Why is Privacy important - Ethereum?

Privacy is awesome but why do we care at all ? why cant we keep the data all public and the dangers of the applications without privacy on blockchains

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Lesson Transcript

  • [00:00 - 00:14] Okay, so let's try to see why is privacy important? Well, first of all, because all of these blockchains are public, we're now looking at Etherscan, which is a block explorer for Ethereum.

  • [00:15 - 00:35] Because they're all public, you can go into any account and look into how much they own and what their transactions are. So, for example, we can go into this account and see that it made a transaction 38 minutes ago, then it made 128 minutes ago and it made one minute ago.

  • [00:36 - 00:51] And we can exactly see what it's doing. So by doing any sort of analysis, you can actually find out what they're doing, what their transactions are and where they're spending their money.

  • [00:52 - 01:06] And this is what a lot of companies do, like chain analysis and many, many others. So you can look into every account, every transaction and know what they're doing.

  • [01:07 - 01:27] So it is very important to have privacy because otherwise everything that you do is public. And for this, Ethereum and Bitcoin have many, many solutions that are out there and we're going to go and look into each one of them.

  • [01:28 - 01:42] And this is where you have many different privacy techniques to keep you hidden in the public setting. It is important that you design new applications with privacy baked into them so the user doesn't have to care about privacy at all.

  • [01:43 - 01:55] But unfortunately, most of the applications that run on Ethereum are very public by nature. For example, you could see in this one, it's talking to Uniswap version two.

  • [01:56 - 02:11] And you can go into that and you can see all of the transactions that are happening and nothing is hidden at all. So you can go and read the source code and you can go and look at all the transactions that are happening.

  • [02:12 - 02:34] And pending basically means that the transaction is sent to the miner and it's waiting to be put into a block and waiting for confirmations. So this is very important that when you design your applications, you take all these considerations and you try to design them with privacy in mind.

  • [02:35 - 02:41] So your users don't have to worry about them at all. (sighs)

  • [00:00 - 00:14] Okay, so let's try to see why is privacy important? Well, first of all, because all of these blockchains are public, we're now looking at Etherscan, which is a block explorer for Ethereum.

    [00:15 - 00:35] Because they're all public, you can go into any account and look into how much they own and what their transactions are. So, for example, we can go into this account and see that it made a transaction 38 minutes ago, then it made 128 minutes ago and it made one minute ago.

    [00:36 - 00:51] And we can exactly see what it's doing. So by doing any sort of analysis, you can actually find out what they're doing, what their transactions are and where they're spending their money.

    [00:52 - 01:06] And this is what a lot of companies do, like chain analysis and many, many others. So you can look into every account, every transaction and know what they're doing.

    [01:07 - 01:27] So it is very important to have privacy because otherwise everything that you do is public. And for this, Ethereum and Bitcoin have many, many solutions that are out there and we're going to go and look into each one of them.

    [01:28 - 01:42] And this is where you have many different privacy techniques to keep you hidden in the public setting. It is important that you design new applications with privacy baked into them so the user doesn't have to care about privacy at all.

    [01:43 - 01:55] But unfortunately, most of the applications that run on Ethereum are very public by nature. For example, you could see in this one, it's talking to Uniswap version two.

    [01:56 - 02:11] And you can go into that and you can see all of the transactions that are happening and nothing is hidden at all. So you can go and read the source code and you can go and look at all the transactions that are happening.

    [02:12 - 02:34] And pending basically means that the transaction is sent to the miner and it's waiting to be put into a block and waiting for confirmations. So this is very important that when you design your applications, you take all these considerations and you try to design them with privacy in mind.

    [02:35 - 02:41] So your users don't have to worry about them at all. (sighs)