Reclaiming Opacity: The Imperative for Privacy in Crypto

Many thanks to Mert, Matt, Tilo, and Brady for reviewing earlier drafts of this article.

Introduction

Surveillance is no longer an imposition. Instead, it is infrastructure. We’ve come to inhabit a world wherein transparency has been moralized, visibility signals virtue, and the architecture of finance and identity merges into an omniscient mirror.

This is marketed as “openness.” If you’ve done nothing wrong, then you have nothing to hide. Right? In actuality, this is an auto-panopticon: a self-sustaining system of voluntary exposure, in which the watchtower has been replaced by the feed, the ledger, and the dashboard. We monitor ourselves and call it freedom.

Crypto was the summer promised after a long winter. It was meant to shatter dependence on centralized forces and restore sovereignty to the individual. It was meant to usher in change—true change—but somewhere along the way, it replicated the logic of the very system it rebelled against. Bitcoin made financial work transparent. However, doing so made it forever traceable. The dream of liberation turned into a chain of custody that recorded behavior, affiliations, and intent for everyone to scrutinize. 

If crypto was meant to liberate us, why has it turned into another tool of surveillance? Why are we freely and willingly exposing every aspect of our lives to the very system we seek to usurp? 

Is there no value in privacy anymore? 

Privacy is not the absence of data. Rather, it is the refusal of capture. The only true path of refusal in this digital age is to reclaim opacity, to reclaim the right to exist outside the algorithmic gaze. The right to live unindexed, beyond the machine, is of paramount importance and seems to have been forgotten in the quest to popularize crypto. We must fight to rebuild crypto’s purpose, and opacity is the most radical form of resistance.

To start this process of resistance, we need to overcome our neoliberal inclinations.

Neoliberal Inevitability

The collapse of the Soviet Union marked the end of the Cold War and the only viable alternative to capitalism. It was never simply capitalism versus communism, but a tension between systems of possibility. When one collapsed, the other no longer needed to justify itself. Capitalism stopped being an ideology and became the environment, the very air we breathe. 

The neoliberal world order had reigned supreme, as some scholars, such as Francis Fukuyama, proclaimed it the end of history. The idea was that mankind had evolved to the point that the universalization of Western liberal democracy marks the final form of human government. There are no longer alternatives, but optimizations in a managed future. Once politics is reduced to optimization, every boundary becomes negotiable, including the oldest one between the public and the private. The barrier itself comes to look like inefficiency, friction to be engineered away, first in markets and then in selfhood. 

Of course, liberal Western democracy (i.e., the winning world order), which had become synonymous with neoliberalism, was not born in 1991. It was engineered in the late 70s and early 80s by polarizing heads of state, namely Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher, who weaponized the free market as moral truth. The state was the problem. Public life was inefficient. Freedom meant competition. Thatcher famously said that there is no such thing as society, but only individuals and families.

And, just like that, the collective was dismantled. Welfare became dependency, public became inefficient, and solidarity became suspect. The invisible hand became exalted, of the most high, deserving all the glory and praise for our current prosperity. Everything from schools to relationships was reimagined through the lens and logic of the market. The true innovation of neoliberalism was the privatization of desire. Once the market colonized desire itself, resistance became impossible to conceive. What followed was not an economic or political order, but a psychological one, sinister in its pervasiveness.

The Totalizing World

As the decades passed, the system no longer needed to justify itself. Instead, it became the cultural mood, a metaphysics of the everyday. We live in an atmosphere of hustle, optimization, and production. Albeit a really nice culture for a startup, it becomes deleterious when applied in a totalizing manner to every facet of life.

Mark Fisher conceptualized this harrowing reality in his seminal work Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative? He posits that capitalism has become a pervasive atmosphere that affects cultural production, economic activity, and general thought. Everything, irrespective of whether it is for or against, seeks to reinforce the current worldview. Human desire has become compatible with capitalism—we want fast cars, nice clothes, or wealth for the altruistic sake of taking care of others. This is it. We have solved politics. Any other alternative becomes almost unimaginable.

