Vitalik: Why Bitcoin is Decentralized but Not Private On January 27, Ethereum founder Vitalik Buterin shared at the ETH ChiangMai togETHer Tuesday event that Bitcoin had to prioritize decentralization in its initial design, but this also meant it wasn't fully optimized for privacy. Early cryptographic solutions for privacy generally relied on centralized institutions, and technologies that could balance both decentralization and privacy were not practically feasible at the time. It wasn't until the past decade, with the gradual maturity of privacy technologies like zk-SNARKs, that some applications in the Ethereum ecosystem began exploring ways to reintroduce privacy into on-chain systems. Source: ETH ChiangMai togETHer Tuesday