Is privacy dead on Ethereum?
Protocol design · 9 participants · 9 quotes · 2026-09-19 ~ 2026-09-20
When gakonst said that his main concern is how dead privacy will be going forward, pcaversaccio pushed back that privacy is not dead and that we have only been building the wrong defaults, and that unconditional privacy enshrined in L1 should be deployed. The discussion split between those who say privacy is a lost cause in the age of AI and those who say it is an endless arms race that neither side wins.
Background
This debate extends the old question of whether privacy should be enshrined by default in the Ethereum protocol rather than being an individual feature. pcaversaccio has argued for years for unconditional privacy enshrined in L1, meaning that the default transaction itself is private. In the background, the ZEC (Zcash) rally and advances in AI-based chain analysis have raised doubts about how effective privacy technology really is.
Why it matters
Privacy is not just a debate about an individual feature but is becoming a touchstone for whether Ethereum is losing ground in the privacy narrative. The points to watch are whether unconditional privacy on L1 will be deployed as the default and what its timeline will be.
Key points
- Is privacy a fundamentally losing battle in the age of AI, or just a problem of default design?
- Should privacy be built into the runtime (execution layer, browser) by default, rather than being an option users configure?
- Will one side win the relationship between AI and privacy, or is it an endless arms race?
For — Privacy is dying
Georgios Konstantopoulos, Maya Zehavi
- gakonst: What concerns me most right now is how dead privacy will be going forward
- mayazi: Privacy is a lost cause in the age of AI
Against — It is not dead, we have only been building the wrong defaults
vitalik.eth, sudo rm -rf --no-preserve-root /, Privacy Pools, Web3Privacy Now, chase
- Vitalik Buterin: Privacy only dies if you give up, and he is not giving up but pushing harder
- pcaversaccio: Privacy is not dead, we have only been building the wrong defaults. All privacy should be part of the runtime (execution layer, browser), not something users configure
- pcaversaccio: If we deploy unconditional privacy enshrined in L1 and make the default transaction private, privacy scales and wins. I will not stop until my XMR transactions can be replaced with ETH transactions
- 0xprivacypools: Privacy only dies if we let it die, the fight continues
- web3privacy: Some people complain and some people act. If privacy were that dead, 2000 people would not already be registered for Cypherpunk Congress
Neutral — It is an eternal arms race that neither side wins
𝕧𝕖𝕣𝕤 𝕝𝕒 𝕃𝕦𝕟𝕖, Fran ~ priv/acc
- vers_laLune: It is intensifying if anything, but this is a constant arms race
- Franacc_: AI and privacy are opposing forces in a permanent arms race. The stronger AI gets, the more valuable privacy becomes, and the better privacy gets, the more new workarounds AI finds, so neither side really wins