Bitcoin Masterclass with Craig Wright, Session 2: How, when and what of data privacy

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What data should be seen by everyone, how should it be stored and who should have access to it? Creator of BitcoinDr. Craig S. Wright continues his Masterclass series with Session Two, further expanding on data storage and privacy issues that will impact everyone in the future.

The full video of the day one “Bitcoin Masterclass” video is here, containing the first four sessions. Everyone is welcome to take a look, if only to familiarize themselves with the concepts.

Like all of Craig Wright’s tutorials, this series contains a mix of technicalities, history, law, political philosophy, and ethics. The tutorials are not only about what Bitcoin can do, but also questions surrounding how, when, and what data should be accessible in a future where almost every action produces data.

The “how, when, what” questions are at the heart of questions of confidentiality and access to information. We need to ask ourselves what type of data can be accessed, as well as the methods used to access it and the speed of the process.

Other issues to consider include: the purpose (what limits should there be?); Fairness (from the point of view of both parties); Legality and control thereof; Transparency or even “translucency” (accessible only when needed); Data minimization and storage limits. The second session examines all of this.

Dr. Wright provides anecdotal examples along the way. A doctor can access your private medical records for treatment purposes, but not to sell this information to the media. National Security Agency (NSA) contractor Edward Snowden has denounced intelligence-gathering activities, actions that people regard as heroic or wicked, but how was he even able to access this data during a long period without anyone being alerted? Regardless of the results, the fact that he was able to do so is a security hole for other types of data.

Technology won’t change the system, only humans can

Dr. Wright also calls for greater political engagement for people who have opinions on legal conditions. Although we don’t always like the rules that exist, the only way to change them is through logical, intellectually sound debates (not online shouting matches). Attempting to bend or circumvent the rules through technology is not the right approach, and one would likely see these technologies banned or defeated anyway. When we lose transparency, we lose rights.

“If we want to have a free society, we must be able to communicate openly.” To express your opinion, you must put yourself in danger (of opposition), or your opinion does not make sense. This matters in the public sphere, not in private conversations.

You can’t have a real conversation if we don’t know who we’re talking to, and he says that’s one of the reasons he objects to anonymity so often. A handle can hide your identity in the real world, but that becomes a problem when you have multiple handles to pretend you are multiple people, suiting and amplifying your own arguments as happens on Twitter.

Scaling and the “problem” of blockchain data pruning

Scaling will actually help with privacy because in the future, if everyone has been storing all the data on the blockchain for years (or centuries), there will be too much information to sift through. However, you will still be able to prove things if you know how/where to find the data (e.g. the relevant private keys).

If there is a need to store some data, services will exist to hold it and will likely specialize in the type of data they hold. However, with Bitcoin’s SPV verification, you will still be able to prove that a particular file existed at a specific time, even if the file itself is no longer there. The Bitcoin blockchain even allows for a form of “provable deletion” if the access keys to this data are destroyed.

We don’t want the blockchain to look like “psychohistorian” Hari Seldon from Isaac Asimov’s “Foundation” series, he says, who had records of every event for over ten millennia.

nChain Director of Research Owen Vaughan opens the session with a question about how Bitcoin developers should provide data access tiers. Dr. Wright suggests it be tokenized, with digital tokens created with varying levels of access and given to users individually.

As with the previous session, he asks viewers to think more about what Bitcoin and blockchain could do, expanding on the original title of the 2008 white paper:

“Everyone thinks of cryptocurrency. What is beyond? What is Bitcoin’s real purpose? It is a digital token system that allows the exchange of money, the exchange of value, the saving of records, as well as the tracking and transmission of information. All the foregoing. Let’s think about what that means.

He notes that his company, nChain, is currently working to develop the technologies he describes, or at least make them more accessible to users. One of the challenges is communicating to the world that all of this is possible and that tools are available. The Bitcoin Masterclass series is an effort to spread this message.

Watch: New Technologies, New Futures for Nations

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New to Bitcoin? Check out CoinGeek’s Bitcoin for Beginners section, the ultimate resource guide to learn more about the Bitcoinas originally envisioned by Satoshi Nakamoto and blockchain.

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