Why #privacy is more important than #anonymity

Privacy is the right to decide what you share and with whom, while anonymity aims to completely hide your identity.

You can live without anonymity and still have privacy (e.g., your family life), but without privacy, anonymity becomes just a fragile disguise.

You can talk to your doctor in confidence, with privacy and without anonymity, or you can have anonymity without privacy, being monitored in everything you do.

At any moment your anonymity disappears because all your data reveals you.

You are your data and metadata.

Furthermore, let's be realistic, don't buy into extreme messages. For most people, it's impossible to live in total anonymity, but you can have selective privacy.

In certain cases, you can combine anonymity and privacy. Okay, it's powerful, but these are exceptions.

—Privacy without decentralization

In theory, you can have privacy in a centralized system (e.g., Signal, ProtonMail). But you depend on the good faith and legal framework of the custodian. It is not sovereign privacy: it is borrowed and revocable.

—Privacy without open source

Difficult to sustain. If the code is closed, you have to blindly trust that there are no backdoors. Privacy is based on verifiability; without open source, there is only promise.

—Privacy with a traceable ledger

If traceability is total (as in Bitcoin), real privacy does not exist: what exists are additional layers (CoinJoin, mixers, Lightning, etc.). For robust privacy, you need base layer obfuscation (ring signatures, zk-SNARKs, etc.). Guess which blockchain has no native traceability by default in L1?

In other words, a transparent record may give the appearance of order, but never of privacy.

Without privacy, you are vulnerable: you are exposed to governments, corporations, or criminals.

And without privacy, there is no freedom, only an illusion of it under constant surveillance.