{"@context":"https:\/\/schema.org","@type":"Periodical","version":"1.0","generatedAt":"2026-07-26T15:49:33+00:00","magazine":{"id":"d8b91d308361b9370159a5232a748eb45fb4d27bcb8bd4d6e777087627194912","slug":"newsroom-magazine-on-imwald-by-laeserin","title":"Nostr, Curated Thoughtfully","summary":null,"image":"https:\/\/blog.imwald.eu\/assets\/laeserin_logo-iPPO3wF.png","language":null,"pubkey":"dd664d5e4016433a8cd69f005ae1480804351789b59de5af06276de65633d319","createdAt":"2026-06-08T07:23:38+00:00","url":"https:\/\/www.decentnewsroom.com\/mag\/newsroom-magazine-on-imwald-by-laeserin"},"categories":[{"slug":"newsroom-magazine-on-imwald-by-laeserin-category-politics","title":"Politics","summary":"","image":null,"url":"https:\/\/www.decentnewsroom.com\/mag\/newsroom-magazine-on-imwald-by-laeserin\/cat\/newsroom-magazine-on-imwald-by-laeserin-category-politics","articleCount":6,"articles":[{"title":"Living like God in France is easier to do when you live in France.","slug":"living-like-god-in-france","summary":"Why Americans are nearly working themselves to death and all they have to show for it is bigger trucks.","content":"Quality of life isn\u0027t only controlled by what a particular person owns; it is heavily impacted by their environment, the local and regional infrastructure and markets, and the emotions, state, and trust of the people around them. **That is why it costs less to enjoy life more, in Europe.**\n\nThe overall quality of life in western EU is substantially higher than in the USA, and the eastern EU is catching up, quickly. I expect the east to catch up, even faster, now that Hungary voted to give themselves another chance at prosperity.\n\nThe USA had a massive head start, by having an intact industry after WWII, controlling the world\u0027s reserve currency, and having a gigantic internal market. But that advantage has been steadily shrinking, since the advent of the EU. (That is why Trump and Putin \u2014 and their many online and offline minions \u2014 hate the EU with a passion: it is increasingly-successful competition because of its large size and population.) Even America\u0027s slightly-higher birthrates will mean less, in a roboticized world.\n\nAs America turns its government into a violent mafia and terrorizes and discombobulates its trading partners, Europeans are rapidly increasing their internal trade within their continent, and with their partners across the world. Agriculture, energy, consumer goods, defense. The EU cannot go it alone. But the EU is definitely not alone. Europe is not alone. **It is now the USA, not Britain, that is the real island.**\n\nWe are catching up and increasingly surpassing, yes. Partly because Europe is improving. Partly because the USA is declining. A rising stock market can only mask the malaise for so long.\n\nhttps:\/\/c.tenor.com\/sIhfg2cHPXgAAAAd\/tenor.gif\n\nAnd I don\u0027t know who needs to hear this, but the German stock market is also at a record high. For what that is worth. Which isn\u0027t much, unless you own those stocks (which I do, of course).\n\nWhat you can\u0027t do in the EU (or even wider Europe) is have a good idea and a snazzy Powerpoint presentation, and then have it immediately rain millions or billions of dollars down on you. It is true. **Becoming mega-rich in the USA is much faster and easier, I know.** But there are over 340 million US residents who are not mega-rich, and they don\u0027t not-matter. Many of them would live better in Copenhagen, Madrid, Verona, Dublin, Prague, Lisbon, or Bayreuth. Not because they would be richer there. They would be poorer. But they would live _as if_ they were richer.\n\nThat is not nothing.\n\nhttps:\/\/thinkeuropa.dk\/en\/notat\/2025-10-the-european-union-is-becoming-the-worlds-quality-of-life-superpower","image":"https:\/\/i.nostr.build\/TPYDotleKqHv1cxn.webp","pubkey":"dd664d5e4016433a8cd69f005ae1480804351789b59de5af06276de65633d319","kind":30023,"createdAt":"2026-04-20T08:43:25+00:00","publishedAt":null,"topics":["eu","economic"],"url":"https:\/\/www.decentnewsroom.com\/mag\/newsroom-magazine-on-imwald-by-laeserin\/cat\/newsroom-magazine-on-imwald-by-laeserin-category-politics\/d\/living-like-god-in-france"},{"title":"American Disneyland","slug":"american-disneyland","summary":"Why I am vacationing in Europe. Again.","content":"I don\u0027t feel very American, anymore. I can barely relate to their (our?) whole... mindest, worldview, lifestyle, whatever anymore. And that applies across race, religion, class, region, and political lines.\n\nHearing them talk is like listening to people from Kenya or Laos or wherever talk. It\u0027s interesting. They\u0027re nice people or maybe even good friends, business partners, or well-loved relatives. But... it\u0027s clear that they are foreigners. The foreigners  \u2014 yes, even those from the Middle East or someplace even further away \u2014 here actually feel less foreign to me, than the Americans over there. At least I can understand what they are saying. I mean, _really_ understand. Empathize.\n\nA lot of Americans are actually really difficult to talk to because they have so little knowledge of what the world outside of America is like and they think everyone wants to be American. Quality of life is much better here, overall. The last time we traveled to the USA, to one of the nicest, most-peaceful, beautiful, and wealthiest parts of the country, it was so unpleasant and unnerving, that my kids are refusing to ever return.\n\nI only know one person here (a Russian immigrant), who has ever expressed any desire to move to America. Mostly to buy a gigantic rifle for the grocery store and drive around his Texas ranch in a cybertruck with Elon Musk. American Disneyland.\n\nBut Russians aren\u0027t allowed to move there, anymore.\n\nThat is all.","image":"https:\/\/i.nostr.build\/lmcumrD74mGk5kCp.jpg","pubkey":"dd664d5e4016433a8cd69f005ae1480804351789b59de5af06276de65633d319","kind":30023,"createdAt":"2026-03-28T12:56:18+00:00","publishedAt":null,"topics":["usa","expat","politic"],"url":"https:\/\/www.decentnewsroom.com\/mag\/newsroom-magazine-on-imwald-by-laeserin\/cat\/newsroom-magazine-on-imwald-by-laeserin-category-politics\/d\/american-disneyland"},{"title":"We Can Send Merz Out to the Golf Course","slug":"we-can-send-merz-out-to-the-golf-course","summary":"Why voting is the worst way to determine who will govern, excepting all of the other ways.","content":"I\u0027ve been following rumors that the Chechen President Ramzan Kadyrov might be terminally ill with kidney failure. He has come out, publically, and denied the rumors, but there\u0027s no way to tell what is going on. They managed to nurse Biden through embarrassingly-obvious dementia for an election and a full presidential term, after all.\n\nThis is such an odd character, at any rate. His father, Akhmat-Khadzhi Abdulkhamidovich Kadyrov, was the imam who called out the jihad against Russia, in the first Chechen separatist war. He switched sides in the second separatist war, and the Russians made him the president. Islamists (well, other Islamists) blew up his car, in Grozny, and his son soon took over and has been ruling since. \n\nHe has two wives, 12 children, multiple mansions, and has amassed a great fortune through whichever means politicians over there amass great fortunes, while their residents grind along in poverty and despair. The Kadyrov rise to power was an important move, for Russia, as the Chechens have become one of the main sources for fighters in the Ukrainian invasion, including being disproportionately present near the most war crimes. Millions of people are hoping for him to finally die, so that there can be political change, over there, and fewer horrors, elsewhere. That\u0027s probably why the rumor of his impending death spread so quickly: wishful thinking.\n\nAnd this reminded me of why voting for your leadership, although highly imperfect, does serve one purpose well: getting rid of someone the public doesn\u0027t like. I don\u0027t know how popular Kadyrov is, but his government is highly corrupt and infamous for racking up extrajudicial slayings of gays, journalists, political opponents and people who have cut him off in traffic. Even Hillary Clinton is rumored to study his life\u0027s work.\n\nHis insistance that the war in Ukraine is a holy jihad is especially reprehensible, as he\u0027s betraying his own people with daft religious posturing, pressuring them to join a battlefield that the Russians themselves have long since nicknamed _the meat grinder_. He humbly calls himself _Putin\u0027s Foot Soldier_, but is more commonly known as _Putin\u0027s Bloodhound_ and that branding seems to stick. At any rate, the Ukrainian war has helped keep him in power, by sending so many angry, poor, young men off to die elsewhere. They have stubbornly good health, unusually long life expectancies, and elevated fertility, for Russian citizens, so it\u0027s clear that something needed to be done.\n\nThe participation in the war has led to a sort of death-boom, as the 14 million rubles death payments his soldiers receive have created a latent economic surge, helping to balance out any troubles in its oil sector. (Followed rapidly by inflation, as eating your human seed corn doesn\u0027t actually fuel sustainable growth, \u2014 surprise, surprise \u2014 but I digress.)\n\nAs I was saying, perhaps he is very popular, in Chechnya, but there\u0027s no way to truly know how popular, as there is no reliable, free, anonymous, decisive polling. By _decisive_, I mean that the person being polled is aware of the gravity and importance of their vote cast. They are not merely telling someone on the phone what they feel, at this moment, but are making some strategic or even merely tactical decision to change or keep their government.\n\nThis is missing in Chechnya, Russia, China, Iran, Venezuela, Cuba, North Korea.... that whole potfull of psychopathic despots, who are amazingly indifferent to the well-being of their populace. I suspect it is truly impossible for any of us, outside of such countries, to understand why crushing sanctions and rapidly-climbing popular misery has so little impact on their political careers: they don\u0027t care and there is no upcoming vote that might make them care. They will *never* change. The sanctions and etc. are simply a way to starve their particular beast, slowly, so that it can\u0027t devour its neighbors.\n\nEven if Russians began starving and freezing to death on their potato fields, Putin can just put on his snazzy shades and grin for the cameras. After all, if they have no potatoes, let them eat cake! Not only does he not care, he doesn\u0027t care, to an extent we can only find baffling. We have no frame of reference, for such rulers. We can only hope that someone around him might care, and remove him from office, in their traditional fashion.\n\nAmericans whine, incessently, but I think we can all see that trading in Trump for Biden, and then back to Trump effected some tangible difference in policy. It wasn\u0027t mere democratic theater. Merkel retiring, in Germany, rapidly uncovered the economic and political poison of her chancellorship, and we are all grateful that we didn\u0027t need to beg the USA to surgically remove her, like Maduro. Merkel, like all democratic politicians we have grown utterly sick of, was painlessly sent on a book tour and out to the golfing range, whence she proceeds to annoy and bore us with tiresome excuses about her own incompetence. Let her talk.\n\nGood riddance to bad rubbish, democratic-style. If only it were so easy to be rid of Kadyrov. Perhaps we can offer to build him a presidential library or name a bridge after him, so that he joins the book tour. But we\u0027ll likely be stuck, disappointedly reading the political obituaries, with the fate of millions of people determined by the blips of his dialysis machine.","image":"https:\/\/cdn.prod.www.spiegel.de\/images\/c6e47b08-37b8-46ab-aceb-511681f02553_w1840_r1.778_fpx60.02_fpy50.webp","pubkey":"dd664d5e4016433a8cd69f005ae1480804351789b59de5af06276de65633d319","kind":30023,"createdAt":"2026-04-21T09:29:22+00:00","publishedAt":null,"topics":["politic","chechnya","ukraine"],"url":"https:\/\/www.decentnewsroom.com\/mag\/newsroom-magazine-on-imwald-by-laeserin\/cat\/newsroom-magazine-on-imwald-by-laeserin-category-politics\/d\/we-can-send-merz-out-to-the-golf-course"},{"title":"The Abundance Cage","slug":"the-abundance-cage","summary":"What if the most dangerous prison ever built has no walls, no guards, and comes with a guaranteed income? Musk\u0027s Universal High Income proposal isn\u0027t a safety net but it\u0027s the final move in a game where \u0022the technology oligarch who proposes UHI is not a philanthropist; he is the architect of a closed loop.\u0022 Eight billion people rendered economically redundant, wholly dependent on the benevolence of the men who own the machines, history has a word for that arrangement. It wasn\u0027t called freedom then either.","content":"New technologies often arrive riding a wave of \u0022hopium,\u0022 where its gains are exaggerated and its risks are glossed over. Reflecting on the internet\u0027s emergence in the mid-1990s, many visionaries predicted a digital utopia of free information, dominant e-commerce and a borderless world. However, they failed to foresee the return of censorship, the actual pace of global adoption, or the deep psychological impact it would have on society.\n\nWe are currently witnessing a similar cycle with artificial intelligence, as its advantages are grossly exaggerated while its potential hazards remain largely ignored. Elon Musk recently ignited a firestorm of debate across the internet when he proposed a controversial solution to the anticipated economic upheaval caused by artificial intelligence. He [*tweeted:*](https:\/\/archive.is\/ybuYW)\n\n\u003E *\u201cUniversal HIGH INCOME via checks issued by the Federal government is the best way to deal with unemployment caused by AI.\u00a0 AI\/robotics will produce goods \u0026 services far in excess of the increase in the money supply, so there will not be inflation.\u201d*\n\nIn short, Elon is asking you to trust the state\u2019s judgement as the chief allocator of productivity gains from AI adoption. This is the same government that he unsuccessfully tried to repair with DOGE before throwing in the towel and declaring it to be[*\u0026#x20;\u201cbasically unfixable\u201d.*](https:\/\/x.com\/europa\/status\/2039632057463185519?s=20) That\u2019s the same group of people that he believes will do a stellar job of issuing UHI responsibly and wants you to put your trust in their hands? How\u2019s that for a contradiction! He further asserts, with characteristic bravado, that there will be \u0022no inflation.\u0022 Framing it as liberation since the machines will do all the work; while the citizen receives the dividend. Who could object?