"Bitcoin's design is so radical precisely because it eliminates trusted third parties not just from transactions, but implicitly demands you eliminate them from your thinking. You cannot truly understand Bitcoin while still operating in a mental framework that requires permission from authorities. You cannot grasp decentralization while centralizing your cognitive process around celebrity opinion. You cannot advocate for trustless systems while trusting Wall Street executives to tell you what to believe." View Article →

Anyone who has a pet knows she has a point!

If you can't spend your money privately, is it really your money? If writing open-source code can put you in prison, are you truly free? If privacy tools are treated as criminal infrastructure, how long until thought itself becomes a regulated service? And when they finally roll out their programmable Central Bank Digital Currencies, will you still believe you have "nothing to hide"? View quoted note →

The most common defense of surveillance is always the same: "I have nothing to hide." This is the refrain of the comfortable, the naive, or the historically illiterate. As Cardinal Richelieu warned; "If you give me six lines written by the hand of the most honest man, I will find something in them which will hang him." Think about that the next time you justify your own surveillance. The state doesn't need you to be guilty, only vulnerable.

To want financial privacy is to be labelled a criminal. If you build tools that provide it, you're facilitating crime. The legal system implicitly forbids financial privacy for the individual citizen and the Samourai Case is a clear cut example of this. Keonne Rodriguez, co-developer of Samourai Wallet, pled guilty to conspiracy to operate an unlicensed money transmitting business, not for committing crimes himself, but for building software! The government has chosen to criminalize privacy technology not because it enables crime, but because it enables independence. Rodriguez's sentence wasn't about law enforcement. It was about sending a message: financial privacy itself is a permissioned privilege. The state wants everyone to know; thou shalt not have financial privacy. That's the only logical conclusion you come to after listening to this chat that @Efrat Fenigson had with Rodriguez.