The Praxeology of Privacy
Economic Logic in Cypherpunk Implementation
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Privacy is the precondition of every voluntary arrangement a free person enters into, and it is being engineered out of daily life. This book is about the conditions under which it survives.
Two traditions — Austrian economics and cypherpunk engineering — arrived at the same conclusion from opposite directions. State predation depends on state observation. The engineering that raises the cost of observation is the engineering this book is about.
The argument
Privacy in the working sense is selective disclosure: the power to choose what is revealed and to whom. Without it, deliberation collapses into observed performance, prices stop carrying private information, and the calculation problem that makes central planning incoherent returns inside every transaction.
The Three-Axiom Framework shows how:
- Privacy enables economic calculation (building on Mises)
- Privacy protects rational discourse (extending Hoppe)
- Privacy provides resistance tools (following Voskuil)
The opening
Cryptographic capability sufficient to protect ordinary communication, payments, identity, and computation is now in production. So is the observation stack assembled on the other side. Two architectures are contending for default status. Whichever becomes common infrastructure will be difficult to replace inside the ordinary political calendar.
Chapters are released daily to Nostr and appear here as they publish.