Vitalik Buterin said that Bitcoin chose decentralization over privacy from the very beginning.
Speaking at an event in Chiang Mai, Buterin explained that Bitcoin’s early design focused heavily on staying decentralized. That meant privacy features were not fully developed or optimized.
He said that in the early days of crypto, technology simply wasn’t advanced enough to support both strong decentralization and strong privacy at the same time. Because of that, many systems relied on centralized services to provide privacy protections.
Buterin pointed out that things have changed over the past decade. New tools like zk-SNARK now allow developers to experiment with privacy features directly on blockchain networks.
He added that parts of the Ethereum ecosystem are exploring ways to bring more privacy on-chain — something Bitcoin never fully integrated into its base layer.
His comments highlight what he sees as a core trade-off in Bitcoin’s design: it maximized decentralization, but that came at the cost of stronger built-in privacy.
