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Welcome back to The Breakdown.

It is Friday, March 6th, and today we have a very special episode.

So for a little bit of context, I want to go back to February 17th.

That was the point at which most people in America were not paying attention to the coronavirus

yet, but it had become a huge emergency

in China already. On that day, China's English language newspaper, the Global Times, reported

that authorities in the province where the coronavirus epicenter of Wuhan was located had launched

a very extensive search of fever patients. They were using

financial transaction information about people who had bought fever and cough medicine since a

month earlier, January 20th, to go look for and find people who had symptoms of coronavirus. Now, I tweeted that day,

when someone tells you that only criminals should care about financial privacy or says

something like, I have nothing to hide, send them this. Privacy is the topic of our conversation

today, and I am joined by an illustrious guest in that context,

Ricardo Spagney. Many of you know Ricardo better as his online avatar, fluffy pony. Many of you

know him as the former lead maintainer of Monero, which is a privacy-centric cryptocurrency.

Some of you know him as the co-founder of Tari, which is a privacy-centric cryptocurrency. Some of you know him as the co-founder of

Tari, which is a new digital asset platform. But whatever the case, however you know Ricardo,

what everyone knows about him is that he is an extremely poignant observer of privacy

in the larger global context. In our conversation today, we really

take a look across the globe at the state of privacy in the context of a number of issues

...