Take the 2008 financial crisis, the fires and ash from which Bitcoin was born. We bailed out the banks. Not because they were competent, not because they had merely made an innocent mistake, not because it was the right thing to do—we bailed them out because the line between the state and the banking system had already dissolved. The banks were not private actors who failed in the free market. The banks were entwined with public guarantees, government-sponsored mortgage entities, and a central bank that treated their survival as synonymous with the economy's survival. Failure was, therefore, unimaginable. That’s the tell of capitalist realism: when an institution becomes too entangled to fail, the question of whether it deserves to is no longer even askable.

We live in a post-political world in which capitalism inhabits a Lacanian reality—an ideologically based understanding of the world that rejects facts that do not fit its current interpretations. Are there better alternatives to the current way of things? Of course. Believing otherwise is merely an overly pessimistic, naive take that this is the complete culmination of human development. 

Even the act of mere resistance seeks to reinforce the current world order. For example, Fisher wrote about Kurt Cobain’s dreadful lassitude and rage, which gave voice to the despondency of the generation that came after the proclaimed end of history. A generation where every move was anticipated, tracked, bought, and sold before it had ever happened. Cobain was just another part of the spectacle. What makes MTV make more money than a protest from one of music’s most popular bands, saying fuck MTV, while on MTV? Slowly, everything becomes cliché. The desire to provide a compelling alternative gradually shifts toward mitigating its worst effects.

The world is now self-referential. Every protest becomes a campaign. Every critique becomes content. Every act of resistance becomes a new product category. We live and breathe inside of capitalism, a very specific type heavily influenced by cronyism.

Within this atmosphere, the boundary between economics and identity has eroded. The market subsumes what we buy and who we are, commodifying meaning. Elon’s text to Parag Agrawal might as well be the sacred, memetic scripture that defines our zeitgeist. To live is to produce. To exist is to perform. In this grand performance, transparency becomes the highest virtue, manifesting in dashboards, metrics, and feeds. Visibility became a moral category: to be seen producing was good, to be transparent was to be trusted. Naturally, this gave rise to every click, purchase, and movement becoming a devotional act in service of the algorithm. 

We started to internalize the system as the moralization of visibility intensified. The demands to perform, optimize, and quantify necessitated new architectures of power. The best architecture to suit our needs already had a name, coined centuries before: the panopticon. 

The Auto-Panopticon and Self-Imposed Surveillance

The panopticon started as a prison. In the 18th century, English philosopher and social theorist Jeremy Bentham designed an institutional building with an inbuilt system of control. The idea was horrifyingly simple: build a rotunda with an inspection house at its center. It was equally applicable to factories, schools, asylums, sanatoriums, and hospitals, but Bentham was most interested in applying this idea to prisons. Imagine Barad-dûr at the center of a perfect circle of cells. The inmates have no idea whether they are being watched, so they’re constantly motivated to act as though they always are.

Michel Foucault took Bentham’s panopticon and turned it into a metaphor for modern society. Surveillance no longer requires walls—it lives inside schools, factories, institutions, and offices. It lives on the streets in the form of British CCTV cameras (very ironic, coming from the society that also produced V for Vendetta and 1984). Power no longer needed violence, as we learned to police ourselves. The gaze had become internalized.

Byung-Chul Han takes the analysis one step further. In Psychopolitics, Han argues that disciplinary power, even in its internalized Foucauldian form, still presupposes an external structure. That is, walls, guards, institutions, a watchtower somewhere. Psychopolitics, its successor, operates through freedom, rather than against it. We exploit ourselves voluntarily and experience that self-exploitation as a form of self-realization. Burnout becomes the signature pathology of this condition, representing exhaustion of a subject that has become its own taskmaster. There is no guard to overthrow; you are the guard, and you’ve learned to really love your job, even if you grow tired of it.

