Derek Loo

I genuinely don't think crypto people are aware of the massive privacy improvements that have been achieved in Bitcoin over the last 5-10 years

Martti Malmi, one of Bitcoin's earliest developers, just released a new version of Nostr VPN, an open-source mesh VPN that replaces the entire trust model of traditional VPN services. Traditional VPNs route all your traffic through a central server operated by a company you have to trust. They see your data. They require your email. They can log your activity. They can be subpoenaed, hacked, or shut down. Even modern mesh VPNs like Tailscale, which improved on this by sending data peer-to-peer, still require you to authenticate through a centralized coordination server using third-party accounts like Google or Microsoft. Nostr VPN eliminates the central server entirely. Your identity is a Nostr keypair, a self-generated cryptographic key pair with no registration, no email, no third-party account. The underlying transport layer is FIPS (Free Internetworking Peering System), a self-organizing encrypted mesh network where nodes authenticate each other, route traffic for each other, and establish connections without any central authority or global topology knowledge. Each node's Nostr public key (npub) serves as its network address. The architecture uses two layers of encryption: hop-by-hop encryption between peers and independent end-to-end encryption between mesh endpoints with periodic rekeying for forward secrecy. When direct connections fail due to NAT issues, the system falls back to Nostr-based multihop routing through other FIPS nodes rather than relying on company-operated relay servers. Peer discovery and NAT traversal happen through public Nostr relays using encrypted gift-wrapped messages. The new release adds native desktop apps for macOS, Linux, and Windows, an Android app, Nostr-based multihop routing for when NAT holepunching fails, and improved network management. It supports UDP, TCP, Ethernet, Tor, and Bluetooth transports simultaneously on a single mesh. This is what happens when you apply Bitcoin's design philosophy, permissionless, self-sovereign, no trusted third parties, to networking infrastructure. Built by one of the people who helped Satoshi build Bitcoin in 2009.

Just stumbled across bitview.space, an excellent Bitcoin metrics site with over 22,000 charts. Even better, it's all open source so you can run your own version locally. The project is called Bitcoin Research Kit by @_nym21_

no email. no phone. no eyeball scan. your keys. your data. your feed.

The Crypto Anarchist Manifesto By Timothy C. May A specter is haunting the modern world, the specter of crypto anarchy. Computer technology is on the verge of providing the ability for individuals and groups to communicate and interact with each other in a totally anonymous manner. Two persons may exchange messages, conduct business, and negotiate electronic contracts without ever knowing the True Name, or legal identity, of the other. Interactions over networks will be untraceable, via extensive re-routing of encrypted packets and tamper-proof boxes which implement cryptographic protocols with nearly perfect assurance against any tampering. Reputations will be of central importance, far more important in dealings than even the credit ratings of today. These developments will alter completely the nature of government regulation, the ability to tax and control economic interactions, the ability to keep information secret, and will even alter the nature of trust and reputation. The technology for this revolution--and it surely will be both a social and economic revolution--has existed in theory for the past decade. The methods are based upon public-key encryption, zero-knowledge interactive proof systems, and various software protocols for interaction, authentication, and verification. The focus has until now been on academic conferences in Europe and the U.S., conferences monitored closely by the National Security Agency. But only recently have computer networks and personal computers attained sufficient speed to make the ideas practically realizable. And the next ten years will bring enough additional speed to make the ideas economically feasible and essentially unstoppable. High-speed networks, ISDN, tamper-proof boxes, smart cards, satellites, Ku-band transmitters, multi-MIPS personal computers, and encryption chips now under development will be some of the enabling technologies. The State will of course try to slow or halt the spread of this technology, citing national security concerns, use of the technology by drug dealers and tax evaders, and fears of societal disintegration. Many of these concerns will be valid; crypto anarchy will allow national secrets to be trade freely and will allow illicit and stolen materials to be traded. An anonymous computerized market will even make possible abhorrent markets for assassinations and extortion. Various criminal and foreign elements will be active users of CryptoNet. But this will not halt the spread of crypto anarchy. Just as the technology of printing altered and reduced the power of medieval guilds and the social power structure, so too will cryptologic methods fundamentally alter the nature of corporations and of government interference in economic transactions. Combined with emerging information markets, crypto anarchy will create a liquid market for any and all material which can be put into words and pictures. And just as a seemingly minor invention like barbed wire made possible the fencing-off of vast ranches and farms, thus altering forever the concepts of land and property rights in the frontier West, so too will the seemingly minor discovery out of an arcane branch of mathematics come to be the wire clippers which dismantle the barbed wire around intellectual property. Arise, you have nothing to lose but your barbed wire fences!

