Private Thoughts

May 12, 2026 ·

Privacy seems to be the new trendy discussion nowadays. Zcash is cool, I guess. It's like Bitcoin but encrypted. X chat is encrypted. Meta apps stopped claiming to be so, made the news. Signal. Tornado Cash. Zero knowledge proofs. This, that, and the other. Private, private, private. I don't know what to think of that in its entirety. I guess cash is private? Would I want the United States Bullion Depository, where all the gold is supposedly kept over at Fort Knox be private? Absolutely not. I want it audited and transparent and verifiable. But I want my cash and assets to be private from surveillance. The question becomes that of the observer. Who is observing what, and what are the boundaries of this observation? A public good ought to not be private, and private assets ought to only be public by permission of their owner(s). But it's more complex than that in decentralized networks; probably because the problem is new, and not so much because it cannot be solved. I think who the observer is, is key to determine the subtleties.

Need to think more about this. Just writing my thoughts out loud for now. Once Clarity Act goes through, which is scheduled to be marked up on Thursday this week, this discussion will come about more loudly. Exciting times ahead.

Got work to do today so I'll give Claude max a shot or whatever the upper tier is called. Up until now I've only been using AI in chunks, and even there it kind of spazzes out after a while. Are the higher end plans really that much better? More at 9.