This is the uncomfortable truth most people in crypto refuse to confront:

We say we care about privacy, but we keep building on architectures that structurally cannot provide it.

Not because we don't know better, but because the incentives reward visibility, speculation, and network effects, not privacy.

They were designed for:

• transparency

• auditability

• censorship resistance through public verification

Privacy was not a design goal. At best, it was an afterthought masked by pseudonymity.

If you build on a system optimised for transparency, you inherit transparency.

You can't separate the psychology from the architecture.

• People build where the liquidity lives.

• People use what's convenient.

• People trade where others trade.

Privacy tech requires friction: new tools, new UX, new patterns, new trust assumptions. Most users won't touch that unless privacy is forced upon them.

Founders love:

• onchain analytics

• open user graphs

• composability through global state

But global state is a surveillance oracle. Every wallet, every action, every relationship becomes a permanent data trail.

Privacy must be the default or it will never materially exist.

What happens when privacy is optional?

• people don't opt in

• developers don't integrate it

• platforms treat it like an accessory

• regulators treat it like suspicious behavior

Optional privacy = no privacy.

Privacy hurts the narratives that built crypto:

• removes "transparent markets"

• reduces hype loops

• breaks speculative monitoring

• kills "leaderboard culture"

• makes sybil detection harder

• makes founders blind to user behavior

• removes the easy monetization of identity/entity data

It also makes compliance harder. And VC due diligence harder. And user acquisition tracking harder.

Most of the industry is not ideologically aligned with privacy; it is ideologically aligned with appreciation, liquidity flow, and public metrics.

It isn't. Never was. Never will be, without deliberate cryptographic design.

Transparency is not freedom. It's simply a different kind of surveillance.

If we truly cared about privacy, we would:

• build on zk-first L1s/L2s

• design account systems with default encrypted state

• bake privacy into bridges, wallets, payments

• treat metadata minimization as a first-class requirement

• make privacy-preserving smart contracts the standard library, not a niche category

• make public raw transactions the rare exception, not the expectation

• The infrastructure needed already exists; people just don't choose it.

The problem is no incentive to adopt it.

Until:

• major apps launch on privacy layers

• exchanges support private assets

• wallets default to shielded interactions

• developers see adoption metrics for privacy products

...nothing will change.

Privacy won't emerge until builders refuse to keep enabling surveillance-by-default architectures.

And until users stop treating transparency as "neutral"