thejohnnycrypto on Nostr: A friend of mine once had to hand his employer a doctor's note. The note said one ...
A friend of mine once had to hand his employer a doctor's note. The note said one thing. He was cleared to stay off work until a certain date. It never said what was wrong with him. His boss got exactly what the boss needed and nothing more.
That small idea turns out to be the hardest thing to build into money that moves over a computer network.
Start with how most of it works today. A public blockchain is a shared ledger that anybody can read, and it works the opposite way from that note. Every balance and every payment sits in the open. That openness is what lets a stranger confirm the rules were followed without taking a company's word for it. The price is that your salary, your suppliers and your margins are readable by your competitor and by the person two doors down.
So anyone building a real application on one of those ledgers runs into a fork. Leave the details public and give up on running a business there. Or move the details into a private database and give up the openness that made the ledger worth using.
My claim is that the third road is where the work is going. You can prove something about an asset without publishing the asset. The system confirms a rule held, and the number behind it stays with you. A payroll run could show nobody was underpaid without printing anyone's salary. A fund could show it holds what it claims without handing a rival its whole book.
The case against this is a fair one and I am not going to wave it away. Every layer of privacy you add is one more place a bug can sit unseen, and a bug nobody can audit is how money goes missing without anyone noticing for months. People asking for plain, boring, readable ledgers are asking for something sensible.
One thing would settle it. Give these systems a few years at real scale and compare their safety record against the open ones. A named failure, an amount, and a date.
Bitcoin gets no free pass here. Its ledger is fully public. That is what lets you verify it yourself, and it is also why somebody who learns one of your addresses, meaning the string you hand out so people can pay you, can read your balance for as long as you hold it.
if this made you go look at your own address, Zap ⚡
Published at
2026-09-24 20:02:16 GMTEvent JSON
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"content": "A friend of mine once had to hand his employer a doctor's note. The note said one thing. He was cleared to stay off work until a certain date. It never said what was wrong with him. His boss got exactly what the boss needed and nothing more.\n\nThat small idea turns out to be the hardest thing to build into money that moves over a computer network.\n\nStart with how most of it works today. A public blockchain is a shared ledger that anybody can read, and it works the opposite way from that note. Every balance and every payment sits in the open. That openness is what lets a stranger confirm the rules were followed without taking a company's word for it. The price is that your salary, your suppliers and your margins are readable by your competitor and by the person two doors down.\n\nSo anyone building a real application on one of those ledgers runs into a fork. Leave the details public and give up on running a business there. Or move the details into a private database and give up the openness that made the ledger worth using.\n\nMy claim is that the third road is where the work is going. You can prove something about an asset without publishing the asset. The system confirms a rule held, and the number behind it stays with you. A payroll run could show nobody was underpaid without printing anyone's salary. A fund could show it holds what it claims without handing a rival its whole book.\n\nThe case against this is a fair one and I am not going to wave it away. Every layer of privacy you add is one more place a bug can sit unseen, and a bug nobody can audit is how money goes missing without anyone noticing for months. People asking for plain, boring, readable ledgers are asking for something sensible.\n\nOne thing would settle it. Give these systems a few years at real scale and compare their safety record against the open ones. A named failure, an amount, and a date.\n\nBitcoin gets no free pass here. Its ledger is fully public. That is what lets you verify it yourself, and it is also why somebody who learns one of your addresses, meaning the string you hand out so people can pay you, can read your balance for as long as you hold it.\n\nhttps://blossom.primal.net/b27b92503149c3364dae812be1d0f426bce726beb996866d9e5b67b5a8cb9f90.png\n\nif this made you go look at your own address, Zap ⚡",
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