The Importance of Financial Privacy
Bitcoin was developed for three reasons; to fix the current inefficient financial payment rails, to provide basic financial services to the unbanked and underbanked, and to improve privacy within a financial system that requires giving someone the keys to your bank account in order to pay them.
The effects of the lack of financial privacy have been both damaging and costly for 100’s of millions of people over just the last five years. For instance, in 2013, retail giant Target was hacked, affecting 70 million customers. Leaked bank account and credit card information belonging to these customers not only led to over $160 million in losses for the company, but also put their unsuspecting customers at risk for fraud and identity theft. All of this was made possible by an antiquated financial system based on centralized databases and private ledgers implementing “pull technology”. (Pull technology refers to a system where the receiver must use information to pull funds from the sender, as opposed to the sender pushing funds to the receiver without revealing his information.)
At Bitwage, the privacy and security of user information are a top priority. By leveraging bitcoin payroll, we provide new ways for people to receive their salaries via the bitcoin blockchain as a payment rail, while providing faster and lower cost international freelance payments into local currency or skipping the current financial system entirely by receiving wages directly in bitcoin.
Our customers receiving their wages directly in bitcoin enjoy a great deal of financial privacy when it comes to their everyday transactions except for one catch — a lack of rotating public addresses to pay out to. Because of the transparency of the blockchain, sending multiple payrolls to the same address allows outsiders to see patterns and learn information about the address, thereby increasing the risk of hackers targeting this address. At Bitwage, we strive to evolve our service by actively listening to the needs of our Bitwage Users. We have heard requests for greater privacy and are happy to announce the release of our Address List payout option.
Bitwage Address List Payout Option
Our new Address List payout option allows Bitwage users to more securely and privately manage their bi-weekly or monthly payrolls without having to worry about bad actors monitoring their wages. This feature enables users to enter up to 100 different public bitcoin addresses to be paid into. With each bitcoin payroll, our service will send wages to the next address on the list until the list ends, where we will then continue to pay out into the last address until the list is further updated.
Here is how to set it up:
Once logged in, go to the “Outputs Tab”. Click on the button under “Network/Country/Service”, then open up the “Bitcoin Network Tab”. On the right, there will be a button for “New Address List”. Press the button and add up to 100 new addresses to receive your bitcoin payroll.
While this advanced feature improves privacy for our direct bitcoin payroll employees and freelancers, employees, employers and freelancers using our Bitwage Cloud Saving, Bitwage Debit Card and local currency solutions can be assured that we have enterprise quality security and privacy measures in place with all of our partner relationships. Together, with our partners, we are striving to create a new industry standard for safety, privacy, and financial security.
Regarding XPubKeys
We recognize that many people have been asking for the ability for people receiving bitcoin payroll to be able to upload their xpubkey in order to improve their own privacy. We have spent many man hours researching this functionality, including speaking with many industry experts of open source, decentralized wallets (such as Airbitz, Breadwallet, and MultiBit). The Bitwage Address List payout was implemented instead of (or before) the alternative method of accepting an xpubkey of a BIP32 HD wallet for the following reasons:
Accepting an xpubkey would allow Bitwage to see all public addresses of the user including all future and current non-payroll addresses thus giving Bitwage more knowledge than necessary and reducing user privacy.
Accepting an xpubkey would reduce our current compatibility with user wallets because of the quantity of different path structures of the various BIP32 HD wallet implementations.
Photo by Sanwal Deen on Unsplash
