Curriculum·J311 Privacy, Surveillance, and Compliance Exposure·about 33 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 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, 6 October 2022.
- What happened
- As part of Celsius Network's Chapter 11 proceedings, a schedule appeared on the public docket on 6 October 2022 running to more than 14,500 pages. It listed customer names alongside transaction types, amounts, the tokens held and the Celsius services used. Wallet addresses were redacted. The dates and amounts were not, which meant a reader could match a named customer's disclosed transactions against the public chain and thereby recover the address the redaction was meant to protect, along with everything else that address 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. The redaction failed because it removed the identifier while leaving the fields that reconstruct it.
What you will be able to answer
- →What are the four surfaces?
- →Why did redacting the address 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
Confidence high·Volatility low·Reviewed 2026-08-06·Owner unassigned
Contested
Reported counts for the Celsius disclosure range from tens of thousands of named customers in the schedule 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.
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.