Max Hillebrand: The Price of Privacy
“These are the Cypherpunk ideals… to use modern day technologies to define and establish the property rights of individuals in cyberspace. And to make sure that theft and surveillance are not possible anymore.”
Max is a well-known privacy and Bitcoin activist and CEO of zkSNACKs, the company whose flagship product is the privacy-oriented Bitcoin wallet, Wasabi Wallet.
Max spoke in depth about privacy and self-sovereignty at last year’s Liberty in our Lifetime conference and this conversation follows in a similar vein. We begin with a few stories from his time working at Deutsche Bank but the conversation quickly moves on to open source software, Bitcoin and of course privacy.
We discuss many of the practical aspects of privacy tech, including how GitHub works, methods for anonymising Bitcoin transactions, blockchain surveillance and the privacy implications of Bitcoin’s lightning network. Max also makes some fascinating predictions about the far distant future of the Bitcoin network – certainly some things that I, for one, had never contemplated before.
This conversation gets quite technical at times – apologies in advance if it’s too much for some listeners. I can’t help myself when I get the oportunity to spend 3 hours chatting alone with an expert like Max.
He said it best: “You’ve got to scratch your own itch, you know!”
I think I agree. Enjoy my scratch.