DeFi Technologies : The difference between privacy DeFi and anonymity is huge |

Imagine that one of you lovely readers sent me an email and I replied. Imagine that once I did that you could see every email I had ever sent and every detail therein.

Imagine that I owed one of you £1,000 and sent that transaction to your bank and when you received it you could see every single transaction I had ever made. Every transaction over the whole time I had in that bank account.

Imagine there’s no heaven, right, it’s easy if you try. That is the current hell of DeFi and why the industry is being held back. 

Trades can be hijacked by so-called front-runners who can see all the transactions on a public blockchain and then pay a higher GAS fee to shortcut the market. The very openness and Version 1.0 of crypto has led to this situation. It’s time to change it.

Herein lies a huge problem

But herein lies a huge problem as companies start to prevent front-running and overt transaction histories by making them private. 

For all those who are against crypto equate privacy with anonymity and this brings out all the old tropes of the Dark Web, bad actors, hackers, drug-dealers, terrorists and all the baddies.

But there is a huge difference in privacy and anonymity. The former is good, the latter bad. Everybody deserves privacy whether it’s a closed door when they sit down to read the paper on the bog/khazee/crapper/loo or if they want a closed door and retreat to their house/flat/room/attic.

As this ‘thought-leadership’ blog shows in a much more focused way than this article, privacy is a human right and even if it is Ye Olde Evil Crypto then people are entitled to it. As much as anything else. Call it open privacy, not closed anonymity.

The hypocrisy here is self-evident (and not just in the sentence above). Offshore banking business and so on. Anonymous and extremely complicated money trails that make tracking it down impossible for any but the most intrepid.

Meanwhile, the vast majority of crypto companies have strenuous KYC processes and that’s for the investors in private sales as well as the community that follows in public sales.

Compare that with Twitter where there is zero KYC and the only nod to any form of identity is when a Blue Tick is offered, users HAVE to have a corporate email identity that defines who they are… and Gmail accounts don’t count. Another nail in the freelancers’ coffins. 

Stupid trolling

So, if Twitter applied its Blue Tick rules to those who sign up to its platform, then all this stupid trolling, cowardice and racism/sexism/transphobia/homophobia could all just go away. 

Blue Tick KYC, you heard it here first… for every Twitter account.

And believe me, that’s the best idea you’ll hear all day. My consultation charge, Twitter, is the usual one – two pints, a meeting with Kate Bush, and a date with Francesca Cumani – in that order. Thanks.

In all seriousness, this is a big job, educating the finance world that crypto privacy is a…