You're The Voice | by Efrat Fenigson - The Praxeology of Privacy: Cypherpunks Rebuilding the Internet - Max Hillebrand | Ep. 165

Episode Date: September 29, 2026

Max Hillebrand is a cypherpunk, crypto anarchist, and author of the new book “The Praxeology of Privacy”, a 587-page work bringing Austrian economics and cypherpunk engineering together. He is a contributor to White Noise, a decentralized encrypted messaging app built on Nostr and the Marmot protocol. In this episode, we dig into his new book, the gap between Austrian economics and the cypherpunk movement, state intervention, CBDC, we explore various freedom tech tools, and Max explains his optimism about a peaceful, tech-driven path to freedom. → Please like, comment, share & subscribe, to help me beat the suppressing algo's. Thank you!SPONSORS→ Join me on Oct. 1-2 on Expat Money Summit, focusing on Latin America, and hosted by Mikkel Thorup. Register for free, or use code EFRAT for 30% off VIP tickets: http://ExpatMoneySummit.com → Access liquidity without selling your Bitcoin with Ledn, get 0.25% off your first loan: https://ledn.io/Efrat    → Get your TREZOR wallet & accessories, with a 5% discount, using my code at checkout (get my discount code from the episode - yep, you’ll have to watch it): https://affil.trezor.io/SHUn→ Have you tried mining bitcoin? Stack sats directly to your wallet while saving on taxes with Abundant Mines: https://AbundantMines.com/Efrat - Claim your free month of hosting via this linkLINKSMax on Nostr: https://tinyurl.com/5x7xbu3h Max website: https://towardsliberty.com/ Max’s book The Praxeology of Privacy: https://towardsliberty.com/popWhite Noise (Download): https://www.whitenoise.chat/  The Internet Privacy Foundation (Donate): https://ipf.dev/  Master in Bitcoin Degree: https://hesperides.edu.es/estudios/master-in-bitcoin-global-edition/ Max’s first episode on You’re The Voice: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dyuptJD8YQgEfrat’s X: https://twitter.com/efenigsonEfrat’s Channels: https://linktr.ee/efenigsonWatch on all platforms: https://linktr.ee/yourethevoiceSupport Efrat’s work: https://tinyurl.com/zapefrat CHAPTERS 00:00 - Coming Up...01:36 - Introducing Max, White Noise & The Praxeology of Privacy04:09 - A Cypherpunk vs a Bitcoiner07:18 - Defining Privacy vs Secrecy & Anonymity09:43 - The Gap Between Austrian Economics & Cypherpunks17:14 - Ad-Break: Expat Money & Ledn21:13 - Why Observation Enables State Predation24:40 - Why Write & Open "The Praxeology of Privacy"30:50 - Living the Cypherpunk Life: Costs & Rewards32:42 - Ad-Break: Trezor & Abundant Mines37:16 - Does Bitcoin's Security Depend on People Willing to Resist?40:48 - Freedom Lived Is Freedom Well Understood43:46 - CBDCs & Rothbard's Triangular Intervention52:19 - Cypherpunk Tools 101: Encryption, Signatures, Hashing & VPNs57:23 - Zero-Knowledge Proofs and the Age-Verification Trap01:02:03 - Anonymous Database Lookups & TEE (Trusted Execution Environment)01:04:29 - Rebuilding the Internet: Mesh Networks, FIPS & Tollgate01:05:49 - Cypherpunks Can Just Build Things01:12:37 - The Internet Privacy Foundation: Funding Freedom Tech01:14:02 - White Noise (Decentralized Messaging)01:14:52 - Max Resources & Book TranslationsAFFILIATES→ Want to preserve your privacy online? Get a GrapheneOS privacy phone or laptop, up to $150 off “Above Phone” products + extra $50 off with code EFRAT: https://abovephone.com/efrat/ → Get 15% off “Born To Be Free” all-natural, tallow-based skincare products on a bitcoin standard, using code EFRAT: https://oshi.link/1nvZYq  → Join me in these upcoming events & use code EFRAT for discounted tickets: https://www.efrat.blog/p/upcoming-events→ Get 10% off on Augmented NAC to detox Spike protein, with the code YCXKQDK2 via this link: https://store.augmentednac.com/?via=efrat (This is not medical advice, please consult your MD)→ Watch “New Totalitarian Order” conference with Prof. Mattias Desmet & Efrat - code EFRAT for 10% off: https://efenigson.gumroad.com/l/desmet_efrat

I went to university and high school, etc., specifically to study economics. Everything they told me there was a lie. Taxation. You've earned money. I come with a $5 wrench. I hit you until you give me half of the money. People have been in an outcome-based education system for 20 years or something in their life. And they're very much taught not to say, no, you are wrong.

The teacher is never wrong. The teacher tells you the truth. Bitcoin proves that resistance to control is possible. Yeah. Now let's look beyond money. All the politicians hate it because it makes sense. theft insanely expensive for them. And obviously the government doesn't like that.

Intellectual property is a scam. It's a net destruction to society, and if we would stop doing it, we would all be infinitely better off tomorrow. We just can't fix everything for everyone by tomorrow. I wish it were true, but it just isn't. And, okay, we do the best that we can. There's, for me, a deep spiritual motivation of ending slavery. And this book is one of my attempts to make a minor part in helping people understand

that there is hope and we can stop tyranny and we can do it today. We have so much in our favor that we have a right to be optimistic. We can actually fix this and nobody can actually stop us. And it will work. It will work. It must work. It's the truth. So we keep going.

Freedom lived is freedom well understood. Let's take that to the max. Hello and welcome to another episode of You're the Voice. A Fat here from Prague. Shout out to Treasure Team for letting me hijack their studio once more. Hello, Max Hill, Brand. So good to be back. Right.

Looking forward to our conversation. We've had a couple good ones in the past. We did. We did. People, go check out episode number 96. That was a bomb. And it was so well received by our community. People loved it.

And they asked for more and here we are. I'm so happy to have this conversation with you. I'll give a quick background because most people know you, but for those who don't, Max is a prexologist, cypherpunk, crypto anarchist, and author of this new book, The Praxiology of Privacy. It's a short toilet paper read of 587 pages, bringing Austrian economics and cypherpunk engineering together. I think this is very like we're going to talk about this today. So I'm very glad that the book is finally out. I didn't have the chance to read it yet, but I didn't read the beginning of it. So I can, I see the framework. You're also former contributor to Wasabi

Wallet and you're building freedom tech on various projects and platforms. White Noise is one of them where we're trying to like take signal and put it on top of Noster and do it right, right, the way we need to do it. And we had Jeff G on my show as well. So people have already heard the term white noise. And if you haven't, download it from the test flight store. So you can start playing around with it. It's still being developed and upgraded all the time.

But I love it. And I'm there already. And I wanted to mention two more organizations that you have projects with. One is sound money solutions, like a consultancy that, from time to time you help people when they have needs to come into the space and learn how to work with sound money. And the second one is IPF, Internet Privacy Foundation, right? Exactly. So I would like to touch more on that. But that was a short intro because Max is not doing anything, as you can tell. He's such a busy man, I love it.

We have stuff to build. Right. We have things to do. Like that's what we're here, right? I'm sorry that I'm doing all the speaking in the beginning, but I'm going to shut up very soon. I just want to start with this question, which was not on my list, but after we spoke yesterday, I thought I should start with it. You introduced Paul Rosenberg to me. Thank you. You're welcome. Yes.

