Privacy

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

As I’ve followed the rise and fall of Zcash’s popularity in my time in the crypto and privacy spaces, it’s been fascinating to see the shifting narratives, successes, and failures as it has fought to remain in the limelight in a rapidly changing space. A recent blog post by an OG cypher punk and someone I highly respect, Frank Braun, gave me a good chance to think more on where I see Zcash fitting in today, and more specifically, where I think it continues to fall short. ...

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

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. ...

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.

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

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