Privacy first steps

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

December 21, 2021 · 18 min · Seth For Privacy

Setting up a Bitcoin username

BIP 353: Making payments social, one DNS entry at a time.

July 15, 2024 · 11 min · Seth For Privacy

Why I Focus on Bitcoin

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. ...

March 12, 2023 · 10 min · Seth For Privacy

Proposed Bitcoin Privacy Improvements

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). ...

May 31, 2022 · 17 min · Seth For Privacy

Privacy-preserving Statistics Using Plausible

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. ...

February 23, 2022 · 7 min · Seth For Privacy

Dispelling Monero FUD

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.

December 17, 2021 · 12 min · Seth For Privacy

Announcing my new podcast - Opt Out!

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.

June 10, 2021 · 2 min · Seth For Privacy

Bitcoin's Fungibility Graveyard

Where the pipe-dream of Bitcoin’s real-world fungibility goes to die.

March 23, 2021 · 10 min · Seth For Privacy

Switching to CalyxOS

How and why I made the jump to CalyxOS for my mobile operating system.

March 13, 2021 · 11 min · Seth For Privacy

Community Drama and My Search for a Privacy-Preserving Mobile OS

Community drama, legal battles, slandering, and harassment takes away from the important mission of any OS like this: privacy and security.

February 19, 2021 · 8 min · Seth For Privacy