Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin said at ETH Taipei that privacy technology will struggle to gain broad adoption unless the people signing procurement contracts see it as little more than choosing a different vendor.
Speaking during the latter part of a post-talk Q&A, Buterin was asked about a practical gap in privacy-preserving systems: some designs already exist in technical terms, but almost no one has an incentive to install them.
The bottleneck is incentives, not technical feasibility
The question referred to a design Buterin had discussed earlier in his presentation.
He said a city that wants cameras to detect violent incidents without creating an around-the-clock surveillance system could run an open-weight model inside trusted hardware. Under that setup, video would be retained and uploaded only when a specific event is detected, while all other data would be deleted immediately. Onchain transactions could then serve as a public, verifiable counter so anyone could check how many times that camera had uploaded footage.
Buterin’s point was that an available technical path does not automatically lead to real-world adoption. The person asking the question framed the problem this way: the people who decide which system gets installed often have no clear reason to pick the one that protects privacy more effectively.
First condition: make the option mature enough that buyers barely notice the difference
Buterin’s first answer was about maturity.
He said these systems need to reach a point where, for a politician or a university administrator, adopting them feels like signing with another supplier and nothing more. If the privacy-preserving option brings a longer review process, harder-to-understand specifications, or more internal persuasion costs, decision-makers will stick with the existing system.
That standard pushes the burden back onto developers. In his framing, the goal is not to make procurement teams understand cryptography. It is to make sure they do not need to understand cryptography in order to adopt the product.
Second condition: do not underestimate how many allies privacy advocates already have
The second part of Buterin’s response focused on who is already aligned with the same objective.
He said people should not underestimate how many allies there are. His first example was the weight of the General Data Protection Regulation, or GDPR, in Europe’s technology environment. His second was the importance many governments place on technological sovereignty. Many of them, he said, do not want foreign companies to have full visibility into the private lives of their citizens.
Buterin added that these institutions often speak in the language of compliance and risk management. That vocabulary sounds different from the way the privacy technology community talks, but the end goal is often the same.
The exchange at ETH Taipei centered on a simple argument: privacy technology needs to become easy to buy, not just possible to build. And the groups pushing for it may have more support than they think.