#bitcoin
59 items · 59 articles
Articles
Protocol First, Library Second, Application Third
The zkSNACKs coordinator died because we ran the only one; Wasabi the client survived because that layer was protocol-shaped, not operator-shaped.
Building the Parallel Economy
Praxeology joins cypherpunk cryptography: privacy is a fact of action, a defensible norm, and a buildable property under pressure.
Trust and Dispute in the Parallel Economy
Tools move bits and settle payments. Reliability over time and adjudication of broken deals remain unbuilt institutional work.
Implementation Strategy
Privacy implementation is progressive. Each tier addresses a different adversary and stops where its threat model is covered.
Operational Security
Cryptography fails when humans fail. OPSEC ties each defense to a specific adversary and sustains the discipline over time.
Decentralized Social Infrastructure
Nostr moves identity from platform databases into user-held keypairs, so a ban no longer deletes the social graph.
Bitcoin Privacy and Monetary Layers
Bitcoin's base layer is transparent by design. Privacy on Bitcoin is an architectural achievement built in layers above it.
Bitcoin as Sound and Resistant Money
Bitcoin's monetary rules hold because every full node validates blocks against them. A chain that breaks them carries no value.
Bitcoin and the Digital Money Breakthrough
Nakamoto solved double-spending without a central operator and produced base money instead of another claim on an issuer.
Anonymous Communication Networks
Content encryption hides what was said. The transport layer leaks who is communicating with whom, enough for targeting decisions.
Computing on Secrets
Homomorphic encryption, MPC, and trusted enclaves each run a computation on inputs the executing party is not permitted to see.
Zero-Knowledge Proofs
Zero-knowledge proofs separate what is verified from what is revealed, ending the forced choice between participation and privacy.
Cryptographic Foundations
Cryptography shifts trust from institutions to mathematics, and that shift carries every privacy primitive the book later builds.
The Crypto Wars
Crypto controls failed against builders, held against defaults, and locked in the two-tier privacy equilibrium thirty years later.
The Analytics Stack
Commercial firms assemble surveillance no agency could lawfully build, and the state buys the output as a service.
Corporate Surveillance and Data Extraction
Corporate data extraction inverts the market: the advertiser is the customer, and the user supplies the raw material.
Financial Surveillance and the State
Financial surveillance is triangular intervention. The state forces banks to watch customers, and CBDCs strip the buffer entirely.
Money and Privacy
Money emerges by market process. Sound money carries privacy alongside its three classical functions; fiat lacks all four.
Privacy as Capital
Privacy tools are capital that compounds across uses; institutional promises last only as long as state goodwill does.
The Economic Value of Privacy
Privacy aids exchange by guarding deliberation and negotiation from observation that chills marginal trades and distorts the rest.
Information, Scarcity, and Property
Property rights apply to scarce things. Information is non-scarce, so privacy stands on self-ownership, owned media, and contract.
Chapter 5: The Axiom of Resistance
Systems can be designed to resist external control. The claim rests on computational hardness and the record of deployed tools.
Chapter 4: The Argumentation Axiom and Self-Ownership
To argue is to presuppose control of body and mind. Coerced surveillance breaks that presupposition and counts as aggression.
Chapter 3: The Action Axiom: Privacy as Structural Feature
Privacy is built into the structure of human action. Deliberation and the asymmetry between actor and observer are structural.
Chapter 2: Two Traditions, One Conclusion
Austrian deduction and cypherpunk code reach the same privacy conclusion from opposite directions. Their agreement is evidence.
Chapter 1: The Nature of Privacy
Privacy is control over disclosure. Observation cost decides if any targeted intervention runs, and cypherpunk tools raise it.
The Praxeology of Privacy: Endorsements, Foreword, Preface
Third edition, joining Austrian economics and cypherpunk engineering on what privacy is, why it survives, and how to defend it.
The Engineering Choice Between Complicated and Complex
Bitcoin converts a complex monetary problem into a complicated protocol, absorbing irreducible uncertainty into deterministic rules any node operator can verify.
Where to Start with Rothbard: A Reading Guide to His Major Works
Murray Rothbard built the most internally consistent radical libertarian system of the 20th century. This guide shows where to enter it.
The Instrument Returns: An Introduction to Bitcredit
Bitcredit is the concrete protocol reconstructing bills of exchange on Bitcoin, closing the credit layer gap that prior posts have diagnosed.
The Key Inside the Ciphertext: A Full Introduction to PIPEs v2
PIPEs v2 turns spend conditions into key-recovery conditions, letting Bitcoin enforce proof-gated authorization through ordinary Schnorr signatures and extraordinary off-chain cryptography.
Every Crowd Hides You Differently
From Bitcoin CoinJoin to zero-knowledge proofs, every serious approach to financial privacy bets on a different crowd to disappear into.
Sign What You Cannot See: A Field Guide to Blind Signatures
Four decades of blind signatures show that one algebraic trick, letting someone sign what they cannot see, protects ecash and CoinJoin.
Programmable Magic Internet Money: How Nostr Apps Can Monetize Ethically and Profitably
Bitcoin plus Nostr creates programmable money that solves software monetization through micropayments respecting user sovereignty.
The Engine of Prosperity: How Four Sources Drive All Economic Progress
Four sources of economic progress form an interdependent system that emerges spontaneously from voluntary exchange when property rights remain completely intact.
