Blockchain is seen as a beacon of hope for secure, transparent, and privacy-friendly digital payments. But how justified are these hopes?
In this episode of Digitalgelddickicht, we take a closer look at Bitcoin, Ethereum, and DeFi. We look at how blockchains function as distributed ledgers, how consensus is achieved without banks or other central authorities, and why transparency is not a voluntary extra, but a fundamental principle of blockchain. Other topics include high energy consumption, the difference between proof of work and proof of stake, and the innovation potential – and risks – of Smart Contracts.
The focus is on the issue of privacy and payment security: contrary to widespread belief, public blockchains do not enable anonymity, but usually only pseudonymity – which can often be dissolved retrospectively. The episode shows what privacy coins are and how additional cryptographic solutions work, how investigative authorities are achieving success, and what unavoidable trade-offs exist between autonomy, convenience, regulation, and security. Maximum privacy does not come automatically when paying on the blockchain, but requires knowledge, effort, and discipline. Instead of hype or demonization, the episode argues for seeing the great innovation potential of blockchain as a young, fascinating basic technology, but also for not falling for false promises and researching into possible and necessary optimization, structural limitations, and risks of the technology.
Digitalgelddickicht Season Secure Money – What can the blockchain do? (German only) | 17 December 2025
Guests
Dr. Clara Schneidewind is a computer scientist and leads the Heinz Nixdorf Research Group for Cryptocurrencies and Smart Contracts at the Max Planck Institute for Security and Privacy. In her research, she aims to develop solutions for the meaningful, secure, resource-efficient and privacy-preserving use of blockchain technologies. She is also a principal investigator in the CASA (Cyber Security in the Age of Large-Scale Adversaries) Cluster of Excellence at Ruhr University Bochum. In her research, she develops solutions for the sensible, secure, resource-efficient, and privacy-preserving use of blockchain technologies. The aim is to create strong theoretical foundations to ensure a high degree of reliability in financial processes.
Jana Ringwald is a senior public prosecutor at the Central Office for Combating Internet Crime (ZIT) of the Public Prosecutor’s Office in Frankfurt/Main. In this role, she has been involved in internationally renowned investigations, such as the seizure of illegally obtained cryptocurrencies worth hundreds of millions of euros. In addition, she represented the Federal Ministry of Justice in the European Judicial Cybercrime Network at Eurojust in The Hague until 2024. She describes her experiences, including the case of the darknet marketplace WallStreetMarket discussed here, in the book “Digital. Kriminell. Menschlich – Eine Cyberstaatsanwältin ermittelt”.
Thomas Moser holds a doctorate in economics and is an Alternate Member of the Governing Board of the Swiss National Bank. Previously, he was an executive director at the International Monetary Fund (IMF). He is also a visiting professor at the University of Lucerne and works and conducts research primarily on CBDCs, crypto assets, and other forms of digital money.
Marek Jessen was a member of the ZEVEDI project Money as a Data Carrier and now works as a consultant for strategy and business of the digital euro at the German Savings Banks Association (DSGV). He has also worked for the Association of German Banks (BdB) and the European Data Protection Supervisor (EDPS).
Sources
Chainalysis: How Chainalysis Helped Uncover an NCA Officer’s Theft of Seized Bitcoin, 16. Juli 2025.
Leslie Lamport, Robert Shostak, Marshall Pease: The Byzantine Generals Problem, ACM Transactions on Programming Languages and Systems (TOPLAS), Vol. 4 (1982), 3, Seiten 382–401.