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In American gun culture, a desire for privacy runs deep. For many gun owners, any government attempt to keep tabs on who owns what is a non-starter. \u201cI\u2019m not for any type of registration,\u201d John Crump, the special projects coordinator at the Gun Owners of America, said in a recent interview.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
Cryptocurrency advocates have a similar ethos and\u00a0often talk about empowering people to avoid government oversight<\/a>\u00a0via their newfangled financial ecosystem.<\/p>\n Crump lives in the overlap between those two worlds. At GOA, which describes itself, quoting former U.S. congressman (and presidential candidate) Ron Paul, as “the only no-compromise gun lobby in Washington,” he\u2019s an in-house expert on crypto and blockchains.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n The latter, of course, is what makes crypto possible in the first place.\u00a0Blockchains<\/a>\u00a0are digital accounting ledgers that publicly track when a token moves from one person to another. While built to be anonymous (nobody has to record their identity in a blockchain), that shroud of secrecy can be pierced by law enforcement or anyone with the right sleuthing skills.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n And that\u2019s where crypto can get tricky for gun owners. In effect, when someone purchases a gun with a cryptocurrency, a digital paper trail is created. The blockchain record might not spell out the name of the buyer and seller or what gun was exchanged, but the transaction is logged so privacy cannot be assured.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n \u201cHonestly, I don’t think a lot of people realize how everything is traceable,\u201d Crump said. \u201cA lot of people in the firearms market, when they hear bitcoin or crypto, they automatically assume that it’s untraceable and private. But they don’t realize that blockchain is a ledger. Everything is there.\u201d<\/p>\n Tom Heston, a clinical associate professor at Washington State University\u2019s Department of Medical Education and Clinical Sciences, approaches the gun-violence epidemic from a public health perspective. His 2017 paper titled \u201cA Blockchain Solution to Gun Control<\/a>\u201d proposes a blockchain-powered universal ID to track guns and ammunition. That, Heston argues, would help enforce gun-control measures such as red-flag laws, which let police temporarily seize firearms from people thought to be a danger to themselves or others.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n Such a system, he argues, wouldn\u2019t include personal information like names or addresses on the blockchain. But if law enforcement needed to identify someone it could do so by connecting a crypto wallet address to the actual person behind it. \u201cHaving a way to identify people while also maintaining their privacy is, I think, that combination that cryptocurrency brings,\u201d Heston said in an interview.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n The gun lobby strongly disagrees with Heston\u2019s take on registries and privacy. (In June, the state of California accidentally\u00a0leaked the personal information of gun owners<\/a>, the worst nightmare of privacy-focused gun owners.) Heston counters this argument by sharing that Congress has just passed a\u00a0gun-safety law<\/a>, \u201cand those red-flag laws require databases. So why don’t we have a database that protects privacy?\u201d…<\/p>\n Read more at CoinDesk<\/a><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n