Public privacy

The blockchain is a space of a private nature: don't let them sell you a lie

And this is so, regardless of who it may concern, because a blockchain is by nature a space of privacy, just as your living room is —for the moment—, regardless of whether it is permissioned or permissionless. It is a singular privacy, a public privacy in which everything is seen and recorded, but no one knows or can know who is behind all that is seen and recorded, nor behind the whole where what is seen is recorded.

Something like a costume party in your living room where you can do everything, from telling amusing gibberish to the most spectacular business, such that this party belongs to your privacy, and only to your privacy, as long as you don't leave your living room. Something like that, too, like a land registry of real estate in which you could know everything about the rights to that property except for the holders of those rights.

The noun "privacy" derives from the adjective "private", and this from the verb "to deprive" (privare in Latin), where to deprive others of something is to forbid others access to that something because it is mine, and mine alone, unless I want it not to be. And just as private is your living room, which I only enter if you let me, as private is any network built on any blockchain on the basis of any protocol (even open networks are in this sense private because whoever designed them designed them to be open, when they could have deprived you of such access).

The protocol is the rules of a game in your living room, a game in which only whoever you want can participate, which includes the possibility (ad exemplum) of imposing the purchase of a ticket (getting a token), the condition of going furry (fulfilling certain requirements), or leaving the door open if that is what you want (simply connecting your wallet). However, the fact that you leave the door to your living room open for whoever wants to enter does not in any way detract from the fact that your living room is still a private space; a space that belongs to your privacy where you, and only you, are the master, you are the one who exercises dominion and therefore who has exclusive decision-making power over who (how and when) can and cannot access this private space, over who you share this privacy that is yours, and yours alone.

This is exactly the case of a blockchain network, for example, a DEX: it is a private space in which users play token exchanges and win or lose (whatever) on the basis of those exchanges, just as they could be playing poker, winning and losing (money, shots, clothes...) without the tax authorities having the right (and if they did, they could not) to stick their noses in there. And the only difference between that private space and that DEX —read any blockchain decentralised platform— is that it is a shared space.

Your living room is yours, but the platform belongs to its members; the living room is private property, but the platform is a shared property in the broad sense (which is technically closer to a joint ownership whether it is Germanic or Romanesque depends on the letter of the protocol —but that does not matter now—, although it is possible that it deserves the creation of a new legal conceptual category), which in any case does not affect your privacy at all. Your living room is just as private as the premises you buy, rent, use and enjoy or, in short, own, together with your colleagues or best friends under a kind of shared privacy.

Bad intentions aside —which there are, those of Them, who fear that someone will eat some of the cake— the tendency or confusion to consider a blockchain as something public comes because, being essentially a registry (however distributed) then it happens that, as such a registry, everyone, publicly, can access what has been registered.

You —any human being— can only know the transactions that Vitalik Buterin has made on the Ethereum blockchain if it is the case that you know what his wallets are; and you can only know them if it is the case that Vitalik tells you what they are, if he de-privatises them.

However, whether you know or do not know the transactions of a wallet does not alter the character of that wallet in terms of its privacy.

Your bank account does not cease to be (in nature) private because you post a monthly transaction statement on your home gateway.

Privacy cannot be a dispositional concept, a concept that manifests itself under certain circumstances. Privacy is an extension of man's Freedom and, as such, an existencial absolute. If They manage it, you are no longer free and you lose your humanity.

So, for example: (i) If you send 0.3 ETH to a friend who is short of cash, it is a private transaction no matter how publicly registered it is. (ii) If you vote on a proposal in a DAO that governs a platform for playing multi-game chess with distribution of incentives and prizes, it is also a private transaction, however publicly registered it may be. And (iii) if you come third in a tournament organised on that platform and for that you receive a prize of equis native tokens, then this transaction is as private as the transactions that take place if you set up a chess tournament in your house where you have all put a hundred euros to distribute 70% among the three winners and apply the rest to the organisation of the next tournament or go on a spree.

It is this kind of blockchain privacy that we call "public privacy" as a species of the genus privacy and, as such, not a lesser or inferior privacy, but a specifically different privacy.

In Vegas, what happens there stays there and no one can or should have access to it. They are private, very private matters... that you don't want to share (you don't want to give up your privacy) and that are not recorded (unless someone unduly sticks their nose in where it doesn't belong). What happens in the jungle also stays in the jungle except for the fact that it is practically impossible to find a jungle that escapes The Public and, therefore, the public. They have already made sure that everything that does not belong to someone is registered as public property. What happens in your living room stays in your house as if it were in Las Vegas unless you want to organise open doors days. What happens in the blockchain stays in the blockchain as if it were your living room (and therefore Las Vegas) unless you want to share it, without this being an obstacle to everything that happens there being indelibly and unfailingly recorded. And it is because of this characterisation that we call them matters of public privacy. And what happens in the tribe stays publicly in the tribe, so that if you know about it, everybody knows about it or can know about it. It's all —shall we say— kind of shared by default, just the opposite of what happens in Las Vegas, the jungle, your living room and the blockchain where everything is private by default.

And don't lose sight —human— that privacy is like honour: once lost, it can never be regained. What is private that becomes public is already irreversibly public, because what is public can never be private.