Author: Techub News Compilation

Introduction

During the ETH Tokyo conference, Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin attended an in-depth dialogue organized by COTI Foundation. As the soul of Ethereum, each public sharing by Vitalik Buterin garners much attention, especially in the realm of privacy, which is increasingly becoming a core challenge and opportunity in Web3. This interview was not a pre-set agenda speech but rather unfolded in a live Q&A format, covering a wide range of topics including technical implementation of privacy, ecological incentives, compliance challenges, L1/L2 roles, and even the modern evolution of the cypherpunk spirit. In the context of tightening regulations and an awakening user consciousness regarding data sovereignty, Vitalik Buterin's thoughts provide a key perspective for understanding the Ethereum privacy roadmap and the future direction of the entire industry.

Summary

• There is a fundamental goal difference between corporate privacy and individual privacy: corporations often accept "backdoors" to meet compliance, while the core of individual privacy is precisely to eliminate backdoors.
• The key to promoting privacy is reducing usage costs and enhancing technological maturity, not merely economic incentives; user trust (such as in complex ZK code and multi-signature solutions) is currently the main bottleneck.
• Ethereum L1 will not directly integrate strong privacy protocols (such as EIP-7503 "Wormhole") in the short term due to high technical risks; privacy should be a default part of user experience, enabling innovation at L2 and higher layers.
• A solution to potential conflicts of interest within the ecosystem (such as L2 investments affecting L1 development) is to maintain ecological diversity and ensure that the best technological solutions can win in public debate.
• The modern cypherpunk spirit needs to shift from "total confrontation" to "strong checks and balances" and adopt a "full-stack" mindset, comprehensively ensuring security and privacy from hardware, operating systems, browsers to application layers.

Corporate Privacy vs. Civilian Privacy: Two Worlds with Different Goals

At the beginning of the interview, Vitalik Buterin pointed out a core contradiction in the realm of privacy: the privacy needs from corporations (or institutions) and those from civilians (individual users) are fundamentally different. He noted that the privacy field encompasses people with different goals from various angles.

Corporations or institutions seek privacy, possibly due to their own commercial interests (such as protecting customer data), meeting compliance requirements (such as GDPR), or intergovernmental data safety measures. A notable characteristic of theirs is that they often can accept some form of "backdoor" or regulatory interface because their core demand may be "no one else can see except for us and the necessary regulators."

In contrast, individual users often seek privacy from ideological or practical protection needs, one of the core principles being "no backdoors." Individuals want to have complete control over their data, preventing any unauthorized access, including mass surveillance by service providers or the government.

"The worst outcome is," Vitalik Buterin warned, "that we simultaneously have two fragmented privacy domains, where the corporate privacy domain defines 'privacy' by itself." He worries that if corporate-level privacy solutions (which typically incorporate compliance compromises) become the industry standard, the true demands of individual privacy will be marginalized.

The best path in his view is for influence to flow in reverse: strong privacy technologies developed from individuals and communities (such as advanced zero-knowledge proof solutions) should permeate upwards and even influence and shape institutional privacy practice standards. In this process, both sides can collaborate on shared technological foundational components (such as more efficient ZK proofs and secure elements), but it is crucial to recognize that they are not the same ecosystem and have fundamentally different goals.

Limitations of Economic Incentives and the True Bottleneck: Costs and Trust

When asked how to economically incentivize people to participate in privacy protocols, Vitalik Buterin gave a pragmatic answer: short-term incentives like liquidity mining are useful, but net benefits ultimately become zero and are unsustainable. He believes that reducing usage costs is key. He cited the proliferation of HTTPS as an example: when the cost of encryption becomes negligible, privacy (security) becomes the default option.