In The Transparency Society, Han articulates that transparency is power in its most contemporary form. A society that has moralized total visibility has perfected it, dissolving the secrecy, mystery, and unknowable other that genuine politics and personhood require. 

Now, we’ve built something far more efficient than a panopticon: the auto-panopticon, a system in which we willingly participate in our own observation. Of course, this sounds absurd. Why would anyone willingly subscribe to surveillance? Simply put, we made it feel good. We accept cookies on every site we visit, we sign the terms of service without reading them, we turn on our location sharing, we post our meals, we vlog our daily lives to invisible audiences. We measure ourselves through dashboards and metrics. We track our steps, our trades, our wins, our sleep scores, our literal heartbeats (shoutout Whoop), and we call it “transparency.”

The watchtower has been replaced with the feed. The guard has been replaced with the algorithm.

Shoshana Zuboff calls this surveillance capitalism. That is, the mass harvesting and commodification of personal data. Instead of fearing exposure, we crave it because the system was engineered to make exposure feel good through gamification. 

Sure, I might see a few more targeted ads, and Amazon would get freakishly good at recommending the next book I should read, but surely this is all harmless, though, right? Well, no. For example, Cambridge Analytica was a British political consulting firm that operated from 2013 to 2018. They were notorious for harvesting user data from Facebook and combining it with psychological profiling to predict and influence voter behavior. The idea was that if you knew a person’s likes and dislikes, friends, clicks, and the quizzes they took for fun, then you could show them personalized political advertisements that would sway their views. Cambridge Analytica was involved in the UK’s 2016 European Union membership referendum, supporting “persuadable” voters to vote to leave the EU (look how that turned out). Cambridge Analytica was also involved with the Trump campaign in the Republican primaries and the summer of 2016 (look how that turned out). Cambridge Analytica was also politically involved in Australian, Indian, Kenyan, Maltese, and Mexican elections, among others, as its executives said in 2018 that they had worked in more than 200 elections worldwide. It doesn’t help that their parent firm, SCL Group, was involved in psychological operations with the UK Ministry of Defense. Suffice to say, it’s not just a few more targeted ads.

It feels like I’m wearing a tinfoil hat at this point, spewing conspiratorial bullshit, but this is all well-documented, revealing something far darker. We aren’t just being watched anymore—we’re being modeled. 

What Foucault could never have predicted was that the subjects of surveillance would become its architects. The panopticon is no longer imposed from above. We build it ourselves, pixel by pixel, post by post, like by like. What began as social media became social engineering. The same logic followed as finance digitized. 

Crypto ironically elevates this to its highest and purest form. Every transaction and every address is visible to all. The blockchain has become a sort of decentralized panopticon; transparency incarnate. We deliver hyper-legibility by replicating the watchtower across every node. Anyone can see everything, forever, “just in case.” 

This gives rise to a moral economy in which privacy becomes suspect. Why are you obfuscating transaction amounts? Why did you just use Tornado Cash? Why did you bridge to Monero? 

To be opaque is to be dangerous. 

The system didn’t start with crypto, but crypto perfected it. To understand how we arrived at our current state of affairs, we must return to Bitcoin's creation.

Bitcoin’s Broken Promise: Amplifying the Panopticon

Bitcoin wasn’t born in rebellion against surveillance capitalism; it was born in rebellion against opacity. The year was 2008: the world had to endure the trials and tribulations of the global financial system imploding under its own complexity and complacency. Banks collapsed, the government printed money, and the people footing the bill were told the institution was “too big to fail.”

Bitcoin was a reaction to the black box of modern finance. A reaction to a system of intermediaries so opaque it collapsed under its own lies. The solution presented was radical transparency, an incorruptible public ledger that everyone could see and use to reach consensus on the truth. Satoshi Nakamoto’s response of “don’t trust, verify” was both simple and devastating. The very first block carried a message, buried in its code: The Times 03/Jan/2009 Chancellor on brink of second bailout for banks.

