Coming up on the tenth anniversary of Satoshi Nakamoto’s paper, do we really need yet another take on Bitcoin? Well, I think so. Today, I am going to focus on an aspect of this technology that needs more discussion — privacy.

The bedrock of blockchain — that every transaction is added into the history and written in “blocks” — has already backfired on more than one cybercriminal. The tremendous success of investigators in tracking down the perpetrators is a direct result of the history of their transactions being forever (as much as this adjective can be applied to the matter) inscribed in the chain of blocks. That, by the way, raises an important question: Why aren’t financial regulators embracing the cryptocurrencies already?