What do you do when no one sees you? Do you sing at the top of your lungs without paying attention to tuning? Do you dance naked in your living room to music that no one knows you enjoy? Or do you just sleep comfortably all day without worrying about anyone calling you lazy? Who are you in your darkest loneliness? How do you feel in those moments that only belong to you, and that no foreign presence conditions? Don’t tell me! I’m not interested; I only care about your right to your privacy, to experience yourself fully and that you can know yourself in all your possible expression.
One of the things that struck me the most about the conference Watch Out! Bitcoin Last week was when, in one of the panels, Ben Kaufman from the Bitcoin Keeper wallet commented that, after the arrest of the developers of Samourai Wallet and those of Tornado Cash, there had been fear in the ecosystem to integrate privacy technologies into their products. That he has discussed this with other fellow developers, who are also refraining from developing these services.
On the one hand, it makes sense: no one wants to see their freedom and physical integrity, or that of their family members, violated. From a practical, utilitarian, selfish perspective, is it worth immolating yourself? But, on the other hand, weighed in the grand scheme of things, this individual calculation has the counterpart of admitting defeat, giving in to the triumph of hyper-surveillance and the criminalization of privacy.
That was the goal of the United States government and, as long as the fear of the developers remains, they achieved it. Because to criminalize something, de factolaws are not needed. Power is more consolidated when the threat is sufficiently deterrent that the exercise of violence is not necessary. People learn to “self-regulate,” which is just another way of saying self-censorship.
A spiritual battle is being fought. Because the right to privacy is the right to oneself. Without privacy there is no access to the intimate world, because we all act differently when we know we are being watched. And it’s nothing esoteric. It is even a physical truth, as demonstrated by the double slit experiment: even electrons behave differently in the presence of an observer.
But on a more material level, privacy is the condition for physical security in a system like Bitcoin.
To achieve decentralization, Satoshi chose transparency and sacrificed privacy. He created a protocol in which we are all watchers of each other so we don’t have to depend on a centralized source of truth. This comptroller general had as a side effect the creation of one of the largest financial panopticons that have ever existed, open to any eavesdropper, with good or bad intentions.
Due to this crystalline transparency, it has been reported more than two hundred physical attacks to cryptocurrency holders, of which forty-eight have been in 2025. This means that, in 16 years of bitcoin history, At least 20% of the attacks are concentrated in the last year alone. We say at least because these figures are not exact, since there may be underreporting due to unreported attacks.
The fact is that violence against cryptocurrency holders is increasing dramatically, almost at the same rate as transaction analysis tools are becoming more sophisticated, becoming available to anyone regardless of their intentions. This is not to mention that the request for personal data from clients through KYC regulations is becoming more and more massive, data that ends up being sold to criminals on the deep web.
States promote the criminalization of privacy tools under the justification of fighting crime, but the lack of privacy tools facilitates crime.
At the same time, developers stop promoting privacy tools for fear of state violence, increasing the risk of suffering violence from extralegal criminals.
The middle path may be the smartest. Introduce, in a veiled way, privacy tools, under the cover of tools that serve other purposes. Lightning is an example of this: a network for instant and cheap payments that, in addition, increases privacy. RGB and ark They also seem to be going in that direction. Thus, we mitigate both the risk of official and unofficial violence, and we gain ground to be more private.
I think that the defense of privacy is something that should not be abandoned. Although it may seem like an absurd task, since everywhere, inside and outside of Bitcoin, we are surrounded by transparency and indifference to the surveillance and abuse of our data. Even so, we must insist, raise our voices and raise awareness about the valuable asset that we are losing, and the danger we run for being afraid to defend it.