\n\nI object. I do so not merely on the grounds of economics (we all know there is no free lunch) but simply because this is a blueprint for serfdom. It is the most elegant form of subjugation yet devised; servitude dressed in the language of abundance.\u00a0\n\n## **The False Binary**\n\nMusk presents a false binary: either the machine replaces you and you receive a government cheque, or the machine replaces you and you starve. This framing conceals the actual question, which is not *whether* machines will augment human productive capacity, but *who will own the machines, who will benefit from their output, and in what monetary system the gains will be denominated*?\n\nFurthermore this idea is based on a chain of heroic assumptions that the AI industry will rake in tens of trillions in revenue; that a functional state will tax those revenues honestly and that the state will simply distribute the cheques to citizens, equally, without using its distribution as leverage in any way. That\u2019s also assuming the AI agents themselves don\u2019t \u201crebel\u201d against the \u201cuseless eaters\u201d that are benefitting from all their hard work.\u00a0\n\nGiven how companies like Palantir are already using AI and have been integrated into the defence infrastructure of the US, as well as other key parts of the economy; over time as their power grows what\u2019s to stop them from becoming the new unelected government? Perhaps this is the real plan, that is being sold to us under the guise of *\u201c*[**everyone will have a penthouse\u201d**](https:\/\/x.com\/elonmusk\/status\/2045589182308040856?s=20)*\u0026#x20;*\u0026#x75;topian propaganda. That\u2019s before we even consider the fact that the state would probably use a CBDC for such a program. A government that can give you everything can take everything away. A citizenry that depends on the state for its subsistence is not free; it is domesticated.\u00a0\n\nWe saw this during the plandemic when vaccine passports became the gateway to participating in normal life, and the same government that Elon wants you to trust created a two-tiered society where you had less rights as an unvaccinated person. With this in mind, what\u2019s to stop a government that now has that kind of power from abusing it by targeting dissidents or settling political scores? What of people living under repressive governments, what happens to them when this kind of power is handed over to the state?\u00a0\n\n## **The inflation illusion**\n\nMusk\u2019s most audacious claim is that a Federal program issuing \u0022high income\u0022 cheques to tens of millions of displaced workers will produce no inflation. That is definitely untrue.\u00a0\n\nDuring the 2025 fiscal year, the U.S. government [*recorded expenditures*](https:\/\/fiscaldata.treasury.gov\/americas-finance-guide\/national-deficit\/) of $7 trillion against $5.23 trillion in revenue. This shortfall was financed through borrowing, contributing to a massive national debt that has now climbed to $39 trillion. AI is incapable of resolving the problem of a state that habitually outspends its income. This lack of fiscal discipline, rather than a shortfall in productivity, is what ultimately fuels inflation. Inflation is not primarily a function of supply chains or price indices but it is the inevitable consequence of increasing the money supply faster than the production of real goods and services. Call it what you will: \u0022printing,\u0022 \u0022deficit spending,\u0022 \u0022quantitative easing,\u0022 or \u0022Universal High Income.\u0022\n\nMusk\u0027s retort, presumably, is that AI will so dramatically increase productivity that output will keep pace with the new money. Perhaps, but this argument contains a fatal contradiction. If AI produces such abundance that inflation is impossible, then the displaced worker needs no government cheque as the abundance itself will drive prices toward zero. Should the abundance be insufficient to prevent inflation, then the program destroys the very purchasing power it claims to provide. You cannot have it both ways.\u00a0\n\nFurthermore, the other problematic assumption with this is that governments will be fiscally responsible and will only print money at a constant rate; thus implying that they will curb their spending. Anyone that has been merely observing government spending, even for a short period of time, knows that the general tendency of government is always to spend more not less. Do you honestly foresee a scenario where the Pentagon will cut its budget in half every year simply because they have more efficient AI systems? I highly doubt it.\n\nThe argument isn\u2019t against the use of AI per se but with a failure to closely examine actions and their consequences in an economy. The biggest threat to the abundance narrative will be the fiat system and the fact that it\u2019s inflationary by design. If the fiat financial system requires continuous credit expansion to grow, how can such a system be sustainable in a world where there i\u0026#x73;*\u0026#x20;no inflation?\u0026#xA0;*\n\nSovereign debt, which underpins the entire system of reserve currency issuance, is viable only in an environment where the future units in which it will be repaid are worth less than the units borrowed today. Governments and central banks are, in a deep sense, inflation merchants. They must sell the currency to fund the state, and the currency is only worth holding if it depreciates slowly enough to retain confidence, yet fast enough to service the debt loads states have accumulated across decades of deficit spending.The bigger threat is to the solvency of the fiat system itself.\u00a0\n\nThe debt loads that major governments have accumulated are viable only under specific assumptions; that growth will continue, that inflation will persist, and that debt servicing costs remain manageable relative to tax revenues. AI disrupts all three simultaneously. It threatens to deliver such profound deflationary pressure that central banks lose control of the inflation signal entirely. In a world where governments must inflate or default, the failure to inflate is fatal for the fiat system.The deflationary world that Musk envisions as being the outcome of AI driven productivity is a mathematical impossibility under a fiat regime because deflation is an existential threat to the entire fiat ponzi scheme.\n\n## **Power without accountability: the new feudalism**\n\nThe Roman *annona*, the grain ration that fed the urban poor of the Empire, began as emergency relief and became the instrument by which emperors secured quiescence. *Panem et circenses:* bread and spectacle. The population that might have organized, that might have demanded political accountability, was pacified by the dole. The Emperors understood, as Musk surely understands, that a population fed by the state is a population controlled by the state.\n\nThe enslaved worker of the antebellum South received food, shelter, clothing; subsistence, guaranteed, in exchange for the surrender of agency. The master\u0027s power was not exercised primarily through violence, though violence was always available. It was exercised through the structure of dependency itself: the knowledge that outside the plantation there was no food, no shelter, no position. The \u201ccheque\u201d in this system was not cash but corn.\u00a0\n\nNow scale this dynamic to the present. Artificial intelligence, as currently developing, is not a distributed technology. It is extraordinarily capital-intensive, concentrated in the hands of a very small number of corporations among them, the enterprises of Elon Musk and his peers. In this AI dominated world, these men who control the machines that replace your labour, while simultaneously lobbying for the government program that sustains you in your idleness, have achieved something the feudal lord could only dream of; total economic enslavement without a sword drawn. To have 8 billion people dependent on the benevolence of the tech bros who will have all the capital and the power, while the citizen owns nothing but his own idleness, is a destiny that no free man should find tolerable.\n\nIn this chain of causation, the technology oligarch who proposes UHI is not a philanthropist. He is the architect of a closed loop, his machines displace your labour, his lobbying and a portion of the company\u2019s revenues secure your government cheque, your government cheque makes you politically docile, your political docility secures the regulatory environment his machines require. He has privatized the gains and socialized the dependency.\n\nOnce the state is established as the universal income distributor, the question of how much to distribute becomes permanently political. Every election becomes a bidding war over UHI levels, every fiscal crisis becomes a justification for expanding the conditions attached to payment and every social problem becomes a candidate for behavioral modification through the threat of payment suspension.\u00a0\n\nThe AI infrastructure that makes UHI administratively feasible also makes it the most powerful behavioral surveillance and control system ever built. Citizens will not be required to do anything overtly but they will simply find that certain behaviors, associations, speech acts, and consumption choices are quietly incompatible with continued receipt of their government cheque. The state does not need malicious intent to arrive at total economic control through UHI. It needs only the ordinary operational logic of a bureaucratic institution with unlimited financial leverage over the population it administers.\n\n## **What is to be done: the Bitcoin standard and the free machine**\n\nWe have spent considerable time discussing what we oppose. It is time to speak plainly about what we would like to see and to do so without the wan equivocation that passes for policy analysis in this diminished age. The status quo of the fiat rot that makes Musk\u0027s proposal seem plausible by comparison must be immediately abolished. This is why I am advocating for something genuinely radical, genuinely liberating, and grounded in the same tradition of distributed sovereignty. A hard money standard, anchored in Bitcoin, in which artificial intelligence and robotics serve as tools wielded by free individuals rather than instruments of control operated by concentrated power.\n\nConsider the carpenter, who for a century, the power saw has made the carpenter more productive than his predecessor who worked only by hand. The power saw did not make the carpenter obsolete. It liberated him from the most tedious portion of his labour and freed his attention for joinery, for design, for the judgment that distinguishes craft from mere cutting.\n\nThe carpenter did not receive a government cheque in compensation for the power saw\u0027s existence. He purchased the saw, and his increased productivity generated the income to accumulate capital for the next tool. The machine served the man. The machine is not the enemy of meaningful work. Cheap money is the enemy of meaningful work. The machine is merely the latest tool; the monetary system is the operating environment in which that tool is either liberating or enslaving.\n\nThe question, then, is not the machine. The question is the money and this is where the Bitcoin standard becomes not merely relevant but essential. In a Bitcoin-denominated economy, when AI reduces the cost of producing legal services, medical care, software, or education, the price of those services falls in bitcoin terms, and the purchasing power of every bitcoin holder rises proportionally. There is no monetary authority to counteract this signal, no need to \u201cstimulate demand\u201d and no debt overhang to service through currency debasement. Bitcoin is the only monetary system in which the deflationary gains of AI can be fully and fairly harvested by the population rather than captured by the financial system.\n\nThe Bitcoin network also possesses a property uniquely suited to an AI economy: it is natively digital and natively programmable. As AI agents become economic actors in their own right, capable of entering contracts, rendering services, receiving payment, and managing resources; they require a monetary system they can interact with directly, without banking relationships, without identity verification tied to human legal personhood, without the friction and censorship potential of fiat correspondent banking. Bitcoin\u0027s open protocol, accessible to any computation that can speak its language, provides exactly this. It is the first monetary system that a machine can use as easily as a human.\n\nIf history is a guide, whenever a new wave of automation arrives; the market does not simply destroy jobs but it dissolves old categories of work and, through the restless operation of the price system, surfaces new ones that no central planner could have designed or foreseen. The hand-loom weavers displaced by the power loom did not need government handouts, but they needed the freedom to enter new industries at market wages. The same dynamic, operating at AI scale and speed, will produce new forms of productive human activity, provided the price system is allowed to function. Universal High Income would corrode that process at the root, replacing the hunger that drives adaptation with the sedation of a government stipend\n\n## **Eudaimonia vs. the Digital Serf.\u0026#xA0;**\n\nThe distinction that Musk\u0027s proposal erases, which the Bitcoin standard restores, is the distinction between *toiling for sustenance* and *working for purpose*. These are not the same thing, and the conflation of them is the deepest error in the technocratic imagination. Toiling for sustenance is what the serf did, labour extracted by necessity, directed by another\u0027s will, producing no accumulation of capital, no development of personal mastery, no expression of individual judgment. The serf plowed because he had no alternative; he received subsistence in return; he built nothing of his own. The UHI recipient is the digital serf: his sustenance is guaranteed, his labour is unnecessary, and the development of personal mastery, the accumulation of capital, the exercise of economic agency, all of these are rendered irrelevant.\u00a0\n\nWorking for purpose is something categorically different. It is the craftsman who chooses her specialty because it aligns with her aptitude and her vision of a life well-lived. It is the farmer who knows his land intimately and directs the robotic harvester not as a passive recipient of technology but as a sovereign producer deploying a tool. It is the physician who uses the diagnostic AI as a second opinion rather than a replacement for clinical judgment. It is, in the deepest sense, the Aristotelian concept of *eudaimonia* (flourishing) which is not a passive state of contentment but an active condition of excellence: the exercise of distinctively human capacities in pursuit of genuinely chosen ends. No algorithm can choose your ends for you.