I'm glad you get to meet him. Yes. He is. I'm spanking myself. We have the banker spanker here. This is a banker spanker, but spanking myself. for not knowing Paul Rosenberg before because he is a legend and now we have an episode with him on the pod and I you know I'm consumed in his content so really thank you and when I asked

you about his presence in conferences and especially in Bitcoin conferences I was wondering like how come I haven't noticed him he's relatively low key and he has been speaking to conferences but not necessarily Bitcoin ones. And when I asked you why, you said, well, he's a cypherpunk. He's not in Bitcoin. It's like he's a cypherpunk not bitcoiner. Or, you know, he is a bitcoiner, but more cypherpunk than Bitcoins. And my question is, how do you make that distinction?

Like what is for you, what makes him more of a cypherpunk than a bitcoiner? What makes someone more of a cypherpunk than a bitcoiner? Oh, there's many ways to answer this. For one, because he has been a cypherpunk since before Bitcoin was around. So there is a core philosophy that precedes Bitcoin that out of which Bitcoin was created. And that's one aspect of it. Another is that Bitcoin Maxi focuses on Bitcoin and that's like the main thing that you do. And for a cypherpunk, I believe the main focus is to create unstoppable anonymous technologies.

And Bitcoin is part of that, a very important part. And that's why many cypherpunks support Bitcoin. But it's not the exclusive focus. Like we need to have anonymous communications. That's like encrypted email, encrypted chat messages, right? We need to have unstoppable publication that's Noster and so on. We need to have self-sovereign compute. And so running your own infrastructure, self-hosting your servers, etc.

All of these are important aspects of the cypherpunk mission. And Bitcoin is one subset of that. Yeah. So his main focus is to bring more freedom to the, world via technology and the narrative that is required to inspire the builders of such tools. So his main focus is that and Bitcoin is one of the tools, but it's not the only one we have. You know, I love your answer because I think you just revealed to me that I am a cypherpunk. Yes.

More than I am a bit-corner in a way. Me too. Because I love Bitcoin, no doubt about it. But from day one of doing this podcast, for example, I always told people, this is not just a Bitcoin podcast. This is a podcast about freedom and tech and how do we bring freedom to the world in any way possible and anonymity and privacy and all of that. I just didn't know it. I'm a decipher book. So I love it.

Yes. Thank you for answering this for me. Okay. Let's go to the book. Yes. The Pregsyology of Privacy. It opens with privacy as selective disclosure, the power to choose what is going to be revealed and to whom. Why is that framing more precise than most people talk about privacy today?

Yeah, many people conflate privacy, secrecy, anonymity, kind of altogether in these are the same things. And I think that just is a too primitive understanding or too naive definition. Like we have different words for different reasons. It's important to have clear definitions. And so privacy, as you said, defined by Eric Hughes, is the ability to selectively reveal yourself to the world. And so an ability, right, a choice. And that is an option, yes. No, option, exactly.

And that's a very important definitional pillar. And it's different from secrecy, which is you have information that you don't want a certain group of people to know. And then anonymity is you don't want your actions to be attributed to your identity. These are three different things and it's useful to differentiate them. And if you do, I think a lot of the things become clear. Like there's nothing wrong with privacy. Right now I'm exercising privacy by speaking certain words and not others. Correct.

So even a public speech is to a large extent of private act. Yes. Yeah, I didn't think about that. Yeah. And then secrecy is where you reveal some information to others, but not to everyone. My doctor knows more about my medical history than you. And I'm not going to tell it here for obvious reasons. And then anonymity is when you can act without being seen and observed and attributed.

And this helps you, especially if you're in a dangerous environment. If someone tries to steal from you, rob you, hurt you physically, whatever, if your action is anonymous, then he cannot attack you ultimately. So it's a tool of defense anonymity. And differs from secrecy and privacy. Privacy is kind of the overarching category, the study of what to be revealed and whatnot. And for what reasons and what are the consequences of those reasons? These are interesting questions to ask about privacy per se.

I love it. Okay. Now, the gap, let's talk a bit about the gap between tradition. So you write that Austrian economists diagnose but don't build, and that cypherpunks build and don't always understand the political economy of what they're building. Can you talk a bit about that gap? And has it caused any damage in your opinion? I think there were so many early Austrians who perfectly understood money and the downsides of stealing and the benefits of trade. and they've never really looked much into technology.

Right. Maybe they were, you know, boomers a little bit, like armchair, academic theorizers and writers of books and great speeches. And that's an incredibly valuable work. But so often economists just say, oh, the free market will fix this, which is true on a, like, principled logical deduction. But like, it turns out that we're the free market. And we are actually the ones who have to fix it.

So they lack a little bit of this application of technology towards a freer future. And that's why a lot of them did not understand Bitcoin in the early days. Because it does require some technical and computer science understanding in order to really appreciate what Bitcoin is and to dismantle the obvious FUD. Like one thing that was quite easy for... FUD is fear, uncertainly in the end doubt. Exactly. And a lot of our Austrians in the early days had this common fud.

The government is just going to ban Bitcoin. So it's not going to help. They'll just shut it down and censor it from the internet, which is a valid objection, right? If the government has the power to do that, then Bitcoin would not work. Correct. And by the way, they still do it to today.

Like, I'm associated with a lot of what's called the health freedom movement that are on the most part libertarians that really want freedom. And when it comes to Bitcoin, they are being stopped in their psyche. And they go, nope, it will be stopped. You know, people like Catherine Austin Fitz, and many others that really understand money, understand the shortcomings of fiat. They understand that Bitcoin,

maybe on an ideological framework, can solve this, but they really don't believe that there is something that exists that cannot be stopped because they never took the time to dig into the technology and understand its traits. And so it exists today in a very prevalent community, which many of my audience belong to that community, and I show them how they don't need to

be afraid of that. And they can step in and examine it for themselves. Sorry, go on. And this is why I introduced in this book, or referenced, the axiom of resistance by Eric Woskew. Okay. Eric Woskeel is one of those legends who's both mastered praxeology and mastered computer science. He's a wizard on both level, and there's only a handful of people who have done both. So he wrote the book Crypto Economics, the fundamental principles of Bitcoin.

I remember I started listening to it, yes. Yes. It's the best book on Bitcoin, period. Like I haven't found any better. Like maybe history books, Janice's book, etc. is good. But the real logic of Bitcoin is excellently displayed there. And what he introduced, which I think the Austrians and the health movement and most people subconsciously reject, but is obviously true, is the axiom, the assumption that systems,

can be designed to resist external control. If you assume that that is false, in other words, the government can just stop any system and there's nothing we can do about it, well, then you're just content in your slavery, ultimately, because why would you resist if resistance is futile? Correct. Turns out, though, it's not.

We can absolutely resist systems that resist external control. Yeah. And the internet is one example of this. The internet routes around censors. around censorship. It was designed to do that and it does that extremely successfully. The Tor network, a decentralized network of routers to anonymize internet traffic has resisted state attacks since forever. They have an entire anti-censorship circumvention team that has phenomenal work to make

sure that the technology continues to be able to resist a state adversary. And of course, Bitcoin. Bitcoin is around since forever and all the politicians hate it because it makes theft insanely expensive for them. And obviously the government doesn't like that. So the beautiful realization is that, no, we have it in our ability to create systems that resist external control, that the government cannot shut down. And once you implicitly take this assumption that at least it's possible, you might fail, but it is possible and you might succeed if you align your tools correctly, then that means that we can build a world where theft is more expensive and defense is insanely cheap. And we can simply make theft unprofitable. because it will be too easy to resist and too hard to overcome that resistance. And we can do that especially well in cyberspace, which we have proven.

But we can, I believe, also do the same in Meadspace and create resilient societies where theft is simply abolished. Bang. One of the first sentences I opened my keynote this year in BDC Prague with was Bitcoin proves that resistance to control is possible. Yeah. Now let's look beyond money. Yep. Because it's proven. That's it.

