017 - Max Hillebrand: The Price of Privacy, Open Source Freedom & Bitcoin

Today I’m talking with Max Hillebrand.

Max is a well-known privacy and Bitcoin activist who is also the CEO of zkSNACKs, the company who’s flagship product is the privacy oriented Bitcoin wallet, Wasabi Wallet.

Max spoke in depth about privacy and self-sovereignty at last year’s Liberty in our Lifetime conference and this conversation follows in a similar vein. We begin with a few stories from his time working at Deutsche Bank but the conversation quickly moves on to open source software, Bitcoin and of course privacy.

We discuss many of the practical aspects of privacy tech, including how GitHub works, methods for anonymising bitcoin transactions, blockchain surveillance and the privacy implications of Bitcoin’s lightning network.

Max also makes some fascinating predictions about the far distant future of the Bitcoin network … certainly some things that I, for one had never contemplated before.

Enjoy the conversation

AI Generated Summary:

0:10 - Introduction to this episode

3:33 - How did you become interested in economics and banking?

5:57 - Falling down the Bitcoin rabbit hole at Deutsche Bank

12:23 - What did you learn from the bank?

15:19 - What does anarchy mean to you?

21:52 - The power to change code

28:37 - The difference between Git and GitHub

32:29 - Where is the source code of bitcoin on GitHub?

37:48 - The importance of privacy in banking

40:22 - Definition of privacy

45:33 - What do we want to prevent with Bitcoin?

51:01 - Explain how privacy tools work on the blockchain

56:21 - How does a bitcoin transaction work?

1:00:29 - The cost of a single transaction

1:08:58 - How much does it cost to use coinjoin?

1:13:21 - What’s the legality of what you’re doing?

1:17:30 - What is the attack vector on privacy?

1:20:49 - The legality of using a wallet

1:28:09 - What are the percentages of people making illicit coinjoins?

1:33:12 - Centralised vs decentralised

1:42:59 - How do wallets decide which coins to spend?

1:49:38 - The second layer of the monetary system

1:55:10 - Opening lightning channels

2:00:15 - Custodial wallets vs. money warehouses

2:04:58 - Federated money warehouses and Bitcoin

2:30:58 - What are your thoughts on other cryptocurrency coins?

2:37:28 - Bitcoin is not inevitable

2:44:52 - Hashing power and mining

2:51:30 - What would you do if money was no object?

LINKS:

Liberty In Our Lifetime 2023: https://libertyinourlifetime.org/

TWITTER:

Max Hillebrand: https://twitter.com/HillebrandMax

Timothy Allen: https://twitter.com/MrTimothyAllen

WEBSITES:

Max Hillebrand: https://towardsliberty.com/

Max's GitHub: https://github.com/MaxHillebrand

zkSNACKs: https://zksnacks.com/

Free Cities Foundation: https://free-cities.org/