\u00a0\n\nThe Bitcoin standard creates the material preconditions for this kind of work by doing one thing that no government program can do, it lowers time preference. In a fiat system, high time preference is the default;\u00a0 inflation punishes patience, debt rewards consumption, and the quarterly earnings report governs corporate behaviour with a tyranny that destroys long-term investment. In a hard money system, the future is properly weighted.\n\nThe craftsman can afford to spend three years mastering a skill before it pays off, because her savings will be worth more in three years, not less. The entrepreneur can build a business with a ten-year horizon, because patient capital is not being eroded from below. The worker displaced by automation can afford the two years of retraining that transforms his obsolete skill into a new one, because the money he saved last decade has not been quietly redistributed, via inflation, to the balance sheets of institutions too large and too connected to fail.\n\nThis, then, is the genuine counter-vision: not the passive receipt of government checks, which extinguishes the motivation to adapt and surrenders economic agency to the state; not the resentful rejection of technology, which is as futile as opposing the power saw; but the active deployment of powerful tools (AI, robotics, the entire apparatus of automated production) by individuals who own sound money, whose savings are protected across time, whose capital accumulates at the pace of their own discipline and not at the discretion of any central authority. In such a world, the arrival of a more powerful machine is not a threat to be compensated for. It is an inheritance to be claimed; another instrument added to the workshop of a free people who own their labour, own their money, and bow to no sovereign for the disposition of either.\n","image":"https:\/\/blossom.primal.net\/979590912ce9122aaa9dadede0dd530e62427ff3e5129f8f9c9b171d3c605780.png","pubkey":"54609048284d2a151c8df625f40c389d423ed057fcef927db88956d28e22ba03","kind":30023,"createdAt":"2026-04-21T22:59:01+00:00","publishedAt":"2026-04-21T22:59:01+00:00","topics":["bitcoin","ai","abundance","freedom","ubi","cbdc"],"url":"https:\/\/www.decentnewsroom.com\/mag\/newsroom-magazine-on-imwald-by-laeserin\/cat\/newsroom-magazine-on-imwald-by-laeserin-category-politics\/d\/the-abundance-cage"},{"title":" Financial Repression and the March Toward Serfdom","slug":"-financial-repression-and-the-march-toward-serfdom","summary":"The Dutch government just declared war on private capital and most Europeans don\u0027t even know it yet. The Netherlands\u0027 Box 3 reform imposes a 36% tax on unrealized gains across stocks, bonds, and crypto, forcing ordinary citizens to liquidate real assets to pay for paper profits they haven\u0027t made.  The sophisticated wealthy will restructure offshore but the schoolteacher with an index fund will not. What follows is an indictment of one of the most destructive fiscal policies in modern European history and a defiant blueprint for how free people can build their way out of it.","content":"There is a moment in every empire\u2019s decline when the state, having exhausted the easier methods of extraction, turns directly on the accumulated savings of its citizenry. Rome debased its currency, France imposed the [**gabelle***\u0026#x20;*](https:\/\/www.britannica.com\/topic\/gabelle)and the Soviet Union simply took everything. The Dutch government, in its characteristic Northern European technocratic fashion, has chosen a more bureaucratically elegant route, where they will tax their citizens on money they haven\u2019t made yet.\n\n[*The Box 3 reform*](https:\/\/www.archipeltaxadvice.nl\/insights\/box-3-unrealized-gains-tax\/), scheduled for implementation in 2028, proposes a 36% levy on unrealized gains across stocks, bonds, and cryptocurrency holdings. Not on profits realized or income earned, but on *paper gains*; the fluctuating, market-priced, potentially-evaporating-tomorrow *notional* appreciation of assets you still own. This is confiscation by stealth that is dressed up as tax policy. Similar unrealised gains tax proposals are circulating in Belgium, Denmark, and at the EU level as part of broader capital income harmonisation discussions, but the Netherlands is the leading edge, not an isolated case\n\n### **Property Rights Are Not Negotiable \\\u0026This Policy Abolishes Them**\n\nProperty rights are the logical prerequisite of all social cooperation. You own your body, the products of your labour, and assets acquired through voluntary exchange. The state\u2019s legitimate role, to whatever limited degree one grants it legitimacy at all, does not extend to claiming title over appreciation in the value of assets you continue to hold and have not sold.\n\nTaxing unrealized gains is not just bad policy but a massive philosophical contradiction. When the Dutch tax authority demands 36% of a gain that exists only as a number on a brokerage screen, a number that can reverse tomorrow, it is by definition asserting a property claim over something that does not yet, in any economically meaningful sense, exist. The gain is unrealized and is potential in the *future*. Taxing it requires you, today, to liquidate real assets to pay for a tax liability generated by a fictitious event.\n\nAs Murray Rothbard pointed out in the [**Anatomy of the State**](https:\/\/cdn.mises.org\/anatomy-of-the-state.pdf), the state is that organization which claims a monopoly on the use of force over a given territorial area, and which sustains itself through compulsory extraction, taxation, which when stripped of its legal dressing, is indistinguishable from theft. The Box 3 reform is simply a more aggressive and transparent iteration of this logic. The Dutch government will not just be taxing the income of its citizens, but it will be taxing their *wealth*; more specifically, the unrealized appreciation of it and forcing them to sell productive capital to satisfy the bill.\n\n### **The Economics of Destruction: What Happens When You Tax Unrealized Gains**\n\nContrary to popular opinion in Keynesian circles, all economic value is subjective, capital formation requires low time preference, and savings and investment represent the bedrock of prosperity. Time preference, the degree to which individuals prefer present over future consumption; determines civilization\u2019s trajectory. Low time preference produces savings, investment, long-term thinking, and compounding wealth. High time preference produces consumption, debt, political myopia, and eventual collapse.\n\nThe unrealized gains tax is a blunt instrument designed, whether intentionally or through economic illiteracy, to dramatically raise the time preference of every Dutch investor. Why hold assets for the long run when you face annual tax bills on their paper appreciation? Why compound your savings when the government extracts a 36% toll on the compounding itself? The rational response is to reduce equity exposure, shorten investment horizons, and shift into non-taxed or less-taxed vehicles. As a result the following consequences are likely to follow:\n\n**Capital flight is not a risk. It is a mathematical certainty.** Affluent Dutch investors, precisely the people with the capital, legal infrastructure, and international mobility to relocate assets, will do so. They will restructure through holding companies in Luxembourg, Cyprus, Ireland, or Singapore. Offshore corporate vehicles will provide carve-outs for the sophisticated. The burden will fall on those who cannot afford the accountants and the jurisdiction shopping, the middle class.\n\n**Liquidity contraction follows forced selling.** When investors must liquidate holdings to meet tax obligations on unrealized gains, they do not sell in an orderly fashion. They sell into markets. This creates price pressure, which reduces asset values, which, in a grim irony, potentially reduces or eliminates the very gain they were taxed on. A cacophony of the \u201cunintended consequences\u201d of central planning will manifest in full force, thanks to the planners\u2019 inability to anticipate the second and third-order effects of their interventions. The Dutch government cannot model how many investors will sell, when, and into what market conditions.\n\n**Entrepreneurship is strangled in the cradle.** Startup equity which is illiquid during the early-stages, and often locked up contractually; will generate paper gains that founders and employees cannot convert to cash. Will the Dutch government demand tax payment on Series B valuations from engineers who hold options they cannot exercise? The answer, buried in the legislation\u2019s details, will determine whether the Netherlands remains a viable startup ecosystem. Early signals suggest it will not.\n\n### **The EU Architecture: Harmonization as Subjugation**\n\nThe Dutch Box 3 reform does not exist in isolation, but must be understood as part of a broader European project of tax coordination. A euphemism for harmonization, which is itself a euphemism for control. The EU\u2019s [*Capital Markets Union*](https:\/\/finance.ec.europa.eu\/financial-markets\/financial-markets-policy\/capital-markets-union\/what-capital-markets-union_en), its[*\u0026#x20;Anti-Tax Avoidance Directives*](https:\/\/taxation-customs.ec.europa.eu\/taxation\/business-taxation\/anti-tax-avoidance-directive_en), and the OECD\u2019s[*\u0026#x20;Global Minimum Tax framework*](https:\/\/www.oecd.org\/en\/topics\/sub-issues\/global-minimum-tax.html) are all facets of the same tendency; the gradual elimination of tax competition between jurisdictions, the closing of escape routes for mobile capital, and the consolidation of fiscal extraction power at the supranational level.\n\nThis collectivist economic planning, once initiated at the national level, creates irresistible pressure for supranational coordination, because capital, unlike labour, can move. The logical endpoint of EU tax harmonization is a continental fiscal corral in which capital has nowhere to run. The Dutch policy, if successfully implemented without any citizen backlash, becomes a template. It demonstrates that a wealthy, politically stable, well-regarded EU member can impose unrealized gains taxation without triggering immediate economic collapse or civil unrest. Other member states will take notes and implement the same playbook.\n\nThis is precisely how European financial repression advances incrementally, jurisdiction by jurisdiction, always wrapped in the language of fairness, always targeting the \u201crich,\u201d always generating precedents that harmonize upward.\n\n### **The BIS Fingerprints: Central Planning of European Capital**\n\nExamine the broader architecture and the role of the Bank for International Settlements (BIS) becomes impossible to ignore. BIS macroprudential frameworks, the ECB\u2019s regulatory capture of European banking, and the accelerating push toward central bank digital currencies represent a coherent vision, which is the migration of capital allocation authority from private actors to state-allied institutions.\n\nThe unrealized gains tax accelerates this process through market mechanics. When retail investors are forced to sell equities to meet tax obligations, those equities are purchased by someone. That someone, in a market with sufficient institutional liquidity, tends to be pension funds, sovereign wealth vehicles, insurance companies, and increasingly through quantitative easing (QE) and asset purchase programs by central banks themselves. The wealth transfer upwards is a rationally engineered process..\n\nIn other words, this 36% tax on unrealized gains is, functionally, a tool for transferring equity ownership from independent private holders to state-adjacent institutional actors. Combined with the ECB\u2019s continued expansion of its balance sheet, its interest in programmable CBDC architectures, and BIS frameworks that grant regulators increasing visibility into and authority over private financial transactions, the direction of travel is unmistakable: toward a European financial system in which private capital ownership is conditional, monitored, taxed in real time, and ultimately subordinate to macroprudential priorities defined by unelected technocrats in Basel and Frankfurt.\n\nThis is Rothbard\u2019s anatomy of the state thesis rendered in 21st-century technocratic, financial infrastructure. The state does not seize property directly, it taxes, regulates, and inflates until private ownership becomes a costly, precarious burden that rational actors (i.e. the middle class) surrender voluntarily to better-positioned institutional entities.\n\n### **The Middle Class Will Pay. They Always Do.**\n\nEnough talk about the architecture. Let us direct our attention to the human cost.\n\nThe sophisticated wealthy will restructure and establish holding companies in favourable jurisdictions. They will consult teams of tax attorneys and navigate the law with the resources the law costs too much for ordinary people to afford. The truly wealthy in the Netherlands, old money, institutional money, money with offshore corporate structures; will be largely unaffected by Box 3 in its intended form.\n\nThe Dutch schoolteacher who opened a brokerage account during COVID-19 and bought index funds will not be so fortunate. The freelance developer who accumulated \u20ac150,000 in ETF holdings over a decade of disciplined saving will face annual tax bills on paper gains he cannot predict and may not be able to pay without selling the assets. The middle-class family that moved a portion of their pension savings into stonks because they watched the purchasing power of their euros erode year after year will find themselves liquidating hard-won positions to feed a tax authority\u2019s demand for payment on appreciation they have not monetized.\n\nThis is the distributional reality that the \u201ctax the rich\u201d framing deliberately obscures. Wealth taxes do not fall on the wealthy in proportion to the narrative. They fall on the *aspiring wealthy* which are always the people who are *trying* to build multigenerational financial security through patient, disciplined capital accumulation. The middle class. The people least able to absorb forced liquidation and most dependent on compound returns over long time horizons. These are the people who most likely cannot afford the escape routes.