However, in the noble pursuit of making corruption impossible, Bitcoin made surveillance inevitable. It stands as a permanent monument to human activity. Data that was once hoarded behind compliance, paywalls, and vaults is now available to everyone. This unprecedented level of transparency automated oversight, rather than liberating us from it.

The result was the birth of a new priesthood of individuals, companies, and institutions capable of turning Bitcoin’s immutable ledger into a panoptic interface. This became painfully clear in 2022 during the COVID-era trucker protests in Ottawa. As demonstrators rallied against vaccine mandates, the Canadian government invoked emergency powers to freeze the bank accounts of protesters and donors alike. Bitcoin wallets used to fund the convoy were blacklisted, traced, and seized.

Bitcoin’s fault—its most grievous fault—was that it mistook transparency for trust. Transparency is a virtue for institutions, not for individuals. It becomes a system of soft coercion when applied to human life, as it gives rise to a moral economy in which privacy is suspect. Say it with me: to be opaque is to be dangerous. 

Of course, Bitcoin wasn’t all that bad. It was the first to establish a peer-to-peer online payment system that eliminated the need for a third-party intermediary to authenticate transactions. Its origins lie in the shadowy super coders who pioneered new frontiers in cryptography and encryption to maintain privacy. The idea was that encryption was a tool for privacy—a tool with “the power to selectively reveal oneself to the world.” These shadowy supercoders were known as cypherpunks. 

The Cypherpunks

In an era where most people were just discovering dial-up, a ragtag mailing list of programmers, cryptographers, libertarians, anarchists, hackers, and academic shitposters understood that the digital world would become the primary battleground for freedom.

At the time, strong encryption was classified by the US government as a munition pursuant to Cold War-era export control regulations designed to prevent technological advances from falling into the hands of the Eastern Bloc. So, anyone doing encryption out in the wild was treated like they were shipping yellowcake to Commies. This gave rise to Adam Back’s infamous munitions t-shirt, which printed export-restricted RSA encryption source code as a freedom-of-speech protest, and Richard White’s tattoo of an RSA encryption string. With the introduction of the personal computer, in tandem with Phil Zimmermann’s PGP encryption software and its distribution on the Internet, we now have a precarious legal situation. Meanwhile, the NSA was quietly pushing for backdoors in every device, standard, and protocol. These conflicting interests, protests, and the proliferation of encryption led to the first “crypto war,” back when “crypto” meant cryptography and not “number go up.”

The cypherpunks argued that privacy was a prerequisite for freedom—not a luxury, concern, or niche, but a precondition for personhood in the digital age. They said that if surveillance technology were possible, then governments would use it extensively, and they were right. Thus, the only meaningful resistance is technological resistance. Not protest or policy, but through code. 

In A Cypherpunk’s Manifesto (1993), Eric Hughes argues that “[p]rivacy is necessary for an open society in the electronic age.” He goes on to say that “[w]e cannot expect governments, corporations, or other large organizations to grant us privacy… we must defend our own privacy if we expect to have any.” We need to defend our own privacy.

The cypherpunks went on to build the first prototypes of what we now call crypto:

• David Chaum invented digital cash and zero-knowledge proofs
• Nick Szabo was the first to theorize smart contracts
• Wei Dai proposed b-money, an anonymous, distributed system eerily similar to Bitcoin
• Adam Back created Hashcash, a Proof of Work mechanism to combat spam
• Hal Finney developed a reusable Proof of Work system using Hashcash, five years before Bitcoin 

They were saboteurs trying to design systems that the state could not regulate, not ones it would eventually endorse through ETFs and pension plans. Bitcoin inherited its cryptography, but not its politics.

Privacy was always the goal for the cypherpunks. They wanted unobservability. They wanted transactions that left no public residue, untraceable communication, identity decoupled from behavior, and the possibility of coordination without creating a behavioral exhaust for states or corporations to monetize. Bitcoin was built on top of their work to solve the double-spend problem, but in doing so, it sacrificed opacity. 

