A class of fraud that powers entire black markets on legacy platforms is structurally absent from Nostr. Aged accounts with established reputations cannot be bought and resold to scammers, because the cryptography refuses to enforce the handoff. Below is the argument for why this property emerges from the nature of an nsec, why hardware almost solves it but doesn't, and what it means for the kinds of trust the protocol can sustain. View quoted note →

Encrypted messaging hides content. The fact of communication, its frequency, its timing, and the parties involved stay visible to observers. Hayden was on record about acting on that data. Transport architectures sit on a latency-anonymity tradeoff. A VPN relocates trust to one provider in exchange for speed. Tor distributes trust across multiple relays so no single hop learns both endpoints, and mixnets defeat timing correlation through batching and reordering at a higher latency cost. View article →

A computation can be performed when no participant is permitted to see the inputs. Three architectures have reached production in the past decade. Fully homomorphic encryption operates on ciphertext directly; Gentry's 2009 construction was a billion times slower than plaintext, and fifteen years of engineering have cut four orders of magnitude off that overhead. Secure multi-party computation splits inputs across parties, as MuSig2 and FROST do for Schnorr signatures on Bitcoin. View article →

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. View article →

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! View quoted note →

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. View article →

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. View article →

Signing room is a pretty neat idea. View quoted note →

WabiSabi now in a standalone library, check it out of you want anonymous amount ecash tokens.

GitHub

GitHub - WalletWasabi/NWabiSabi: WabiSabi protocol implementation in .NET

WabiSabi protocol implementation in .NET. Contribute to WalletWasabi/NWabiSabi development by creating an account on GitHub.

221 - Max Hillebrand: Evade Censorship with Nostr

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. View article →

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. View article →

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. View article →

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. View article →