I mean, it's not game over in terms of continuing to work on Bitcoin, but it has already proven that we can resist with our money using Bitcoin. And the cypherpunks have acknowledged this since the 1980s, right? That there are, that we just write code. We can simply build the systems and deploy them to 8 billion people. And they will exist and they will continue to work. What the cypherpunks were missing is a, of, a. an appreciation on the foundational logical consequences of their actions and how deep this actually goes and how strong the theoretical underpinning to this entire movement is and therefore

they've had weak arguments and design systems like weak arguments like what you know like this this aspect of oh you have nothing to hide it's the most common critique of any privacy related topic and that is so easy to be dismantled if you have solid logical underpinnings. But you think the cypherpunks came up with this? What do you mean they had a week Angam-a-Mond. The cyphabre-pans kind of failed to address the thought of you have nothing to hide in a fundamentally radical way, for one example. I mean, many people did, but not really structurally and properly. And you think it's because they were early and the technologies were just being shaped up. Yes. And they didn't study too much about Austrian economics.

Okay. There were some early cypherpunks, Nick Zabo, for example, who was very appreciative of the Austrian in school. So there's obviously people who do. And I believe if more people in the cyphph punk movement would understand proxiology on a deep, deep level, that they would benefit tremendously and for one be even more motivated to build freedom tech. And build freedom tech that's more economically sound and profitable and a good business. And then also to have the ethical foundation of, no, what we're doing is right. And we have the moral case to continue our venture and therefore we will. So I think it will create more resilient than sound systems if we marry these two traditions. On October 1st and 2nd, I'll be at the expat money summit. Join me if

you're serious about building your plan B right now. And if you're interested in the VIP ticket, to watch my panel, stick around to the end. As you may know, I've been a digital nomad for the past couple of years with the intention of finding my next home. That's exactly why this summit comes spot on for me in the middle of my own research process. I'll be speaking at a panel called escaping the technocratic trap. Where is your freedom safest? The summit theme is freedom is rising in Latin America and it's all about the region's growing opportunities. Over the two days of the summit, you learn about second residences, international real estate, offshore banking, asset protection, tax optimization, and global investing in Latin America, the summit is totally free, but you need to register in advance.

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and I want to at this moment give a shout-out to my friend, Hakeem Anwar, who was on the show about two months ago, and the episode we did together was, again, a banger because people loved it. And we talked about the above phone, the Grapherino-S, privacy tools. We talked about everything. And then I showed him Noster.

And he was like, whoa, that looks. so much better today than it did three years ago when he first visited it. And now he's on Oster, thanks to the episode we did. And we talked a bit about Bitcoin. But that's exactly the thing with Hakim, which I consider a cypherpunk that did not go deep into Bitcoin. It's like, dude, you're missing that Austrian economics foundation and you're missing the like the deep technological understanding of Bitcoin to really, someone like you can

easily appreciate it once you go deep enough. So that shout out, I know he'll watch that. I'll tell him because I really want him to get deeper into it. Those kind of people that really get the bigger picture of why we need to stop the surveillance. I mean, not stop, but by building the new technology, we can stop the surveillance digital prison from stopping us in our lives. and he can be a very good ambassador for that. So just like, people, get it. Okay, my next question to you. Your core strategic claim is that state predation depends on state observation,

make observation more expensive, predation receipts. Is that still true when the observation infrastructure is already built and normalized? Yes, this is a very foundational premise or argument. It comes from Boyd, is his last name, a military guy from America, a fighter pilot. Yes. And he figured that there is a cycle of decision making that any two adversaries in a battle go through and whoever can process the loop faster will ultimately win the fight.

And so the loop is that first you must observe if your adversary. If you don't know where the adversary is, what are you going to do about it? That's why stealth bombers are very powerful because you don't see them. Then second, you need to orient yourself in relation to the adversary. Like where are you, are you in immediate danger? Does he know about you, etc.? These types of decisions or information gathering has to be done. And finally, or not finally, but the next is to decide what do you want to do about the situation that you're in,

that the adversary is in, what are your tools at your disposal, what are you actually going to do? And after you make that decision, you have to act upon the decision and execute whatever maneuver is planned. After that, you keep going. Now you again observe of like, what did that action do to the adversary where we know? And you continue to loop over and over again. And if you want to defend yourself from an adversary, but the adversary has already observed you, he's already oriented and already decided what he's going to do, if now you try to stop him, that's difficult. Because he's already quite far advanced.

He's got the advantage. Exactly. It's the early surprise attack, basically. So on the flip side, if you cut the adversary at the observation part, if you are in the stealth bomber and he has no idea that you're flying over him, then that's an easy one fight because he doesn't even see you. So that means that the udalp really shows a light that privacy or anonymity at the early stages makes attacks incredibly expensive. Right.

And if attacks are expensive, and the loot that you could get is not that much money, then you will stop. If it costs you 10 Bitcoin to steal one Bitcoin, that's a bad trade. Like that doesn't make sense. Any rational attacker would say, okay, no, I can't keep doing this. Otherwise, I'll be bankrupt very soon because I lose nine Bitcoin on every time I try to steal. And simultaneously, then, if we can on the flip side, decrease the cost of defense and use anonymization technologies by default, instantly. for free for anyone, then this becomes a tool that we can use to protect less valuable assets as well. So we'll be able to protect more people, more assets, from not being stolen from or hurt, ultimately.

So these are, this together is very powerful. And I think that's the core mission of the cypherpunks. They've realized strategically that privacy is exceptionally important for censorship resistance, for freedom. And now how do we get there by decreasing. the cost of defense by making PGP and encryption free for everyone to use, by continuously improving the user interfaces and the efficiency of doing stuff so that we can put things into the background and just do it by default. The more we can do this, the more we will protect people.

And that's a really valuable mission. Very valuable mission. What drove your decision to write the book? It's a very deep book and it goes into a lot of details and it's a very deep book. and it covers definitions, it covers protocols, it covers different types of technological platforms or projects that are released into the market. And you also made it like there's no rights reserved, right? So you also made it open for people to take knowledge from and to use.

So that's very rare. Like what drove those decisions to go so deep and to also open it so much? Oh, this is to some extent the summary of what I've learned. far in two different categories. The Austrian economic tradition I've been studying for a long time and before being a cypherpunk already. So that I learned a whole bunch and I think it's insanely useful knowledge. It helps me tremendously.

It is insanely useful. Not just in business but also in family life and just generally being a good person helps if you understand something about economics that were very closely related. And then I've learned also an insane amount about the cypherpunks and the tools, the software, the cryptography that we can use. And that's like a reality. It's no longer a pipe dream. No, this is very real. The technologies that we have right now are breathtakingly insane, like monumental. And if you understand them, you can massively increase your freedoms. I'd like to an unheard of degree. And we can just do it. So marrying these two experiences that

that I've had. And the unique viewpoint of being deep in both of these traditions and how they interrelate, I've been trying to tell people who thought about this. A thousand plus podcasts and videos like this. So it just felt proper to finally put it in writing in a more structured, detailed view than ranting here for an hour, which is not nearly enough. So that's why the book to kind of ratchet in and give back to the canon of knowledge that I've benefited so much from. I went to university and high school, etc., specifically to study economics. Everything they told me there was a lie. All my economic understanding I've gotten for free on mesas.org Because there they have a mountain, and I mean a mountain, of books available for free in PDF, audiobook.

