Murray Rothbard spent decades arguing that voluntary cooperation could replace state coercion in every domain of human life. Critics called it utopian theorizing. Nostr proves them wrong. In this deep dive, I analyze how the protocol implements Rothbardian principles, from keypairs as homesteaded digital property to relay markets as spontaneous order to zaps as demonstrated preference. If you've ever wondered what anarcho-capitalism looks like when it actually ships code, Nostr is the answer. Read the full analysis here. View article →

What's a good way to find out which npubs on a follow list have not posted in a long time / are low WoT?

There is something quietly remarkable in giving your life to an ideal, whether that means pursuing the good by extending freedom into an unfree world, seeking truth through science or code, or shaping beauty through words and music that outlast us.

TIL session chat app doesn't use a ratchet and has no forward secrecy or post compromise security.

New blog: a deep dive into symmetric encryption for developers. When to use ChaCha20-Poly1305 vs AES-GCM, the mathematics behind Poly1305, why nonce reuse is catastrophic, and how TLS 1.3, WireGuard & Signal made their cipher choices. Essential reading for anyone building encrypted systems. View article →

What do you call a swarm of frozen marmots achieving Byzantine Fault Tolerance on the International Space Station? "Securely Scaling Autonomy: The Role of Cryptography in Future Unmanned Aircraft Systems (UAS)" This paper benchmarks cryptographic libraries for securing autonomous drone swarms, focusing on two technologies: **Messaging Layer Security (MLS)** for group key exchange, and threshold signatures (**FROST** and BLS) for decentralized consensus. Key findings: OpenMLS significantly outperforms Cisco's MLSpp library, operating MLS in "Key Management" mode dramatically improves performance, and the Zcash FROST implementation offers the best balance of security and efficiency for high-volume signing scenarios. https://www.preprints.org/frontend/manuscript/166bd86b82cbbac3515ea9c86281432b/download_pub

Ship things. Ship things harder.

Nothing more infuriating when you trouble shoot the failure of a script, only to find out that curl returned an error message "this site is not available in your country" because your Tor exit node location. Fuck the broken internet.

@Vladimir Krstić is the UX hero nostr has, but doesnt deserve. Incredible talent, so bullish to share his latest work, not yet, but soon.

tldr: Data path: file → fixed-size chunks → encrypt each block → erasure-code into n shards → upload shards to n servers Key derivation: nsec → random per-file key → derived per-block subkey View article →

We've published the latest Garland architecture document, detailing our design for Nostr-native distributed storage. The system erasure-codes encrypted blocks across independent Blossom servers, surviving arbitrary failures while revealing nothing to storage providers. A hash chain of commit events enables complete history and single-key recovery. Read the full spec for details on the layered approach to durable, private, sovereign personal storage. Massive thanks to @Johnathan Corgan for all the help with reaching this level. Please review and give feedback. View article →