Bitcoin used to be libertarian money. Now it appears to be rapidly becoming authoritarian money.

Both major coinjoins are gone in a week? I don’t think many of us were aware that the US government could arrest 2 men and intimidate a 3rd and the entire privacy infrastructure is gone. It needs to be re-built for an adversarial environment with real decentralization

All privacy tools are going to have to be developed by anonymous nyms from here on out. The US government has shown it is ready to start kicking down doors both foreign and domestic to crush financial privacy. Developers all need to become invisible ghosts like Satoshi.

The DOJ Samourai seizure isn’t about money transmitting. They knew Samourai never held money. Samourai never broke a law. This is outlawing privacy. This a new law—a tyrannical law.

It turns out a paper bitcoin market manipulated by Blackrock and friends won’t make bitcoin moon… Good. Bitcoin isn’t for them anyway.

The ensuing bull market is looking more and more dystopian… KYC mining that only mines compliant blocks. Banning coin joins. Pushing everyone towards custodial and financialized paths. Bitcoin is coming up against the final boss of the US financial system and Government. A lot bitcoiners will claim bitcoin has “won” because they are richer, while bitcoin is being slowly morphed into a totally captured CBDC. I’d rather my Sats not go up in value rather than be captured and regulated!

They are going to try and slip the anti-coinjoin regulations in quietly as the bull market heats up… They hope all the number-go-up bros will be so excited about price that they will let bitcoin lose the freedom and privacy tools that made it valuable. We can’t let bitcoin become worth a lot of fiat and worthless for what matters.

FinCin is trying to break Bitcoin into regulated and black market realms… Lightning has bugs… I still love hodling bitcoin, but I’m glad I’ve got some Monero squirreled away.

It is so hard to get my friends to use freedom technology. I set up bitcoin and monero wallets for them and send them satoshis and monero. Even with free gifts of the hardest and most private currencies on earth they kind of shrug and go lose their keys… I stay optimistic. I’ve started keeping a copy of each of their keys for them in a secret strongbox. Someday, just like all of us they will remember they laughed the first time they heard of bitcoin and monero, but in the future they will realize they need it. They will likely come to me and say “I’m so sad I lost my keys!” and I will give them their keys back and they will realize they have been HODLing for years…

Why does no one care about doing things right? “Most fast and break things” suddenly became the ethos of the whole culture just because it made a few people in Silicon Valley rich…

Nostr Relay Privacy Question: If as an anon I were to set up a relay and let friends and family use it would I accidentally dox myself? Is it always obvious to outside observers which profiles are using a relay? I seems probable that a small relay with only a few accounts is run by someone who has some connection to all those people. If some accounts are anon and some are open about their real world identities, it might make it very easy to guess the identity of anon accounts based on what small personal relays they are on with those who are open about their identity. Am I understanding this correctly? If so, anon accounts wanting to use Nostr as privacy freedom tech should avoid creating a relay they share with anyone else or using a friend’s personal relay, but should stick with large public relays for safety in numbers, right? This seems a little concerning becuase it makes the anons dependent on the large, corporate relays who might care less about freedom in the future and the “spin up your own node for more privacy” ethos of bitcoin might end up not working as well here, because the moment you share your relay with a friend you run the risk of blowing your anonymity. Might @ODELL or @Seth For Privacy be able to offer some insight on this? Thanks!

Question: Are there any privacy foot guns we should be aware of with anon accounts using custodial lightning like Wallet of Satoshi? I’ve got a pretty decent understanding of bitcoin privacy on the base chain, but lightning privacy has alway been a bit vague to me. If someone buys sats from a KYC dealer who knows their real world name like Strike and sends them to a custodial wallet like Muun or Wallet of Satoshi which they use for Zaps is it pretty trivial for 3rd parties like Strike to trace these sats back to the real person and dox the account? I know we should all be more hardcore, but the average Nostrich who makes an anon account just isn’t going to start by buying sats on Bisq and then spin up a lightning node and handle chanel management just to zap an account they like. Most people are too busy for the time and learning curve involved in that. It’s great if the Nostr protocol itself allows for Anon accounts, but if most accounts permenantly dox themselves the first time they send or receive Zaps then this place becomes and unintentionally honeypot that’s almost as bad as Twitter.

I’m still not sure I understand how relay nodes are incentivized on Nostr. I’m sure some people will run them just because they love the protocol and want to enable it (I would try if I was more technical). But it seems that as Nostr grows the data and processing needs of relays will increase, right? This seems like it will push out the “Uncle Joe” who runs a relay out of altruism, and leave relays in the hands of the companies and apps making enough money off Nostr usage to make running a relay worthwhile. Big corporations owning the relay structure seems like an easy target for regulatory capture… Which would make the “decentralization” of Nostr a lot more like the etherium network than bitcoin network. Sure it’s decentralized, but the deciders are few and their interests alight more with the government than with users. Do any technically more knowledgeable people who are reading know of a solution that protects relays from corporate capture and keeps them in the hands of end users? The data on this thing is going to be a lot more than the bitcoin blockchain will ever hold... How do we keep cypherpunks with raspberry pies in charge?

I’m on Nostr now. I’m mostly going to use this profile to talk about freedom tech, but who knows? Let’s see where this goes…