I don't own any Bitcoin, but if I did I wouldn't want to sell it. I would want to spend it however.

Nostr Mail | The Open Protocol for Decentralized Email - The first decentralized email protocol powered by Nostr. Own your identity, your keys, and your inbox. No central authority. No gatekeepers. nostrmail.org

@OrdinaryGamers A decentralized VPN like @nym can’t be banned. No personal data and takes cryptocurrency. Pass it on!

Game theory pretty much proves that the long game is not a strategy most people can execute at all. That's because it tends to require a negative short-term position in exchange for a real advantage later. Most people cannot commit to this because their threat-detection system reads current loss as an existential failure. And that's vicious short-sightedness. It leads them to optimize for visible progress and sacrifice their real position. The people who constantly win rarely have better information. Instead, they accept that losing now will pay off later. Never quit a game before it starts.

Taking your freedom is always wrapped up as for your own protection.

⚡️The old world asks what backs Bitcoin. Bitcoin asks what backs the old world.

The answers to many modern problems are simple but politically incorrect. So instead of solving anything, everybody pretends they don't know what's going on, and spend years misdiagnosing the issue, talking in circles, and wasting time.

BREAKING NEWS: Mayo Clinic is offering me an "Executive Director" position for up to $400k 😃 Oh and they're not the only one. My email inbox is suddenly filling up with Executive job offers from several big Pharmaceutical companies. So this is what I get for helping 9000+ Cancer patients with Ivermectin & Mebendazole and leading the largest Ivermectin Cancer Project in the world? After talking about a New Florida Cancer Clinic? 🤔 If they can't sabotage me, they'll just buy me out? 💵 I have to admit, it is mildly amusing. Ten years ago, I may have jumped at something like this. It's almost tailor made for me. But at this stage of my life...can't say I felt even a hint of temptation. They really don't know me very well 😃 Sorry, Mayo Clinic. I'm building a Cancer Center in Florida. It's going to be a bit different from yours. 😉

⚡️This is the state crossing from taxation into ownership. A tax on unrealized gains means the government no longer waits for wealth to become liquid. It marks the citizen’s balance sheet, declares a portion of the mark to be public property, and demands payment before the market has settled the truth of the gain. That is a profound regime shift. The investor takes the risk. The investor absorbs the drawdown. The investor supplies the capital. The investor holds through volatility. Then the state taxes the upside before the upside is converted into cash. The state gets senior claim on a future that may never fully arrive. That breaks the logic of private compounding. Assets become annual tax events. Long-term ownership becomes a liquidity problem. Volatile assets become dangerous because a paper gain can create a real tax bill, then the asset can fall after the state has already taken its cut. The citizen is forced to hold more cash, sell winners, borrow against assets, or avoid risk altogether. The deeper force is fiscal exhaustion. Aging welfare states have promised more than their growth engines can naturally fund. Productivity is weak. Demographics are worsening. Public obligations keep expanding. So the state starts hunting balance sheets. Income is no longer enough. Consumption is no longer enough. Property is no longer enough. Paper appreciation becomes the next reservoir. This is how capital flight gets born. The truly mobile leave. The sophisticated restructure. The very rich build legal shields. The trapped productive class gets harvested. Ordinary investors become visible prey because their wealth sits in taxable accounts, marked every year, exposed to bureaucratic extraction. For Bitcoin and crypto, the signal is obvious. Every move toward taxing unrealized wealth strengthens the desire for portable, self-custodied, jurisdiction-resistant assets. The more governments behave like private balance sheets are pre-approved tax collateral, the more rational it becomes to seek wealth outside the reach of easy capture. Deep down, this is a sovereignty warning. The state is no longer satisfied taxing what citizens earn or sell. It wants tribute on what they might be worth.

