Last Notes
The book opened with a challenge: if you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to fear. The argument closes by joining three axioms with the working stack.
The Action Axiom places privacy inside the structure of human action. The Argumentation Axiom shows that denying privacy requires the autonomy denial would erase. The Axiom of Resistance holds that designed systems can raise the cost of control sharply, and Bitcoin, Tor, and Signal at consumer scale support the claim.
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The parallel world always exists, some live in it fully, others visit occasionally, some never hear about it. That's alright. Freedom doesn't depend on mass adoption.
New way to talk to your Hermes agent via marmot by @nprofile…xf48
http://github.com/notmandatory/hermes-marmot
Encryption, Bitcoin, and Nostr solve transport, identity, and settlement. They do not establish reliability across time or adjudicate what happened when a deal fails. Those are institutional functions.
Reputation under pseudonymity is the starting point. A persistent key with two years of public history has something to lose if its holder cheats. Most transactions need a narrow fact, and zero-knowledge credentials extend selective disclosure without handing over the underlying record.
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Perfect privacy is unachievable. Pursuing it produces paralysis or burnout, so the practical goal is continuous improvement from wherever you are now.
The foundation tier addresses automated credential theft through password managers, hardware keys, encrypted messaging, and device encryption. The intermediate tier resists financial surveillance and platform aggregation. The advanced tier reaches Tor, Qubes, GrapheneOS, and per-identity hardware.
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Encryption protecting your messages is worthless if you post the same content publicly under your real name. Tor does not help if you log into personal accounts through it.
Security is always relative to a specific adversary. The OODA framework gives the strategic guide: break the adversary cycle at observation, where prevention is cheapest. Compartmentalization enforces the principle, and once two identities are linked, the correlation cannot be undone.
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Centralized platforms own the identity layer. When two firms control the social graph for most U.S. internet users, a ban does not restrict speech, it deletes the audience a creator spent years building.
Nostr inverts the arrangement. Identity is a keypair the user generates; relays store and forward signed events without holding authority over the account. Exit becomes possible without losing followers or history. Long-form articles, marketplaces, and encrypted messages ride the same format.
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This is great.
Got a link to the spec/code?
@nprofile…xdyf just released a local text to speech app with an open source model, its great actually!
https://github.com/GrapheneOS/SpeechServices
Always love talking with you!
Bitcoin's base layer is transparent. A surveillance industry has spent over a decade building tools to read it. Address reuse anchors clusters, the common-input-ownership heuristic extends them, and KYC touchpoints at exchanges map the result onto real people.
Privacy on Bitcoin is an architectural achievement on that base. CoinJoin, PayJoin, and CoinSwap improve on-chain privacy. Lightning moves payments off-chain with unilateral exit. Ecash and Liquid trade custody for confidentiality.
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The Praxeology of Privacy with Max Hillebrand | Bitcoin Infinity Show #205
https://relay.towardsliberty.com/e84566dcc443626222995e93b82aaa68ccfe9cb3241a379a54cd8215f8f9e180.mp3
Hopefully less bad ones than c Tor tho
Sound money that can be inflated or frozen by decree is not sound money. Bitcoin builds monetary discipline and resistance into the same architecture.
Every full node validates blocks against the rules its operator chose to run. A block that breaks those rules is rejected on the spot, and a miner who tries to inflate supply finds no exchange running standard rules will accept payments on the chain that extends from it. When China banned mining in 2021, hash rate recovered within months.
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@nprofile…vhl6 @nprofile…xcpk
Here is a kotlin binding for arti, much better than tor-kmp, that's quite outdated.
https://gitlab.com/guardianproject/tormobile/arti-mobile-ex/-/tree/main?ref_type=heads
Digital money failed for years on two unsolved problems. Double-spending seemed to require a central operator, and most digital currencies were claims on issuers and not money proper.
Chaum's DigiCash threaded privacy and double-spending through blind signatures, then collapsed in 1998 when its operator went bankrupt. Nakamoto joined a permissionless ledger to consensus rules each operator enforces locally, with chain selection by accumulated work. Holders possess the units themselves.
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Yes exactly, no trustless transfers.
It was awesome to finally meet you, and I thoroughly enjoyed our conversation, looking forward to the next one!
A class of fraud that powers entire black markets on legacy platforms is structurally absent from Nostr. Aged accounts with established reputations cannot be bought and resold to scammers, because the cryptography refuses to enforce the handoff. Below is the argument for why this property emerges from the nature of an nsec, why hardware almost solves it but doesn't, and what it means for the kinds of trust the protocol can sustain.
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Awesome, let me know what you think!
Encrypted messaging hides content. The fact of communication, its frequency, its timing, and the parties involved stay visible to observers. Hayden was on record about acting on that data.