This could’ve been our present-day reality. Take Chaum, for example: he invented blind signatures and anonymous digital cash in 1982, years before the Internet was even public. He founded DigiCash in the early 1990s, secured a deal with Deutsche Bank, and developed working, untraceable electronic payments. The tech worked. Banks were interested. The infrastructure for a private digital economy existed before most people had ever heard of the World Wide Web.

Sadly, DigiCash went bankrupt in 1998. Nobody felt the need for it yet since the Internet was still a novelty and had not become predatory. People weren’t worried about being watched—they wanted to be seen. The same impulse that would later fuel the auto-panopticon was already there in embryonic form, waiting to spread like wildfire with the advent of social media. Chaum was selling a cure to a disease no one believed, or, as a matter of fact, knew they had. The world moved on and chose credit cards and PayPal—convenient, centralized, traceable. Privacy was available, but we opted for surveillance because it was easier.

Hal Finney carried the thread forward. He was a cypherpunk from the mailing list’s earliest days, working on cryptographic tools that would make decentralized money possible. Finney’s reusable Proof of Work system was a direct precursor to Bitcoin. When Satoshi Nakamoto published the Bitcoin whitepaper, Finney was among the curious few. He was the first person ever to receive a Bitcoin transaction: 10 BTC sent by Satoshi himself on January 12th, 2009. Finney saw both the promise and the compromise of Bitcoin up close, remaining a committed advocate for privacy in digital systems until his death in 2014.  

Bitcoin was born inside a community that voraciously fought for opacity. Satoshi needed to solve double-spending without a trusted third party. The solution was elegant (i.e., a public ledger that everyone could verify). However, it was a Faustian bargain. The cryptography was cypherpunk. The architecture was cypherpunk. But the legibility was the opposite of everything cypherpunks fought for.

Verifiability without trust also meant surveillance without effort. Every transaction, address, and flow of value recorded permanently for all to see. The properties that made Bitcoin incorruptible made it forensically perfect. Bitcoin reproduced the auto-panopticon at the protocol level. The transparency designed to hold institutions accountable became a mechanism for holding individuals accountable instead. On-chain analytical firms, OFAC sanctions, and renewed efforts by law enforcement agencies were an inevitability.

The industry’s response to all of this has been to commodify privacy rather than restore it. Buying Zcash on Coinbase does not make you a cypherpunk. Privacy is seen as a product, whether that is a token you purchase or a feature you toggle on. The cypherpunks saw it differently. The cypherpunks envisioned privacy as the default state of digital existence, a condition so fundamental that its absence would require justification. The few that still build with such conviction are prosecuted instead of being celebrated. 

The Fight For Privacy-First Building

Legal Battles

In August 2022, the US Treasury’s Office of Foreign Assets Control sanctioned Tornado Cash, which, to those familiar with blockchains and smart contracts, sounds utterly nonsensical. Tornado Cash is a set of immutable smart contracts on Ethereum that breaks the traditional links between sender and receiver by pooling funds from multiple users together and allowing them to withdraw equivalent amounts to new wallets. Put succinctly, Tornado Cash is a decentralized cryptocurrency mixer operating on Ethereum to provide privacy for its users. 

This marked the first time that OFAC had sanctioned autonomous code.

Two days after the sanctions were imposed, Dutch authorities arrested Alexey Pertsev, who wrote and published Tornado Cash’s code. In May 2024, he was sentenced to over five years in prison. A year later, the US charged co-founders Roman Storm and Roman Semenov with money laundering, sanctions violations, and operating an unlicensed money transmitting business. Today, as of June 2026, this legal battle is still ongoing.

Tornado Cash never takes custody of funds. Its core contracts are immutable, meaning Pertsev, Storm, or Semenov couldn’t shut them down if they wanted to. The government’s argument, in effect, is that publishing privacy-preserving code and maintaining a website that points to it constitutes “operating” a financial business. 