The Mathematics That Bridges Bitcoin: From BitVM to Argo
Cryptographic enforcement succeeds where trust fails, and nowhere does this principle matter more than in Bitcoin's quest for trustless bridges.
The Non-Computational Nature of Agency
Vervaeke proves agency emerges from non-algorithmic relevance realization, explaining why Bitcoin and Nostr preserve human autonomy while algorithmic systems destroy it.
The Merchant's Return: When Systems Fail, Producers Prosper
Being cast out of the system reveals its deepest secret: you were never its beneficiary, only its fuel. Freedom begins with this recognition.
The Root of Money
Money is neither vice nor virtue but the material expression of human judgment exercised through time. Only parasites hate it.
The Consumption You Call Saving
Holding money does not defer gratification but consumes the opportunity cost of lending, making hoarding a present expense rather than proof of low time preference.
The Action That Accomplishes Nothing
Decentralization does not prevent the adversary from acting against you. It ensures that his action accomplishes nothing.
The Price of Patience
Hoarding is not low time preference; only lending expresses it. Wealth lowers time preference via diminishing marginal utility, not the reverse.
The Right to Walk Away: Angor and the Future of Bitcoin Crowdfunding
Angor gives investors what ICOs and crowdfunding never could: the cryptographic ability to recover their funds if projects fail to deliver.
What Your Loved One Is Actually Trying to Tell You
They haven't joined a cult. They stumbled onto questions they couldn't stop asking, and they love you too much to keep them to themselves.
Strategic Intelligence for Freedom-Builders: Paul Rosenberg's Quarterly Newsletter
Rosenberg predicted Bitcoin in fiction seven years early. His quarterly newsletter delivers strategic intelligence for freedom-builders, not commentary for readers.
The Praxeology of Privacy ~ Chapter 21: Building the Parallel Economy
The parallel economy grows through counter-economics. Cheap defense defeats expensive attack. When theft becomes unprofitable, the state withers. Build. Trade. Resist.
The Praxeology of Privacy ~ Chapter 18: Lessons from History
DigiCash, e-gold, and Silk Road failed through centralization and poor OPSEC. Bitcoin succeeded through decentralization, open source, and properly aligned economic incentives.
The Praxeology of Privacy ~ Chapter 16: Zero-Knowledge Proofs
Zero-knowledge proofs enable verification without disclosure. SNARKs, STARKs, and Bulletproofs make different tradeoffs. Deployed in Zcash and rollups; broader adoption developing.
The Praxeology of Privacy ~ Chapter 15: Bitcoin: Resistance Money
Bitcoin solves double-spending without trusted third parties. Sound money enforced by code. Base layer privacy requires additional tools like Lightning and coinjoin.
The Praxeology of Privacy ~ Chapter 9: Monetary Theory and Sound Money
Sound money emerges spontaneously from markets, not decrees. Bitcoin implements digital soundness with fixed supply and censorship resistance; privacy requires additional tools.
The Praxeology of Privacy ~ Chapter 5: The Axiom of Resistance
The Axiom of Resistance assumes systems can resist control. Mathematics, empirical evidence, and similar systems support this well-grounded but non-self-evident assumption.
The Praxeology of Privacy ~ Preface
Austrian economists theorize but cannot build. Cypherpunks build but lack theory. This book synthesizes both to make the state irrelevant.
Builders, Not Talkers
Decades of libertarian theory and cypherpunk tools have produced almost nothing because ideas without builders are worthless. Act or leave us alone.
The Art of Waiting: Random Delays for Private Payments
Two scripts that randomize timing between Wasabi coinjoin rounds, making your payment patterns indistinguishable from organic human behavior.
When Math Catches Your Typos
Bech32's BCH code detects up to 4 typos with 100% certainty, locates up to 2 error positions, but deliberately refuses to auto-correct to prevent catastrophic mistakes.
Counting Grains of Sand in an Infinite Universe: Why CoinJoin Privacy Doesn't Need Perfect Math
Coinjoin entropy becomes computationally impossible to calculate exactly for large transactions, but lower-bound estimates provide rigorous cryptographic guarantees through information theory.
Disappear Into the Crowd: Wasabi's Hidden Payment Superpower
Three bash scripts to queue, cancel, and run Wasabi coinjoin payments from terminal - with smart denomination suggestions for maximum privacy.
Bitcoin Address Lookup: A Question of Privacy
Bitcoin wallets face a fundamental tradeoff: how to discover your transactions without revealing your addresses. Full nodes (2009) provide perfect privacy by downloading everything but require ~700 GB storage. Electrum (2011) achieves instant sync by transmitting your addresses directly to servers, exposing your complete transaction history. Block filters (2017-2019) restore privacy through client-side filtering - you download compact filters, check them locally, and only request matching blocks, revealing just block-level interest. Utreexo (2019) compresses the UTXO set from 11 GB to 480 bytes using cryptographic accumulators while maintaining full-node privacy, but requires 20% more bandwidth. Each approach trades privacy, storage, bandwidth, and convenience differently.
Summary of: The Praxeology of Privacy ~ Economic Logic in Cypherpunk Implementation
A book explaining why Privacy = Economic necessity proven through Austrian logic. Three axioms (Action + Argumentation + Resistance) demonstrate that surveillance destroys market calculation like socialist planning, while cryptography restores conditions for voluntary coordination. Complete bridge between Austrian economics and cypherpunk technology.