I have been trusting the wrong things my entire life. I first trusted a bank with my savings, but they loaned the money to people who never paid it back. I trusted my employer with my personal information, but they got hacked, and now my social security number is being sold on a random sketchy website. I trusted an accountant once, which resulted in me getting audited and paying taxes on money I never even earned. I could go on, but I think you get the point. People lie. Businesses lie. Organizations lie. The government lies. I have been lied to enough to lose all my trust.
Except for one thing. I trust math.
When I first heard about the Kachina thing with Midnight, I thought, “Great. Just what I need. Another group of people trying to trick me into giving them my information.” Explain it however you want, people will always try to screw you over.
But then, I realized, that complexity is not the problem. It's the hiding.
Let me describe for you how the world exists right now. Imagine you are buying a beer at the corner shop and the shopkeeper asks you to photocopy your passport, your utility bill, and get an affidavit from your mom saying you were born. That’s today’s ID verification.
That’s Web2. To be honest, that’s most of Web3.
Midnight said: What if proving you’re old enough to buy the beer didn’t involve giving your home address, your birthday, and your grandma’s maiden name?”
This is where Kachina comes in. And frankly, if you don’t understand the compiler, or the syntax, or any of that stuff, who cares? What matters is this: Kachina enables you to put walls around your business. Not hiding walls, like that’s something for criminals. More like one-way mirrors. You can see outside. The world can see you. But no one can see inside unless you want them to.
I’m not going to sit here and pretend I can rebuild it from scratch, but I get it. The public state, the private state, the way these zero-knowledge proofs work.... It’s the part of my life that is mine, and it puts a fence around it. And then gives the world a receipt that says “everything behind this fence is in order” without showing anything.
I think about all the stupid arguments I've had with people who tell me "if you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to fear." That's the dumbest thing I've ever heard, and I've heard a lot of dumb things. I have nothing to hide in my bedroom either, but I still close the curtains. Privacy isn't about hiding crimes. Privacy is about not performing your life for an audience of strangers, data brokers, and whatever marketing executive thinks they deserve to know what medication I take.
The Web3 dream was supposed to fix this. But most of these blockchains are just glass houses with nicer locks on the front door. Everyone can still see what furniture you bought. Midnight is different. It's a brick house with windows you actually control. You open them when you want fresh air. You close them when you want to sleep. Revolutionary concept, somehow.
I'm not betting on Midnight because I think the price of $NIGHT is going to moon next week. I couldn't care less about that noise. I'm here because I'm tired of being the product. I'm tired of watching corporations treat my personal information like crude oil they're allowed to drill for free. I'm tired of explaining to people why privacy matters and watching them shrug because they think they're not interesting enough to spy on.
You're all interesting enough. Your data is interesting enough. Every single one of you.
So yeah, I'll learn Kachina. I'll figure out the wallets and the proofs and whatever else they throw at us. Because the alternative is going back to the bank. Going back to the accountant. Going back to the glass house where everyone watches and the stones just keep coming.
Math won't sell my data. Math won't get hacked and apologize with free credit monitoring. Math just sits there, being true, waiting for me to use it.
That's the only trust I have left.