In August 2025, a jury in the Southern District of New York convicted Storm on the unlicensed money transmission count and deadlocked on the other two charges. The Department of Justice is pushing for a retrial of the hung-jury counts.

At a hearing in April earlier this year, the presiding judge asked a prosecutor whether merely creating Tornado Cash was a crime, to which the prosecutor responded no. The American government is suggesting that maintaining it is illicit because a mixer obfuscates illicit funds more effectively when it also contains large amounts of “clean” crypto. Following this logic to its natural conclusion, serving law-abiding users who merely want privacy is itself evidence of facilitating money laundering. The lawful use of privacy is reframed as camouflage for the unlawful.

Say it with me now: to be opaque is to be dangerous.

Another DOJ case, the Samourai Wallet case, ended with less ambiguity. Keonne Rodriguez and William Lonergan Hill, who built a non-custodial Bitcoin wallet with CoinJoin-based privacy features, pled guilty to avoid risking decades in prison. Rodriguez received five years, whereas Hill received four.

Within days of the Samourai arrests, Wasabi Wallet blocked American users and soon discontinued its mixing service entirely. Phoenix Wallet, a self-custodial Lightning wallet with no known legal issues, withdrew from US app stores. Sparrow Wallet disabled its Whirlpool integration one day after the indictment. Nobody ordered any of this, but two prosecutions disciplined an entire industry. That is because the inmates could not tell whether they were being watched, so they behaved as though they always were.

Meanwhile, Monero, which has privacy built into its protocol rather than bolted on top, has been squeezed out of the regulated world. Exchange after exchange has delisted Monero under regulatory pressure. In Europe, for example, this stance was codified pursuant to the EU’s Markets in Crypto-Assets (MiCA) regulations, specifically Reg. 2023/1114, Art. 76(3), which prohibits crypto-asset providers from serving anonymity-enhancing coins unless their holders and their respective transaction histories are identifiable. The EU’s new anti-money laundering regulation, Regulation (EU) 2024/1624, seeks to enforce this stance from July 10, 2027 onwards, necessitating providers to maintain a connection between holders and their transactions.

The pattern is unmistakable: privacy at the application layer gets you prosecuted; privacy at the protocol level gets you delisted. Nonetheless, the state has no objection to crypto—it is embracing it through ETFs, stablecoins, RWAs, and strategic reserves. The objection pertains specifically to opacity. Crypto is largely welcomed, such that it remains a perfect instrument of surveillance.

The legal ground for all of this is less solid than the aforementioned prosecutions suggest. In late 2024, the Fifth Circuit ruled in Van Loon v. Department of the Treasury that immutable contracts such as Tornado Cash’s are not “property” of any foreign nation and, therefore, cannot be sanctioned under existing law. By March 2025, the Treasury had removed Tornado Cash from the sanctions list entirely. How absurd; the code itself has been legally rehabilitated, while the coders who wrote it face retrial. The tool is unsanctioned, but not the toolmaker. This is not the behavior of a system confident in its legal theory. Rather, it is the behavior of a system making an example.

Philosophical Battles

Central to these legal arguments is the notion that these tools are used for money laundering, sanctions evasion, and worse. No serious person will dispute this. However, that argument presupposes that a tool should be banned because criminals use it.

Cash is the original privacy technology. It is an anonymous bearer instrument that changes hands without leaving a record, identifies neither a sender nor a receiver, and settles instantly without any intermediaries. It is the payment rail for essentially all street crime in human history. By the logic of the Tornado Cash proceedings, cash is an unlicensed money-transmitting business of staggering scale, and the Treasury that prints it is its operator. 

