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Title: 2013-06-05 Wired: How bitcoin lets you spy on careless companies Post by: grondilu on June 05, 2013, 11:19:19 AM « When Foodler jumped on the Bitcoin bandwagon a few months ago, it seemed like an interesting way to drum up new business. But it turns out that, for some, Bitcoin business can come with an unexpected pricetag: privacy. »
http://www.wired.com/wiredenterprise/2013/06/bitcoin_retai/ Title: Re: 2013-06-05 Wired: How bitcoin lets you spy on careless companies Post by: The 4ner on June 05, 2013, 06:26:05 PM Read this a little while ago. Very interesting. This is definitely an issue that needs to be resolved if the community wishes bitcoin to be adopted by corporate entities.
Title: Re: 2013-06-05 Wired: How bitcoin lets you spy on careless companies Post by: ArticMine on June 05, 2013, 07:04:33 PM Could not a large payment predecessor address this simply by taking all the payments for each merchant and paying them all to one address and then disbursing from this address the individual payments to each merchant. In effect treating the single Bitcoin address as a trust account / mixing service?
The merchant processor would then only release the individual merchant information to the appropriate authorities after going through the proper legal process thereby avoiding any AML / KYC issues with this mixing service, while protecting the confidentiality and privacy of each individual merchant. Title: Re: 2013-06-05 Wired: How bitcoin lets you spy on careless companies Post by: aigeezer on June 05, 2013, 08:06:05 PM I don't think the "hair on fire" headline matches the content, but Wired usually seems to have a knife out for BTC.
From the article: "This issue is not a big deal right now, says Adam Sah, the CEO of a Bitcoin-friendly retailer called Buyer’s Best Friend. “It’ll be decades before Bitcoin has enough marketshare to create this problem,” he tells us in an email message. Foodler has figured out a way to at least obscure its Bitcoin trail. The company has written its own software that subdivides its daily balance into a random number of components. Then it mixes and remixes these components in order to obscure the transactional trail. “By randomizing both the amounts and the length of the chain, bit becomes very difficult to know whether it’s still under our domain or not,” says Dumontet. Dumontet says that as Bitcoin usage grows, companies should think about taking steps to obscure their sales data. But he’s still a big Bitcoin believer. “We see this as an opportunity for the network to improve,” he adds." Careless companies at risk, you say? Wow! I guess they'd best not be careless then. In other news.... Title: Re: 2013-06-05 Wired: How bitcoin lets you spy on careless companies Post by: justusranvier on June 05, 2013, 08:29:24 PM Quote “It’s very easy for merchants to inadvertently expose the details of their supply chain, their finances, and their spending habits,” says Christian Dumontet, one of Foodler’s founders. This is good. The realization that businesses need financial privacy to protect their trade secrets will cause a push for the development of solutions that will give individuals financial privacy as well.Figuring out this kind of information isn’t easy, but it’s possible, Dumontet says. In order to combat this, most merchants create a unique Bitcoin deposit address for each sale, but when the merchant decides to bundle all of those deposits together — to pay suppliers or to convert Bitcoins to U.S. dollars, for example — they could still be giving a competitor a way of tracking all their Bitcoin transactions. So a competitor could learn something interesting about a company by first paying them in Bitcoins and then tracking how that money flows through the block chain — Bitcoin’s public ledger — and studying the other transactions that got bundled with the competitor’s original payment. |