Don't be fooled by the rhetoric of "transparency equals justice." This issue has been pointed out by industry insiders long ago—decentralization and privacy often conflict, and a fully public blockchain ledger essentially exposes every transaction to the sunlight.

The reality is quite sobering. Bitcoin users will realize what it means that transaction records are traceable across the entire chain. Your asset flows, spending habits, and even investment rhythms can be thoroughly analyzed with on-chain tools. Adding money, transferring private funds, adjusting positions—all can be traced clearly from blockchain data. Is this what we call financial freedom? Essentially, privacy is sacrificed as a price to pay.

The irony lies here: many new projects promote "transparency" as a selling point, as if all transactions being on-chain makes it sufficiently secure. But think about it—who in real life would post their bank statement to social media? Decentralization without privacy guarantees is at best just a different way for large-scale surveillance.

This is also why certain technical solutions are particularly important. Around 2016, a technical direction gained attention—using zero-knowledge proofs, a cryptographic method, to prove the validity of transactions without revealing transaction details. It sounds complex, but the core logic is straightforward: I can prove to the network that this transaction is valid and free of double-spending risks, but the specific sender and receiver addresses, amounts, and other details remain hidden.

The brilliance of this design is that it does not negate the core verification mechanism of blockchain; instead, it adds a layer of privacy protection while preserving validation functions. From a technical perspective, this allows encrypted asset interactions to maintain decentralization while granting users genuine privacy rights. At that time, this was indeed a groundbreaking and imaginative breakthrough.

Many people only know that privacy coins exist in this space, but they don’t realize how deep the technological evolution behind them is. The implementation of zero-knowledge proofs has gradually permeated the entire industry infrastructure—from Layer 2 scaling solutions to cross-chain protocols—its presence can be seen everywhere. Privacy protection is not just an application direction; it’s a key component in completing the foundational infrastructure of the entire industry.

From a different perspective, if the crypto world truly aims to become the next-generation financial infrastructure, then privacy and security are both indispensable. A system that is transparent but lacks privacy will ultimately hit a ceiling in real-world applications.