“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.
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.
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.
