may have hundreds or thousands of owners, causing widespread security breaches before action is taken. He once again recalls the case of the well-known Dutch CA DigiNotar, which was founded in 1998 and went bankrupt in 2011 a few weeks after being compromised. The compromise affected well-known names such as Yahoo!, Mozilla, Tor Project and WordPress.
Bitcoin, the blockchain structure and data tokenization allow access to more data than existing systems. Their processes also allow for faster detection of breaches and attempted attacks, prompting administrators to alert them to these incidents and enable them to take prompt action. Blockchain logs also keep a complete, verifiable record of all events.
Can you delete data from a blockchain?
“Can anyone tell me what section 7 of the (Bitcoin) white paper is about?” Dr. Wright asks. Note that this is the “recovery of disk space” section, which, as it reminds everyone, is also about “Pruning a Merkle Tree” and is about “erasing” data like records on a blockchain according to erasure laws. EU General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR).
If we transfer something from the Bitcoin UTXO and transfer it to a new value, then miners can stop producing blocks containing this data.
What type of information can be specified for pruning in our identity hierarchy? First, other people’s information and your own information if it is outdated, embarrassing or unnecessary.
So we can create something like X.509, which is better than X.509 and without some of its problems? How would it handle things like certificate revocation?
With Bitcoin and the blockchain, we can build structures to create provable ownership of data, primary identity keys and multiple “sub-keys,” multi-signal access to data, even pseudonymous investments that remain legally compliant (as long as the proper authorities exist) to identify the true identity behind the pseudonym. no one needs to know except the one who knows).
We can structure the identity of the “false person” with his (real-life) stockholders/option holders and office holders and their complete chain of custody records (as today’s companies are considered by law). What information should we enter and where should we go? Dr. Wright asks the audience.
With Bitcoin, information and legal structures can be transparent and open, while confidential and private information remains hidden or accessible only to relevant parties. There is food for thought at both the technical/coding level and the policy level. If you’re interested in this topic and want to hear more, the Bitcoin Masterclass series is a great place to start.
Check out Blockchain Masterclass with Craig Wright: Privacy, Privacy, Anonymity, Party-to-Party
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