In the second installment of their multi-part series meant to help those who may need to transact privately in the course of their sensitive work, security expert Eric Wall details the “how” of using Bitcoin privately.
To fight political dissent, authoritarian governments can abuse their power over the administrators of centralized payments networks. Bitcoin can be a lifeline in those situations. But using Bitcoin privately is no easy task. This guide aims to help, as Eric explains:
If you’re an activist or a journalist concerned with the dangers of having your bitcoin activity unmasked by a corporation or an authoritarian government, choosing the right wallet application could potentially mean the difference between life and death. While the previous article in this series aimed to answer the question “What traces do we leave when we’re using the Bitcoin blockchain?” to equip readers with a protocol-level understanding of Bitcoin’s privacy characteristics, this article aims to take things into the practical domain and familiarize the user with the applications we use to interact with the protocol to send and receive bitcoins; Bitcoin wallets.
The discussion being presented here is heavily focused on achieving privacy in the face of a spying corporation or government. For users who aren’t concerned by surveillance and simply wish to get started with bitcoin, this article is likely to be overkill. It is the purpose of this investigation to set fairly ambitious privacy goals for different use cases and explore the practical feasibility of achieving them using the tools currently available in the industry today.