THE TYRANNY OF COMFORT OR HOW WE SOLD OUR PRIVACY
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We haven't lost our privacy. We've bartered it, counted it, monetized it, then exchanged it for free delivery, a pre-filled form, a "Connect with..." authentication, a cloud that smiles at us and promises to never forget anything for us again. It's not a robbery. It's a polished contract, a click in a window that opens, with the most visible button, the one that says "Accept and continue." We signed without reading because we had to move quickly. The promise was simple and irresistible: less effort, more ease. And at the heart of this ease, something has crumbled. That something is sovereignty over our traces, our habits, our transactions, our memory. The tyranny of comfort is this: a softness that anesthetizes, an ergonomics that dispossesses us.
It wasn't born yesterday. Digital technology simply industrialized a human reflex: avoiding friction. The platform economy took this reflex, optimized it, and transformed it into a business model. Do you want to come in? Fine, show me who you are, what you like, what you watch, when you sleep, what you order, how you pay, who you talk to. In exchange, I'll offer you the freedom to forget all passwords, recommendations "just for you," the feeling of being expected. Today's internet is a large hotel that calls you by your first name without ever asking for your ID at the counter, because it already took it when you booked, and it kept the number "for your security." Security is always the argument that closes the discussion. We didn't force you, we did better: we made it easier for you.
Comfort comes at a price that no one advertises. The signs don't say "here, we resell your data," they say "here, we personalize the experience." Personalize is a velvet word for profile. And profile is another word for mastery: knowing your triggers, guessing your weaknesses, calculating the exact moment you'll click. We call this optimization. It's clean, scientific, without any apparent violence. The only trace of constraint is the little pang in your heart when you discover that the ad knows you better than you do. You get used to it. You get used to everything, even the cage, if the cage is well-appointed.
Money has followed the same path. Cash is disappearing, we're told it's for our own good. Fraudsters don't like traceability, so traceability will save the world. An undeniable argument, perfect packaging. And while we're hailing contactless payment, something else is disappearing: the ability to exchange without witnesses. The ability to leave no trail. The trivial possibility of buying bread without four servers, two payment processors, an analytics aggregator, and an insurer knowing which bakery you go to and how often you change neighborhoods. You're told you're being dramatic, that all this happens under strict conditions, regulated by the law. The law regulates as long as the law allows it. When the law changes, the logs remain, and habits turn against you.
The tyranny of comfort loves default settings. The “default” is the most powerful of public and private policies. Who takes the time to uncheck boxes? Who even knows where they are in the menus? The user experience was designed to guide you toward the smoothest, fastest option, the one that saves you mental fatigue. It also saves you freedom, because freedom costs money: it requires daily attention, vigilance, decisions that no one can make for you. We have left these decisions to screens that promise to be our guardians and butlers. They have become stewards and jailers, smoothly.
Bitcoin comes here as an insult to the times. It's anything but comfortable, especially at first. It talks about keys, backups, addresses, fees, confirmations. It reminds you that if you lose your seed, you lose your value. It has no warm welcome, no "forgot password" button, no customer service that will call you by your first name to tell you that everything will be fine. Bitcoin breaks the grammar of the tyranny of comfort. It forces you to become responsible again. It is criticized for its harshness, when that is precisely its virtue. It reintroduces "useful difficulty": the one that protects what you don't want to lose.
“But I have nothing to hide.” This is the favorite phrase of polite submission. It rarely comes from bad intentions; it stems from fatigue. We no longer want to fight the tide of opt-ins and cookies; we want to watch a series, we want to pay and leave. We tell ourselves we're not interesting. That's when the trap closes. You may have nothing to hide in your opinion, but someone always finds something to extract: a correlation, a usage, a segmentation. On an individual scale, the concession seems minuscule. On a population scale, it's a system of statistical control. No need for a police officer behind every door: the dashboard is enough; the thresholds are triggered, the risks aggregate, and behaviors normalize. We haven't sold secrets. We've sold degrees of freedom.
Bitcoin is not a magic shield against surveillance. That's not its promise. Its gamble is deeper: to reintroduce scarcity, and therefore responsibility; to reintroduce verification, and therefore truth; to reintroduce custody, and therefore sovereignty. It doesn't abolish the law; it removes what arbitrariness can from it. It doesn't guarantee invisibility; it guarantees issuer independence: no one prints your value while you sleep. It doesn't exempt you from operational prudence; it makes you accountable for it. This isn't comfortable. It's healthy.
The tyranny of comfort, however, has one last trick: integration. It likes to take ideas that oppose it and repackage them in its own way. It compresses Bitcoin into custodial applications, wraps it in cumbersome KYC, transforms it into a stock ticket that can be exchanged for other tickets. It reconstructs the “forgotten password” button over the initial promise. It offers you a “smooth” version of insubordination, a version without friction, but also without power. Bitcoin then becomes a logo in a multi-asset portfolio, a line on a statement, a synthetic exposure. Comfort takes over again. The trap is subtle: you're told it's simpler, more secure, better insured. This is undoubtedly true for a certain purpose. But if everyone takes this shortcut, ownership becomes a promise again, money becomes a service again, and sovereignty returns to the account issuer.
Make no mistake: ease is not the enemy. Ease is the natural tool of a world that wants to move forward. The enemy is ease without ownership, ease that nullifies your right to say no, to be silent, to withdraw, to pass out. Freedom needs escape routes. Comfort doesn't; it seals them off to keep you inside, where it can serve you better. Bitcoin reopens a creaking door in the darkness.
