Rogers book is great, check it out View quoted note →

It will be legendary (again) Join us View quoted note →

A post about an architectural error I helped make and the strategy I am now building around to avoid repeating it. The short version is that the parts of Wasabi we built protocol-first survived the regulatory pressure that killed our coordinator company, and the parts we ran as a single operator did not. The longer version is below, written for anyone building freedom technology who would prefer to learn the lesson from someone else's scar tissue. View quoted note →

Citadels are the last fortress before the end. Lodgings are the first house of the next civilization.

Purple pilling monero people is fun.

A Lodging of Wayfaring Men - Full Audiobook - Paul Rosenberg Narrated by Max Hillebrand

The Lodging of Wayfaring Men audio book is finally back up, get it on any podcast app: https://towardsliberty.com/audiobooks/lodging.xml Also here is the crypto economics audio book liberated from Spotify and available on nostr / blossom. https://towardsliberty.com/audiobooks/cryptoeconomics.xml

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. View article →

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. View article →

New way to talk to your Hermes agent via marmot by @notmandatory

GitHub

GitHub - notmandatory/hermes-marmot: A Hermes gateway that allows you to message your agent via the Marmot protocol

A Hermes gateway that allows you to message your agent via the Marmot protocol - notmandatory/hermes-marmot

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. View article →

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. View article →

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. View article →

@GrapheneOS just released a local text to speech app with an open source model, its great actually!

GitHub

GitHub - GrapheneOS/SpeechServices: Fast, efficient, and high-quality text-to-speech for GrapheneOS using state-of-the-art models running completely on-device.

Fast, efficient, and high-quality text-to-speech for GrapheneOS using state-of-the-art models running completely on-device. - GrapheneOS/SpeechServ...

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. View article →

The Praxeology of Privacy with Max Hillebrand | Bitcoin Infinity Show #205

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. View article →

@Vitor Pamplona @greenart7c3 Here is a kotlin binding for arti, much better than tor-kmp, that's quite outdated.

GitLab

Files · main · guardianproject / Tor on Mobile / Arti Mobile - Tor in Rust for Android and iOS · GitLab

The official Arti Mobile library, supported by Tor Project, bringing the new Tor Rust runtime to mobile devices. Learn more at:

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. View article →

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. View quoted note →