Andreas Antonopoulos speaks up against firms like Chainalysis

In a recent interview, Andreas Antonopoulos said that working at Chainalysis is similar to working for a weapons manufacturer or a firm that builds cages for concentration camps. Antonopoulos is a well-known Bitcoin educator and he criticized firms like Chainalysis that help in deanonymizing Bitcoin transactions:

Companies like Chainalysis and others are basically in an arms race against privacy. And what they're doing is they're providing the world's worst dictators and regimes, either directly or indirectly, with information that violates the civil rights of millions of people.

According to Antonopoulos, it is immoral to work for such a firm. 

Just like I would consider it immoral to work for a weapons manufacturer or a company that builds cages for refugee concentration camps.

Responding to this criticism, Jonathan Levin, Chainalysis co-founder and chief strategy officer, said:

While U.S. agencies represent many of our governmental customers, we also work with other government agencies across the world. This is especially beneficial when law enforcement agencies from multiple countries work together, much like they did on the Welcome to Video case. We have policies and procedures in place that help us determine which governments we work with, and as a general rule Chainalysis does not work with dictatorial governments.

Levin said that Chainalysis is “often criticized as being antithetical to the spirit of Bitcoin.” However, he believes that regulatory compliance is necessary for Bitcoin adoption. Antonopoulos admitted that Bitcoin’s initial design was flawed concerning privacy protection and that it has been slowly addressing them due to its inherent conservatism.

Bitcoin is fundamentally the most conservative system out there because it's intended to be extremely robust and secure and able to resist attacks by collusion or cooperation between nation-state-level actors.

He further noted that this issue will be resolved as new privacy-preserving enhancements are coming to the Bitcoin protocol.

Fortunately, there are a number of technologies that are likely to make that much better. One of them is a series of changes that are being introduced to bitcoin now. Schnorr signatures, taproots and tapescript.