Max

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.

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

Checkout vector, its a cool project!
@JSKittyVector v0.4.0 is now available for Public Testing (Quality Control!). The biggest release in our history is only a week away, and we need YOU to help us test, polish, and finalise it. Got a Desktop or Android? Come help! Send me or a comment (or NIP-17 DM) and we’ll invite you to the Quality Control group on Vector - or just download and try it out nomad style. 🤙🏻💚 The Changelog is...

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.

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.

Signing room is a pretty neat idea.
@Signing Roomhttps://blossom.primal.net/ddc6f684202a396da8dfe68d43ef9c20cb0f2b99dce92867c2bff8e6810ea351.jpg It was an incredible experience attending Bitcoin Ireland Conference! Meeting so many like-minded individuals and hearing from such a visionary lineup of speakers was truly energizing. I want to extend a sincere thank you to the event organizer, Lawrence -stanley. He recognized the potential impact...

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.

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.

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.

New @White Noise release is out on @Zapstore, get it while its hot!

It's a thing!

Every exchange has two sides, and money is one of them. Whatever properties the monetary medium carries, traceability or opacity, permissioned or permissionless, apply to every transaction conducted in it.

Menger showed money emerges through market process. Sound money carries properties derived from its three functions: medium of exchange, store of value, unit of account. Transaction privacy belongs alongside them, since a medium that exposes all transactions distorts coordination.

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 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.

Try that hammock, it might help with the pain.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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

Engineering >> Coding

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...

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

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

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.

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.

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.

We gotta ship freedom tech 10x faster.

20.2 Teachers of Bitcoin || Ben Arc

https://relay.towardsliberty.com/3b7116cf9d73e82f0d551258a067e66668f58348fbf95bca75c2c53548f778c4.f4a