Let's Talk Bitcoin #392 That's Not a Blockchain, That's a Sequence of Poor Engineering Decisions!

On Todays Episode of Let's Talk Bitcoin... Join Adam B. Levine, Andreas Antonopoulos, Stephanie Murphy and Jonathan Mohan for a look at the latest Coinbase privacy kerfluffle, JPM's tepid jump into the Stablecoin market, and the still unannounced but inevitably coming "Facebook Coin" and what it means to... Banks? Tip LTB:1FZGD64BA7B9GdwDhGGGF92amt9X6VH38K or Via the Lightning Network at https://tipltb.tokenly.com/ Curated & Transcribed Highlights from Let’s Talk Bitcoin #392: “That’s Not a Blockchain, that’s a Sequence of Poor Engineering Decisions!” provided by Professor Meow Coinbase Acquiring Neutrino Adam B. Levine: The core of what's happened here is that Coinbase was representing that they were not selling or sharing data about people who use Coinbase, except under very specific circumstances. And it came out somewhat recently that it actually was not true and one of their service providers had been actually selling that data (as many of these service providers do). Coinbase opted to acquire a company called Neutrino. Neutrino basically allowed Coinbase to do the same type of thing through a third party, but there's some baggage that came along with Neutrino name. Andreas Antonopoulos: This :give-and-get data” is the Devil’s deal with all of the analytics firms. Basically, if you want to get a transaction scored in terms of its AML, counterterrorism and KYC score for how tainted it is by bad-y coins, you have to give these services every transaction to review and they will return a score. You give them every transaction with all the identifiers, so they can score it, so they build a surveillance database with this. I don't know why anyone is surprised that these companies whose primary business is to collect surveillance data, also sell this surveillance data to third parties. That's the least of the problems right. Yes, they sell it to third parties. Yes, they feed it to intelligence agencies directly. Yes, they're also vulnerable to being hacked themselves, which leaks all of that data to everyone. That data is effectively public. It is a public surveillance mechanism that collects all of the information. All exchanges do this. All exchanges have to do this.  And so the initial rationale of Coinbase is: if we buy a company that can do analytics for us, we won't have to give this to third parties. That's not an outlandish claim, that's a rational choice. Where things fall apart is that the team that they bought (Neutrino acquisition) is the team that has been criticized in multiple investigations of assisting horrible dictators who puts back doors into software, been involved in State-level hacking that targets dissidents in places like Saudi Arabia, all the way up to being linked to the slaughter of Jamal Khashoggi. Privacy and Banks Jonathan Mohan: I remember one of the prosecutors from the Southern District of New York was saying that he couldn't be more excited by Bitcoin. He saw it as email for money. The way they can crack down on criminal enterprises is because it's almost impossible to engage in a crime with a couple dozen people without an email record. And he saw Bitcoin as that future, and actors like Coinbase are very much willing to feed into that narrative. That’s why I actually think that the most contentious hard fork in Bitcoin's history will be privacy and transact