You Don’t Opt In to Sovereignty You’re born into sovereign systems. You don’t choose the state, the currency, or the jurisdiction. Parasovereign systems flip the script: you opt in. You choose to run a node, relay a message, verify a transaction. Participation is voluntary—and exit is always on the table.

Engineered vs. Emergent Some parasovereign systems are ancient and organic—like family, language, or barter. Others are engineered with intention—like Bitcoin, Nostr, or Tor. What they share is independence from centralized enforcement. Their legitimacy comes not from authority, but from utility and persistence.

The Sovereign–Parasovereign Divide Sovereign systems rule by law and monopoly. Parasovereign systems operate by code and consensus. One enforces compliance through institutions; the other encourages participation through incentive and structure. The state can tax, conscript, and censor. The protocol can only persuade—or be ignored.

What Is a Parasovereign System? A parasovereign system operates alongside and beneath formal state structures—but it doesn’t depend on them. It’s not anti-state or post-state. It’s beyond state. Built through voluntary participation, enforced by protocol, and sustained by purpose, it creates a parallel order—resilient, self-governing, and hard to kill.

Platforms are entitled to set their own rules. But when the state compels private platforms to block, amplify, or demote specific content, it crosses a line. That’s no longer corporate policy—it’s state-mandated censorship. It violates the spirit of free expression.

Censorship isn’t the enemy—coercion is. Freedom includes the right to curate what you consume and share. Protocols like Nostr and Bitcoin protect that freedom by engineering decentralization into their design. They shift control from gatekeepers to participants, from platforms to protocols, from sovereignty to parasovereignty.

ensorship isn’t the enemy—coercion is. Freedom includes the right to curate what you consume and share. Protocols like Nostr and Bitcoin protect that freedom by engineering decentralization into their design. They shift control from gatekeepers to participants, from platforms to protocols, from sovereignty to parasovereignty.

TANSTAAFL: If the service is free, then you are the product.

This essay explores how recent U.S. crypto legislation marks a strategic effort to make the digital economy legible to the state. Through laws like the GENIUS Act and CLARITY Act, the government is classifying and enclosing formerly parasovereign systems such as Bitcoin and Lightning—systems designed to resist precisely this kind of control. View article →

Is anyone working on creation mnemonics for nostr private keys analogous to BITCOIN seed phrases?

What Sovereignty Really Is To understand the world, you must understand where power lives—and how it stacks. Sovereignty is not just legal authority or monopoly on violence. It is the establishment and maintenance of a hierarchical order over territory—a full-spectrum system of rule that touches every dimension of human life. At its core, sovereignty is structured as a seven-level strategic tetrahedron, from apex to foundation: 1. Leadership – Those who wield ultimate decision-making power. 2. Government – The administrative structure through which authority is exercised. 3. Public Order & Defence – Police, military, and security forces that enforce rule and protect the regime. 4. Total Economic Activity – Production, trade, taxation, and monetary control. 5. Infrastructure – Energy, transport, communication, logistics—what holds the system together. 6. Population – The people who are ruled, regulated, and mobilized. 7. Territory – The physical domain over which rule is asserted. This is not just a diagram—it’s a strategic map. Every sovereign system is a struggle to assert and align these layers: to make them legible, governable, and loyal. And every challenge to sovereignty—whether insurgency, exit, or protocol—targets one or more of these layers. Parasovereign systems, for instance, bypass or invert this model. Bitcoin secures economic activity without sovereign currency. Tor enables communication without sovereign infrastructure. Nostr allows speech without institutional permission. But sovereignty remains the dominant global order—because it connects symbolic legitimacy to territorial control, and turns power into durable structure.