\n\nThe moral case for private property rests on the observable fact that it is the indispensable institutional foundation of human prosperity, individual autonomy, and social cooperation. Violate it by taxing people on wealth they have not realized, and forcing them to liquidate savings to satisfy a liability generated by a number on a screen; you do not merely harm economic efficiency. You sever the institutional connection between effort, saving, and security that makes civilized life possible.\n\nIn short, you make people poorer and more dependent on the state. You make them, slowly and incrementally and with great bureaucratic politeness, serfs. Given these obvious outcomes of this policy, it becomes increasingly difficult to attribute such policies to incompetence and not malice.\n\n### **The Exit**\n\nConsider what financial repression actually looks like for the human beings it crushes, and you will understand why monetary alternatives are not optional luxuries but existential necessities.\n\nIn Cyprus in 2013, depositors woke up one morning to find their accounts seized to bail out banks that had been reckless with their property. In Greece, capital controls capped ATM withdrawals at sixty euros per day, imprisoning citizens inside a monetary jurisdiction they could not legally exit. In Argentina, the blue dollar market; the black market, by the state\u2019s preferred terminology has functioned for decades as the real economy, because the peso is not a store of value, it is a *destruction* of value, engineered by a state that monetizes its own fiscal incontinence at the expense of the productive class.\n\nIn Nigeria, the naira has lost over ninety percent of its dollar value in a decade while the central bank simultaneously prosecuted citizens for using alternatives. These are not policy failures but are policy *successes*, with the policy being the subordination of private property to state finance.\n\nThe Dutch Box 3 reform is a template that more European governments will follow. The EU harmonization machinery will attempt to close the exits and those who have not considered what it means to hold an asset that exists outside the legacy financial system; outside the BIS regulatory perimeter, outside the ECB\u2019s macroprudential reach, will find themselves without options at precisely the moment options matter most.\n\nThe antidote to a rigged system is to stop playing by its rules wherever legally possible and build parallel infrastructure that operates on sound money principles. I will outline three important steps that EU citizens can start implementing today in light of these increasingly hostile regulations, assuming leaving the EU isn\u2019t an option.\n\nThe first and most important step in this parallel infrastructure is self custody. Your Bitcoin on an exchange is not your Bitcoin. It is a claim on an institution subject to regulatory seizure, compliance demands, and the same counterparty risk the fiat system produces in abundance. Hardware wallets with air-gapped signing, multi-signature setups for larger holdings, and steel-stamped seed phrase backups stored in geographically distributed locations are baseline requirements. The entire value proposition of Bitcoin as a property rights instrument collapses if you do not hold your own keys.\n\nAcquiring Bitcoin through peer-to-peer rails is the next important practical step. [*Bisq,*](https:\/\/bisq.network\/) [*Peach Bitcoin*](https:\/\/peachbitcoin.com\/), and [*RoboSats*](http:\/\/robosatsy56bwqn56qyadmcxkx767hnabg4mihxlmgyt6if5gnuxvzad.onion\/) enable non-KYC Bitcoin acquisition through peer-to-peer exchange with no centralized custodian. These platforms operate within legal grey zones in most EU jurisdictions, not illegal, but not convenient. Use them deliberately and consistently for a portion of your acquisition strategy. Cash-for-Bitcoin meetups through Bitcoin-only communities exist in Amsterdam, Berlin, Prague, and Zurich. Use them. Not only does this starve the fiat banking system, that centralized exchanges are now a part of, but it also preserves your financial privacy. Paying a small premium for privacy is indeed worth it.\n\nLastly, Bitcoin circular economies are of paramount importance. A true Bitcoin circular economy is not a collection of individual actors holding BTC. It is a *network* of interconnected businesses, freelancers, employees, and consumers who route value through Bitcoin rather than through the euro banking system. This means Bitcoin earned is Bitcoin spent, not Bitcoin converted back to euros at every junction. A Bitcoin circular economy cannot survive on isolated transactions. It requires density with enough merchants accepting Bitcoin that a person can, in a given week, spend Bitcoin on coffee, lunch, professional services, and groceries without touching the euro system.\n\nThis starts by identifying Bitcoin-accepting merchants. Who among your local business community, professional network, and social circle already holds Bitcoin? These are your first trading partners. Every time Bitcoin flows directly from a buyer\u2019s wallet to a merchant\u2019s wallet, from a client to a freelancer, from an employer to an employee and the banking system is bypassed, exchange fees are avoided, and the circular economy deepens. The initial goal is not to never touch a fiat offramp. It is to touch it less with every passing month. [*Bitrefill*](http:\/\/www.bitrefill.com\/) also provides gift cards for hundreds of retailers globally, enabling Bitcoin to reach nearly every consumer context. Stack Bitcoin income, spend Bitcoin where possible, minimize fiat conversion events, and minimize taxable realization events in the process.\n\nManufactured crisis is the new policy, with distressed acquisition being the endgame. Only hard money, held in self-custody, beyond the grasp of the technocrats in The Hague and Brussels and Basel, offers a genuine alternative. That hard money is Bitcoin. The Dutch government has declared war on private capital and this is just the beginning. The future of European financial sovereignty depends on individuals who refuse, quietly and relentlessly, to comply with their own impoverishment.\n","image":"https:\/\/blossom.primal.net\/83a17d377d173ae3bd6f7e02246b53de1625c529792d9ad95b0ae7e5215fb5ae.png","pubkey":"54609048284d2a151c8df625f40c389d423ed057fcef927db88956d28e22ba03","kind":30023,"createdAt":"2026-05-08T17:15:09+00:00","publishedAt":"2026-05-08T17:15:09+00:00","topics":["bitcoin","eu","digital euro","ecb","bis","freedom"],"url":"https:\/\/www.decentnewsroom.com\/mag\/newsroom-magazine-on-imwald-by-laeserin\/cat\/newsroom-magazine-on-imwald-by-laeserin-category-politics\/d\/-financial-repression-and-the-march-toward-serfdom"},{"title":"Central Planning is a Problem for Charities","slug":"central-planning-in-charity","summary":"Why concentrated wealth is so terribly difficult to spend, even if you donate it.","content":"I keep seeing articles where millionaires and billionaires describe how they are trying to donate their wealth to good works. This is noble, but the articles make it clear how difficult it actually is for one person, trust, or fund, to give away money. And the more money given away by one entity (i.e. the more concentrated the wealth among the charitable), the less efficiently and effectively the money can be spent.\n\nThe market for charitable goods is sprawling and complex. There is a large amount of information that only the workers \u0022on the ground\u0022 even have, which is why the best charities tend to be those like parishes, mosques, fire departments, private initiatives to renew the school roof, local emergency aide following national disasters, the regional children\u0027s hospital, etc. There, the people donating the money, the people spending the money, and the people receiving the goods or services, are intimately aware of the situation and have a clearer understanding of it. And the smaller size of the charity reduces the amount of money that can be misappropriated or simply mispent.\n\nThis charitable subsidiarity also leads to more equitable charitable giving. Lots of individual people spending small sums of money can add up to the same amount as a large grant, but the spending will tend to be spread around to a larger number of recipients. In fact, the recipients that would have gotten the large grant might receive few donations if the number of people \u0022voting\u0022 on (donating to) the various recipients is larger. That one person might have a specific cause they want to promote, that the majority of givers don\u0027t care about or even find destructive.\n\nIt is also that large, individual gifts that seem relatively small to the person giving them, can actually end up destroying or skewing a small, charity market (like Nostr), with the person trying to do something positive facing constant criticism. A grant of $100k or even $1m is not an awful lot, in the larger scheme of things, but if the competition is running on $1k or $10k, it seems grotesquely outsized and unjustified. The market that grant is landing in is too small to absorb it, so the grant can destroy the market\u0027s pricing mechanism and give the charitable consumers the false impression that there must have been a 100x or 1000x difference in quality between the one recipient or the other, when the difference was perhaps negligible.\n\nThis is the classic example of how wealth inequality skews absolutely everything, even when the person receiving the wealth also finds it problematic and is attempting to extricate themselves from the money. Once inequality exists, it is invariably painful to unwind it because central planning is based upon less information than decentralized planning.","image":"https:\/\/i.nostr.build\/wp429V19pN2mDbij.jpg","pubkey":"dd664d5e4016433a8cd69f005ae1480804351789b59de5af06276de65633d319","kind":30023,"createdAt":"2026-07-06T16:33:17+00:00","publishedAt":"2026-07-06T16:23:13+00:00","topics":["charity","economic","inequality"],"url":"https:\/\/www.decentnewsroom.com\/mag\/newsroom-magazine-on-imwald-by-laeserin\/cat\/newsroom-magazine-on-imwald-by-laeserin-category-politics\/d\/central-planning-in-charity"}]},{"slug":"newsroom-magazine-on-imwald-by-laeserin-category-economy","title":"Economy","summary":"","image":null,"url":"https:\/\/www.decentnewsroom.com\/mag\/newsroom-magazine-on-imwald-by-laeserin\/cat\/newsroom-magazine-on-imwald-by-laeserin-category-economy","articleCount":3,"articles":[{"title":"MBS26: Why Muslims Must Embrace Nostr","slug":"g8QNvFd4nEJkV64HkqLOC","summary":"Lecture notes from the Second Muslim Bitcoin Summit Nostr talk.","content":"*Full prepared text from the second Muslim Bitcoin Summit Nostr lecture.*\n\n04.19.26 Dallas, TX\n\n---\n\n\u003E The question is never only whether the tech just works. The more important question is what kind of human being the tech expects, and what kind of human being the tech produces.\n~ nostr:npub1uzfp6cgwue2njm86cmyeq7m26y0n58w72acq98sjsnnv4c87002s6857h3 \n\n# Why Muslims Must Embrace Nostr\n\nAt the inaugural summit last year I was given the honor of hosting the Nostr workshop. To my knowledge this was the first time Nostr was presented at any formal Muslim event. The fact that this year MBS26 has dedicated space for a talk as well as a workshop[^1] I think speaks to how easy it is for us to understand and embrace liberating technologies since it is what we are already doing when we sell our fiat and start stacking sats, set up our own nodes, and withdrawn our coins from exchanges to embrace the full beauty of the bitcoin standard. Muslim Bitcoiners have been constant champions of sovereign tech and Nostr is really just a social protocol that elegantly integrates with bitcoin lightning payments to instantly and permissionlessly economize. \n\nAt last years\u0027 workshop I framed my presentation of Nostr around this quote from nostr:npub1chmhgx9nwxdpwv6jj6qs257fwzrhtsjh2egvyvqq3rmzfy8cd5fq4nr4y5 who is a key figure in the muslim cypherpunk space[^2]. He wrote in his essay [Notes on Digital Sovereignty](https:\/\/theiqrafiles.com\/notes-on-digital-sovereignty\/) that:\n\n\u003E The first step towards establishing any type of Digital Sovereignty is to consider migration away from infrastructure and networks that are saturated with malevolent surveillance\u2026 there must be a simple recognition that anything sustainable from an Islamic perspective cannot be built on the platforms of Meta, Google or Amazon.\n\nToday I\u0027m not here to give you a state of the art on Nostr[^3]. What I want to do is discuss the idea of Digital Hijra. \n\n## I. Beyond the Technicals of Onboarding \u2014 Why Migrate to Nostr At All?\n\nThere is an essay that I think deserves more serious engagement than it\u0027s gotten so far. nostr:naddr1qvzqqqr4gupzpcyjr4ssaej489k043kfjpak45gl8gwau4msq20p9p8xets0u774qyd8wumn8ghj7mn0daexummyv5hxummnw3erztnrdakj7qgmwaehxw309a6xsetxdaex2um59ehx7um5wgcjucm0d5hsqyp4xyunqwtpvymngwfj8ymrxve3uq9e7a Our very own Muslim Bitcoiner has made in it a real theological argument: that *istikhlaf* (the Quranic doctrine of vicegerency) extends into the domain of digital infrastructure, and that Muslims have an obligation grounded in the shariah to migrate away from systems of surveillance and behavioral capture toward sovereign, decentralized alternatives. This naming is not rhetorical. A real Digital Hijra is being proposed. \n\nI believe this diagnosis of the problem of legacy social media (LSM) is correct and the theological argument needs serious consideration, but the full weight of what it is arguing for has not yet gone as hard as it needs to go. Today I want to push this argument a little further and show you what we mean when we talk about Digital Hijra and Nostr. \n\nReframing structural dependency as a theological problem is a stronger case than most people make when they talk about freedom tech. Discussions around convenience and security are still important but they become secondary concerns. A degradation of the moral agency that Islamic obligation presupposes is a fundamental priority to address. It shifts the conversation out of classical fiqh register, away from the halal-haram question, and into *akhlaq*. What kind of person and what kind of community the Islamic tradition is trying to form. That is the correct frame, and most people are not using it.\n\nThis is an area that we have not spent nearly enough time developing. What is the user or community supposed to do once they have migrated? We genuinely assume that the act of moving to sovereign tools is itself a liberating thing \u2014 that by leaving the panopticon [^4] you start to become free. We treat the infrastructure change and inner transformation as more continuous than I think they actually are. There is something to that. But I think it is imprecise in a way that we need to unpack. The person who arrives on Nostr after years inside algorithmic systems of desire-production doesn\u0027t arrive free. They arrive carrying the formation of everything they just left. The habits of attention, the patterns of desire, the particular relationship to their own identity that those systems spent years engineering. None of that is addressed by a change of protocol.