I hate when conspiracy theorists use the Matrix movie plot as justification for their latest tin foil splutterings, I'm like, if you didn’t have the movie to fall back on, wtf would you base all your bullshit on!
But in making my point, it's infuriatingly convenient to use as a base for making the point
Just like the characters in the Matrix movie, privacy bros, Bitcoiners, sovereign individuals or whatever niche set of people that are awake to the incoming state overreach
We are using the infrastructure possessed by the powers that be, are we completely missing the elephant in the room? Why are we fighting for privacy in a system owned by them
Isn’t this an utterly futile attempt to fight the system, when we are inside the system trying to fight the system, it's almost difficult to conceptualize and convert into words
I loved the first Matrix film but lost interest when the others came out, but didn’t it transpire that Zion was actually created by the machines for the 1% who rejected the program
And Isn’t that what we're doing, by using SN, Bitcoin and Nostr, we're actually putting ourselves in a box which is easily viewable by the state
And all of our digital architecture is hosted on their grid, our unstoppable relays are hosted on their web servers, even self hosted vpn's built on a private vps is still using the system we seem to be trying to escape
While we scoff at normies suffering from the privacy paradox, they look at the complicated, inconvenient requirement to maintain absolute digital privacy, fucking about with apk's, burning rogue operating systems on phones (another example, no matter how many os systems we come up with, the imei number and celluar towers are still owned by the system) so they decide to take the blue pill, they will happily accept the surveillance grid as long as the digital steak tastes good
I see a picture like this on Nostr advocating for a way to not let the internet fuck us all
Am I thinking in defeatist mode or what?
I know Optimism will wade in, this is his area
££££££~~~~~££££££opti_~~~~~££££££~~~~~rides in on a board... no wading breh.A bit of Optimism was needed, phew
You're just being a realist, but I've been called a privacy nihilist, so...
"If you're looking for the truth look at the guy everyone is mad at"
Reality is privacy as a practice, yet everyone wants to bandwagon jump and virtue signal about privacy solutions... Silent payments? If you think you need those you're exactly the kind of person who will dox your stack during consolidation? Tor? Enjoy your IC sybil'd honeypot. VPN companies? also owned by the IC. Ecash? Nice anon-set you got there dummy.
Where's all the good old fashion virtue signaling about war driving like in the early 2000s? At least then people did things.
Now people just want to be seen LARPing. The loudest privacy advocates are wholly unserious, especially in Bitcoin circles, the irony being lost on most Bitcoiners that it is an NSA-built public ledger explicitly to track flows extrajudicially across borders constraint and without the compliance of hostile international banks that don't serve NatSec interests.
Not to mention, all your systems are completely backdoored at the hardware level and down into the RNG if the state is your threat scenario. #1008583
Wow cold hard reality check ✔️
Even if the feds didn't build it, they just need to wait for adoption knowing that human error and public ledgers is all they need lol
Justin is 100% right that privacy isn't tools: it is a process and thus takes effort. The best privacy you can get is by not digitizing and broadcasting your secrets. And if you must: by not using software you didn't write and by not using hardware you didn't make. And if you cannot do that, work through the assumptions and at least understand every line of source code on your hot path.
You're still defeatist though. No matter what you believe the state of compromise of the compute space is, the question will always remain: what are you going to do about it?
Not really, because NatSec "sets" the standards. There's a 2025/2026 series of posts on Bernstein's blog about an alleged current occurrence of what Justin points to, showing that there's no need to "wait for adoption":
Note that these posts aren't really written for normie consumption - they're more a reflection of raw frustration - but the bottom line question here is: why, if
X25519+ML-KEMis provably more secure than the latter on its own, are people[1] lobbying for publication and adoption of the less secure option?The only use-case other than "CNSA2 requires this" that I saw mentioned, was an example offered where an unnamed individual allegedly said that dropping ECDH and doing pure ML-KEM is good for an unspecified HFT algo, see post VII.
It doesn't even matter if Bernstein is right or wrong about this. What matters is that with this information being available, how are you going to judge its validity, and how are you going to defend yourself? Are you capable of selecting the ciphersuites used by your TLS interactions on the interwebz, anon? If not, are you just gonna sit there? Or are you going to learn?
Bernstein implies these people are spooks, but let's give everyone the benefit of the doubt and just treat everyone, including you and yours truly, as a potential spook. No shortcuts. ↩
Amazing comment 👏 thank you brev
I guess I can't stop being killed if a bus runs me over, but I can learn to cross the road 🎤🫳 do you like that one 🤣🤣🤣
This is why I SN, to get this type of conversation
I know you're right and unless you're smelting your own silicone chips you have to assume everything is backdoored
Your observation is a clear view of what is public, and you don't interact with that environment using your private self—don't get them confused. To do that, first and foremost, you need to make this distinction between private and public.
https://livingintheprivate.blogspot.com/p/home.html?m=1
Other truly sovereign individuals here like @Lux and @DarthCoin have more posts on this subject.
My point is, whatever identity you want to assume, strawman, common law, whatever, you're still using their garden
That's the primary mistake in my opinion: only accepting absolutely perfect outcomes instead of incrementally working your way toward that goal.
As a normie, your adversaries aren't anywhere near perfect either. So start somewhere and try to stay ahead of realistic adversarial profiles.
They could take down Nostr almost instantly by going for the dozen (or so) central relays.
This looks interesting though. Anyone tried it?
https://pubky.tech/
If we're going to have a movement and can't use the internet, What else are we going to use? HAM radio? Meshtastic? The opposition using the internet will win, because they have huge bandwidth and reach.
I think of it like this. If we're having some power struggle in meatspace and all the roads are controlled by the powers that be, should we stop using the roads? Or should we blend in, use the infrastructure to win hearts and minds?
The bad system is a ponzischeme that is starving itself to death. You win just by staying alive long enough.
I think Bitcoin wins, and then it gets captured, and we eventually need a new disruptive technology to cope with the problems of captured Bitcoin. This is Andreas Antonopolous, "disruptarianism" he's talked about.
Yes this is the phenomenon whereby if we designed our own Internet, only us niche users would interact with it, meaning it would never scale, not saying thats what's happening in Bitcoin and Nostr but there are similarities
"We are using the infrastructure possessed by the powers that be --- Why are we fighting for privacy in a system owned by them". economy/work/time/survival structure sets 1% to do their own.
That's how defiance works! You're constricted, pushed around and ridiculed.
You operate in hostile territory but you still try to somehow fight the good fight.
And we will. The cool thing about building tools for privacy is that gains are huge and there are always lots to do.
One of the major reason why it is failing is