| Wonderland went down the rabbit hole, all right. Crypto investors are generally smart: you have to be, just to use this stuff. So why would they trust an anonymous person to be the treasurer of their money? It’s baked into crypto culture. And that needs to change. 'Crypto' Stands for 'Cryptography' Remember our origin story: we were trying to find a way to transmit things securely across the open web. It’s like trying to pass a secret message across a crowded sports stadium without anyone else overhearing it. For that, we needed cryptography. Cryptography is important for everything from military communication to keeping your passwords safe. It’s been around since at least ancient Greece. The name is actually derived from the Greek word “kryptos,” which means “hidden.” When cryptography moved to computers, the early pioneers were privacy nuts. (It comes with the territory.) In the 1990s, a new generation of cryptography experts called themselves cypherpunks, and they believed in computer-based encryption as a means of creating social and political change. Most of us believe in the right to privacy, at least in our bathrooms or a doctor’s office. But when it comes to sharing our personal data with big corporations or the government, most of us sigh and look the other way. The privacy activists don’t. Deep down, we know they’re probably right: it’s not in society’s best interest for Facebook to collect information on your personal life and then sell it to Cambridge Analytica, or for Equifax to collect information on your credit history and lose it to hackers. Indeed, when the tech companies make it easy to protect our privacy, we’re more likely to do it: the most recent data from Apple shows that only 24% of users allow ad tracking when given the choice. We prefer privacy. Cryptocurrency, which shares the same prefix, was built from this tradition of privacy. The person who started it all, Satoshi Nakamoto, used a pseudonym! While I believe in our individual right to privacy, that right does not extend to people in positions of trust. Put another way, your banker does not have the right to remain anonymous. We have a right to know the names and faces of our politicians, our clergy, and our teachers. And we have a right to know the names and faces of every person behind a crypto project. The reason is simple and obvious: we are entrusting our money to them. So why do so many people still trust their money to anonymous crypto founders? | 