Because the Austrians did also realize that, similar to the cypherpunks, that intellectual property is a scam. It's a net destruction to society and if we would stop doing it we would all be infinitely better off tomorrow in unimaginable ways so it's an essential part of a free economy to have freedom of information and to not have ownership claims on information

and there's the economic and moral logic to this and also a strategic one is the cypherpunks have explored but ultimately that's why the book is in the public domain I don't own these patterns of words these ideas they aren't mine most of them I've received as gift from others and then sure maybe I did a little bit of mental work to put them together in a certain shape or form

but the result is just a pattern. It's just words and these aren't mine. So if you want to print the book, the PDF is on my website. You can send it directly to the printer and send it to work and do it. Please. Isn't it POP something? How did you call the website? Yeah, towardsliberty.com slash pop. Pactology of privacy. Yeah, exactly. Liberty. Towards liberty. Towards liberty. Towards liberty. Towards liberty. We'll put the link in the In the show notes, fantastic. Just fantastic. But, you know, that that makes me think a little bit because many people would have this next question then, okay, so if you are an author, you write for a living and you put all your work out there for free, what would you make

money from? I mean, economically speaking, you're saying there is a good justification behind it. Can you just a little bit give us like the rationale for why would you? this make economic sense to just remove all trademarks and all copyrights from information out there? For one, profit is a broader category of satisfaction. We act because we think that after the action will be more satisfied than before. And that can include money. We'll get money if we sell something. It could be monetary, but it doesn't have to be. It could be barter. It could be spiritual reasons. It could just be friendships. And that's what motivates me much more in this regard of this book. I don't need to make much money with this. Obviously, it would be nice. Yeah. But my mission with this is to help

my friends, first and foremost, to tell people about valuable knowledge that I've come across and that I think will benefit their life. So that is my main motivation. Again, like my two different friend groups, the Austrians and the cypherpunks, they like, they should agree, but they're not really talking to each other. And so I'm like, guys, you both read this and you will love the other party and then we can join forces and do something. So there's for me a deep spiritual motivation of ending slavery. It's a deep moral calling. And this book is one of my attempts to make a minor part in helping people understand that there is hope and we can stop tyranny. And we can do it today, if not in the next 10 years.

If we get our act together and deploy the cryptography. and the cyphorpunk tools that we have already. We just need to all use it, and the world would be an instantly better place. And considering how fast technology can be adopted, this is like real talk in a very short amount of time. We could liberate a mega amount of the human population. And the end result of that,

even if it stays at a minority of like, 10%, it's a lot of people that could all of a sudden be now so much more productive and solve so many more problems. And where that would take us as a society is incredible. And I want to see it in my lifetime. That's the profit that I'm looking for to see the world prosperous and beautiful. I'm with you. We talked about Paul Rosenberg before.

He writes the foreword to this book, which I've read. And he writes that you've lived the cyphepunk life. You are living the cypherpunk life, not just observing it, which gives you a lot of credibility when it comes to the stuff you're writing about. what are the benefits versus the cost for you to live like that, practically, personally, to live the cypherpunk life? I think it's a lot of fun, honestly. Like, the adventure is great.

The people that you meet are wonderful. And it's a, I don't know, it feels like a karmic cleansing to some extent. A hundred percent. So these are some of the aspects why I do it. And again, that moral calling of fixing the world and making it a better place is very, very motivating. I work a lot, but it doesn't feel like work. It's more like hanging out with friends and building cool stuff. And that type of flow state, I would not have expected it being that prevalent for duration.

This is just really, really fun and cool. So that is one aspect of it. And you know, you get to see the world. I travel a lot. I meet a lot of amazing people in different places and get to see what people are building. That is also so rewarding, not just to build yourself, but to see what other people come up with, with their genius creativity. Like there's just, I'm so proud of so many of my friends on what they've created. It's really, really cool.

And they're just normal people too. They're just people who realize that they can do something about the problem that they have, and then they just did it. And to the extent of which is baffling. So I just am having a lot of fun. You're the Voice is brought to you by Treasor, the original Bitcoin hardware wallet company pioneering the development of self-custody for crypto assets since 2013, empowering individuals with an open source device, enabling beginners and experts to easily and securely hold their coins. I find my treasurer super easy to use and recommend it to my friends and family. Enjoy my 5% discount on Treasurer product by clicking the link in the show notes and using the code a flat. I want to introduce you to Abundant Mines because they take a very different approach to Bitcoin mining.

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It's about freedom, privacy, and purpose. You can book a free strategy call, see how it works, and mine some of your first Bitcoin for free with a special offer for my audience. Learn more on abundant mines.com slash effort. Yeah, I'm with you, me too. I'm just remembering as you're speaking that another way for you to pay it forward and to be part of this amazing adventure is the recent course that you have designed and delivered in Christina's degree, like the Spanish master's degree, right?

Do you want to say a word about that? That's so cool. I forgot about that. Yeah, you introduced me to them, which is great, so thank you very much. No, pleasure. It was just like a match made in heaven. Right. So this is the Hesperides University in Grand Canaria.

Yes. The only university in Europe at least, for sure in Spain, that does not take money from the government. They are purely privately funded, run by an OG Austrian economist and Bitcoiner Gabriya, who's done phenomenal work. He's been trying to fight the government for 16 years to start this university. And finally, he managed a couple years ago. So it was an insane battle. And the hoops he had to jump around are just ridiculous. bureaucracy and education and the state censorship of education is incredible.

And the coercion as well, the kind of stuff they forced them to do. Yeah. So this is one of the few Austrian economics universities. And given from some of the professors that I've met and the way that I could teach my course, which is roughly inspired by the book, but some customized, it's pretty cool. Like, no strings attached. They were very happy to review the material and just go with it. So cool to see.

They're actually good Austrians that are teaching there. And it's an official master's course for Bitcoin. So fully accredited. It's a Bitcoin course. You guys get the Bitcoin degree. Yeah. Like for people to just get it. And it's all remote.

It's a really modern university. They, you know, embrace free ideas. Anyone can sign up from anywhere in the world, right? You just pay the fee and you're in, as any good business should do. and education is a great business, if you do it right, as you do. Thank you. So this is, yeah, these are just, it's a really cool course. And so I was invited to teach the privacy section of the Bitcoin course.

So talking a bit about the economics of privacy and why it's important and then focusing a lot on the tools that we have. So all the Bitcoin privacy technologies on how they work and what adversaries do in order to spy on you while you're using Bitcoin and how to protect yourself against that. Amen. So shout out to Christina, our friend, who's put together this amazing curriculum and the group of the cohort of professors. And I'll put a link to the university and the course in the show notes so people can join if they want or learn more. I think it's an amazing initiative. And if I could, I'd be a professor as well. I didn't have enough time. Maybe next year. We'll see. Okay. You mentioned Eric before. Eric Voscul. Voscul. Good enough.

Voscul. Okay. So building on his idea that Bitcoin security model presupposes people willing to defy state coercion at personal cost. I know I am. I don't know if everyone is willing. How many people are actually willing to do that? Do you think that that is like that we are supposing, like over-supposing that that? That is correct.

And does the whole system depend on those people? It does depend on those people. Okay. If there is no one to run a note despite censorship, then Bitcoin's dead. As simple as that. It requires humans to use it in dangerous environments. You're talking about actively doing things that would help you resist.

I'm even taking you one step before that, just resisting, just saying no, just like the simple act of like saying no before you even pick up any tool. It's like you think people are wired in this day and age to have the courage or whatever it takes to resist? Did you just say no? No is the most powerful word. And it's not said much for a reason, I think. And there's so many ways to answer this question. For one, I think it's just controlled behavior.

or like conditioned behavior. People have been in an outcome-based education system for 20 years or something in their life. And they're very much taught not to say no, you are wrong. The teacher is never wrong. The teacher tells you the truth and that's it. You can say no and walk out of the classroom. She punished me in my first grade when I said something.

