Monero [XMR] UI/UX designer: Protecting people doesn’t come without protecting privacy

Diego Salazar aka Rehrar, a UI/UX designer in the Monero community, advocated the need for privacy and why he is into Monero in a podcast recently. On the Coin Boys podcast, Salazar spoke about the privacy aspects of Monero and what attracted him to the community.

He said that he got into Monero community a year and a half earlier and further confirmed how Monero was started as a scam by a user, ‘Thankful_for_today’. The core team developers later discovered the scam and took over the project [Monero] from him.

Thankful_for_today was a user on Bitcointalk forum who forked the codebase of Bytecoin into the name BitMonero, which is an amalgamation of Bit [Bitcoin] and Monero. This literally translates into ‘coin’ in Esperanto. He added:

“And at the same time, if the core team member starts doing something the community doesn’t like, we can take it from them.  So one of the things we do and trust them with is looking over the code and merging it and building the binaries and signing those because they’re trusted members of the community like FluffyPony, ArcticMine and Luigi111.”

Touching on the more intriguing aspects that attracted him to Monero, Rehrar said that he was a huge advocate of privacy and believed that privacy was instrumental and fundamental to our civil liberties. He continued saying if privacy was eroded, liberties would erode along with it, and that it was vastly seen in totalitarian governments.

Furthermore, Salazar said that for people in first-world countries, lack of privacy would mostly be used for nothing more than targeted advertising. According to him, if people from other countries lacked privacy, they could go to jail or get killed.

Explaining what attracted him to Monero, he said that they were creating a currency taking into account the survival of these people. He stated:

“We’re looking on the fringes of the people that actually need this technology, not where the institutional money is. More importantly, we’re seeing how can we really help people with this technology and you can’t really do it without privacy.”