Vitalik Buterin and Naomi Brockwell - Fireside Chat // ECC#2 - Buenos Aires 2025

I think, as I wrote in that post in April, privacy is something that you have to have if you want to be able to live any part of your life for yourself, and not have to constantly worry about how this will be perceived by people you know personally, by social media, by local government, by foreign governments who have the ability to send a drone at you, by your employer. If we have to constantly think about all of those things from any kind of decision we make, it becomes almost impossible to live. This kind of thinking can seem far away if you think you have an ordinary life that doesn't affect other people, but the reality is you never know when your life starts being perceived very differently by other people in the future. So if we want people to have personal space, to have the ability to act to satisfy their own goals and needs, to think for themselves, having that space where people can do that and not be judged by everything at the same time is super important. One of the big things happening in the last hundred years is that a lot of these barriers we've taken for granted — that conversations are private, that money is private, even that our own thoughts are private — each and every one of those is being quickly eroded away. If we want to keep that, it needs to be much more actively defended.

Yeah. Without privacy, everything becomes subject to whatever are the most powerful incentives that are able to impose themselves. Sometimes that's money, sometimes that's physical force, and in large quantities either one can completely overwhelm whatever intrinsic goals were originally meant to guide people participating in those activities. If you don't have privacy, it decays into a small number of powerful people and organizations having all the influence. If we want to avoid that, any kind of private decision — journalism, participating in creating culture, making decisions on behalf of an organization, voting on social media — all of these things need privacy. Otherwise, each and every one of those decisions gets overwhelmed by the strongest forces trying to oppose themselves.

Yeah. If you look at health and all the various schools of thought — Brian Johnson style longevity, pandemic prevention and clean air, or other areas — one thing they agree on is that to get the best results, you need data about people and the environment. Each person and environment is different, so you need to know where to intervene and where not. The whole scene has shifted over the last 15 years from giving universalized recommendations to asking what is the situation of each individual person or room. Knowing that is the first step to knowing what you need to improve. But on the other hand, it's easy to underestimate the potential for dystopian privacy consequences. For example, CO2 readings in your room can tell whether people are in the room, when, how many, when they leave and enter, and what physical activities they're doing. It reveals everything. Same for Fitbit data. Everything gets incredibly leaky. So we need to unlock and use all this data for a healthier 21st century, but it has to be done the right way from the start, protecting privacy and not revealing compromising individual information. The nice thing is that with cryptography being built — zero knowledge proofs, FHE, differential privacy, and tooling to make it secure — this is actually possible. The traditional corporate world is not doing this by default, so we have to go and actually do it.