# Vitalik Buterin and Naomi Brockwell - Fireside Chat // ECC#2 - Buenos Aires 2025 - Speakers: [Vitalik Buterin](https://streameth.org/speakers/vitalik-buterin) - Channel: [Ethereum Cypherpunk Congress](https://streameth.org/ethereum-cypherpunk-congress) - Date: 2026-01-09 - Duration: 18:18 - Topics: web3, privacy, now, crypto, cryptography, blockchain, data, security, human right, rights, tech, technology, internet, open source, free, freedom, ethereum, hackers, ethics, cypherpunk, dev, developer, dapp, decentralization, bitcoin, computer, surveillance, cyber, peer2peer, p2p, love, solidity, zk, zero knowledge, education, academy, w3pn, congress, ethereum cypherpunk, buenos aires, argentina, vitalik buterin, privacidad, Education - Watch: https://streameth.org/watch/yt-5At5_GiQNEA - YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5At5_GiQNEA ## Description Fireside chat with Vitalik Buterin from Ethereum Foundation and Naomi Brockwell about cypherpunk values in Ethereum. Ethereum Cypherpunk Congress by Web3Privacy Now is the world's largest cypherpunk and human rights event. 4500 people gathering in Buenos Aires to celebrate privacy with internet freedom leaders like Richard Stallman, Vitalik Buterin, Roger Dingledine, and Eva Galperin. Join us in building a free internet for all. Website: https://web3privacy.info/ Congress site: https://congress.web3privacy.info/ ## Transcript [applause] All right, super. Um, so we're going to be zooming out and talking about privacy in general. Vitalik already quoted some of the wonderful stuff that he released in his article in uh, April this year. And I want to focus on that, the importance of privacy. Why is so much of the Ethereum community focused on privacy right now? And essentially it's because privacy is the foundation of a free society. So Vitalic the first thing I will ask is why do you believe that privacy is a foundation of a free society? I think uh I mean as uh I wrote in that post in April, right? Privacy is uh just something that you have to have if uh you want to be able to live any part of your life, you know, for yourself, right? And uh not have to constantly worry about you know how will this be perceived by you know like people you know personally. How will this be perceived by social media? How will this be perceived by one type of local government? How will it be perceived by foreign governments who have an ability to send a drone at you? How will it be perceived by your employer? And uh you know if we have to constantly think about all of uh all of those things from basically any kind of decision that we make then like it's it basically becomes almost impossible to live right and I think uh like this kind of thinking like it can seem far away if uh you know you think you have the kind of you know ordinary life that doesn't really affect other people but the reality is like you never know when you know you're uh you know you your life starts being perceived very differently by other people in the future, right? And so if we want to like just have for people to just have personal space for people to just uh you know have the ability to act uh to for to uh to satisfy their own goals and their own needs uh to think for themselves then uh having that space where people can do that and you know not be judged by everything at the same time is just uh super important. And uh I think uh one of the big things that's happening in the last hundred years is that uh a lot of these barriers that we've just taken for granted this whole time right uh you know [snorts] that conversations are private that money is private even that our own thoughts are private like each and every one of those is being uh quickly eroded away right and I think uh if we wants to keep that then that's something that like needs to be much more actively defended >> and one of the things that you you uh summarized beautifully in article was that idea that privacy isn't for the mainstream. Privacy is for anyone who diverges in any direction from the mainstream and you take into account all the possible directions you can diverge from the mainstream. It turns out that all of us need privacy for some part of our lives and that really encompasses you know the importance and then that second pillar that you talked about was you know the importance for order um and I kind of interpreted that as our society has all of these self-correcting mechanisms. We have whistleblowers and investigative journalists and protesters and dissident in order to push back in case authoritarianism gets too strong. We can have these self-correcting mechanisms uh to force that back in the other direction. But without privacy, we lose that. >> Yeah. I mean without privacy like basically yeah everything becomes subject to whatever are the most powerful incentives that are able to impose themselves and sometimes that's money and sometimes that's physical force and in large quantities like either one of those two can just uh completely overwhelm you know like whatever the like whatever the intrinsic goals that were originally meant to be guiding people who are participating in uh in those kinds of activities. Right. And so the whole thing if you don't have privacy basically just decays into a small number of powerful people and organizations having all of the influence right and so if we wants to avoid that then you know like people making I mean any kind of private decision I mean like journalism is a good example I even just like participating in creating culture of any kind is an example making decisions on on behalf of an organization uh voting like including voting on social media like all of these things I mean know like there ha like there has to be privacy if we don't want each and every one of those decisions to just be overwhelmed by you know the strongest forces that are trying to oppose themselves. >> Then the third pillar you talked about was about how we progress as a society. So the three pillars you've got, you know, the individual's right to do things without having to take into account all of the people around them. The second one is order. You know, how do we maintain that self-correcting mechanism in society and push back? The third one is progress. The idea that like there's there's a myriad of amazing data out there. We want to be able to use that to improve our lives. But the problem is that this data isn't just in