Max

Max

Praxeologist ~ Cryptoanarchist ~ Cypherpunk

max@towardsliberty.com

The Hanseatic merchants, Thurn und Taxis, Lysander Spooner, and the WWII escape lines all built private postal and shipping networks that outran the official mails of their day, and the techniques they perfected are sitting in the record waiting for the next generation of builders. Nostr marketplaces are ready to inherit them, and this post is the field guide for the translation work ahead.

The Couriers Knewby Max
8h ago
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Every Bitcoin private key generated this decade can be written down on a steel plate that survives fire and flood, but Nostr keys still live mostly in password managers and iCloud screenshots. The math to bring the same physical-backup workflow to Nostr has been sitting in every Bitcoin library since 2013, hiding inside a step of BIP39 that the NIP-06 flow happens to skip past. Below is the case for a backwards-compatible 24-word encoding of any existing nsec, the cryptographic reason it cannot collide with a Bitcoin seed, and the NIP that needs writing.

Twenty-Four Words for an nsecby Max
22h ago
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The math to do this has been sitting in every Bitcoin library for a decade. The Nostr community has spent that decade convinced it was impossible.

Twenty-Four Words for an nsecby Max
22h ago
My favorite Nostr feed algorithm is @Zapstore latest releases.
23h ago
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Just found @Open Markets Podcast and I'm sad I didnt know of them before, awesome Nostr pod!
1d ago
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Zweite version der Übersetzung von Der Praxeologie der Privatsphäre ist raus, bitte die neue PDF durchlesen.
Auf diesem Link werde ich weiter updates veröffentlichen:
https://towardsliberty.com/pop/de
@MaxMein Buch Die Praxeology der Privatsphäre ist jetzt auf Deutsch übersetzt. Bitte durchlesen und Fehler oder schlechte Wortwahl korrigieren und an mich schicken. Es sollten ein paar Leute durchlesen bevor es in den Druck geht. https://relay.towardsliberty.com/a5687e7d47a1d9500f770b80fa399edc553e65f0a67769f6094af7b544b01aec.pdf
6d ago
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Best Nostr desktop client?
#asknostr
1w ago
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Now my Nostr relay @ towardsliberty.com is exposed via @FIPS
ws://npub1v5fmkz5s8ygrrzw2rtje8eej7gt69sysllytwh93vjk47mvu9eqqjw05pz.fips:3355
1w ago
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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.

Protocol First, Library Second, Application Thirdby Max
2w ago
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Citadels are the last fortress before the end.
Lodgings are the first house of the next civilization.
2w ago
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Purple pilling monero people is fun.
2w ago
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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.

Building the Parallel Economyby Max
2w ago
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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.

Trust and Dispute in the Parallel Economyby Max
2w ago
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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.

Implementation Strategyby Max
2w ago
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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.

Operational Securityby Max
2w ago
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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.

Decentralized Social Infrastructureby Max
3w ago
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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.

Bitcoin Privacy and Monetary Layersby Max
3w ago