Yeah, yeah, exactly. Like it's simply not taught to say no and to reason for yourself with the trivium process. That's not really a thing in modern education. So I think that does a tremendous amount of harm and people just get used to it. So this is a problem that ultimately I think education can fix in the long run. More and more people, especially the young generation, might have access enough to these types of ideas so that they don't get conditioned to accept servitude. On the other hand, there will be people, or there always have been, always will be people who reject servitude and take on a many.

uncountable costs to be free and to resist. For those people who want to, the tools are there. And that's already perfect. Then the question is, how easy is it to use these tools? How costly? Again, if it's expensive to defend yourself, you don't defend yourself. For stop, right? If resistance literally is futile, then why would you resist?

You'd be dead. So to help with that economy of defense is, I think, very powerful, very important. And then people will start to experience what it actually does. I think anyone who's really been studying Bitcoin and who fell in love with Bitcoin notices how much it changes you by just being like that. That is the most intense knowledge that you could get of by becoming a bitconer and actually living the type of life on, hey, this is not that bad. This is not that scary. It's actually even not that difficult. So freedom lived is freedom well understood.

Yes. And more and more people will live that freedom and will get immeasurably wealthy on all the levels. I'm not talking about lots of stats. That doesn't matter. I'm talking about great families, great health, great spiritual exploration and growth. This type of wealth will accompany the resources wealth. and we will have beautiful cities where Bitcoiners live. Like this will come.

And some, you know, the slave cities will continue to get more ugly and more depressed. And then there people will see, okay, why does this work so well and why does this not work well? Yeah. And then hopefully start to question, especially as the pain in the first realm continues to increase, which unfortunately it will. It is. It is and it will. Yeah. It will.

It has to. Yeah. There is no other way for them. if they, this is the downstream of control system, of Fiat system. Yeah. And there's still a lot of cleanup to be done. Even in the best case where we would stop stealing from each other like tomorrow, we would still have many years to clean up the mess that we've left behind.

So even in the most bullish case, there will be pain for a lot of people, including the people who choose to be free, maybe especially those people. But if we don't do it now, it will be even worse later. Like we can't keep kicking the candle on the road that just leads to extinction. And hopefully we will figure that out sooner rather than later. So the pain of healing won't be much. Well, some people will. And our camp will grow, I think, in the next few years.

But many people will not and they will suffer. I guess that's what needs to happen. Yeah, I don't see a way that it could have happened otherwise, given our current situation. Yeah. We just can't fix everything for everyone by tomorrow. That's not, I wish it were true, but it just isn't. It's not feasible. And, okay, we do the best that we can.

Yeah. Correct. You also don't need to feel guilty if you can't help people because if they're not ready for it and if they don't choose to be, you know, shown the way or helped in any way, it's their choice. It's fine. You need to respect that. Maybe sad, but. I think that's what Jesus meant when he said, turn the other cheek. Yes, okay. Say more. In the context of it, it was he was speaking truth and someone was not ready to hear it. So he slapped him. Yes. And Jesus continued telling the truth and turned the other cheek and the way to the next blow. Right.

Because telling the truth is important. And even if people don't want to hear it, it's understandable that they don't because it's a scary thing to realize. But if they continue to be hostile, then continue to be passionate and try to help them understand and give them the space that they need until they get it. And if they don't, then that's all right. It wasn't meant to be. Yeah. I think Jesus was incredible. Oh, man.

You cite CBDCs in the book as a direct threat in the preface programmable money with spending restrictions defined by the issuer. What are some of the protections or privacy measures you'd recommend people take tomorrow morning, especially here in the EU where we sit right now when CBDCs are, you know, coming faster than you think? The best way to stay free while using CBDCs is to not use CBDCs. That's the gist of it. It's that simple, people.

Because that's kind of good. That simple. Yeah. It's kind of sad because you could use, you know, cash in a relatively private way, in a relatively free way. You can do that a little bit with bank accounts. But even there. But it's also very limited cash is also. Cash is super limited.

Getting more and more limited by the day. With CBDCs, it will just be impossible. Because there is no longer. a middleman who can protect you from the government. The government already now is controlling the banks, right? The government applies triangular intervention, as Rothbart would say, where the government says that the bank is not allowed to provide you a service without doing full K-Y-C and asking who your friends are and what type of how much money you have and where did you get it, etc. So there's already massive intervention in the banking money system, obviously. Why does it call triangular

intervention? So he classifies three different ways of theft of intervention. The first is autistic Yes, I just read it page 123. Seriously, I swear to God, I opened it just before and I wanted to ask you why is a call? Rothbard uses autistic in its technical economic sense derived from misses, meaning self-contained or non-exchange action, not in any psychological sense. Wow, I can't believe I just read this as you were out of everything in this book. Yes, go on. It was meant to be. Talk about it.

Autistic intervention is something like prohibition. Yes. I declared it illegal and bad for you to drink alcohol, whatever it is. Right. So I prevent you from using your own resources with your own body as you see fit. It's a pretty bad thing to do. People shouldn't do that. The second type of intervention is binary intervention.

Taxation. You've earned money. I come with a $5 wrench. I hit you until you give me half of the money. That's a binary intervention. You've had this stuff. I took the stuff. plus I hit you, that's a binary intervention.

Again, shouldn't do that. That's bad. And finally, there's the triangular intervention where the government prevents one party to work with another party under whatever conditions. It could be, I'm not allowed to cut your hair because I don't have a license for it. So apparently we need a license to cut someone's hair nowadays.

But that's the reality in basically every country. You need license to fish. Yeah. You need license to have a boat. Like, you need a license for everything. Yeah. And so some licenses are binary interventions, some are triangular interventions. But KYC is a binary intervention.

Okay. And the interesting thing with a binary intervention is that at least there is still some other party involved. Like there is a company that is the buffer between you and the state. So let's look at Bitcoin exchanges, for example. If you use Coinbase, they are happy cooperating with the government in whatever shape or form they want. They help them all the time. But you also have the option to go to Bull Bitcoin. And Bull Bitcoin is a little bit of a different exchange.

They actually care about their customers and protect them and don't just do anything that the government tells them. They resist where possible. I can't resist perfectly, but they do resist. And that means that you can use a centralized exchange at different degrees of government involvement. And there have always been entrepreneurs that protected their customers. And then there were others that ratted them out to the state. So at least you have the choice. the problem with a binary intervention

with a central bank digital currency that means that you have to interact with the government directly in order to receive money, to hold money, to move money. You need a direct government involvement all the time. That's with retail CBDC,

but they are going in a model that involves the commercial banking system. To some degree that's better. Or other what they call payment service providers. It can be a supermarket, whatever, any corporation that they deem authorized. Yeah. It's still an intervention, right? It's still bad, but it's differently bad. There might then be a private CBDC issuer who is privacy respecting and allows you to make

private payments and has technology that makes stealing the money impossible. Right. It may exist. Probably won't because let's be real, but it could. And depending also on the regulation and what they force them to do. Yeah. This is all politics. This is all the censored, slated, slay. a coerced market that has a lot of problems. And the only real solution is to stop stealing and to defend yourself from thieves. And again, the best way to do this on the money layer, if you don't want to be subject to the CBDC slavery, just use Bitcoin. It's a simple, it really is as simple as that.

It is the one action that you can do to sell your fiat for Bitcoin, to start earning Bitcoin, to save in Bitcoin and to pay your employees, your suppliers, your loved ones in Bitcoin. then any CBDCs genanigans simply don't affect you anymore. That's the idea of the cypherpunks. We build a parallel economy. And it's there for those who want it. And for those who don't want it, well, okay, you don't have to use it. That's a beautiful thing about anarchy.