End-to-end encryption runs the same gauntlet in a loop. Every few years, it seems that our governments rediscover that terrorists use applications like Signal and demand a backdoor for the “good guys,” and every few years, cryptographers patiently explain that a backdoor for the good guys is a backdoor for everyone. We mostly recognize this argument as authoritarian when it targets our communications, but we’ve somehow been persuaded to think it's prudent when it targets our money. Although financial relationships are arguably less intimate than text messages, revealing who you send money to, when, how much, and how often can create some of the most revealing data trails a person can produce.

In 2025, the UK Home Office served Apple a secret “technical capability notice” under the Investigatory Powers Act, demanding backdoor access to encrypted iCloud data. Apple withdrew its strongest encryption feature (i.e., Advanced Data Protection) from the UK entirely rather than building a backdoor. In late 2025, the government had simply renewed its demand. It’s criminal to reveal that such a demand was made. The state requires “transparency” from its citizens while criminalizing transparency about itself.

What about cars? Should they be banned because getaway drivers use them? What about the Internet? American law has long recognized the principle of dual-use technology: a tool with substantial lawful uses does not simply become contraband merely because criminals also use it. We apply this principle everywhere except, apparently, to the infrastructure of financial privacy. 

The empirical evidence is even worse, as financial crimes on blockchains consistently pale in comparison to illicit activity in the traditional banking system. Did we forget that HSBC moved hundreds of millions for the Sinaloa cartel and received a deferred prosecution agreement and a fine? Did we forget that Danske Bank’s Estonian branch pumped through some two hundred billion euros in suspicious flows? No executive built those pipelines from a laptop, and no executive faces what Roman Storm faces. The institutions that launder at scale are fined as a cost of doing business. The developers who write privacy code for ordinary people are imprisoned as a warning.

Eliminating privacy tools does not eliminate criminal privacy. Sophisticated criminals have jurisdictions, shell structures, and professionals for that. It eliminates privacy for everyone else who cannot afford those things, which is to say it leaves the powerful opaque and renders the rest of us legible. 

The question was never whether bad actors use privacy tools. The question is whether the existence of bad actors justifies abolishing privacy for everyone else. Every generation before ours, confronted with cash, sealed letters, curtains, getaway cars, and the Internet, all resoundingly answered no. 

We are the first generation to be talked into answering yes. 

The True Path to Change

The trap with writing an essay of this scale is that the diagnosis is so total that any prescription feels inadequate. Fisher named the disease with devastating precision and ended his seminal work on capitalist realism with a gesture toward a reemergent politics he was never able to fully articulate. Han diagnoses psychopolitics brilliantly and, by way of resistance, offers idiotism, which is oddly fitting given the current discourse on “retardmaxxing.” From the Greek idiotes, Han derives the term for the private person who refuses to enter the agora. We have the right to be unproductive, unindexed, and illegible.  

This is the right answer.

However, as Han presents it, it is an aesthetic posture rather than a program. How does one actually live unindexed when the index is the substrate of economic life? Han doesn’t say. If we simply refuse to be productive, then the panopticon will continue to exist.

The familiar levers are no better. Lobbying harder, electing friendlier regulators, and codifying developer protections all matter at the margin. The Fifth Circuit’s decision on the statutory definition of “property” is a technicality that Congress can amend in a single afternoon. Rights that depend on the state’s forbearance are not rights—these are permissions, all revocable on the next administration’s whim.

Privacy cannot be rescued by consumption, either. Buying the right coin, toggling the right feature, and subscribing to the right VPN will not solve the problem. The consumption channel is itself the surveillance. Resistance is not a product category.

The cypherpunks are of paramount importance to us because, unlike Fisher and Han, they offer us a clear praxis: infrastructure as code. The goal is privacy built into the substrate of digital life, where opacity is the ordinary condition, and not a deviant election; something that cannot be moralized against, or sold back as a premium feature. Han’s idiotism is what cypherpunk infrastructure makes materially possible. Opacity at the protocol level is a precondition for personhood at the human level.

