This chapter covers
- Basic privacy
- Replacing names with public key hashes
- Protecting against expensive typing errors
By the time you reach the end of this chapter, the cookie token spreadsheet will no longer have personal names—you’ll be replacing these names with hashes of public keys. This is useful from a privacy perspective. No one can easily see who’s paying whom, making it harder for others to extract information from the spreadsheet and see how many cookies any of your coworkers eat. Lisa also finds this useful because she doesn’t have to maintain a table of names and public keys.
When switching to public key hashes in the spreadsheet, coworkers will no longer use names in their emails to Lisa. They will instead use strings of hex code representing public key hashes. This means it will be easy to make typing errors. If you make a typing error, your money may end up digitally burned!
Some coworkers invent cookie token addresses (Bitcoin addresses) that protect them from losing money due to typing errors (figure 3.1). Cookie token addresses are used between users to pay each other, pretty much like an email address, but they aren’t used in the spreadsheet.
Figure 3.1. Cookie token addresses are exactly the same as Bitcoin addresses. They’re used mainly by wallet software.