I said 18-24 months ago that we had reached PEAK Bitcoin education - and was hated for it and now the conferences are empty and the views are dying. Western retail is cooked & the empanada stand owners in third worlds are irrelevant. The game has become institutional and now all you have to do is watch Wholecoiner numbers decline while institutional capture accelerates. Those that literally do nothing will win, BIGLY.

Trusted third parties are security holes.

The nice thing about the Quantum FUD is that it's immunizing the Bitcoin community. In 5 years when they claim to have made yet another breakthrough that's going to end Bitcoin as we know it, it'll have the same effect as China banning Bitcoin for the 32nd time.

Because I get asked a lot. Why we must fight Palantir, in brief. 1. Programmers working on the Internet have a moral responsibility to the entire world, not a single country. The Internet has been designed since its inception as a universal system for the sharing of knowledge without censorship. The Internet is not the property of any one government or nation. 2. The Internet enables mass surveillance at a scale unimaginable to the Gestapo and the Cheka. Far too many programmers have wasted their lives at building surveillance systems under the guise of Web advertising. Today, these web tracking systems are being used to monitor, control, and even kill humans by companies like Palantir that seek to combine state violence with corporate efficiency, and thus create a new form of technofascism. 3. Surveillance justified by external national security threats will be turned against citizens inside the nation-state. Mass surveillance was once the exclusive domain of the NSA, but today it has been privatized to corporations like Palantir that are unaccountable to any democratic process. What begins as fear of external foreign nation-states turns inwards to focus on immigrants, dissidents, and eventually to anyone that might challenge the status quo or try to exit an increasingly dysfunctional society. 4. Everyone is a target. The “enemy within” continually expands until it encompasses the entire population of a nation regardless of their status and beliefs, justifying evermore paranoid and totalizing surveillance. The line between policing and military operations blurs, with legal frameworks being replaced by technological violence operating with total impunity. 5. Surveillance can only be defeated by building software and hardware to defend ourselves. Meek calls for regulation or moralizing demands for human rights are useless in this era. Any rights must be enforced by the hard power of code. Code, not laws, can be used to uphold the right to privacy by making surveillance difficult, if not impossible, even by nation-state adversaries. 6. We are ruled by a senile gerontocracy. Unlike the generations that fought in the world wars, most of our current rulers are degenerate pedophiles who would sacrifice the well-being of the youth and the entire planet due to their infantile desire for wealth and power. Technology of surveillance and automated warfare reflects their increasingly desperate attempts to maintain archaic forms of domination. 7. The American Empire is unraveling. Once, the United States of America presided over a globe where it could enforce its rule via the status of the dollar as a global reserve currency and a network of equally global military bases, but new regional powers now directly challenge the United States as its empire dissolves in the face of internal economic stagnation, political corruption, and the inflation of the dollar. 8. In a real war, fantasies of total technological dominance always backfire. When a faceless drone kills a child’s father, that child will one day take revenge regardless of the cost, something forgotten by those raised in comfortable suburbs. Going beyond zero-sum games, one can only truly win a battle against a people by demonstrating your victory provides a better way of life, increased prosperity, and an inspiring philosophy. 9. Oddly enough, proponents of fully automated warfare support a universal draft. Deep-down, these keyboard warriors know that their technofascist fantasies are a paper tiger when up against determined opponents that engage in asymmetric warfare. They also know none of their children will fight in a war for their state but they would be happy to see other people’s children come home in body-bags. 10. The problem is not whether AI weapons will be built; we must hold responsible those who are building them. No matter which country is deploying automated killing machines, no one is absolved from the murder of civilians and the destruction of infrastructure due to the parlour-trick of shifting the blame to AI. 11. Atomic war is on the horizon. As various states descend into wars over increasingly scarce natural resources, the possibility of tactical nuclear strikes over Teheran, Kyiv, and other areas of conflict has returned to the historical stage. Increasingly geriatric and authoritarian rulers face less guardrails than before to deploying nuclear weapons, and may even be willing to sacrifice the survival of humanity to appease their own petty egos. 12. Our goal is a world of peace where every person can be empowered by the Internet. Modern war is the quintessential game of sending young people to the meat-grinder. Why die for the profit of corrupt rulers when one could build real wealth and power for yourself using the Internet? 