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