Transport architectures sit on a latency-anonymity tradeoff. A VPN relocates trust to one provider in exchange for speed. Tor distributes trust across multiple relays so no single hop learns both endpoints, and mixnets defeat timing correlation through batching and reordering at a higher latency cost.
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Thanks. I hope you'll enjoy it!
Really enjoyed that conf!
haha, I'm just a dude, you can do even better.
As of now prints only on amazon for dirty fiat (sorry) or meet me at a conference and I'll gladly take proper money.
We'll have it available for online order payable in bitcoin hopefully soon, sorry for the delay.
Thanks bro, I appreciate it a lot!
Now I can't wait to read your manifesto one day...
Yes, I'll bring a bunch and will sign them there.
Thanks. I hope you like it!
A computation can be performed when no participant is permitted to see the inputs. Three architectures have reached production in the past decade.
Fully homomorphic encryption operates on ciphertext directly; Gentry's 2009 construction was a billion times slower than plaintext, and fifteen years of engineering have cut four orders of magnitude off that overhead. Secure multi-party computation splits inputs across parties, as MuSig2 and FROST do for Schnorr signatures on Bitcoin.
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Recently I migrated all my ~1000 videos and podcasts to nostr & blossom.
Now you can also see them as a podcast here:
https://towardsliberty.com/podcast.xml
Verification has traditionally required disclosure. Show the document, expose the birthdate, hand over the transaction history. Zero-knowledge proofs cut that link by letting one party prove a statement is true while revealing nothing beyond its truth.
The taxonomy splits along three axes: proof size, trusted setup, and proving cost. SNARKs produce tiny proofs after setup. STARKs drop the setup and add quantum resistance. Zcash, validity rollups, and Sui zkLogin carry real load today.
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Apparently battery should last years, its not rechargeable tho...
No, he added to the intro that he still didn't make the move. A shame...
Checkout vector, its a cool project!
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I always preferred the narrative of "if you have nothing to hide, you're just a very boring person"
Traditional systems require trusting intermediaries. Cryptographic systems trust computational hardness assumptions tested by decades of failed attacks. That shift is the foundation everything later in the book stands on.
Mathematics replaces some trust requirements and leaves others standing. Key authenticity needs an out-of-band channel. Implementations fail more often than algorithms. The post-quantum transition has shipped in NIST standards, Signal PQXDH, and iMessage PQ3.
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Mathematics is indifferent to legal prohibition. Information replicates at near-zero cost. Jurisdictions with divergent interests cannot coordinate suppression. The first Crypto Wars ended on those structural facts.
Victory was partial. Strong protection reached those who prioritized it. Defaults stayed weak for everyone else, and the two-tier equilibrium has held for three decades. The current phase targets builders through Chat Control, the UK Online Safety Act, and commercial spyware.
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Signing room is a pretty neat idea.
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WabiSabi now in a standalone library, check it out of you want anonymous amount ecash tokens.
https://github.com/WalletWasabi/NWabiSabi
221 - Max Hillebrand: Evade Censorship with Nostr
https://relay.towardsliberty.com/8d9791e65a78da9f903c8f194de62137deea2d2c6562c030f4373bbf3dce9d17.mp3
What the Constitution forbids any single agency to do, the market assembles in stages for the state to buy. Sensors harvest, brokers aggregate, models analyze, and agencies deploy.
Clearview holds twenty billion images. Palantir runs the query interface. Venntel sells location data without warrants. Flock's license-plate readers cover five thousand communities. Sensor, storage, and analysis costs collapsed in overlapping phases, and the stack became economically mandatory.
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The advertiser is the customer. The user supplies raw material. Serving the user is incidental to a business that competes to capture attention and resell predictions about it.
Surveillance capitalism inverts ordinary exchange. Behavioral surplus is extracted without compensation, and information asymmetry blocks the price signal competition would otherwise produce. When Apple prompted plainly, around 80 percent of users rejected tracking. Demand is there once the price is visible.
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It's on towardsliberty.com/pop, just zap any note, thanks!
Most financial surveillance is the state conscripting private institutions to watch on its behalf, and Rothbard's intervention typology names the mechanism.
Triangular intervention dominates the field. The Bank Secrecy Act forces banks to report customer transactions, KYC conditions account access on identity disclosure, and the FATF Travel Rule extends the same logic to virtual-asset service providers. CBDCs narrow or remove the commercial-bank buffer entirely.
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It got a lot better.
But it was always super weird to reproduce this, so let us know if its better for you now.
as of now here https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0H1L1H1GM
Later for bitcoin too.
So far on amazon, bitcoin payment comes later asap.
https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0H1L1H1GM