some private contract with a company. They're not looking after this. They're usually selling this. They're harvesting more data about us. They're giving this to governments and it becomes really hard to have progress and use this data to move society forward if that data is constantly at risk. >> Yeah. I mean, I think, you know, if you look at health and even if you look at like all of the various different schools of thought on health, like whether you're looking at kind of Brian Johnson style longevity people or, you know, like people focused on pandemic prevention and clean air or, you know, like one of five other areas. One of the things that they agree on is like if you want to get the best results, you just need to have data. You need to have data about people and you need to have data about the environment, right? Because each and every one of us each and every person is different each and every environment is different. you know, you need to know what are the uh like the the places where you have to intervene and where it's not and on the other hands places where there's no point in intervening and uh like basically yeah like the whole scene has I think shifted over the last 15 years from giving these kind of universalized uh you know recommendations to basically yeah asking well what is the situation of each individual person or if we're talking about like cleaning the air like what is the situation of in this room and then like knowing that is uh the first step to knowing and like what you need to improve, right? But then on the other hand, of course, any of that data, it's just so easy to underestimate the potential for totally dystopian privacy consequences, right? Like literally like if you take CO2, right? If you look at the CO2 readings in your room, CO2 readings in your room, they can tell you whether or not people are in the room, when people are in the room, how many people are in the room, when people leave and enter the room, whe when people are doing different kinds of physical activities in the room. So, you know, it reveals everything, right? And uh you know, same thing is true for you know, like Fitbit data, like basically everything. It gets incredibly leaky, right? So, this is one of those spaces where we on the one hand, you know, if we want a much healthier 21st century, we need to be able to um unlock and use all of this data, but on the other hand, like it just has to be done the right way from the start in terms of protecting the uh the privacy and not revealing compromising individual person, right? And uh and I think uh the really nice thing is that with all of the different kinds of cryptography that are being built, you know, including things like zero knowledge proofs and including FHE, also including uh you know like differential privacy noise also even including some of the tooling that's being built to make this stuff secure so that people actually know what guarantees uh they're made like this is actually possible, right? like the you know the the traditional corporate world is not doing this by default right so we have to go and actually do it >> and there's another thing that you already uh talked about when you say that these are things we took for granted this actually makes this fight um inordinately difficult because for you know hundreds of years we've just had this presumption of privacy in so many areas of our lives and then it slowly eroded it's eroded in finance through things like the bank secrecy act that you don't see a wy anti-money money laundering act, the Patriot Act, it just slowly disappeared and became taken for granted that every government agency gets access to all of our financial data and all of our choices, all the causes we support. And I think that that frog in boiling water scenario has been dangerous to us. We've just slowly normalized this erosion of privacy. So now we're at this situation where we've never had, you know, a a history or a movement of fighting for privacy because we've always just had it. So, it's like right now we're at this moment where we need to create this movement. We need to create a movement around fighting for privacy. We've never had to do this before, but now it's slowly gone. Everyone's taken it for granted. And this dystopia that you keep you're pointing out that we are skyrocketing towards, we are h hurtling towards is very scary. So, this is right now where we all need to rise up and and create this movement. And I think that you've really lit the fire under this privacy movement. >> Yeah. Yeah, and I think it's uh going to be super super important over the next quarter century, right? I think uh you know the stakes are very high, right? The way these technologies are going to be built by default and like even already, right? There was this paper in 2025 that you can basically turn Wi-Fi hotspots into surveillance cameras, right? Like the frontier in 10 years is they're going to want to read your mind. And so like that those are the stakes, right? And uh you know like in a lot of ways reading to your mind reading your mind is possible already right like you can let's probably take an LLM look at both of our faces and probably determine you know how many hours like we've been awake and like what our what our emotions are right and like these are things you can do today but then like we have the other one is AI you know like AI is I think for more and more people just intrinsically this not even just part of their workflow but part of their most personal thoughts, right? And these things can be done in a way that concentrates information and concentrates power of a very very small number of people over the entire world or they can be done in a way that is much more prohuman and that uh uplifts everyone and I think we have to like really push uh and uh make that more positive outcome happen. >> Absolutely. So let's look at the future because a lot of people ask me you know whether I'm an optimist or a pessimist when it comes to privacy. Obviously we are h hurtling towards a really dangerous direction. But for me the good news is that it's our choice to head in that direction. If we don't want to head there just build different technology just proliferate the amazing tools that already exist. And so like I I look at the legislative run, I'm pretty scared about what's going on globally with the implementation and mandating of handing over