\n\nSome would say this makes the entire project naive. I want to argue something different: that the Digital Hijra movement is right about the necessity for migration but has not yet given a full account of what migration is for. And that when it does, the objection turns out to rest on an anthropology that Islamic theology has pretty good reasons to reject.\n\nThe second objection I see is somewhat harder and something we need to sit with rather than wave off. It is the critique that Digital Hijra is strategically irrelevant. Their argument is simple. Technological acceleration is a planetary process, inhuman in scale, indifferent to what any community decides to do about it. Nobody\u0027s migration to decentralized protocols changes the material conditions of that process. Those of us on Nostr with our relays, zapping from our lightning wallets are not founding an alternative civilization. They are building an enclave. A comfortable one, perhaps. But calling it something more than that is a kind of consolation.\n\nThat critique has real teeth. And I want to deal with it directly, because I think the answer to what\u0027s true in it is also the answer to what\u0027s most consequential about what the Digital Hijra movement is actually proposing.\n\nThat answer starts with getting our own history right \u2014 the Muhajirun did not retreat.\n\n## II. Hijra Is Not Retreat\n\nMost people here have probably encountered some form of Wael Hallaq\u0027s argument from [The Impossible State](https:\/\/theiqrafiles.com\/notes-on-the-hallaqian-problem-and-cybernetics\/). His core thesis is that the modern nation-state is not a neutral tool that Islamic political projects can simply capture and redirect. It is a metaphysically loaded organism with assumptions that produce a specific kind of subject, the citizen, whose formation is structurally incompatible with the Muslim moral subject our tradition is trying to cultivate. The Hallaqian problem[^5] is thus a problem of pyrrhic victory: you capture the machinery of the state and find that the machinery has been quietly capturing you.\n\nThis cybernetic critique extends that diagnosis into the digital domain. Accelerating techno-capital is evolving in ways that are faster than any community\u0027s ability to route around them and fundamentally indifferent to what any group of people decides to do about it. From outside the protocol, Digital Hijra to Nostr, Bitcoin, the broader stack of freedom tech, looks like a reaction formation \u2014 a nice story about sovereignty while not meaningfully different in kind from the infrastructure we are proposing to migrate from. Our hardware is manufactured abroad in conditions of labor extraction. That supply chain isn\u0027t something you can opt out of. As decentralized as the protocol is most internet infrastructure is still owned by the same concentrated capital we claim to escape. And it is a product of the same civilization, running on the same material base, built by developers whose cognitive and moral formation happened inside the same technological epoch. The open source cypherpunk and the surveillance capitalist are operating within the same fundamental disclosure of the world. Hallaq\u0027s insight about the state \u2014 that it is not an inert tool but a living philosophical project \u2014 applies with equal force to digital infrastructure. You do not escape the Matrix by choosing better tools within it.\n\nWhile I obviously do not agree with this argument I do think it is important to understand, as it reveals that where things have gone wrong is in our framing of hijra and a misreading of accelerationism. With Bitcoin our aim hasn\u0027t been to re-create the western financial industry with an Islamic wrapper. So why should our approach to Nostr be any different? \n\nThe Accelerationist framework does not equate technological progress with going along with the currents of hypermodernity. The whole point is that hypermodernity is already losing coherence, having produced the conditions of its own supersession. What matters is not whether you are moving with the flows of cyberspace but whether you are moving along lines that go further and faster than civilization can accommodate or capture. This is not a question of speed. It is about direction and depth of engagement. \n\nThe Hallaqian insight \u2014 that you cannot capture or reform a metaphysically loaded system without being formed by it in return \u2014 does not lead to paralysis. It leads precisely to our founding move. If the state cannot be captured, if the platforms cannot be reformed, if the system cannot be redirected from within \u2014 then you do not try. You build outside. You found something new on different metaphysical ground, with a different account of what the human subject is and what community is for. The Hallaqian problem is not an argument against Digital Hijra. Properly understood, it is the argument for it.\n\nAnd this is where the correction of the historical record becomes important. The Muhajirun were not slower than Mecca. They were more radical. The Quraysh had wealth, infrastructure, established trade networks, social legitimacy, institutional inertia \u2014 everything that looks like power from the outside. The community that left for Medina had none of that. What the Muhajirun had was a different anthropology, a different account of what human beings are for, and the willingness to build something on that account rather than negotiate endlessly with a system that was never going to accommodate them. Mecca did not evolve into Medina. Mecca became historically irrelevant. The strategic act in founding Medina was not a defensive maneuver \u2014 it was the act that made the old configuration of power obsolete. \n\nSo when someone says Digital Hijra is a retreat from the actually consequential terrain of technological development \u2014 I would suggest they have the geometry backwards. Building sovereign infrastructure, forming communities of genuine accountability and spiritual depth outside the attention economy, developing economic relationships that don\u0027t run on surveillance and debt \u2014 this is not slower than what the mainstream is doing. It is operating on an entirely different axis. And different paradigms have a tendency, over time, to redefine what the main axis is.\n\nThis is what I mean when I say Digital Hijra is not the reactionary position but a more radical path. Our religion teaches us what human beings are, what communities are for, and what civilization is supposed to produce \u2014 and that theory is not compatible with the endpoint that instrumental rationality is accelerating toward. That incompatibility is not a weakness. It is precisely the source of whatever genuine transformative potential this movement has.\n\nMuslim Bitcoiner\u0027s original essay gestures toward this. What it doesn\u0027t fully develop is the structure of what gets built after the migration. And that\u0027s where I think the most interesting work is. The Medina model is the primary frame we need to focus on even if it makes some people uncomfortable. The Hijra was not a meditation retreat. It was the founding of a polity \u2014 with governance, economic relationships, mutual obligations built on trust, and a vision of justice it was willing to organize collective life around. The brotherhood pacts between Muhajirun and Ansar, were not warm feelings. They were new institutional forms, built deliberately from available materials, reoriented toward a different goal.\n\nThat is the ambition Digital Hijra either has, or doesn\u0027t. I think it does. The question is whether the community forming around it is willing to take that ambition seriously rather than staying comfortable in the enclave register.\n\nThere are second-order models worth developing alongside this \u2014 the Sufi *tariqa* as a structure for elite formation and transmission of spiritual authority within a network, the classical *rihla* tradition as a model for distributed knowledge and attestation across geography. These are not alternatives to the Medina frame. They are what the Medina frame makes possible once the founding act has been taken seriously. You need the polity before the tariqa can flourish within it. You need the institutional ground before the knowledge networks have somewhere to root.\n\nBut the founding precedes all of that. And you cannot create something half-heartedly. The intention must be clearly followed through. The Muhajirun knew what they were doing. The question the Digital Hijra movement needs to answer is whether we do too.\n\n## III. Fitra and the Protocol\n\nWhen we declare Digital Hijra and prescribe: migrate, change your infrastructure, move to sovereign tools \u2014 the first response is: migrate to where, exactly? And before I move on to Nostr I want to address a real issue and strategic failure that I\u0027ve seen all too often with folks joining Nostr for the first time. \n\nI\u0027ll begin with a proposition that will infuriate most software developers: infrastructure change alone is not sufficient. The current systems are theologically problematic so it is right that migration becomes necessary. Where we move too fast is in implying that migration is transformative in itself \u2014 that the act of arriving somewhere new begins the work of becoming new. That conflation needs to be carefully parsed out, because the work of inner formation is not the same as the work of changing your tools. Pretending otherwise produces a community that may have excellent operational security but suffers from the same fractured attention it started with.\n\nMachinic Desire doesn\u0027t operate on its subjects from the outside. It operates through them. People accustomed to the attention of the algorithm don\u0027t just become visible to it \u2014 they internalize its gaze, they regulate themselves, they conform themselves into the product, becoming the subject the system needs them to be. The observation here is not about surveillance in the crude sense of Big Brother watching you \u2014 which we already know is happening[^6] \u2014 it\u0027s about the way extended participation in a system of such power shapes desire, attention, and the relationship to one\u0027s own self. A person who has spent years inside the attention economy hasn\u0027t just been watched. They\u0027ve been formed. Their habits of reading, their tolerance for depth, their capacity for the kind of sustained contemplative study that Islamic practice actually requires \u2014 all of this has been manipulated, quietly, at the level of the nervous system, by systems that were engineered specifically to capture and redirect it.\n\nWhat Nostr provides that is distinct from legacy social media platforms is a space that is a neutral environment. It is not actively engineering your desires. The algorithmic systems of LSM are desiring machines, optimized at scale to capture attention and redirect it toward engagement, outrage, and compulsive return. Nostr is not that. It does not have an algorithm selecting what you see based on what will keep you on the platform longest. It does not have an engagement metric that rewards the most inflammatory content. And it does not have an advertising infrastructure that requires your psychological vulnerability as its product.\n\nAll of that is quite significant. But it is not transformational. It is the precondition for transformation to occur. The work that happens in that space is what our tradition calls *tarbiya* \u2014 the formation of character, the cultivation of virtue, the slow and often uncomfortable process of becoming the kind of person Islamic moral obligation assumes you are capable of being. That work is communal, relational, somatic in the sense that it happens in the body, in practice, in repeated action over time. It is not primarily intellectual. You do not think your way through tarbiya. You are formed through it, by a community that holds you accountable, by practices that reshape attention and desire at the level where the algorithmic formation previously operated.\n\nThe deepest problem with purely secular accounts of human potentiality is not that they are wrong about the power of formation. They\u0027re largely right about that. The problem is that they have no account of what formation is operating on. They map the substrate layers but not the transcendent. And anyone who has done serious inner work \u2014 in any spiritual tradition \u2014 knows that the psychological and the spiritual are not the same thing. \n\nWhat accumulates through years inside the attention economy is sediment. Real, thick, genuinely difficult to move through. But sediment deposited on something. The residue is not the soul. Tarbiya then is not a reconstruction project. It is excavation. It is clearing. Moving through the sediment toward something that was always already there, that the system worked on but could not reach, and so buried it in mud. \n\nIslamic theology starts somewhere different with the concept of fitra. It affirms that the human being arrives in the world already oriented. Not by social formation, nor by cultural inheritance, but by something primordial. The hadith of the Prophet \ufdfa are unambiguous on this: every child is born on fitra \u2014 an innate disposition toward recognition of the divine, toward tawhid, that precedes and underlies everything that social formation subsequently builds over it.\n\nThis changes the function of digital environments entirely. To categorize Nostr as simply another reterritorialization project, where we just end up reproducing the logic of the old system, assumes that tarbiya is a technological reconstruction process \u2014 that the algorithm is the only power that brings about internal formation. This is not what Islam teaches us, and I would go so far as to say that our tradition holds is view as closer to that of shirk. \n\nWhat Nostr becomes is not the site of reconstruction, but the site of unveiling. Because without the mask of the algorithm the layer at which the fitra operates once again becomes exposed. Tarbiya, on this account, is not building a new human from scratch. It is remembering. It is the gradual reassertion of an orientation that the fiat system has worked very hard to bury but could not erase.\n\nThis is why the community dynamics of Nostr matter in a way that goes beyond the practical. A community engaged in genuine tarbiya \u2014 in practices of *muhasaba* and *muraqaba*, self-accounting and vigilance, in the kind of sustained relationships that the attention economy systematically prevented \u2014 is not just doing good Islamic practice in a new location. It is creating the specific conditions under which the fitra can surface. The neutral space of the protocol and the active work of the community together constitute something the protocol alone cannot and the community alone, inside the old system, could not sustain.