13. We should fight for the world we want, and build the tools needed by future generations. Pacifism would be suicidal in this period of global turbulence and resource wars, but real hard power lies in technology: Programmers should be creating technologies to live a free life and prosper in a hostile society of surveillance and control, and decentralization is the only way these technologies will survive against the inevitable repression. 14. The State will not help us. The state is a dying pre-Internet institution that increasingly resembles nothing but a Ponzi scheme fueled by taxes and debt. None of the youth alive today will likely inherit any benefits, such as welfare and health care. 15. Centralized and opaque algorithms are a danger to free speech. Propaganda is the flip-side of surveillance, as continual propaganda prevents anyone from even thinking of challenging the system. Social media monopolies promote propaganda to create a generalized idiocy while silencing those that would dare to criticize the reigning order before they can organize against it. 16. Building new forms of social organization with each other is vital to survival. The traditional mediascape of politics and entertainment exists to distract us from building networked solidarity and distributed autonomous organizations across borders. The hierarchical state is as relevant to us as the medieval church and kings were to the formation of the joint-stock corporation and the labour union. 17. Digital identity is the next step in their system of control. Within the next few years, access to the Internet–including in Europe and the United States–will require biometric national identity cards, using the flimsy excuse of “protecting children.” The real goal is to gatekeep free access to subversive political content and halt cross-border communication in order to prevent new forms of self-organization and resistance from emerging. 18. Only when one can be anonymous is one truly free. The freedom to express oneself without censorship and surveillance is a vital precondition for both the autonomous use of reason and the democratic evolution of society. Technology must enable the freedom to selectively reveal ourselves to the world–so that we can become who we want to be–by preserving the right to privacy over the Internet, including not just individual privacy but the right to transact and form contracts privately. 19. America created the first global surveillance state, but it will not be the last. Too many have forgotten or perhaps taken for granted the revelations of Wikileaks and Snowden. States across the world from China to Russia are creating even more powerful global surveillance systems and propaganda machines. Leveraging private defense contracts in countries across the world, Palantir seeks to make itself the operating system of a cross-border global secret state while it pushes its own farcical version of ethno-nationalism. 20. Culture wars are a psyop. It is ironic that “Epstein class” virtue-signals about traditional morality and the superiority of forms of ethno-nationalism, while trying to return to the rule of hereditary elites, even in the United States. Rather than reverse the gains of the Enlightenment, we take the side of our ancestors who fought a centuries-long battle for individual liberty, scientific progress, decentralized markets, bottom-up democracy and the emancipation of humanity from feudal monarchs and their make-believe mythologies. 21. New forms of technology can reshape the world. Technology is not just a tool, but the world we live in and an extension of our cognitive capabilities. The co-operation of humans with the collective intelligence embedded in AI could accelerate human progress and overcome planetary crises such as climate change and atomic war that threatens the survival of our species. 22. Live free or die trying. We must bear eternal vigilance in the struggle against fascism, and the battlefield is technology. There is no middle ground: Technologists must choose whether to work for the enslavement of humanity or to create new spaces for freedom. These are my personal beliefs, not those of @nym. Yet as a philosopher that founded a tech startup, I have a responsibility to respond to this manifesto of Palantir and it's so-called "philosopher-CEO" Alex Karp.

🚨MEASURED IN GOLD, EVERY MAJOR CURRENCY HAS LOST >90% OF ITS VALUE SINCE 2000⚠️ ⚡️Those waiting for a currency collapse have already missed the first 95% of the collapse in value of global currencies vs gold: Since 2000: USD -93.8% EUR -92.9% GBP -94.9% AUD -93.5% CAD -93.6% CNY -92.6% JPY -96% CHF -87.7% INR -97.1% Average: -93.6%‼️ Chart source: Incrementum AG