#cashu

#cashu

Four years ago, in a building in the former industrial heart of Prague, Eric Sirion sat at his computer with freshly written code and a simple mission: buy a cup of coffee with Bitcoin. The place was Paralelní Polis, during the annual Hackers Congress - a fitting venue for an experiment in digital freedom. This was not the first time Bitcoin had been used to buy coffee, but this time was different.

Privacy is heads, censorship resistance is tails. They're two sides of the same coin. Everything people do together is inherently interactive. When those interactions cannot be conducted privately, when they become common public knowledge, the participants can be subjected to external pressure. They can be shunned, shamed, jailed or penalized in many other ways. Without privacy, you have no censorship resistance. Without privacy, most people will censor themselves.