Posts

An extensive post detailing a recommendation of the order of steps I would take if starting from scratch in my privacy journey today.

What if our devices focused on empowering us instead of ensnaring us? What if limiting the capabilities of our electronics in specific and intentional ways could actually free us up to be more human? It’s questions like these that lie at the heart of Daylight’s entry into the space, kicking things off with their DC1 tablet. Let’s dive in together and inspect the DC1 from all sides to see if it lives up to the grand ideas of the Daylight team, how it’s shifted my expectations from my devices, and what it could mean for the future of computing. ...

It happens with every proposal made for improving Bitcoin. First, the technical developers and researchers weigh in with strong and legitimate concerns, they hash out the details, and the proposal slowly improves over time. But at some point some of these concerns make their way onto social media and quickly become parroted FUD for those who don’t like the concept of a proposal. That same effect has happened with covenants on Bitcoin, so I’ve taken the time to collect, rebut, and give resources for each of the most common FUD points against CTV-based covenants I’ve seen in the space. We’ll go in order from the most to least common I’ve seen, but note it’s a subjective order! As CTV is the most popular and likely initial covenant proposal, that is the focus of this particular post. ...

Note: This was originally posted on X and has been re-posted/reformatted for posterity here. I’ve seen the view that “Taproot caused/enabled arbitrary data storage on Bitcoin” commonly mentioned across Twitter, and it’s one that can be extremely harmful. Many in the space would love to further ossify (prevent change) in Bitcoin and use inscriptions/tokens “spam” as the reason for doing so, but I’d argue that that would be the worst possible outcome from this situation. ...

I’m not a Bitcoin maximalist. I’m not a Monero maximalist. I’m a freedom maximalist. How I got here I’ve talked about it at length on multiple podcasts, but I came into Bitcoin late in 2017 with purely financial motivations. I saw a way to make some extra $$ on Bitcoin, and rapidly fell down the trap of buying into many different cryptocurrencies purely for profit. When that phase blew up in the bear market of 2018, I thankfully stumbled across the Monero project and community purely by accident through a desire to mine Monero. ...

In this blog post form of a presentation, we dive into what circular and parallel economies are, why they’re important, and what tools are being paired with Monero to enable them.

Ragnar Lifthrasir asked for a list of Bitcoin proposals and ideas to improve privacy that either are still a work in progress, were abandoned or never implemented, or failed to make an impact, and so here is my attempt at just that. This will by no means be an exhaustive list, and I could use any help I can get keeping it up to date or finding historical proposals that have fallen out of favor. The sections below will be broken down by project or implementation and in order of proposal (where possible). ...

Introduction As this blog and my podcast, Opt Out, grow and reach a larger audience, having a way to gauge what topics are of interest to site visitors, what blog posts catch people’s attention, and what resources they find the most useful that I link to is becoming a more and more useful tool to enable me to improve the content I create over time. Traditionally, this is done via invasive tracking scripts and cookies that harvest your data, track you across sites, and attempt to link your visits to the site over time using your IP address or a long-lasting cookie. Thankfully, there are two unique new tools that allow for privacy-preserving, self-hosted statistics collection using a lightweight JavaScript script. ...

In this post I’ll attempt to walk through the most common FUD around Monero (both valid and invalid) and help to clarify many of these points.

Welcome to Opt Out, where I sit down with passionate people to learn why privacy matters to them, the tools and techniques they’ve found and leveraged, and where we encourage and inspire others towards personal privacy and data-sovereignty.