To its credit, the state understands this perfectly. That is what the prosecutions are. The Storm retrial, Samourai sentences, Monero delistings, and the EU’s scheduled deletion of anonymity are all actions of a system that has correctly identified privacy infrastructure as a political threat. The cypherpunks wagered in 1993 that code was the only meaningful form of resistance, and thirty years later, the people working hardest to suppress it are empirically validating that wager.

Revitalizing the Cypherpunk Ethos

The path forward is nothing new. It is a return to the original position with far better tools: privacy as the default state of digital existence, a condition so fundamental that its absence requires justification.

Helius’s acquisition of Light Protocol, the team that authored Solana’s original zero-knowledge syscalls and built ZK Compression, pairs cryptography with unparalleled distribution at scale. The kind of tooling that cypherpunks dreamed of will soon be available to the entire world, at scale, on Solana. 

The obvious objection: didn’t this essay just argue that every act of resistance becomes a product category? That we can’t rescue privacy through mere consumption alone? Well, yes, but the distinction matters. Privacy-as-product is a token you buy, a feature you enable, a confession you make, opting in. Privacy-as-substrate is infrastructure: open to any developer, configurable to different applications, designed so that opacity is the ordinary condition for transacting. The first commodifies the cypherpunk ethos, whereas the latter operationalizes it.

There is a second objection. That is, isn’t selective disclosure privacy just surveillance with a permission slip? If shielded systems allow users to prove aspects of their transactions to auditors or counterparties, hasn’t the game already been conceded to compliance? No, the cypherpunks drew this line first. Hughes defined privacy as the power to selectively reveal oneself to the world. This presupposes selectivity. The architecture privacy requires is one that resists involuntary legibility (i.e., no global view keys, no protocol-level blacklists, no surveillance baked into its substrate). Disclosure, when it happens, belongs to the user; proven selectively, at their discretion, to whomever they choose. A system where the user holds the power to reveal to whom and when is Hughes’ definition running in prod. A system in which the issuer or the state can see everything, regardless of the user’s choice, is another panopticon. That distinction—between disclosure the user controls, and disclosure imposed regardless—is the line that separates privacy infrastructure from surveillance wearing its costume.

Zcash is proof that the moment has arrived. For its first decade, shielding was optional and rare, encompassing only single-digit percentages of the supply, and entering a shielded pool was itself suspect. Now, wallets are defaulting to shielded addresses, integrations have grown, and shielded supply has roughly tripled to nearly a third of all ZEC, with most transactions now touching the shielded pool. Decades after DigiCash died, selling a cure to a disease nobody felt, we have real value voluntarily going dark. Cryptography was never the bottleneck.

Zcash is proving to be private money, an encrypted store of value on a dedicated chain. What remains unproven is private economic life: payments, lending, payroll, tokenized assets, denominated in the currencies people actually use, composable with the applications they already depend on, at the scale of the mundane. Zcash asks you to travel somewhere private. The harder problem is making the place you already live opaque by default, disclosable by choice: private economic life on chains that people already use. Solana is one front, with a multitude of other teams across other ecosystems building privacy solutions. These teams must be defended, loudly and materially. Storm’s retrial and the precedent it will set will determine whether the next generation of privacy engineers builds openly or pseudonymously from jurisdictions of convenience. 

Bitcoin proved that cryptographic money was possible. Ethereum proved that it could be programmable. Solana proved that it could scale to the masses. What remains unproven is that it can do all of this while remaining compatible with personhood. That a financial system can be fast, open, and verifiable without rendering every participant permanently legible. Privacy is the last scaling frontier to bring cryptocurrency to the masses, and it is the one the cypherpunks identified first, three decades before the rest of us started to feel the disease.

Fisher said the system’s deepest power lies in making alternatives unimaginable. Han said it rules through the freedom to perform. The ledger says everything is visible, forever, “just in case.” Against all three, the answer Hughes gave in 1993 remains poignant: we cannot expect governments, corporations, or other large organizations to grant us privacy. To have power over oneself, to have true personhood, we need to defend it ourselves. 

We need to build it, run it, and use it.