\n\nThe Naqshbandi Sufis have a concept in their spiritual tradition that maps well onto this \u2014 *khalwat dar anjuman*, solitude in the crowd. The maintenance of inner connection to Allah while being fully engaged in the world. It was developed as a description of the mature spiritual practitioner, but it names something structural that our Nostr community can embody collectively: a mode of presence in digital life that is attentive rather than compulsive, grounded rather than uploaded, and capable of the kind of depth that the attention economy was specifically designed to make impossible.\n\nThat is what Digital Hijra is for. Not escape. Not performative sovereignty. The creation of conditions in which the work of becoming what you already fundamentally are can actually proceed.\n\n## IV. The Beautiful Resistance\n\nLinux, Nostr, Bitcoin \u2014 these are products of the same civilization that produced Google, Facebook and Apple, running on the same material infrastructure, built by people whose cognitive formation happened within the same technological epoch. The open source developer and the surveillance-state capitalist are operating within the same fundamental disclosure of the world. The question is not whether your tools are sovereign. It is whether your relationship to tools as such has been transformed. And changing which tools you use does not, by itself, answer that question because there is a metaphysical orientation that shapes the entire field of modern technological practice. \n\nThe administered world of late capitalism is not a corruption of Enlightenment rationality \u2014 it is its logical culmination. Reason, made purely instrumental, produces systems of total algorithmic control as naturally as water runs downhill. Hypermodern culture is not an aberration. It is what happens when every domain of human experience gets liquified in the logic of calculation and exchange. Digital Hijra does not solve the problems of instrumental rationality by deploying more sophisticated instrumental rationality. In certain respects it is not the negation of Enlightenment instrumental reason \u2014 it is closer to its apotheosis. Saying it is Islamic does not change what it is structurally. The infrastructural program \u2014 sovereign tools, decentralized protocols, censorship-resistant money \u2014 does not by itself escape. It relocates within the same space.\n\nOur Islamic resistance must be an aesthetic experience. It must be an embodiment in cyber of doing that which is beautiful \u2014 *ihsan*. Beauty is an experience that refuses to be reduced to a simple definition. It maintains a form of negative freedom precisely by being purposeless on the administered world\u0027s terms. Beauty doesn\u0027t argue with constraints. It simply exists in a register that cannot be fully colonized. Art is the last defensible form of genuine resistance available within hypermodernity.\n\nIslam\u0027s cultivation of beauty was never ornamental. The adhan is not a notification system that happens to be aesthetically pleasing. The geometry of Islamic architecture is not decorative pattern applied to a functional structure. Arabic calligraphy is not a pretty way to transmit information. These practices cultivate a specific mode of attention \u2014 one that receives the world as meaningful, as layered with significance that exceeds its utility, as oriented toward something that cannot be calculated. The beautiful, in our Islamic tradition, is not outside the world. It is the register in which the world cannot be entirely administered. It is how our tradition has always maintained, against every form of reductive pressure, the experience of the real is not a commodity. \n\nThis is where what our Nostr community is already doing becomes significant[^7]. When a picture circulates on Nostr without an engagement metric determining its reach, something is happening that is structurally different from what happens on platforms organized around attention capture. When an article gets shared in a space that doesn\u0027t reward the most inflammatory framing, the relationship between writer and reader is different \u2014 quieter, more demanding, more genuinely reciprocal. When art gets made and shared in a community not organized around virality, the art becomes accountable to different pressures. These are not just nice features of a better platform. They are the maintenance of non-instrumental experience within an infrastructure that is itself instrumentally structured.\n\nThe protocol doesn\u0027t produce this. The community does. But the community can only sustain it because the protocol isn\u0027t manufacturing the conditions under which non-instrumental experience becomes impossible by design.\n\nThis is the principle I\u0027m advocating: that the Islamic aesthetic tradition is not a supplement to the Digital Hijra movement. It is not something you add once the infrastructure is in place. It is one of the primary mechanisms by which we must navigate through cyberspace in what our community actually produces and circulates. A Digital Hijra community that is generating genuine aesthetic practice is doing something that a purely infrastructural account of the movement cannot explain and cannot substitute for.\n\nArt is the last refuge of non-instrumental experience in hypermodernity. Our Islamic tradition would go so far as to say it was never only a refuge \u2014 it was always a practice of formation, a resistance, a way of training attention toward what exceeds calculation. In the neutral space that the Nostr protocol provides, this practice is necessary and it becomes an integral part of the answer to the deepest critique the movement faces, especially with the dawn of artificial super intelligence. \n\nYou cannot out-rationalize an algorithmic world. But you can inhabit it differently. And Islam has always known how.\n\n## V. Islamic Hyperstitions and the Possibility of Tajdid\n\nThe Digital Hijra movement is not an Islamic digital polity that already exists somewhere waiting to be joined. It is one being enacted. This Summit, the conversations, the economic relationships running on Lightning, the aesthetic practices circulating without algorithmic mediation, the accountability structures forming between people who have chosen to trust each other in this space \u2014 these are not preparations for something that will happen later. These are all elements of Digital Hijra. Embryonic, sure. Still in formative stages. But the polity is not a future state the community is moving toward. It is what the community is in the act of becoming, right now, through the act of taking itself seriously enough to actually do something. \n\nConsider what *tajdid* actually is when you look at it carefully. The concept of civilizational renewal is not a description of someone who finds an unchanged original and makes a faithful copy of it. Every act of renewal is a different act of production. The renewal constitutes what is renewed. Al-Ghazali\u0027s revival was not a return to something that existed independently of his efforts \u2014 it was a creative act that produced a particular configuration of the tradition as authoritative, and the tradition became what he said it was through the collective enactment of his vision by subsequent generations. Ibn Taymiyya\u0027s renewal was also produced under such fashion. Khomeini, Salahuddin, Mehmed, Tipu Sultan \u2014 all were figures who produced types of renewals that echo into our current age. They were not new religious discoveries. They were, in the precise sense I\u0027m using, hyperstitional[^8] acts: visions of Islamic civilization that became real through the commitment of communities to living as if they were already real.\n\nThe hyperstitional claim is that this matters beyond its current scale. That a community enacting a coherent vision of Islamic digital life \u2014 with genuine spiritual depth, aesthetic practice, economic relationships outside the debt and surveillance based economy, decentralized infrastructure \u2014 that community is not just building something for itself. It is producing a proof of concept that has effects beyond itself, in ways that are not fully predictable and not fully controllable by anyone inside it. This is how Islamic civilization has always propagated. Not through central coordination but through the multiplication of communities each taking the tradition seriously in their particular location and moment, each renewal generating the conditions for the next.\n\nAnd here is where the decentralized architecture of Nostr becomes theologically significant rather than just technically convenient. There is no single Digital Hijra. There cannot be, on this protocol, and that is a feature rather than a limitation. Different communities are enacting different visions of what Islamic digital life looks like \u2014 different aesthetic sensibilities, different scholarly emphases, different political orientations, different relationships to the broader questions of technology and civilization. These are not in competition in a way that requires resolution. They are in the kind of productive tension that the Islamic tradition has historically navigated through *ikhtilaf* \u2014 legitimate scholarly disagreement that generates depth rather than fracture.\n\nWhat this means practically is that the hyperstitional potential of Digital Hijra is not dependent on any single vision winning. It is distributed across the network. Multiple relays, multiple clients, development happening in parallel, each accountable to the Islamic tradition and to each other but none requiring the others\u0027 permission. This is structurally closer to how Islamic civilization actually functioned at its most generative \u2014 the Abbasid translation movement, the flowering of Andalusian thought, the Timbuktu scholarly networks \u2014 all more meaningful than any centralized institutional model could be.\n\nWhat is immediately at stake \u2014 and I want to be precise about the scope here because the further implications exist and can be pursued elsewhere \u2014 is the possibility of a Muslim cultural and intellectual life that is not mediated through Western hegemonic infrastructure. Not as a rejection. Not as a retreat into separatism. But as the reassertion of a civilizational voice that has its own sources, its own aesthetic forms, its own modes of knowledge transmission, its own account of what human beings are and what communities are for. That voice has been present throughout modernity \u2014 often suppressed, co-opted, occasionally caricatured into forms that served other agendas \u2014 but never extinguished. The fitra, again, is not the system\u0027s to erase.\n\nThe cultural work is foundational. It has to precede the larger questions, or those larger questions get answered in someone else\u0027s language with someone else\u0027s assumptions built into their grammar. What Nostr makes possible \u2014 what this community is already doing \u2014 is the development of that grammar. A space in which Islamic thought, Islamic aesthetic sensibility, Islamic accounts of human good can develop on their own terms, in conversation with the broader world but not subordinated to it. \n\nThat is real sovereignty!\n\nThe Digital Hijra movement has not yet been fully tested against the weight of what it is proposing. This is the gravity of the situation we find ourselves in. Not one of better tools for individual Muslims to protect their privacy. The founding of a space in which Islamic civilization can think, make, transmit, argue, and renew itself without asking permission. \n\nWhether the community currently forming around this project is prepared to take that seriously is the open question I leave you all with today. And I don\u0027t think it is likely to be answered from anywhere outside this intellectual space that we are working in as Muslim Bitcoiners. It can only be answered by what the community does next.\n\n## VI. Selective Appropriation\n\nSo, can the Islamic tradition\u0027s historical precedent of selective appropriation hold for something as structurally formative as digital infrastructure? Yes, absolutely!\n\nIslamic tradition absorbed Greek philosophy, Persian statecraft, Indian mathematics, Chinese technology \u2014 took them in, worked on them, and produced something that was neither the source material nor a simple addition of Islamic content to foreign form. It was a new configuration. Al-Kindi doing Greek logic birthed the *hikmat* siences. Al-Biruni doing Indian mathematics produced a revolution of applied and advancement mathematics not matched in the West for centuries. These tools were taken seriously on their own terms and then reoriented toward ends their originators didn\u0027t intend and couldn\u0027t fully anticipate.\n\nThis precedent holds significant weight today. Nostr and Bitcoin and the broader stack of freedom technology can be taken the same way and reoriented toward Islamic ends in ways that actually transforms them rather than just adding Islamic content to a foreign structure.\n\nThe Islamic intellectual tradition didn\u0027t appropriate Greek philosophy by taking the conclusions and discarding the method. It engaged the method seriously enough to argue with it, extend it, and in some cases break it open from the inside. Ibn Rushd worked through Aristotle with sufficient depth that the encounter produced something neither tradition had contained before. The appropriation was genuinely transformative because the engagement was genuinely serious. Superficial appropriation \u2014 taking the vocabulary, performing the moves, without the depth of engagement \u2014 does not produces good Islamic thought and risks isolationism in an echo-chamber. \n\nThe same standard applies here. The Digital Hijra community\u0027s engagement with freedom technology has to be serious enough to argue with it, extend it, break it open where it needs breaking. Bitcoin\u0027s monetary philosophy carries embedded assumptions about value, scarcity, and exchange that are not theologically neutral \u2014 they need to be engaged, not just accepted as infrastructure. Nostr\u0027s account of identity and attestation raises questions about community, trust, and authority that have Islamic answers worth developing. The cryptographic imagination of radical individual sovereignty sits in genuine tension with Islamic accounts of the self as inherently relational and communally constituted \u2014 that tension is not a problem to be resolved by ignoring one side, it is a productive site of genuine intellectual work that we need to engage. \n\nThis is where the tariqa and rihla models I flagged earlier become practically important as they become what the Medina frame makes possible once it\u0027s been taken seriously.