What is Vitalik's intention in promoting Kohaku and donating to the privacy communication application?

Many people do not understand what @VitalikButerin's intention is in promoting Kohaku and donating 256 ETH. If you think it's just a charitable donation, you are very mistaken: behind this involves the evolutionary logic of three models: “absolute privacy,” “optional privacy,” and “privacy is security.” Let's talk about it:

1. “Absolute privacy” is a function originally possessed by Tornado Cash, Railgun, Aztec, and Monero, where the core logic is to create a completely black box “privacy pool”. Once funds enter, all transaction information, including sender, receiver, amount, etc., is encrypted, and the outside world cannot see anything, including regulators!

This means that if illegal money mixes with legitimate funds in this privacy channel, it will turn privacy tools into money laundering tools, which will lead to regulatory sanctions. Therefore, for the time being, absolute privacy solutions can only remain at the tool service level. To scale up, it is essential to explore solutions that embrace regulation.

2. “Optional Privacy” is a compromise solution that @Zcash has been exploring recently by adopting a dual-track system of transparent addresses and shielded addresses. The core logic is to allow users to actively choose either to use fully shielded addresses, which can be likened to absolute privacy, or to use transparent addresses to meet regulatory requirements.

Doing this is certainly an improvement, as it adds a layer of intent on top of the tools. If the entity is an individual, they can choose absolute privacy; if the entity is a regulatory-compliant institution, then with an audit process, they naturally opt for optional privacy.

However, the promotion of such schemes is not easy, because under the premise of optional transparent privacy, using shielded addresses is tantamount to labeling oneself as “there's no silver here”. It stigmatizes privacy, making it a privilege for a very small minority rather than a standard feature for the public.

3. Vitalik's series of actions regarding the Ethereum Foundation has one goal: to upgrade optional privacy to a standard feature of “privacy as security.” This is what V has always emphasized, Privacy is not a feature, it’s a prerequisite for security!

This concept presents a challenge: how to ensure privacy while not being targeted by regulation? In other words, default privacy + optional disclosure = the implementation of decentralized privacy protection while accommodating regulatory solutions.

Therefore, Kohaku's design follows the path of Stealth addresses + elliptic curve cryptography + ZK proofs and other technical solutions, achieving a balance between privacy protection and optional disclosure through technological means. Kohaku is more like a modular privacy embedding layer that can directly serve wallets, promoting privacy through application layer habit migration.

But that is not enough. Vitalik is very clear that the major challenge of privacy narratives lies in the “off-chain environment,” because on-chain there are many decentralized validation infrastructures and technologies like ZK and FHE to achieve trade-offs. However, protecting user metadata privacy in the off-chain environment and establishing a decentralized messaging layer has become a bottleneck issue.

So, there was a donation aimed at @session_app and @SimpleXChat, which is actually to explore how to achieve end-to-end encrypted communication in a decentralized environment, thereby completing the entire privacy pipeline both on-chain and off-chain;

The removal of phone number registration for Session, along with the ability to eliminate even the SimpleX ID, reinforces a fact: privacy (off-chain: IP address, communication counterpart, etc.; on-chain: transaction links, interaction details, etc.) is part of the underlying security framework.

So, following Vitalik's directive of going wherever he points, the privacy track can also allow many technical narrative projects to latch onto big names, including the General ZK Aggregation Verification Layer @boundless_xyz, the Intent-Embedded Privacy Transaction Layer @anoma, and the cryptographic holy grail level FHE solutions @zama, among others.

Did you understand?