Nobody's forced to do anything. We're not trying to politic and change the money of the government to be Bitcoin and so that they start forcing you to use Bitcoin. That's a horrible idea. We don't want to force our opinions on others. It's their right to have different opinions. We don't all have to think the same. It's just we should leave each other alone if we don't agree.

And just do our own thing peacefully with those people who want to work with us. And those people who want to continue CBDCs, there's good reasons for it. And they're happy to do so. And we never know what the world could look like because we have never done this before. There was always some form of coercion and forcing and intervention that prevents that freedom from existing. So the world could be a really different place if we just let people do.

Yeah. We've never really had that point where theft was impossible, was never done. There was always thieving, always murder going around. But what we definitely have seen, that when the relative level of theft decreased,

when people stole less from each other, when people did more peaceful trade, things always went better. Always. Now, sometimes the transition period is difficult because after we steal so much, there is a massive boom period and we're building useless things and solving problems that don't really exist and consuming way too much. And that has a real economic cost and we will have to pay that in years to come, even once the theft stops. That's the reallocation

period, the bust in the Austrian business cycle theory. Can I give the analogy of what's happening in the Middle East? They're going to rebuild Gaza, right? It's like, yeah, we bombed the hell out of it. We killed so many. We've done all this, all this harm. And yet, now we will see prosperity. We will have a board of peace and we will bring all the big guys to rehabilitate the area. Sure, but is that organic or is that manufactured? Is that sustainable and long-lasting?

Or is that just a period of bust? That's what I see there. Yeah. War leads to a lot of suffering and obviously a lot of resource allocation. We've destroyed a whole bunch of things. We've produced things that we've then destroyed. We designed things specifically to destroy stuff. Exactly.

That's incredibly wasteful. If we would focus our energy on building new things rather than destroying old things, I think it would be better off. Okay. What are some of the other important ideas that exist in the book that you want to put a little bit of a flashlight on? I think we've talked a lot about the economic side of thing, also last show. So I think going to the technical side is, is important. That's the second half of the book. For all those who already understand economics

or even those that don't, what are the different tools that we actually have at our disposal? And what do they do? And what can we build with them? And the cypherpunks have given us a couple amazing tools. Maybe I'll do a quick intro to some of them at least. Please. The first is encryption. We can have a message and we can apply a math formula to this message so that the result is ciphertext, some gibberish that you cannot read. And only if you know a secret, a private key, then can you actually decrypt this information? Absolutely

powerful. People have been using it since a long time. And another recent innovation is to do private-public key cryptography so that we don't actually have to share and exchange the secret that decrypts the message. You will have a private key. I have a private key. Both of us can easily generate a public

key, and now I can encrypt messages to your public key that you can decrypt with your private key. That is the basis of any anonymous communications system because now we no longer have to share the private key back and forth, which makes encryption much better. And next we can... And Bitcoin and Noster are built on that. Interestingly, Bitcoin does not have encryption, or at least it did not have for very long time. Oh, no, I talked about private public key. Yes. So with private public key pairs, you can do two things.

You can encrypt things. That's how Tor works. That's how HTPS works. That's how Noster direct messages work. And then you can sign things. Basically, you can prove to someone else that you know a private key, a secret number, without telling him the secret number. And you do that by he gives you a message and you sign the message, just multiplying the message with your private key, basically. And then you have a public key and a signature and a message. And with these three things, the other party can verify that it's either true. The message was signed correctly by the person who knows the private key or false,

meaning there is an error. It's not a proof. That's signature schemes and Bitcoin uses them very heavily to. to make sure that basically the rule is you can only spend the token, the coin, if you know the signature, if you can produce the signature by knowing the private key. And whoever knows the private key can now create a valid transaction that spends the money. Another aspect that Bitcoin gives you is hashing. Or not Bitcoin utilizes that.

So a hash is magical. You can take however large of a text you want. And you run it through this very simple algorithm. And at the end you get a short, you know, this long string of text. And the interesting thing is if you change one little word or letter in the input, the output will look completely different. But it will always be the exact same length, which is fascinating. And there's like a whole big brain meta discussion on why that actually works. It's cool that it works.

And Bitcoin uses that for a lot of things, including for denial of service attacks. Because how can we prevent everyone to just use an anonymous system until the servers crash? and the reason is you need to perform work before you can use a service. And you do that by hashing a whole bunch of times with different inputs so that your output starts with a lot of zeros, which is proof that you had to spend a whole bunch of time and computation and energy, electricity, to actually go through these attempts until you have a valid one. And we can calculate roughly how much time that took.

That's the Bitcoin difficulty adjustment, protects your full node from being overrun with new blocks and transactions because we simply require that the whole network needs to spend 10 minutes in compute time before a valid block is found. System works beautifully. But then there's also more advanced technologies

that we can use. So on the internet, computers talk to each other, routed through a bunch of other computers. And your identity on the internet is your IP address. And that is a very personal identifying information because your home has one IP address. And if someone like your internet service provider

knows that here's your KYC data, this is your IP address, then all your actions on the internet are tracked to you personally, what websites you visit, how often, maybe even, you know, the website operator knows now where you live and so on. That's scary. And what you can do is to use anonymization technology to make this obsolete. So a VPN is an easy option. Instead of you directly connecting to a server, you first connect to a VPN and then to the website that you want to visit. This means that the website operator only sees the IP address of the VPN provider, not your own. But the issue is, there's a central third party here. If they shut off the computers, if they log exactly where you're visiting, then they have the data, no longer your ISP.

So we can also add multiple peers in the middle. That's what Tor does. In Tor, you run your traffic always through three other notes and messages are always encrypted back and forth to make sure that none of the middlemen can actually spy on you, which is pretty cool. What did Marty Momi just release in terms of VPN? Yeah, so this is Noster VPN, which is a way that you can connect to computers and do the initial handshake via the Noster protocol and via a bunch of different relays. A little bit similar to what tail scale does. It's like a way to reach your own computer somewhere else securely, but decentralized, which is powerful. A couple more other interesting technologies that are maybe less known that are worth to dive in is the idea of zoonology.

proofs. So you can prove to me a statement without me learning anything about a statement. So the good example is I'm a bartender and you want to buy alcohol. I need to check that you're older than 21. The way that we today do this is with an ID. With an ID and you now I know your name, where you live, in what state you're registered and your exact birth date. I didn't know all of these things. All you needed is the age. All I need to know is are you older than 20. I don't even care about your exact age. Correct. It's just are you older than 21?

Yes or no. Yes or no. And there's already now applications where you can via NFC tap your passport to your phone and then generate a zero knowledge proof that proves to an outside observer that in fact you have a passport that says that you're older than 21. And this magic exists. Yeah. Really, really, really cool technology.

And we can build a whole bunch of different things with that that are very privacy preserving. Yes. Because always in the past, if you wanted to prove something, you needed to tell the exact facts. That's what they're now making everyone do. Yeah. Age verification galore everywhere. And of course, that's implemented in a way that benefits the thief, where you have to upload a picture of your social security number and passport and birth certificates. Of course.

Whatever else they want. How much money you have, where you earn it, with whom you work. All of these things will eventually be requested in the governed web. K-Y-Cing your ass. And we don't have to do that anymore. We can have the same security guarantees without violating the privacy of the end user, which is amazing. I have fantastic research.