\n\n- ***The tariqa model*** \u2014 chains of transmission, relationships of mentorship and accountability, the formation of something like an initiated community within the broader network. This is the model for how depth gets maintained and transmitted inside the Digital Hijra community as it grows. Decentralized networks have a known failure mode: they produce breadth without depth, connection without formation, reach without roots. The structural logic of transmission through relationship rather than through broadcast is the corrective to that failure mode. It is how the community avoids becoming a very sovereign version of the same superficiality it left.\n- ***The rihla model*** \u2014 scholarly travel in pursuit of knowledge, the building of trust networks through direct encounter across geography. This is the model for how the knowledge dimension of the network develops its integrity. The classical Islamic scholarly tradition built its authority not through institutional credential but through chains of attestation, through the *isnad* \u2014 who heard what from whom, traceable back through living relationships. In our distributed network that is trying to develop genuine scholarly and intellectual life, that model of attestation-through-relationship rather than credential-through-institution is not only historically resonant, it is architecturally suited to what Nostr actually is.\n\nBoth of these second-order models depend on the founding having been taken seriously. You cannot have genuine chains of transmission without a community that has committed to being somewhere long enough for transmission to happen. You cannot build nodes of a network state without them being stable and deep enough to be worth traveling to. The enclave mentality that treats Digital Hijra as a personal sovereignty project, and simply a way of protecting individual Muslims from a hostile system, produces neither tariqa nor rihla and so fails to formulate tarbiya. It produces isolation with better tools.\n\nNostr is not an Islamic protocol. Bitcoin is not an Islamic monetary system. GrapheneOS is not an Islamic operating system. They are the structural forms through which decentralized digital life is currently the most coherently organized. The task is not to build from nothing \u2014 only Allah does that. Digital Hijra is about migrating to inhabit and sustain these tools with sufficient depth, spiritual seriousness, aesthetic practice, and intellectual integrity that what emerges become more that just niche Islamic  cypherpunk culture.\n\nWhat it is instead gets determined by the quality of the community doing the inhabiting. That is not a question with a predetermined answer. It is the genuinely open question that our founding act has initiated, and the subsequent acts of tajdid will later answer in their time. \n\nNostr, Bitcoin, the sovereign infrastructure we are pursuing \u2014 these tools build the door. But our tradition has never confused the door with what opens it. Tarbiya, community, beauty, the fitra finally given room to breathe \u2014 these are the keys opening something Muslims have never stopped believing is possible, never stopped working toward, and never needed anyone\u0027s permission to pursue. These are what actually unlock the civilizational potential this movement is either serious about or it isn\u0027t. The question is whether we are willing to use them and build. \n\n[^1]:For Muslims, Nostr is our digital marketplace. Markets exchange things. Publicly and privately. Physical items, digital products \u2014 these nostr:npub175nul9cvufswwsnpy99lvyhg7ad9nkccxhkhusznxfkr7e0zxthql9g6w0 has strategically woven together in NoorNote along with the social marketplace of ideas. Considering our spotlight on developing a grounding cyber language, I think it is important to note that communication is naturally an exchange like market. Similar marginal analysis should be applied to how the value of our dialogue engages people to that of price action. If human action is the driver of cost then we should be more observant of this in the quality of the conversations we engage with online. \n\n[^2]:Based on the principles outlined by nostr:npub1h34n29f3wqvcht0jyhnd36jxcdmljyqjv4vdjfrd69nhxhrdvvnsgwr4h0 in [his review of the Cypherpunk Manifesto](https:\/\/www.metamadeenah.com\/islamic-review-of-cypherpunk-manifesto\/), a Muslim Cypherpunk is an individual who views privacy-enhancing technologies (specifically cryptography and decentralized systems like Bitcoin) as essential tools for fulfilling Islamic ethical and legal obligations. Privacy is understood not just a personal preference but a religious necessity to protect one\u0027s dignity, wealth, and family from unauthorized surveillance or state overreach. A Muslim Cypherpunk believes that by \u0022writing code\u0022 to create anonymous transaction systems, they are establishing a digital environment that aligns with the goals of sharia, such as protection of property and prevention of injustice. Essentially, they merge the cypherpunk ethos of radical transparency for the powerful and radical privacy for the individual with Islamic principles of autonomy and resistance to usury and oppression. For more on Islamic cypherpunk ethos see the siminal text from SAIF \u2014 [Spiritual OPSEC Guide](https:\/\/saif.systems\/articles\/spiritual-opsec-guide.html).\n\n[^3]:An annual report card is due. Sadly many Nostr clients did not pass. Seeing less than a 30% success rate in the developer space has been depressing. But it is important to remember that basically no one is profiting here. These are all passion projects with people who genuinely believe they are doing something important. Those who have survived should be commended for that effort. Without going into detail I would highlight two trends I\u0027ve observed this past year the first of which is that of vibe-coding clients. This is a reality we have to content with now. Both seasoned developer and untrained explorer have relatively equal access to the ability to deliver a functioning client. Whether all of these unique creations will exist a year from now likely will be due to passion retention from their user\/dev relationships and with AI in the game I think what will be interesting to watch will be the interplay between human passion and algorithmic utility. The second observation I want to note is a clear utility preference among those that use Nostr for note vs those that use it for other stuff. While personally in the other stuff camp as I don\u0027t see notes alone as the most exciting feature of the protocol, what it is that distinguishes our notes is the identity verification element. This is something I haven\u0027t really seen either side take too seriously yet and absolutely needs solved if we want to win the digital ID race. Why are we still allowing users to \u0022raw dog\u0022 their nsec to login? This is no different than the \u0022get your bitcoin off exchanges\u0022 and \u0022not your keys not your coins\u0022 talk and it will become an attack vector very soon if not taken seriously by nostr developers. While the excuse that this is a user responsibility is true, it does not hold up to the pressure caused by data leak. The moral weight of governance in a decentralized space will likely hit us sooner than we expect, and in current state that exposes iOS users to be most effected in such an event. Personally, as a user, this has lead me to pivot to root cause solutions such as GrapheneOS and Linux and until Nostr devs clearly define a solution to the problem of Apple\u0027s walled garden (truly a high ask) then this segment of Nostr appears to be a decaying space. Anyhow, these are just some of my own observation and this is in no way meant to be an actual state of the art which should be done but by someone other than myself or at least in a separate context.\n\n[^4]:All extensions of the [Global American Empire](https:\/\/forbiddentexts.substack.com\/p\/what-is-the-global-american-empire) (GAE) from the MIC to the FIC to all the silicon tech bros embedding themselves within the Pentagon. All are fingers of the hand of dajjalic systems with [Palantir](https:\/\/xcancel.com\/rnaudbertrand\/status\/2045767857997484359) being perhaps the most notorious of these recently.\n\n[^5]:Building off the caution in Hallaq\u0027s warning about the corrupting nature of state craft and recent [geopolitical events](https:\/\/theiqrafiles.com\/notes-on-the-sinwar-wars\/), it should be a key observation that the nation-state model itself is now collapsing. The danger for Muslims is no longer that they will be absorbed by a functioning cybernetic empire, but that they will be tempted by the offer of their own Islamo-technocratic regimes which are efficient, stable, monarchical in aesthetic, but no less cybernetic in their control architecture. In particular danger are the GCC majnoonic emirates as outlined in my article on The Dark Islamicate. nostr:naddr1qvzqqqr4gupzpuejs5sha9m2m890q4rygkkczp7mnrm9je7deekvu30xpksqace2qq2k766hdpn57ur8ga495an4v3dxjkzfxag455ujspq\n\n[^6]:If you are not yet convinced of the 1984 dystopia we live in I would encourage you to fully digest Whitney Webb\u0027s breakdown of the Epstein era in her book [One Nation Under Blackmail, Vol 1 \u0026 2](https:\/\/archive.org\/stream\/one-nation-under-blackmail-vol-1-2-whitney-alyse-webb_202401\/One%20Nation%20Under%20Blackmail--Vol%201%262%20-%20Whitney%20Alyse%20Webb_djvu.txt)\n\n[^7]:While there are many beautiful things going on in our Muslim Nostr community I would just like to highlight here the work that nostr:npub1updmknky86nsph84rstlh0yymqpeg9l9f62qgxwvd6a75f3pvzxqxv83nv is doing in trying to build a decentralized media production studio. In particular they are documenting how experience economies can play an important role. nostr:naddr1qvzqqqr4gupzpczmhd8vg048qrw028qhlw7gfkqrjst72n55qsvucm4magnzzcyvqyd8wumn8ghj7mn0daexummyv5hxummnw3erztnrdakj7qgmwaehxw309a6xsetxdaex2um59ehx7um5wgcjucm0d5hsq9txxuurycny0fyxsj62w3f47m2ed9t5k4rkdk4u5a\n\n[^8]:There is a lot of literature on accelerationism and Nick Land\u0027s idea of hyperstition. However, rather than providing newcomers with textbook philosophical and eschatological analysis I think it is best to understand hyperstition in the light of theory fiction where which a healthy reading of [sci-fi](https:\/\/youtu.be\/1KUfWP7zC-I) could serve nicely.  ","image":"https:\/\/image.nostr.build\/42a62eff5c92916146270e04ed32eba82b9807cc71766f7ed18593408564b365.jpg","pubkey":"f33285217e976ad9caf0546445ad8107db98f65967cdce6cce45e60da00ee32a","kind":30023,"createdAt":"2026-04-21T18:10:40+00:00","publishedAt":"2026-04-21T18:10:40+00:00","topics":["mbs26","islam","muslim","hypermodernity","nostr","bitcoin"],"url":"https:\/\/www.decentnewsroom.com\/mag\/newsroom-magazine-on-imwald-by-laeserin\/cat\/newsroom-magazine-on-imwald-by-laeserin-category-economy\/d\/g8QNvFd4nEJkV64HkqLOC"},{"title":" Financial Repression and the March Toward Serfdom","slug":"-financial-repression-and-the-march-toward-serfdom","summary":"The Dutch government just declared war on private capital and most Europeans don\u0027t even know it yet. The Netherlands\u0027 Box 3 reform imposes a 36% tax on unrealized gains across stocks, bonds, and crypto, forcing ordinary citizens to liquidate real assets to pay for paper profits they haven\u0027t made.  The sophisticated wealthy will restructure offshore but the schoolteacher with an index fund will not. What follows is an indictment of one of the most destructive fiscal policies in modern European history and a defiant blueprint for how free people can build their way out of it.","content":"There is a moment in every empire\u2019s decline when the state, having exhausted the easier methods of extraction, turns directly on the accumulated savings of its citizenry. Rome debased its currency, France imposed the [**gabelle***\u0026#x20;*](https:\/\/www.britannica.com\/topic\/gabelle)and the Soviet Union simply took everything. The Dutch government, in its characteristic Northern European technocratic fashion, has chosen a more bureaucratically elegant route, where they will tax their citizens on money they haven\u2019t made yet.\n\n[*The Box 3 reform*](https:\/\/www.archipeltaxadvice.nl\/insights\/box-3-unrealized-gains-tax\/), scheduled for implementation in 2028, proposes a 36% levy on unrealized gains across stocks, bonds, and cryptocurrency holdings. Not on profits realized or income earned, but on *paper gains*; the fluctuating, market-priced, potentially-evaporating-tomorrow *notional* appreciation of assets you still own. This is confiscation by stealth that is dressed up as tax policy. Similar unrealised gains tax proposals are circulating in Belgium, Denmark, and at the EU level as part of broader capital income harmonisation discussions, but the Netherlands is the leading edge, not an isolated case\n\n### **Property Rights Are Not Negotiable \\\u0026This Policy Abolishes Them**\n\nProperty rights are the logical prerequisite of all social cooperation. You own your body, the products of your labour, and assets acquired through voluntary exchange. The state\u2019s legitimate role, to whatever limited degree one grants it legitimacy at all, does not extend to claiming title over appreciation in the value of assets you continue to hold and have not sold.\n\nTaxing unrealized gains is not just bad policy but a massive philosophical contradiction. When the Dutch tax authority demands 36% of a gain that exists only as a number on a brokerage screen, a number that can reverse tomorrow, it is by definition asserting a property claim over something that does not yet, in any economically meaningful sense, exist. The gain is unrealized and is potential in the *future*. Taxing it requires you, today, to liquidate real assets to pay for a tax liability generated by a fictitious event.\n\nAs Murray Rothbard pointed out in the [**Anatomy of the State**](https:\/\/cdn.mises.org\/anatomy-of-the-state.pdf), the state is that organization which claims a monopoly on the use of force over a given territorial area, and which sustains itself through compulsory extraction, taxation, which when stripped of its legal dressing, is indistinguishable from theft. The Box 3 reform is simply a more aggressive and transparent iteration of this logic. The Dutch government will not just be taxing the income of its citizens, but it will be taxing their *wealth*; more specifically, the unrealized appreciation of it and forcing them to sell productive capital to satisfy the bill.