We hear about central bank digital currencies as a form of modernization. The naked truth: they're administrable accounts, programmable money, with all the good intentions attached to them. Counter fraud, streamline aid, streamline tax payments. We know the drill. We also know the downside: what can be administered will end up being administered according to shifting criteria. The tyranny of convenience loves CBDCs: an official app, impeccable UX, silent updates, a sense of national security. You've taken out your health insurance card, you'll take out your citizen's wallet. You'll click "Accept and continue." You have better things to do, you don't want to read the conditions. That's human. That's precisely why we need an antidote.
Satoshi and the cypherpunks made this diagnosis decades ago: in a digital world, privacy disappears by default. It can only survive if it is rebuilt by code, defended by design, and taken care of by the individual. Cash played this role by chance: it had no memory. Digital has perfect memory. If you don't want to be tracked, you have to stop emitting traces that others possess. This is neither romantic nor theoretical: it is operational. It requires concrete actions, demanding tools. It requires chosen friction.
This friction isn't a fetish. It's not there to punish you for wanting to live in the 21st century. It's hygiene. You don't start by running a marathon, you start by walking. In the comfort economy, everything is designed to prevent you from walking yourself. You step onto a treadmill that moves forward. You confuse movement with being carried away. Bitcoin takes you down. It tells you: take one step at a time. Learn to back up. Learn to segregate risk. Learn the difference between an account and a key. Learn to make mistakes with low stakes so you don't make mistakes when it counts. These verbs don't scale well, they're not sexy, they don't fit into a pitch. But they build muscle that no one can take away from you.
The tyranny of comfort loves gentle irreversibility. It guides you into architectures where going back is technically possible but economically unsustainable. When everything is consolidated in a cloud, leaving the cloud is like moving your memory. When everything is linked to a sovereign identifier, “changing your identity” is an administrative operation, not a natural right. When everything is paid for on credit, switching back to cash makes you seem archaic. It's a cultural shift. Comfort has its norms, its policies, its ironies. Asceticism makes you laugh until the day it makes you want it.
Bitcoin doesn't promise absolute anonymity. It imposes an absolute protocol: public rules, verifiable scarcity, finite supply, neutrality of treatment. Within these constraints, everyone can invent their own degrees of confidentiality, their own layers, their own rituals. Some will want a cold vault and an address that's never exposed. Others will prefer mobility and channels. Still others, a mix that takes reality into account: pay, collect, declare, live. Comfort will want to impose a single path on you, the easiest to administer. Freedom supports the plurality that's hardest to maintain. Maintain, that's the word. Freedom is maintenance. It can be cleaned, backed up, checked, and monitored. It's not a product; it's a practice.
It's often said that good technology fades. This is true for many things. Not for money. A currency that fades completely insinuates itself everywhere and becomes invisible: it can then be changed without your knowledge. It circulates within you like a habit, and habit is the last chain to break. A good free currency must resist total erasure. It must retain a relief, a resistance that reminds you that it's there, that it's yours. Bitcoin does that. It keeps you from forgetting that you own, not that you rent.
There will always be people selling you Bitcoin as a comfort asset: “Don’t bother, we’ll take care of everything.” They’re not lying: they do indeed take care of everything, including what you don’t see. They manage your exposure but also your lack of power. It may be what you want, it may be what you can. But don’t get the vocabulary wrong: this is not the cypherpunk promise. The cypherpunk promise is not a promise of returns, it’s a promise of a tool. It asks you to get your hands dirty. It empowers you and makes no apologies.
The tyranny of comfort, at heart, is a tyranny we demand. It's the only one that works in the long run. It's not enough to be afraid to resist it. It must be replaced with a desirable demand. Comfort is not the enemy of beauty; on the contrary, great design can make sovereignty desirable. It can transform friction into ritual, safeguarding into ceremony, prudence into aesthetics. The best Bitcoin tools move in this direction: they give you beauty with ownership, not against it. They don't hide difficulty; they dress it up so it doesn't repel you. This aesthetic isn't cosmetic. It's a policy.
We sold our privacy because we no longer knew what to do with it. We were taught that transparency was a civic virtue and that secrecy was shady. We were told that the rule of law was enough and that social engineering was a paranoid mania. We applauded the blue buttons because they bought us time. We can keep this up for a long time, probably years, with regular updates that will improve the experience while the room to maneuver shrinks. Or we can practice courteous desertion: retaking a few strongholds, not all of them, not right away, but the ones that matter. Currency is one of them. Currency decides whether your work today can be confiscated tomorrow. Currency decides whether your trades should be authorized. Currency decides whether your “yes” is still worth anything when you are ordered to say “yes.”
You don't overthrow a tyranny with a click. You bring friction back to a world that hates it. You relearn how to keep secrets that don't hurt anyone: secrets that protect you. You accept costs you'd forgotten about: time, attention, a little complexity. You rally around tools that don't rely on a teller. You become the hands that verify when we were told to trust. You become technical citizens in a world that prefers passive users. There's nothing romantic about that. It's simply the price of no longer being sold piecemeal.
We don't have to choose between comfort and freedom for everything, all the time. We have to choose the areas where freedom is more valuable than fluidity. For some, it will be communication, for others, health, for others, currency. Bitcoin is the tool that puts currency in the freedom camp. No promise of paradise, no shortcuts, no 24/7 support that takes the load off you. Just a hard rule, a fair game, and the ability to get off the rails when the rails lead to the wall.
The tyranny of comfort will present itself tomorrow with an even wider smile. It will tell you that everything will be better if we are all in the same national application, with an official wallet, a certified identity, a reliability score. It will say that it is modern, ecological, rational. It will show graphs, economists on sets, advertisements that look like you. And then one morning, a small line of code will decide that a certain type of purchase is “temporarily disabled,” that a certain donation is “non-compliant,” that a trip is “unjustified.” You will look for the box to uncheck. There will be none. The tyranny of comfort cannot be fought the day it locks you in. It must be fought the day it reaches out to you.
Bitcoin teaches you to keep yours free.
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