self-sovereignty
Articles with this tag
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
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
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
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
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
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.
by Max
January 14 2026
A Vibe Coding Setup in Your Pocket
GrapheneOS now runs a hardware-isolated Debian VM on your phone, and OpenCode provides open-source AI coding against any provider you choose.
by Max
February 10 2026
Your Software Runs on Enemy Infrastructure
Freedom tech projects build censorship-resistant tools on censorship-susceptible platforms. The Nostr stack offers a coherent migration path for sovereign development infrastructure.
by Max
December 31 2025
The Quiet Departure
The loudest revolutions fail; the quiet ones succeed. We do not protest or petition. We build alternatives and simply leave.
by Max
January 15 2026
Securing the Second Realm
Security in autonomous zones means making attack uneconomical through deterrence, distributed defense, and eternal vigilance against any protector becoming predator.
by Max
January 21 2026
The Code Liberation: How AI Makes Software Infinitely Customizable
When AI handles compilation and patching tasks, source-based computing finally escapes the domain of experts, ending decades of binary distribution monopoly.
by Max
February 25 2026
Your Nostr Key Is Your Network Address
FIPS makes your Nostr npub a routable network address, unifying identity across social and infrastructure layers in a single self-sovereign keypair.
by Max
February 7 2026
Verify Anyone on Any Channel
A simple challenge-response app can verify Nostr identities across any anonymous channel by querying the follow graph users already built.