an ID to use a web browser, which seems chilling. Um but on the tech side, for me, I've always been one who I didn't want to put my fate in, you know, cowtowing to politicians to beg for the rights that should be mine. I think the tech is always the solution. Um, so yes, we can fight that legal battle, but ultimately we have to build the technology that just gives people back our freedom, but then we have to use that technology, right? We actually have to, you know, um, uh, become part of these systems. So what's your take on the future? How do you see those two battles playing out? And are you optimistic or pessimistic? >> Yeah, I mean, I think, uh, I view, you know, privacy technology the same way as I view something like solar power, right? which is like the best thing that's happened to solar power this decade is like it's actually competitive purely on a commercial basis. Like even if tomorrow we all learned that global warming is fake and it doesn't matter whether the world's temperature goes up or down even still solar power would be the correct decision. Right? And so but getting to that state is something that took decades. Getting to that stage is something that took many yeah many thousands of researchers and developers, huge amounts of capital, huge amounts of motivated and hardworking people, decades to incubate this technology and really push it through this early phase where it really depended on these people who really cared about the environment, really cared about creating a a better future for everyone and uh like actually like helped that technology grow up and uh get to the point where the cost curves went down and finally yeah it can fully stand on its own legs right and uh in a lot of ways uh I mean I you know there are parts of privacy technology that are already in that position right like HTTPS is mainstream and uh HTTPS is a battle that we've won and I think we can clap there right um I mean Signal okay let's clap for HTTPS round of applause um yeah I mean Signal is a battle that we're winning I mean It's uh you know it's hard to uh you know say that uh [snorts] like signal is uh just a tool for a few for a few crazy people when uh I mean famously literally the US government is now using it. Um then but then like basically every other uh you know privacy technology like we have to like really nurture it and incubate it and push it through the exact same curve. And I think people like us by being not just supporters in our voice and contributors with our code but even also active users of these technologies as individuals and as a collective is uh a really important part of that step so we can uh push more and more things past the finish line. >> And I think that like we can't succumb to that I have nothing to hide mentality. If the people in this room are not the ones using these tools, no one is using these tools. And if you don't use it, you don't create that quorum and that network effect that leads other people to use it. So it's not about whether you have anything to hide. It's whether you want to live in a society where you no longer have the ability to make private choices. That's really what we're up against now. So I completely agree with Vitalic. Please use these things. Please implement them. And please don't default to the non-private options. All right? You are the change makers here. You are the trailblazers. You are on the cutting edge of technology and you have the power to affect change across the entire globe. So, please lean into that power because we need you. So, what are your parting words for how you think the people in this room can make the biggest difference as they go forward and make a more a better and more private future? >> So, first of all, who here thinks they have nothing to hide? Anyone raise your hand? >> Am I wrong? >> See, zero hand zero hands raised. I mean, I'm kind of disappointed because I was going to ask whoever raised their hand to stand up and take their clothes off. um like like actually you know taking your clothes off reveals like a thousand times less data that could be used against you than uh revealing your uh key conversation history to Google or or or to Sam. uh but uh you know that's another discussion right but uh basically I think you know we're you know we here all understand the importance of this and I think uh like now is really the era where we have to switch uh from uh just doing advocacy to really switch on like go into full gear on push pushing these things into practice and I think obviously if you're a developer you can uh have obvious ways to contribute to that. But also, if you're any other type of person, you can contribute to these technologies. You can spread the word, you can be a user. If you're a user, then actually the less technical you are, the better because uh then you give feedback that actually aligns with what the with what's going to help the rest of the world use these things. Um if uh I mean, if you're a lawyer, you know, I think the political battles are also very important. Um and uh I think we should not underestimate the sheer number of allies we have and the sheer number of people who do not want the five most powerful people in countries uh in the world to see and control everything. uh we should not underestimate that even uh that over 99% of the world's governments are not superpowers and you know they they're interested in um and uh even know huge numbers of people and you know the ones that are um also people um anyone working on UX UX is hugely important for privacy technology um so no matter what uh part of the uh you no matter what your skill set is and no matter what area you're interested in, there are a lot of opportunities to really be active and contribute and uh like basically consider make like take an effort to make at least one extra privacy technology something that you hear about today from here on be a regular part of your life. >> I love that. Well, Vitalik, you have really lit a fire under the privacy movement uh recently and it's incredible. you're one of the most eloquent speakers about privacy. So, please all follow Vitalik's lead, join him in this cause. Uh, and I think together we can make a huge difference and we can actually change the future. So, thank you so much for everything you're doing. Thank you for galvanizing this crowd and thank you all for being here. >> Thank you. [applause]