Ethereum Founder Vitalik Buterin: Privacy is Freedom, Privacy is Order, Privacy is Progress
Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin reiterated three statements: Privacy is freedom, privacy is order, privacy is progress, and pointed to his long article "Why I support privacy" dated April 14, 2025.
In the article, he defines freedom as not having to weigh every step between "private games" and "public games." Order refers to the social foundational mechanism that relies on others not being able to see what you are doing at all times, with secret voting as an example: you cannot prove to anyone who you voted for. Progress means being able to selectively share data while blocking abuse, which is necessary to unlock medical and scientific uses.
He wrote that cryptography originated from projects like Chaumian Ecash that prioritized financial privacy, but later underestimated it due to the lack of decentralized privacy tools. Today, zero-knowledge proofs can prove trustworthiness without revealing identity, fully homomorphic encryption can compute without seeing the data, and obfuscation techniques may advance further. Whoever controls the information holds the power, and privacy is a guarantee of decentralization.
He opposed the old argument that "privacy is dead," naming David Brin's 1998 book "The Transparent Society," Sun Microsystems CEO Scott McNealy's 1999 statement "privacy is dead, get over it," and Facebook's early real-name policy. In 2015, he heard a Western speaker casually say "privacy is over" at a Huawei event in Shenzhen. He has refuted two premises: that top-level politics is entirely benevolent and that culture will always become more tolerant.
Regarding backdoors, he listed four unstable reasons. Data will not only stay with the government; banks, payment institutions, and telecom companies also hold it. In 2019, several Twitter employees were convicted for selling dissident information to Saudi Arabia. In 2024, data retained by American telecom companies was hacked, allegedly linked to China. The regime itself can also change. His conclusion is that the safest practice is for the central authority to collect as little as possible, keeping data on the user side.
AI is enhancing centralized data collection and analysis capabilities, also expanding the range of data people voluntarily provide. He warned that after brain-machine interfaces, discussions may revolve around AI reading thoughts directly. The more companies know, the more they can offer personalized prices that take the most money while just letting you pay. The default path of technological capital will continue to erode this space, and the digital realm is currently the most capable of countering it.
Buyers are users, wallets, and protocols that choose to disclose selectively, while sellers are platforms that price based on data differences and compliant intermediaries that must retain all data. This is not a single transaction but a route switch. Funds are flowing from transparent addresses and centralized logs to zero-knowledge proofs, local models, and user-held data. Benefiting are infrastructures that can prove compliance without disclosing underlying accounts, while those that treat surveillance as a business model are under pressure.
Source: Public Information
ABAB AI Insight
Vitalik Buterin incorporated privacy into Ethereum long before 2025. In the early stages, the protocol could resist censorship and be open-source, but it could not achieve decentralized privacy, so public ledgers were seen as a feature. After zero-knowledge proofs matured, he transformed the slogan "who has information has power" into a roadmap. In March 2026, he summarized four non-negotiables with CROPS: censorship resistance, open-source, privacy, and security. In September, he publicly stated that privacy is only considered dead if it is abandoned, and he is investing more heavily.
The capital path is not about issuing a new coin but integrating privacy into the existing settlement layer. Local models rewrite requests, zero-knowledge interfaces isolate content, and Tor isolates networks, which is the three-layer structure he self-tested on October 4: content, payment, and traffic must all be blocked simultaneously. Remote large models are still called upon, but only receive the rewritten questions. Money continues to flow to inference services, with personal health and travel data required to remain local.
In contrast, Signal has made end-to-end encryption the default rather than an optional plugin. This is also similar to Zcash hiding amounts within the protocol and Tornado Cash facing sanctions after making coin mixing a contract. The industry's position is to catch up, not expand. Public chains already have a share of settlements, but lack identity protection across reading, transferring, and querying layers.
The essence is the transfer of pricing power. Transparent ledgers give user behavior away for free to analysts, and platforms use it to set personalized prices. Programmable privacy returns the granularity of disclosure to users: proof must be sufficiently trustworthy, and underlying accounts do not leave the local environment. The mechanism is that after the information gradient declines, the strong party can no longer lock in the weak based on full logs; charges must shift from data differences back to clear service fees.
ABAB News · Cognitive Laws
Whoever controls the information controls the pricing power.
Secrecy is not hiding; it is a component for society to function.
Less central collection is safer than strict regulation afterward.