The Privacy Trilemma

The trilemma says you can only have two out of three:

Privacy – this means the industry needs confidential data on-chain to match Web2 financial apps. Otherwise, we’ll be stuck forever with trading/gambling/HODLing use cases.

Ease of use – without ease of use and ease of development, no one will use or build privacy apps.

Classic Consensus – this refers to the classic PoS consensus.

If you use Classic Consensus, you can achieve privacy but at the expense of being prohibitively hard to use.

This is very much like Windows fixing security using anti-virus software vs Mac being secure at its foundation.

If you want privacy and ease of use, you must embed privacy into consensus.

Questions?))

2 Likes

Yeah, sure. :+1:

FYI, this is how the Mac vs. PC debate ended up back in 2008 circa:

  • “Hi, I’m a Mac!”
  • “And I’m a PC.”
  • “… and we’re the same because we both use Chrome.”

Anyways, would you mind explaining why this is a trilemma please? In other words, why can we only get two out of three?