So, why hasn’t the usage of privacy protocols (such as Railgun) exploded? Vitalik Buterin redirected the question back to the audience and project teams: "Why haven’t you put 10 times the money into the privacy pool yourself?" He provided two main answers, both pointing to technological maturity and trust:

• Lack of trust in complex ZK code: Zero-knowledge proof system code is complex, with historical vulnerabilities ("skeletons in the closet"). Users worry that if a soundness vulnerability occurs, funds could be entirely lost. For large assets, this risk is hard to bear.
• Concerns about single points of failure: Currently, many privacy solutions rely on single-key wallets. Vitalik Buterin firmly believes that the security of large funds should not depend on a single private key. His long-term vision advocates for migrating EVM to RISC-V architecture, enabling a single account to conduct both public and privacy transactions while controlling rights through ZK proofs. Until this is achieved, native multi-signature support is an important direction for improvement.

The audience's additional comments echoed these views: poor user experience, limited types of supported assets, and opportunity costs (better returns elsewhere) are all obstacles. Vitalik Buterin summarized that most issues ultimately boil down to technological maturity issues, which will continuously improve over time.

Privacy, the Dark Web, and Compliance: Seeking Balance Between Technology and Social Norms

Privacy technologies inevitably will have associations with illegal activities. In this regard, Vitalik Buterin believes that social factors and technological capabilities are equally important. He used Zcash and Monero as examples: technically, Zcash offers stronger privacy, but social norms have made Monero synonymous with "dark web transactions," while Zcash has never catered to this segment of users and thus failed to become mainstream in that specific arena.

This implies that even if Ethereum acquires powerful general privacy technologies, how it will be used, and to what extent it will be associated with illegal activities, depends far more on societal, cultural, and ecological factors than on technology itself. As a diverse ecosystem, Ethereum includes numerous L2s and chains, and the ultimate privacy application landscape will be complex.

Regarding compliance, Vitalik Buterin proposed a pragmatic "passing line" goal: to ensure that cryptocurrency offers no less convenience to large-scale criminals than traditional financial systems. He pointed out that fiat systems are riddled with vulnerabilities, scams abound, and victims often cannot recover their funds. Through technologies like zero-knowledge proofs, cryptocurrencies can potentially provide stronger privacy protection than fiat currencies while creating greater barriers to activities like money laundering than fiat systems.

He specifically mentioned concepts like "Privacy Pools," which allow users to maintain privacy while selectively excluding funds from known illegal addresses (such as those from hacking incidents). This "compliance-friendly privacy" may be a key innovation for addressing regulatory pressures while protecting ordinary user privacy.

L1 Caution and L2 Opportunities: Wormhole EIP and the Future Architecture of Privacy

Regarding whether privacy features should be directly integrated into Ethereum L1 (for example, through the EIP-7503 "Wormhole" proposal), Vitalik Buterin expressed a clear short-term opposition. This proposal allows users to "magically" retrieve ETH from addresses that cannot be spent through ZK proofs, essentially introducing native privacy to L1. The core reason for his opposition remains technical risk: if there is a soundness vulnerability, attackers could potentially mint ETH infinitely, and it would be hard to detect in time, which would be catastrophic for blockchain protocols.

He believes the more important task at hand is to address user experience issues related to privacy, such as wallet integration, account abstraction, and so on. The recent activity of the Ethereum Foundation in the wallet sector is aimed precisely at promoting improvements in these basic experiences.

So, what is the value of L2s focused on privacy (like Aztec)? Vitalik Buterin articulated a clear positioning: payment privacy will ultimately be commoditized, becoming a default, seamless part of user experience. The real value of privacy L2 lies in "everything beyond payments"—supporting privacy-friendly smart contracts, DeFi, and other complex applications. L2 should not just be "branded Ethereum shards" but should build unique value on top of it. For example, Aztec offers a privacy-friendly smart contract programming language, while Railgun has explored on private DeFi functionalities.

Ecological Governance and Conflicts of Interest: Will L2 Investment Impede L1 Development?

A pointed question arose: Will the significant investments by core participants in the Ethereum ecosystem (including leaders and key decision-makers) in L2 lead to impediments for the expansion of L1 Ethereum (as L1 is not allowed to compete with L2)?

Vitalik Buterin acknowledged that this is a real issue that must be addressed not only in the privacy domain but throughout the entire ecosystem. He believes that one cannot and should not expect everyone to act without self-interest or conflicts; having a "side job" is healthy and inevitable for technical developers.

