freedom-tech
Articles with this tag
by Max
January 15 2026
Build for the Mole
Infiltration is inevitable; detection is unreliable. The real defense against state informants is building organizations where their presence cannot accomplish its purpose.
by Max
December 14 2025
The Great Decentralization Swindle: How Every Protocol But One Betrays Its Promise
The decentralized social landscape is littered with protocols that centralize through the back door. Nostr alone eliminates trusted third parties entirely, making it the only protocol where your identity truly belongs to you.
by Max
December 19 2025
Your Phone Without Permission Slips: The GrapheneOS Nostr Stack
GrapheneOS plus Zapstore, Amber, Citrine, Amethyst, and White Noise creates the first phone free from corporate control over your digital life.
by Max
December 28 2025
Free Men Will Build the Roads
Nobody asks who will bake the bread because markets already do it excellently; the roads question reveals statist capture of imagination.
by Max
January 1 2026
Trust Without Ceremonies: How Nostr Fixed the Web of Trust
PGP's web of trust failed because it demanded explicit rituals. Nostr succeeds by extracting trust from ordinary social behavior.
by Max
January 5 2026
The Colossus Falls - How to End All War
Wars persist because each generation consents to fight them; a generation that refused would be history's last to die in trenches.
by Max
January 11 2026
The Constitution That Isn't One
The Universal Principles of Liberty codifies libertarian jurisprudence as discovered law, providing a meta-normative baseline for decentralized justice without sovereign authority.
by Max
January 19 2026
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.
by Max
November 15 2025
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.
by Max
March 14 2026
The Third Court: Insurance, Arbitration, and the Private Production of Justice
Insurance prices risk, arbitration resolves disputes, restitution makes victims whole, and cryptographic enforcement binds them all into one complete system.
by Max
January 9 2026
The Cheapest Defense
Privacy blinds the adversary's OODA loop at observation. When defense costs pennies and attack costs millions, surveillance becomes unprofitable.
by Max
December 15 2025
No Papers Required: How Zapstore Breaks the App Store Checkpoint
Developer KYC creates chokepoints that authoritarian governments ruthlessly exploit. Zapstore restores permissionless software distribution using cryptographic identity instead of government papers.
by Max
November 29 2025
Sifting Through the Archive: Private Set Membership for Blossom
Binary Fuse filters let Blossom clients privately check which files exist on a server - download a compact filter once, query locally with zero server load, and use delta lists for real-time accuracy.
by Max
December 4 2025
Proving You Belong Without Saying Who You Are
Zero-knowledge proofs let Nostr users prove they're trusted without revealing their identity, enabling anonymous rate-limiting and reputation-gated relay access.
by Max
December 7 2025
Nostr-Native Distributed Storage System
The latest iteration of Garland, a privacy-preserving distributed storage system built on Nostr and Blossom, using erasure coding for durability and single-key recovery.
by Max
December 16 2025
When Can We Meet? Cross-Server Busy Sync for Nextcloud
Nextcloud can't sync busy times across separate instances. This bash script uses CalDAV to share availability between multiple Nextcloud servers without exposing event details.
by Max
December 17 2025
Your Phone Is Not Your Property (Until You Install GrapheneOS)
Your smartphone surveils you by design. GrapheneOS transforms a Pixel into private hardware you actually control. Here's why it matters and how to do it.
by Max
January 2 2026
Breaking Free: Deprogramming State Dependence
Learned helplessness is the default response to prolonged state control; recovery requires demonstrating agency through deliberate action, not accumulating more theory.
by Max
January 5 2026
The Poverty Lever: Why Regimes Want You Just Above Starving
Maximum political control comes not from wealth redistribution but from calibrated poverty: desperate enough to depend, not desperate enough to revolt.
by Max
January 6 2026
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.
by Max
January 7 2026
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.
by Max
January 10 2026
The Action That Accomplishes Nothing
Decentralization does not prevent the adversary from acting against you. It ensures that his action accomplishes nothing.
by Max
February 2 2026
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.
