068. Riccardo Spagni aka FluffyPony on Financial Privacy with Monero and Tari

I talk with Riccardo Spagni also known as FluffyPony about concerns over Monero’s privacy model and why financial privacy is something healthy, rather than something that should be looked at as deceitful or nefarious.

Our society believes in privacy, but it’s interesting to see where it’s accepted and where it’s challenged. Riccardo uses the analogy of going to a public restroom. We don’t argue with someone who wants to close the door when they’re going to the bathroom in a public place.

“When you go to a public restroom, you go to the restroom, you close the door, and you don't go like oh, you know, that's a privacy enhancement. That's just natural. So like, a tool like Monero or any privacy enhancing tool really, is just about that same thing, being able to close the door when you're doing something private, like using the bathroom.”

Some people think that if you want to hide your financial transactions, you must be doing something illegal. Isn’t financial privacy a right? If we flip things around and say that ok, every financial transaction you make, must be public, what kind of society would that be?

Riccardo puts it this way - “Why don't you upload three months of bank statements onto Twitter so that we can make sure you're not a criminal?”

Our society has given up on privacy for the sake of convenience. We think that there has to be a trade-off. We’ll give away our photos, our personal information, as long as we can have quick access to all of my online accounts.

“We've ended up in a world that's very Orwellian. It’s very 1984. But the difference between the world that 1984 portrayed, and the world that we live in, is instead of the government going and putting cameras in everyone's homes, and on the streets and all that - we put the cameras and the microphones in our home, and we just call them Alexa.”

Riccardo Spagni @FluffyPony on Twitter

https://twitter.com/fluffypony

Tari

https://www.tari.com

Monero

https://www.getmonero.org