The 6 Bs of Parasovereignty Parasovereignty is not new. Long before digital protocols or decentralized ledgers, human beings built systems of order beyond the reach of states. These weren’t lawless—they were rule-bound. But the rules emerged from ritual, kinship, consensus, belief, and necessity, not from statute or decree. Today’s Bitcoin, Tor, nostr, and other cryptographic systems are simply engineered versions of what has always existed in some form. To map this, I’ve begun framing parasovereign orders through six fundamental patterns, which I call the 6 Bs of parasovereignty. 1. Before Orders that predate the state: Kinship structures, ancestral codes, tribal customs, oral law, and mythic frameworks that regulated behavior long before formal institutions existed. 2. Below Orders that operate beneath state visibility and authority: informal, underground, or subcultural systems that persist under or within sovereign structures. Think barter economies, unlicensed teaching, or black market logistics. 3. Behind Systems that operate in secrecy or denial: smuggling, encryption, whistleblowing, samizdat publishing, underground railroads. These resist sovereign control by hiding from it. 4. Beside Parallel systems that coexist with formal authority: diasporic networks, religious orders, mutual aid societies, or community courts. Not necessarily in opposition, but not subordinate either. 5. Between Borderlands, liminal zones, and jurisdictional gaps. From steppe nomads to darknet nodes, these are spaces where sovereignty is blurred, layered, or absent. 6. Beyond Aspirational, symbolic, or metaphysical orders: cosmologies, eschatologies, or ideologies that offer allegiance to something greater than the state. Often the foundation of long-term loyalty and resistance. Why it matters: We tend to view sovereignty as a monopoly. But humans have always built other systems when trust, legitimacy, or survival demanded it. Parasovereignty is not about lawlessness. It’s about constraint without domination—order without permission. In the digital age, we now encode these patterns directly into protocol. And when sovereign systems overreach or collapse, the 6 Bs become more than theory. They become strategy.

Bitcoin is not the blockchain. It’s a network of people enacting a shared protocol. The blockchain is just a record—a historical ledger of transactions. But Bitcoin, as a system, only exists through the coordinated actions of people: those who run nodes, run hashing workers, mine blocks, write software, sign transactions, and hold keys. The protocol provides structure, but the network gives it life. This applies not only to Bitcoin, but to any functional order—sovereign or otherwise. All systems are enacted by people through networks. Institutions, markets, protocols, states—none of these exist apart from the individuals who maintain, interpret, and embody them. Sovereign orders remain essential—for mutual defence, public order, territorial infrastructure. Parasovereign protocols, like Bitcoin, offer new models for symbolic and transactional coordination. But in every case, the system is not the record or the code. It is the living topology of human action sustained by shared constraint.

What is Engineered Parasovereignty? Parasovereignty refers to systems, protocols, or orders that operate outside the jurisdiction or control of sovereign and sovereign-dependent entities, including states, corporations, and digital platforms. They are not lawless, but neither are they governed by decree or domination. Their rules are structural, not political. Engineered parasovereign protocols are systems deliberately designed to enable human action—especially communication, coordination, and exchange—without institutional permission or trust. These systems don’t confront sovereign power directly. They bypass it. They offer routes that do not pass through chokepoints. They are protocolic pathways of voluntary constraint. Examples: • Bitcoin: Transacts value without banks, identity, or geographic control. • Tor: Enables private routing without centralized servers or surveillance chokepoints. • Nostr: Broadcasts identity and presence without platforms or accounts. These protocols don’t ask permission. They encode rules that can’t be overridden by administrators, corporations, or governments. There’s no root key, no superuser, no appeals court. The protocol is the law. This is what differentiates them from corporate platforms, even decentralized-looking ones. A system isn’t parasovereign just because it’s distributed. It must be non-custodial, permissionless, exit-tolerant, and resistant to capture. Why this matters: In the modern digital realm, chokepoints are increasingly invisible: account recovery, API throttling, DNS filtering, AML compliance, social graph lock-in. Engineered parasovereign protocols are the strategic inversion of this logic. They restore agency not by abolishing rules, but by embedding constraint into the architecture itself, so that sovereignty cannot be reasserted from above. They don’t resist domination with protest. They remove the tools of domination entirely. In a parasovereign order, no one can stop you, but no one can save you either. That’s the trade. And for many, it’s the price of real freedom.

Bitcoin is money without a mint. Tor is communication without a switchboard. Nostr is presence without permission. Engineered parasovereignty is not rebellion. It’s exit.

Sovereign systems work by command. Parasovereign systems work by constraint. What emerges isn’t freedom from rules—it’s freedom through rules that no one can bend.

Parasovereign systems don’t resist power through confrontation. They remove the lever—they make power impossible to apply. You can’t freeze an account if there are no accounts. You can’t censor a message if no one’s in charge of delivery.

What makes them parasovereign? • No custodian • No reset button • No admin key • No off-switch • No trusted third party The system works because every peer validates, not because anyone’s in charge.