Another interesting thing is something called private information retrieval. But hold on. I want to pull on that thread a little bit more. The ZK Zero Knowledge Proof Protocol, what's the coin that is associated to that? And there was something wrong, bad going on with these guys lately? Can you say a bit about that? So zero knowledge cryptography is quite old, but it really got a renaissance after Bitcoin, especially because the massive competition in the monetary medium,

like there's a million and one money protocols out there now. And a lot of them wanted to differentiate themselves by being more scalable and more private. So they pumped a whole bunch of research into zero knowledge cryptography and how to apply them in the monetary realm. One interesting one to highlight here is Zcash. There are a fork of Bitcoin that added zero knowledge proofs at the base layer. So instead of your full note validating that these are inputs, I know where they're coming from, they come all the way back from a valid genesis block.

And then all the signatures checked out, all the amounts checked out, there was never a transaction with more outputs than inputs. That would be inflation, create more money than you spend. And with that, instead, you validate a zero knowledge proof, which is some ciphertext that you can't read. You run it through your local math formula on your computer. And the end result is it's valid or it's invalid. You don't know exactly the details of how much Bitcoin was moved. You just know everything checks out.

Everything is correct. That's the idea of Zcatch. Got it. Okay. One of the issues with this, and maybe that's what you're alluding to, is that these proofs have different security assumptions than other math. There's just, it's hard ultimately. It's just really difficult to understand, to implement correctly

and to not have any theoretical mistakes in these whole schemes. And with projects like Zcash, there have been multiple, or at least two cases, and one was very recently, where they found out that you could create a valid looking proof where you actually created a billion tokens out of thin air because they made some mistake in the math or the implementation of it. Okay. And that's why the Zcash blockchain now stopped mining transactions with these zero knowledge proofs, meaning you cannot spend your money anymore because you cannot properly prove that you're not inflated. the money system. It's a pretty nasty, pretty bad attack. So that's one reason of why Bitcoin doesn't touch these zero knowledge schemes on the base layer blockchain. Because it's hard. It's new mathematics, it's new implementations of really complex things. And the likelihood of mistakes is not zero. It's decently high. Got it. And so most privacy projects like this have had critical

bugs that led to loss of funds or theft or censorship, which is not great. Thank you so much for explaining this to me. Appreciate it. Okay, let's go back to the next tech that you wanted to bring up. One of the cool texts, and probably that's going to be the last one, is private information retrieval. Yeah, we can do more than this one. Yeah, private retrieval. Private information retrieval.

In other words, anonymous database lookups. So you have a database of whatever. I want to connect and find out what's the Wikipedia article of this podcast. But I don't want you to know that I want to check out your podcast. So instead of giving you the clear text query of give me the line in the database about your podcast, I encrypt my database request and I send you this encrypted ciphertext that you cannot read. Now you run this encrypted ciphertext through your entire database and you get another piece of encrypted ciphertext that's different. You send that back to me and I can decrypt it and get the actual database entry I was looking for.

So I can get information from your server. Without looking at my data? Yes. I don't know all of your data. I just know that one request that I asked for. And you don't know my request or what I actually sent back. Oh, that's crazy. Yeah, it's complicated, but basically, like, I can ask you questions without you knowing the question I asked or without you knowing the answer that you gave. Answering you without you knowing the answer, but just like what you needed from that answer. So we can do incredible things with this.

Far out. Okay, one more. Yes, yes. is another amazing thing is that, now if I have a server, I can prove to you exactly the software that I'm running on this server,

which wasn't possible in the past, by the way. You always had to trust the server administrator that he's running the software that you would expect him to run. Now we have a cryptographic proof for that. And so let's say I'm a VPN provider

and you wrote your traffic through me. Now I can prove to you that I run on a, that I run software on my machine that does not log your IP address. always before there was this trust assumption and we promise you we don't log your IP addresses, etc. Now they can prove it.

With that technology. Yeah, that's called the trusted execution environment or secure enclaves. Fascinating new hardware-based cryptography. That's a little bit different, has different type of trade-offs. But these are just some of the tools that we have now to build incredible stuff.

Like we can literally build a new internet with this type of stuff. Yeah. That's another cool new project. FIPS. Yeah, that's what I, I met him yesterday. And we spoke and he explained it more to me, Phipps, but also the other project that is working on for. Tollgate.

Yeah, tollgate. Oh my God, those two things together. Yeah. We're literally rebuilding the internet with us now. And I mean, like, that's a technical statement. Like this whole point about IP addresses where, you know, you need to know the IP addresses of the other. Or you have to ask for permission from someone at the top of the pyramid to. Exactly.

Give you access to the internet and tell them who you are. Yeah. Now you can just go directly peer-to-peer mesh, mesh usability to other people and just get a peek, get the window into the open internet through someone else that already has an open channel. Yeah. A properly decentralized mesh network that can run over any transportation medium. I love it. Like radio, Bluetooth, NFC, Ethernet cable, Wi-Fi.

Whatever. As long as one node can connect to the internet, all the other ones can get this. So it's a really powerful idea to have mesh networks where we can run our own infrastructure. Yeah. And it's not a joke. We're going to send balloons into the air that will survive for a year or so that will keep sending and relaying our messages. We're going to build our own Starlink. Without rockets, because we don't need rockets.

We can do it with balloons. That's good enough. They're like a hundred bucks a pop. And that just shows you again of like the cypherpunk spirit of we can just do things. The internet sucks. We don't have to keep using it. We can make something that's even better. More resilient, more free, more censorship resistant, more private.

Where everything is encrypted by default because encryption is free. Encryption didn't exist. What we have today didn't exist when the internet was created. But we have it now. So we can solve the same problem in a much, much, much better way. That will lead to hopefully amazing outcomes. And these are just some of the technologies. And now there's infinite possibility on how exactly do we put these pieces together.

Yeah. And that's where the entrepreneurial genius and the entrepreneurial spark comes in. Yeah. Because we all have so many problems. The world has a whole bunch of problems. We should solve them. Solving problems is a good thing. The question is, which problems do we solve?

That's a prioritization. And how do we solve each of these problems? And how it depends a lot on the tools that we have available. If you're somewhere on a lonely island and all you have is a rock, it's difficult to solve fantastical computer science projects with that because you don't, like you have a rock.

This is just impossible. But when we have this bouquet of toolkits where only some of them I've talked about, there's hundreds more that are fascinating to look into. The things that we can build with this, the problems that we can solve with this, is unreal. And there's so many different opportunities.

Plus, there's not enough people in the space. There are not enough people in the space, period. Which means that the supply is dreadfully short and we have shortages everywhere. Yeah. Which means there's a massive business opportunity. Oh, yeah. For smart people, for loving people to come in and help each other and combine these existing technologies in beautiful new ways to solve ever more complicated problems.

And the more we do that, the better it will be for us. On the parallel society, in that free part of the world where we can just solve problems and help each other and don't have to be. afraid of constantly being stolen from each other will be insanely productive. And the rate of productivity increase will probably even go up. We've seen that more and more with the more free people are, the faster things improve. Yeah. And I mean, let's take that to the max.

Let's take that to the max. This is so awesome on so many levels. I know you know, but, you know, I need to say it. It's just like, hallelujah. what can I say? Like, let's do this. This is why we're here right now, in this time, with this knowledge, with these bodies, with this mission, with all this intentionality, all this understanding. I think we have such a fascinating decade ahead of us, two decades ahead of us, where the world is undergoing so many changes. And we can choose and

take part in a very, very sophisticated, interesting revolution that is being done non-violently with a lot of smart technology, a lot of smart people that can really change the world. In ways, I don't know if that opportunity ever existed because, I mean, I do think, by the way, that ancient civilizations did have very advanced technologies. I do. I just think that in our modern reality. We probably didn't have that opportunity for a very long time and now we do. So we have an opportunity to build something that can really take us out of the swamp that we're in, but not just as a as a bust or for a short-term patch, but really for a sustainable long-term future. And that makes me very bullish. I'm sure it makes you very bullish. And that's why I'm so thankful for

the cypherpunks because they've given me hope of a much better future. Yes. I was deep into Austrian economics before the cypherpunks, and that's depressing. Because, like, everything sucks. We know why it sucks. Yeah. But, like, what are we going to do about it? Oh, the market will fix it. Yeah, okay, but how?