The solution he proposes is to maintain diversity and balance within the ecosystem. The key is to create an environment where the best technological solutions can prevail in open, rational technical debates. As long as there are individuals whose main interests lie in ETH, DApp, or other areas and who can propose reasonable L1 improvement plans unaffected by specific L2 conflicts of interest, and the community's technical debate process is sufficiently robust, then the correct solution should be adopted.

He revealed that the Ethereum Foundation has made significant improvements in communication and relationship balancing with different L2s compared to a few years ago. At the same time, he expressed concern about another extreme risk: compromising decentralization or security deadlines to satisfy the urgent needs of the community. He emphasized that reliability is the core value that Ethereum is valued for by enterprises, and the principle of security first must be adhered to.

From "Confrontation" to "Checks and Balances": Reshaping the Modern Cypherpunk Spirit

Reflecting on the 30-year journey of the cypherpunk movement, Vitalik Buterin pointed out that cryptocurrency has made two significant contributions to this movement: realizing private payments (the dream since David Chaum in 1982), and injecting vast resources into the development of programmable cryptography (such as ZK-SNARKs and fully homomorphic encryption).

However, he also emphasized that the cypherpunk spirit needs to evolve and adapt to a world that is fundamentally different from 30 years ago:

• From "anonymous means freedom" to "selective disclosure": In the past, "on the internet, no one knows you're a dog" symbolized freedom. Today, anonymity also means indistinguishability between people and bots, leading to spam proliferation on social networks. The essence of modern privacy technology (like ZK) lies in hiding some information while proving statements about other information.
• From "escaping structures" to "creating structures": Early cypherpunks tended to oppose and escape existing power structures (like governments). Nowadays, powerful institutions are adeptly utilizing technology themselves. Therefore, modern cypherpunks not only need to resist but also need to create their own structures for large-scale collaboration.
• From "total confrontation" to "strong checks and balances": Vitalik Buterin believes a more "nuanced" perspective is needed. The relationship between government, corporations, and individuals is not merely adversarial. For example, data protection has value at all levels; governments need to check corporate privacy abuses, while companies can sometimes serve as a counterbalance to overreach by governments. Cypherpunks should be a powerful check-and-balance force rather than outright opponents.

Full-Stack Security: The Ultimate Battleground from Smart Contracts to Hardware and Biological Interfaces

Vitalik Buterin has repeatedly emphasized the importance of "full-stack" thinking. He pointed out that even if a DApp's smart contracts are fully audited or even formally verified, if its Web UI is obtained in real-time from potentially hackable servers, if the NPM packages it relies on have vulnerabilities, and if the browser or operating system used by users are insecure, then the entire system remains vulnerable.

He called for the ecosystem to pay more attention to and resolve these foundational issues: UIs should undergo version control, hash checking, and be stored on IPFS; public services similar to Etherscan contract verification need to be established for ZK verification keys; and a "enhanced browser" capable of executing more granular privacy strategies needs to be developed.

He even extended his vision into the hardware and biological realm: if there are backdoors in hardware, all upper-level security is mere talk. He mentioned some research indicating that keystroke data can be stolen through microphones or light reflections just a few meters away. The future brain-computer interfaces (BCIs) will become the ultimate battleground for privacy—"if BCIs are poorly designed, you might face a situation where Mark Zuckerberg, Xi Jinping, and Vladimir Putin can all read your mind at the same time."

Finally, in responding to expectations for hackathons, Vitalik Buterin returned to specific technical challenges: building privacy-friendly DApp UI frameworks, creating more systematic privacy identity solutions (avoiding singular, exclusive "personality proofs"), and even developing a user-friendly anti-DDoS service that utilizes ZK proofs to replace annoying CAPTCHAs. These ideas collectively point towards a more private, secure, and more humane decentralized future.

免责声明：本文章仅代表作者个人观点，不代表本平台的立场和观点。本文章仅供信息分享，不构成对任何人的任何投资建议。用户与作者之间的任何争议，与本平台无关。如网页中刊载的文章或图片涉及侵权，请提供相关的权利证明和身份证明发送邮件到support@aicoin.com，本平台相关工作人员将会进行核查。