Description
Speaker: Peter Van Valkenburgh
Event: Ethereum Day (Devconnect Argentina 2025)
Keywords: Privacy, cypherpunk, blockchain, surveillance, MEV
Privacy is Existential: though it may not be a right.
Privacy is often treated in cypherpunk circles as a right in itself. But does someone who chooses to act in public really have a right to demand others look away? This talk shifts the focus: from privacy as an individual right to privacy as a structural necessity for the survival of permissionless blockchains. Ethereum and other L1s rightly aspire to be “dumb pipes.” Yet dumb pipes, by definition, have no perspective on what flows through them—and if they did, they wouldn’t stay pipes for long. When validators can see and interpret every transaction, they face two existential risks: the temptation to exploit that visibility for MEV (maximum extractable value), and the liability of becoming complicit in what they observe. From private extraction to public prosecution, visibility itself becomes an attack surface—one that can and will be exploited not only by opportunistic actors, but by nation-states.
About Devconnect
Devconnect is a week-long gathering of the Ethereum community with events for developers, researchers, artists and creators. It’s organized by the Ethereum Foundation and took place in Buenos Aires, Argentina in Nov 2025, with ~20,000 attendees.
What’s next
The next major Ethereum community event is Devcon 8, happening in 2026.
For updates visit: https://devcon.org
More
Follow us: @efdevcon · @ethereum
Learn more about Ethereum: https://ethereum.org
And the Ethereum Foundation: https://ethereum.foundation/