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Welcome back to the breakdown.

It is Thursday, April 23rd, and today we're going to be talking about a subject which is

high on many people's minds, not just in the Bitcoin and crypto world, but beyond, but

certainly has particular interest for this group of folks.

We're going to be talking about privacy in the context of COVID-19.

On Monday, the Times in the UK published an op-ed called We Need Big Brother to Beat

this virus.

The subheader is, don't let the civil liberties lobby blind us to

the fact that greater state surveillance, including ID cards, is required. So this is, of course,

clickbait. The title is designed to get engagement, and engagement it got, including for me.

I wrote, we really don't, though,

with a screenshot of the piece, and it seems from the response that I got to that tweet that this

is something that a lot of people are thinking about. One of the great fears in really any time

of extreme crisis is that centralized actors, governments, use that moment to consolidate more power.

Some of this is necessary.

There are extraordinary powers needed for extraordinary times.

The problem is that states tend not to relinquish that power.

I mean, no one tends to relinquish power easily once it has been claimed.

In America, we've obviously seen this with

the Patriot Act and how that kind of just became de rigore normal policy rather than something

...