Curriculum·J311 Privacy, Surveillance, and Compliance Exposure·about 34 min
Your own privacy surface
By the end of this lesson you can
- →Enumerate the four surfaces on which your activity becomes attached to your identity
- →Explain why omitting or redacting an address does not prevent re-identification when amounts and dates remain
- →Compute how often an amount and a date identify a single transaction
- →Name the four disclosure events that publish a record you gave to somebody else
Junior · enrolled learners
This lesson opens with The Celsius bankruptcy filing, 5 October 2022.
- What happened
- As part of Celsius Network's Chapter 11 proceedings, the debtors filed their Statement of Financial Affairs on the public docket on 5 October 2022 (Docket No. 973, 14,532 pages). Its answer to Question 3 listed customers by name with their coin transactions in the 90 days before the petition: deposits, withdrawals, transfers and interest, each with a date, a coin and a quantity, the services used and the tokens held. Per The Block and the filing's own layout it gave no wallet addresses and no transaction hashes, and the court had let individuals' home and email addresses be redacted while refusing to redact their names. The dates and amounts remained, which meant, as The Block reported, that the transactions could likely be identified on the public chain, connecting named customers to wallets that had been anonymous, along with everything else those wallets had ever done. Reporting placed the number of affected accounts in the hundreds of thousands. The disclosure followed standard bankruptcy procedure rather than any breach, and on 24 October 2022 Judge Martin Glenn agreed to appoint a consumer privacy ombudsman in the case.
- The decision point
- Nobody was hacked and nobody broke a rule. The customers had handed their identity and their transaction history to a company in order to use it, which is the ordinary price of using anything custodial, and the company's insolvency put that record on a public docket because insolvency proceedings are public. Leaving the address out did not protect it, because the fields that reconstruct it were left in.
What you will be able to answer
- →What are the four surfaces?
- →Why did leaving the address out fail?
- →Which amounts are most identifying?
- →What are the four disclosure events?
Orientation and Year One are open: anyone can read them without an account. From Year Two onward the lessons are for enrolled learners, because progress through the later years only means anything if it is tracked against a record.
It is free. We do not sell the list and there is nothing to buy at the end of it.
Sources and review
- https://www.theblock.co/post/175445/celsius-provides-users-names-and-trading-history-in-legal-filing
- https://www.coindesk.com/policy/2022/10/24/celsius-bankruptcy-judge-agrees-to-appoint-a-consumer-privacy-ombudsman-in-case
- https://decrypt.co/111451/bankrupt-crypto-lender-celsius-reveals-thousands-of-users-transaction-histories-in-court-filing
- https://www.theregister.com/on-prem/2022/10/11/600k-celsius-customer-crypto-info-revealed-in-court-filing/521110
- https://cases.stretto.com/public/x191/11749/PLEADINGS/1174910062280000000005.pdf
- https://beincrypto.com/celsius-customer-transactions-exposed-in-court-document/
Confidence high·Volatility low·Reviewed 2026-10-22·Owner unassigned
Contested
Reported counts for the Celsius disclosure range from thousands of named customers in the headlines to about 600,000 accounts affected across the proceedings, depending on what is being counted. The mechanism does not depend on the count and the lesson does not assert a single figure.
The filing itself is Docket No. 973 in Case No. 22-10964 (MG), filed 5 October 2022 and 14,532 pages long; press reports from 6 and 7 October give 14,000 or 14,500 pages, and CoinDesk counts more than 29,000 pages across all the documents released. Reports also differ on whether wallet identifiers appeared: Decrypt lists 'crypto wallet IDs' and CoinDesk says wallet addresses were revealed, while The Block reports that the data held no blockchain transaction records such as hashes but did hold dates and amounts. BeInCrypto reports that an address column is listed and redacted; since the court allowed individuals' home and email addresses to be redacted, and the schedules filed the same day print 'ADDRESS REDACTED' for postal addresses, we read that column as the postal address, not a wallet. The insider rider in the filing we read has columns for name, date, account, type, purpose, coin, quantity and USD value and no wallet address column; the customer exhibits are linked files we did not read in full. An earlier version of this lesson said wallet addresses were redacted, which no source we read supports. The lesson follows The Block and the filing, and its point holds either way: where an address was absent, the date and amount stood in for it.
That a reader could recover a customer's address from a dated amount is The Block's reading, stated as likely. We found no published account of anyone doing it at scale, and the lesson does not claim one.
Celsius also supplies the autopsy for J305-01, where it is a counterparty and yield failure. This lesson uses a different mechanism from the same collapse, being the public docket as a disclosure channel. Keep the split and do not re-derive the yield argument here.
F104-03 owns the Ledger customer database breach as a physical safety and phishing exposure. This lesson treats vendor records as one of four identity surfaces. Keep the split.