Yeah. And gold didn't work. We've tried that. And that got compromised and was stolen on massive levels. So, like, are we going to keep yelling end the fat and try it in the political means? Thank you. Yes. I mean, sure, go ahead.

Yeah, try. Is it going to be different than the last 50s? It looks like it's working, yeah. So we were, or at least I was out of option at that point of, okay, so what do we do about this massive problem? And then finding the cypherpunks is, hallelujah, because finally we have an actual strategic path of something that really has a chance of working that doesn't seem to have any obvious problems with it where it's peaceful and a nonviolent way of doing things without having to

politic and take taxes and force our opinions on others. we just build it in cyberspace there's space for everyone this is the new world where we can be where we can communicate where we can trade where we can build amazing things without being stopped

without having to ask for permission without being stolen from without being physically hurt like there have not been many revolutions where you didn't have to put your body on the line and countless people died on their fight for freedom all the time

and like maybe we actually don't have to do that? That would be cool if we don't have to die in order to live in a free world. We don't have to be martyrs, yeah. So that is a, that makes me incredibly hopeful. And I think that spirit of intense hope and optimism for a better future is one of those silver linings of the cypherpunks. I greet Hal Finney. He was insanely positive on what we can do with the world. Think of Paul Rosenberg. Yeah. I think I've ever heard him saying anything doomful ever. Like he's realistic about the immense problem that we face and the danger of it. But we have so much in our favor that we have a right to be optimistic.

We can actually fix this and nobody can actually stop us. And we're just doing it. And it will work. It will work. It must work. It's the truth. So we keep going. I love it so much.

Max, you always make me so bullish. That's good. We're not bullish enough. We're not bullish enough. I know. Oh my God. Okay, hold on. So one thing I want to say is, even though this is being put out there for you to take and share and use, you know, without any copyrights or all that, still, when you visit the website and you do do that, you can leave a donation, right?

Yes. Okay. So do that. And the internet, I want to say a bit about the Internet Privacy Foundation. because I believe that that's something that needs more awareness and more funding as well. Can you say a little bit about why you set it up and what's the vision there? I've been speaking to many, many freedom tech builders throughout these years. And one common team is the lack of funding.

Right. It really is, which is kind of surprising because it's a beautiful mission. like people want to support it and they do. It's just we have a lot more demand for more capital than we have supply. And so the idea of the Internet Privacy Foundation is to help the builders of freedom tech, very broadly speaking, in a non-extractive way. It's a non-profit? It's a nonprofit in America, exactly, which makes it interesting for Americans to donate to.

Correct. For tax purposes, yes. And the idea is. is to help the builders build and connect a group of amazing people to help each other and knowing that there are some funds available to hire someone to do a security audit of your code. Like these things are important. And hopefully we can support countless projects. One of them already is white noise and the Mormon protocol.

And so that's the protocol for doing unstoppable encrypted group messaging. And that has white noise as one. instantiation but already a dozen other applications that support this protocol, hopefully more to come. Yes. And that will take some time to keep working on. So that is our starting project and the idea is to hopefully get many more people involved and make sure that we have...

And get funding coming. Get funding coming. Yeah. Yeah. So you guys, if you're listening to us and you want to invest in something good and make the world a better place, just like a small mission, then visit. the internet privacy foundation website. There is one, right? Yes, IPF.deaf.dev.dev.com. D-E-V. Okay, we'll put a link to that too in the show notes,

IPF.dev. What else? Where should people follow you? What other websites should they be aware of? Yeah. One of the realizations I made early in my journey is that committing fully to freedom is a good thing in any aspect that you can. So that includes my social media usage. Yes. I'm not on any of the social media. You are not. I know that. You are only on Noster.

Only on Noster. And the cool thing with Noster is you can build awesome stuff with it. Correct. So what I recently build is a new website towardsliberty.com where all of my Noster posts are stored. All of my blogs are stored on my book, or not all my books, just one book, but all my audiobooks as well. And recently all of my videos and podcasts. They're on the website.

Did you vibe code that? Everything vibe-coded. No shit. Can you teach me how to do that? I want that website. I want a website like that. Okay. It really was.

Later on, I'll get to it. Insanely easy, all things considered. Was it? I mean, to some extent, I'm the original vibe coder for like a decade now because I've just been vibe coding with humans instead of robots. Now I can vibe with the robots. So you probably have a whole setup ready and everything. And they don't complain.

So, but yeah, we can totally do it. You'll manage. Actually, like, I've never written a line of code. I did. There you go. I have a degree in computer science, dude. I was programming in C++. There you go.

For years. You can program in English too now. It's much easy. I can. I definitely can. I know how a computer thinks. Yeah. So just towardsliberty.com, that's where you can find out more.

Fantastic. But yeah, instead of like, coming to my website, build something yourself. That's, I think, the main shoutout of be productive, be helpful for others, and live a free life. The more of us that do that, the better we will all be. And the greater the signal becomes. Yes.

Fantastic. Join us. We need you on that side of the world. Oh, yeah. And one thing for, one of the things I would need help with for the book is translations. Right now it's only English. We just started some of the translation work. That definitely needs proofreaders.

So again, in the same spirit as I did before this book, all of that will be published on Noster. So you can read the translated editions somewhere on Noster. Just stay tuned. It will be on the website too. And if you find anything bad, tell me. And then I'll fix it before sending it to print. So there will be physical translated editions as well. Do you want to create a Hebrew version of it?

I can be a proofreader. Perfect. Let's do that. Okay. Thank you very much. You're welcome. That's a cool thing with like open source stuff. you don't have to do everything by yourself.

Like I got amazing help with this book. Like the cover design, for example. Vlad did that. Also the design of white noise. Like, legend. I got insane review from Stefan Kinsella, who helped so much. Eric Voskul, Paul Rosenberg, Knood, like a lot of the people that were very, very helpful in this book.

Yeah. I got to thank them. And so people, people did, a bunch of people reviewed the first and the second edition online, all published on Noster. This is the third one, actually the first time I print. And it's much better for all of the work that other people put into it. That's why, again, I don't claim ownership of this because this wasn't even just me. It's a team effort.

It's always a team effort. Like, someone else printed it, someone else. It always is a team effort. You're right. Like, everything we do is a team effort in the end of the day. It's the idea of I pencil, fascinating little story on that, like, nobody knows how to build a pencil. You simply don't know. Like, nobody can do it by himself.

It's impossible. if you would actually try to build a pencil all by yourself without help from anyone else, you would starve. Like, before you would have the pencil like 1% finished. There is no way. So anything of value is produced by a team. Yeah. And the more we play like a team, the more amazing things will build. Max, I love talking to you.

Likewise. Always. This is so fucking cool. Yes. Thank you for being who you are once again. and I'd love to have you in the show again later on. I'm always happy to come back. Thanks for the invite.

Of course. Thank you so much. Thanks for being with us. Please take a minute to give this episode a like, comment and subscribe and hit the notification bell to be notified when I release my next episode. All this really helps me beat the suppression of the algorithms. Take a moment to check my sponsors and affiliation offers and the show notes. That's how you support.

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