Timo Dreger

I'm thinking about the hysteria about Mythos. "[It] is like a gun, and this is like handing a gun to a 12-year-old." (L.A. Times) "It's like randomly mailing automatic rifles to 5,000 addresses. I hope some crazy teen doesn't get a hold of one." (Oakland Tribune). "...even prompted one leading security expert to warn that 'we could lose control of society.'" (L.A Times Magazine). But wait. Those quotes are from 1995, about the pending release of the ominously named SATAN - "Security Administrator Tool for Analyzing Networks". Which, of course, didn't do anything of those things. Learn from history.

Privacy will be the most important moat in crypto. Why? Because secrets are hard to migrate. Everyone is launching a new "high performance" blockchain lately. But these chains are hardly different from one another. Blockspace is functionally the same everywhere. And with bridges that make moving between chains easy, that blockspace is now accessible *from* everywhere. Mercenary users and capital quickly arriving on a chain to farm an airdrop can leave just as quickly to farm the next one on another chain. The reality is that if your "general purpose" chain doesn't already have a thriving ecosystem, a killer application, or an unfair distribution advantage, there's very little reason for anyone to use it or build on top of it. Performance alone is no longer enough. Privacy is the one feature that everyone agrees is critical for the world’s finance to move onchain. It’s also the one feature that almost every blockchain that exists today completely lacks. For most chains, it has been little more than an afterthought until now. Privacy by itself is sufficiently compelling to differentiate a new chain from all the rest. But it also does something more important: it creates chain lock-in. Bridging tokens is easy, but bridging secrets is hard. As long as everything is public, it's trivial to move from one chain to another, thanks to bridging protocols like LayerZero. But, as soon as you make things private, that is no longer true. There is always a risk when moving in or out of a private zone that people who are watching the chain, mempool, or network traffic will be able to figure out who you are. Crossing the boundary between a private chain and a public one—or even between two private chains—leaks all kinds of metadata like transaction timing and size correlations that makes it easier to track you. Compared to the many undifferentiated new chains whose fees will likely be driven down to zero by competition, blockchains with privacy have a much stronger network effect. When you're on public blockchains, it's easy to transact with users on other chains—it doesn't matter which chain you join. When you're on private blockchains, on the other hand, the chain you choose matters much more because, once you join one, you're less likely to move and risk being exposed. This will create a winner-take-most dynamic. And because privacy is essential for most real-world use cases, a handful of privacy chains will own most of crypto.