Max

Praxeologist ~ Cryptoanarchist ~ Cypherpunk

max@towardsliberty.com

Privacy infrastructure is capital in the Austrian sense. It demands present sacrifice for future capability, and like any capital good it compounds across uses.

Bohm-Bawerk's roundabout production explains why building cryptographic tools outperforms reliance on institutional promises. The direct route depends on goodwill from authorities the user cannot control. The indirect route builds mathematics whose protection holds whether institutions cooperate or not.

Privacy as Capitalby Max

18h ago

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Privacy improves exchange. Markets function under surveillance, imperfectly, and the claim is narrower than abolition of trade under observation: privacy improves coordination wherever humans deliberate, negotiate, and transact.

Thinking shaped by anticipated observer reactions becomes performance. Negotiation depends on asymmetric disclosure; revealing maximum willingness to pay collapses the bargain. Confidential terms let parties structure arrangements competitors cannot copy.

The Economic Value of Privacyby Max

1d ago

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Try that hammock, it might help with the pain.

2d ago

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A Mexican net hammock has done more for my sleep and my living space than any mattress I ever owned. The woven net cradles the body so contact pressure spreads across every inch of skin. It folds away to almost nothing during the day, and turns a small room or a vehicle into open floor the moment you unhook it. This post is the case for sleeping in one, and the specific kind to buy.

Sleep in a Netby Max

2d ago

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Property rights exist to resolve conflicts over scarce resources. Information content is non-scarce: once known, unlimited parties can hold the same idea without depleting anyone else's hold on it.

Patent and copyright create artificial scarcity by state grant, giving one party control over how another arranges their own physical materials. Privacy survives intact through self-ownership over mind and body, owned media that carry information, and contract.

Information, Scarcity, and Propertyby Max

2d ago

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Systems can be designed to resist external control. The third foundation of the book, after the Action Axiom and the Argumentation Axiom, is the one a reader can coherently reject.

Resistance is the capacity to impose costs on adversaries attempting control. The claim rests on computational hardness conjectures that have survived decades of attack research, and on the empirical record of Tor since 2002, Bitcoin since 2009, and end-to-end encryption at scale.

Chapter 5: The Axiom of Resistanceby Max

3d ago

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Nodesignal-Talk - E281 - Leck im Stack - Warum Hodler Geld verlieren

https://relay.towardsliberty.com/5d3dfa898353d2474bc1ffc1b7783ef9639006c463ef272b5e2332b623bd9bcd.mp3

4d ago

Anyone who argues has already presupposed exclusive control over body and mind. You cannot make a case while mind-controlled, and you cannot push back against a claim if your speech is dictated.

Self-ownership extends into property through original appropriation, and the Non-Aggression Principle follows. Coerced surveillance falls inside the same frame: a regime that strips cognitive privacy has destroyed the conditions under which its subjects could be parties to any normative argument.

Chapter 4: The Argumentation Axiom and Self-Ownershipby Max

4d ago

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I was wondering for a decade if I should learn to code.
I'm so glad that I didnt.

Engineering >> Coding

4d ago

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PSA: do not expand this note.
It does not end.

Marmot support lands in Amethyst! So dope!!

@Amethyst #Amethyst v1.09.0: We are going crazy - Go live on audio spaces (Nests) - Marmot Group chats (WhiteNoise) - Voice and Video calls (Noscall) - PDF reader - Favorite algo feeds - HLS Video Uploads - Schedule posts for later - Cast videos to your TV (Chromecast) - Mute a whole conversation thread - Pull Notification (internal Pokey) - Local LLMs (Pixel 9+, Samsung 25+, Xiaomi 15+) - `amy`, a...

5d ago

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Nodesignal-Talk - E281 - Leck im Stack - Warum Hodler Geld verlieren

https://relay.towardsliberty.com/5d3dfa898353d2474bc1ffc1b7783ef9639006c463ef272b5e2332b623bd9bcd.mp3

5d ago

Human action is purposeful behavior, and any argument against the claim must itself be purposeful behavior aimed at convincing someone. The denial performs what it tries to refute.

From that starting point, descriptive facts about privacy follow. Deliberation occurs in the actor's mind, valuation lives in individual acts of valuing, and the information asymmetry between actor and observer is built into how purposeful behavior works.

Chapter 3: The Action Axiom: Privacy as Structural Featureby Max

5d ago

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Two traditions developed apart and reached the same conclusion about privacy. The Austrian line worked by deduction from human action. Cypherpunks worked by engineering, building tools that made privacy a property of the system instead of a promise from authorities.

Convergence from opposite directions counts as evidence. Konkin's counter-economics bridges the schools, taking Austrian critique into a program of transition the cypherpunks made operational.

Chapter 2: Two Traditions, One Conclusionby Max

6d ago

After years of living in a truck I wrote a script that finds the parking spots long-term vehicle dwellers converge on: end-of-road clearings deep in forest, used by hikers during the day, empty after dark. I ran it for every country in Europe and the output is about forty thousand candidates, color-coded by tier, free to download. This post makes the case for sleeping in forests over supermarket lots, and explains how the discovery works.