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m0wer
m0wer@sgn.space
npub1w3va...4c5c
JoinMarket NG
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m0wer 3 weeks ago
Max Hillebrand: The Praxeology of Privacy - YouTube Timothy Allen speaks with Max Hillebrand. Max joins me to explore freedom, privacy, and property rights in the free market of ideas. We discuss Cypherpunk strategies, the appeal of Bitcoin, Free Cities, and digital nomadism as ways to resist creeping socialism and surveillance. Drawing on Lockean ownership theory, Austrian economics, and praxeology, Max makes the case for combining decentralization, community, and technology to defend liberty in both physical and digital realms. TIMESTAMPS: 0:00:00 — Coming up 0:00:41 — Veritas Village preview 0:01:27 — Start of conversation 0:10:02 — Triangular Interventions of the State 0:11:26 — The banning of VPNs 0:16:27 — Mean Time To Harassment 0:24:43 — The Cypherpunk Ideal: Increasing the Cost of Attack 0:30:38 — Dragnet Surveillance & Privacy 0:36:48 — Free Cities and The Importance of Freedom in Meatspace 0:44:04 — There are No Frontiers Left 0:53:08 — Conscription is Coming Back 1:00:57 — There are Many More Good People Than Bad 1:06:53 — AI and Robots of Convenience in the Dystopian Future 1:18:25 — Bitcoin Proves John Locke's Theory of Property Rights 1:25:29 — Proving Economic Reasons 1:31:40 — The Cypherpunks Don't Know How Fundamentally Correct They Are 1:36:47 — Freedom is Correct. The State is Evil 1:49:22 — AI Will Remove Scarcity from the World 1:53:50 — Keynsian Bullshit 1:58:08 — Tik Tok Will Eventually Generate 100% AI Content 2:10:35 — Rally Cry for Freedom Lovers NOSTR: Max Hillebrand: npub1klkk3vrzme455yh9rl2jshq7rc8dpegj3ndf82c3ks2sk40dxt7qulx3vt Timothy Allen: Search '[timothy@nostr.com](mailto:timothy@nostr.com)' on your Nostr app Free Cities Foundation: npub1lsj8pmgedqqamt89c27tzjjnlf0wn7q7udjm7j2cl9xxz97eacns2mwpee
Stacker News
Max Hillebrand: The Praxeology of Privacy - YouTube \ stacker news
Timothy Allen speaks with Max Hillebrand. Max joins me to explore freedom, privacy, and property rights in the free market of ideas. We discuss Cyp...
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m0wer 3 weeks ago
Been digging into JoinMarket maker clustering on mainnet. the short version: yes you can cluster makers by fee fingerprint from onchain data alone, and yes it reduces taker anonymity sets. But JM holds up pretty well in practice. mean anonset goes 7.6 -> 6.9, and the mitigation (fee policy homogenization) *can* be a client default change, no protocol surgery needed. The counterintuitive part: some "obvious" countermeasures like makers avoiding change as input actually make things worse. Rough draft, not peer reviewed, happy to get feedback:
JoinMarket Maker Clustering and Taker Anonymity-Set Reduction
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m0wer 3 weeks ago
Texas sues Meta, WhatsApp over encryption privacy claims https://www.reuters.com/legal/government/texas-sues-meta-whatsapp-over-encryption-privacy-claims-2026-05-21/ Texas’ lawsuit cites news reports about a federal investigation into ‌claims ⁠that Meta had access to unencrypted WhatsApp messages and a whistleblower report to the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission.
Stacker News
Texas sues Meta, WhatsApp over encryption privacy claims \ stacker news
Texas’ lawsuit cites news reports about a federal investigation into ‌claims ⁠that Meta had access to unencrypted WhatsApp messages and a whi...
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m0wer 0 months ago
Lightning Network privacy is real. But "better than on-chain" isn't the same as "private." View article →
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m0wer 1 month ago
Privacy isn't binary. There is no silver bullet or magic tool that can give you "full" privacy. Privacy is hard to understand and practically difficult to measure. But easy to lie about. Even many bitcoiners think Monero has "unbreakable" privacy. It doesn't, and no tool, network, or protocol ever will. This video is a good example of how weak Monero's privacy can be in practice. (This isn't a criticism of Monero, it's a criticism of following mantras blindly and being fooled by slogans without understanding the details. Monero devs are doing great work.) It shows how even if you can't tell which output was spent in a 16-participant ring signature, the anonymity set collapses on something as simple as a consolidation. Which would be critical for merchants, for example. And in practice it can be even worse, because there are methods to further reduce the effective anonymity set of the ring participants. Many more attacks and sources of metadata exist for intersection attacks too. If you keep looking for a bulletproof privacy solution, you'll keep getting fooled. ;-)
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m0wer 1 month ago
Travelling the world, I've noticed something: people in "poor" countries often live surprisingly "free" from the state. They build houses however they want, open businesses without licenses, ignore regulations, use cash for everything, pay no taxes. You get the idea. I'm not romanticizing it. I'm trying to understand *why* it works. The answer is probably simple: economic incentives. The cost of prosecuting them exceeds what the state could extract. They're effectively protected by that asymmetry. Which raises the next question: what asymmetry could let us live more freely *and* maintain a high standard of living? My answer: privacy. Bitcoin protects you from inflation. Great, but that's a separate conversation. What actually expands your freedom is privacy. Where you live, who owns the property, how much rent you pay, what you buy, where you go, what you drive. Make your life so opaque that you become unprofitable to pursue. Bitcoin alone doesn't get you there. Without privacy, it's only a matter of time before someone decides you're worth going after.
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m0wer 1 month ago
Pretty nice supply chain attack:
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m0wer 1 month ago
Bitcoin Core :: CVE-2024-52911 - Script Interpreter Remote Crash
Bitcoin Core
CVE-2024-52911 - Script Interpreter Remote Crash
CVE-2024-52911 - Script Interpreter Remote Crash
 **CVE-2024-52911**: use-after-free in Bitcoin Core's script validation; a background thread can read freed memory when an invalid block triggers an early exit. An attacker with enough PoW can craft a block to **crash your node**. RCE is unlikely but not impossible. Affected: v0.14.0–28.x. **Update to 29.0+** to fix it. No patch for older versions.
Stacker News
Bitcoin Core :: CVE-2024-52911 - Script Interpreter Remote Crash \ stacker news
CVE-2024-52911: use-after-free in Bitcoin Core's script validation; a background thread can read freed memory when an invalid block triggers an ear...
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m0wer 1 month ago
I want to open a debate on something practical: how do we make JoinMarket useful for more people? But before that, a framing question: how *should* a normal person use Bitcoin with some privacy? Nothing crazy, not OpSec level. Just "I don't want people I transact with to know what I own." My current answer would be: buy P2P (Bisq or lnp2pbot depending on the person), run the UTXOs through a few JoinMarket rounds (ideally the tumbler) and then either move them to cold storage or open a Lightning channel with the clean outputs. For Lightning on mobile, honestly only Phoenix works well for non-technical people. Everything else is too fragile or slow or kills your battery. This workflow sounds reasonable on paper. In practice it's a mess: you need a full node, you need a computer, Bisq has its own learning curve, and JoinMarket's install alone is challenging. So what's actually worth building? My guess is a light-client mobile wallet with the tumbler baked in: deposit, wait, get clean UTXOs out, ready for cold storage or a LN channel. Simple enough that you don't need to know what's happening underneath. But is that the right call? Is there a better abstraction? I'd love to hear where you think the effort should go.
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