\n\n### **The Economics of Destruction: What Happens When You Tax Unrealized Gains**\n\nContrary to popular opinion in Keynesian circles, all economic value is subjective, capital formation requires low time preference, and savings and investment represent the bedrock of prosperity. Time preference, the degree to which individuals prefer present over future consumption; determines civilization\u2019s trajectory. Low time preference produces savings, investment, long-term thinking, and compounding wealth. High time preference produces consumption, debt, political myopia, and eventual collapse.\n\nThe unrealized gains tax is a blunt instrument designed, whether intentionally or through economic illiteracy, to dramatically raise the time preference of every Dutch investor. Why hold assets for the long run when you face annual tax bills on their paper appreciation? Why compound your savings when the government extracts a 36% toll on the compounding itself? The rational response is to reduce equity exposure, shorten investment horizons, and shift into non-taxed or less-taxed vehicles. As a result the following consequences are likely to follow:\n\n**Capital flight is not a risk. It is a mathematical certainty.** Affluent Dutch investors, precisely the people with the capital, legal infrastructure, and international mobility to relocate assets, will do so. They will restructure through holding companies in Luxembourg, Cyprus, Ireland, or Singapore. Offshore corporate vehicles will provide carve-outs for the sophisticated. The burden will fall on those who cannot afford the accountants and the jurisdiction shopping, the middle class.\n\n**Liquidity contraction follows forced selling.** When investors must liquidate holdings to meet tax obligations on unrealized gains, they do not sell in an orderly fashion. They sell into markets. This creates price pressure, which reduces asset values, which, in a grim irony, potentially reduces or eliminates the very gain they were taxed on. A cacophony of the \u201cunintended consequences\u201d of central planning will manifest in full force, thanks to the planners\u2019 inability to anticipate the second and third-order effects of their interventions. The Dutch government cannot model how many investors will sell, when, and into what market conditions.\n\n**Entrepreneurship is strangled in the cradle.** Startup equity which is illiquid during the early-stages, and often locked up contractually; will generate paper gains that founders and employees cannot convert to cash. Will the Dutch government demand tax payment on Series B valuations from engineers who hold options they cannot exercise? The answer, buried in the legislation\u2019s details, will determine whether the Netherlands remains a viable startup ecosystem. Early signals suggest it will not.\n\n### **The EU Architecture: Harmonization as Subjugation**\n\nThe Dutch Box 3 reform does not exist in isolation, but must be understood as part of a broader European project of tax coordination. A euphemism for harmonization, which is itself a euphemism for control. The EU\u2019s [*Capital Markets Union*](https:\/\/finance.ec.europa.eu\/financial-markets\/financial-markets-policy\/capital-markets-union\/what-capital-markets-union_en), its[*\u0026#x20;Anti-Tax Avoidance Directives*](https:\/\/taxation-customs.ec.europa.eu\/taxation\/business-taxation\/anti-tax-avoidance-directive_en), and the OECD\u2019s[*\u0026#x20;Global Minimum Tax framework*](https:\/\/www.oecd.org\/en\/topics\/sub-issues\/global-minimum-tax.html) are all facets of the same tendency; the gradual elimination of tax competition between jurisdictions, the closing of escape routes for mobile capital, and the consolidation of fiscal extraction power at the supranational level.\n\nThis collectivist economic planning, once initiated at the national level, creates irresistible pressure for supranational coordination, because capital, unlike labour, can move. The logical endpoint of EU tax harmonization is a continental fiscal corral in which capital has nowhere to run. The Dutch policy, if successfully implemented without any citizen backlash, becomes a template. It demonstrates that a wealthy, politically stable, well-regarded EU member can impose unrealized gains taxation without triggering immediate economic collapse or civil unrest. Other member states will take notes and implement the same playbook.\n\nThis is precisely how European financial repression advances incrementally, jurisdiction by jurisdiction, always wrapped in the language of fairness, always targeting the \u201crich,\u201d always generating precedents that harmonize upward.\n\n### **The BIS Fingerprints: Central Planning of European Capital**\n\nExamine the broader architecture and the role of the Bank for International Settlements (BIS) becomes impossible to ignore. BIS macroprudential frameworks, the ECB\u2019s regulatory capture of European banking, and the accelerating push toward central bank digital currencies represent a coherent vision, which is the migration of capital allocation authority from private actors to state-allied institutions.\n\nThe unrealized gains tax accelerates this process through market mechanics. When retail investors are forced to sell equities to meet tax obligations, those equities are purchased by someone. That someone, in a market with sufficient institutional liquidity, tends to be pension funds, sovereign wealth vehicles, insurance companies, and increasingly through quantitative easing (QE) and asset purchase programs by central banks themselves. The wealth transfer upwards is a rationally engineered process..\n\nIn other words, this 36% tax on unrealized gains is, functionally, a tool for transferring equity ownership from independent private holders to state-adjacent institutional actors. Combined with the ECB\u2019s continued expansion of its balance sheet, its interest in programmable CBDC architectures, and BIS frameworks that grant regulators increasing visibility into and authority over private financial transactions, the direction of travel is unmistakable: toward a European financial system in which private capital ownership is conditional, monitored, taxed in real time, and ultimately subordinate to macroprudential priorities defined by unelected technocrats in Basel and Frankfurt.\n\nThis is Rothbard\u2019s anatomy of the state thesis rendered in 21st-century technocratic, financial infrastructure. The state does not seize property directly, it taxes, regulates, and inflates until private ownership becomes a costly, precarious burden that rational actors (i.e. the middle class) surrender voluntarily to better-positioned institutional entities.\n\n### **The Middle Class Will Pay. They Always Do.**\n\nEnough talk about the architecture. Let us direct our attention to the human cost.\n\nThe sophisticated wealthy will restructure and establish holding companies in favourable jurisdictions. They will consult teams of tax attorneys and navigate the law with the resources the law costs too much for ordinary people to afford. The truly wealthy in the Netherlands, old money, institutional money, money with offshore corporate structures; will be largely unaffected by Box 3 in its intended form.\n\nThe Dutch schoolteacher who opened a brokerage account during COVID-19 and bought index funds will not be so fortunate. The freelance developer who accumulated \u20ac150,000 in ETF holdings over a decade of disciplined saving will face annual tax bills on paper gains he cannot predict and may not be able to pay without selling the assets. The middle-class family that moved a portion of their pension savings into stonks because they watched the purchasing power of their euros erode year after year will find themselves liquidating hard-won positions to feed a tax authority\u2019s demand for payment on appreciation they have not monetized.\n\nThis is the distributional reality that the \u201ctax the rich\u201d framing deliberately obscures. Wealth taxes do not fall on the wealthy in proportion to the narrative. They fall on the *aspiring wealthy* which are always the people who are *trying* to build multigenerational financial security through patient, disciplined capital accumulation. The middle class. The people least able to absorb forced liquidation and most dependent on compound returns over long time horizons. These are the people who most likely cannot afford the escape routes.\n\nThe moral case for private property rests on the observable fact that it is the indispensable institutional foundation of human prosperity, individual autonomy, and social cooperation. Violate it by taxing people on wealth they have not realized, and forcing them to liquidate savings to satisfy a liability generated by a number on a screen; you do not merely harm economic efficiency. You sever the institutional connection between effort, saving, and security that makes civilized life possible.\n\nIn short, you make people poorer and more dependent on the state. You make them, slowly and incrementally and with great bureaucratic politeness, serfs. Given these obvious outcomes of this policy, it becomes increasingly difficult to attribute such policies to incompetence and not malice.\n\n### **The Exit**\n\nConsider what financial repression actually looks like for the human beings it crushes, and you will understand why monetary alternatives are not optional luxuries but existential necessities.\n\nIn Cyprus in 2013, depositors woke up one morning to find their accounts seized to bail out banks that had been reckless with their property. In Greece, capital controls capped ATM withdrawals at sixty euros per day, imprisoning citizens inside a monetary jurisdiction they could not legally exit. In Argentina, the blue dollar market; the black market, by the state\u2019s preferred terminology has functioned for decades as the real economy, because the peso is not a store of value, it is a *destruction* of value, engineered by a state that monetizes its own fiscal incontinence at the expense of the productive class.\n\nIn Nigeria, the naira has lost over ninety percent of its dollar value in a decade while the central bank simultaneously prosecuted citizens for using alternatives. These are not policy failures but are policy *successes*, with the policy being the subordination of private property to state finance.\n\nThe Dutch Box 3 reform is a template that more European governments will follow. The EU harmonization machinery will attempt to close the exits and those who have not considered what it means to hold an asset that exists outside the legacy financial system; outside the BIS regulatory perimeter, outside the ECB\u2019s macroprudential reach, will find themselves without options at precisely the moment options matter most.\n\nThe antidote to a rigged system is to stop playing by its rules wherever legally possible and build parallel infrastructure that operates on sound money principles. I will outline three important steps that EU citizens can start implementing today in light of these increasingly hostile regulations, assuming leaving the EU isn\u2019t an option.\n\nThe first and most important step in this parallel infrastructure is self custody. Your Bitcoin on an exchange is not your Bitcoin. It is a claim on an institution subject to regulatory seizure, compliance demands, and the same counterparty risk the fiat system produces in abundance. Hardware wallets with air-gapped signing, multi-signature setups for larger holdings, and steel-stamped seed phrase backups stored in geographically distributed locations are baseline requirements. The entire value proposition of Bitcoin as a property rights instrument collapses if you do not hold your own keys.\n\nAcquiring Bitcoin through peer-to-peer rails is the next important practical step. [*Bisq,*](https:\/\/bisq.network\/) [*Peach Bitcoin*](https:\/\/peachbitcoin.com\/), and [*RoboSats*](http:\/\/robosatsy56bwqn56qyadmcxkx767hnabg4mihxlmgyt6if5gnuxvzad.onion\/) enable non-KYC Bitcoin acquisition through peer-to-peer exchange with no centralized custodian. These platforms operate within legal grey zones in most EU jurisdictions, not illegal, but not convenient. Use them deliberately and consistently for a portion of your acquisition strategy. Cash-for-Bitcoin meetups through Bitcoin-only communities exist in Amsterdam, Berlin, Prague, and Zurich. Use them. Not only does this starve the fiat banking system, that centralized exchanges are now a part of, but it also preserves your financial privacy. Paying a small premium for privacy is indeed worth it.\n\nLastly, Bitcoin circular economies are of paramount importance. A true Bitcoin circular economy is not a collection of individual actors holding BTC. It is a *network* of interconnected businesses, freelancers, employees, and consumers who route value through Bitcoin rather than through the euro banking system. This means Bitcoin earned is Bitcoin spent, not Bitcoin converted back to euros at every junction. A Bitcoin circular economy cannot survive on isolated transactions. It requires density with enough merchants accepting Bitcoin that a person can, in a given week, spend Bitcoin on coffee, lunch, professional services, and groceries without touching the euro system.\n\nThis starts by identifying Bitcoin-accepting merchants. Who among your local business community, professional network, and social circle already holds Bitcoin? These are your first trading partners. Every time Bitcoin flows directly from a buyer\u2019s wallet to a merchant\u2019s wallet, from a client to a freelancer, from an employer to an employee and the banking system is bypassed, exchange fees are avoided, and the circular economy deepens. The initial goal is not to never touch a fiat offramp. It is to touch it less with every passing month. [*Bitrefill*](http:\/\/www.bitrefill.com\/) also provides gift cards for hundreds of retailers globally, enabling Bitcoin to reach nearly every consumer context. Stack Bitcoin income, spend Bitcoin where possible, minimize fiat conversion events, and minimize taxable realization events in the process.\n\nManufactured crisis is the new policy, with distressed acquisition being the endgame. Only hard money, held in self-custody, beyond the grasp of the technocrats in The Hague and Brussels and Basel, offers a genuine alternative. That hard money is Bitcoin. The Dutch government has declared war on private capital and this is just the beginning. The future of European financial sovereignty depends on individuals who refuse, quietly and relentlessly, to comply with their own impoverishment.\n","image":"https:\/\/blossom.primal.net\/83a17d377d173ae3bd6f7e02246b53de1625c529792d9ad95b0ae7e5215fb5ae.png","pubkey":"54609048284d2a151c8df625f40c389d423ed057fcef927db88956d28e22ba03","kind":30023,"createdAt":"2026-05-08T17:15:09+00:00","publishedAt":"2026-05-08T17:15:09+00:00","topics":["bitcoin","eu","digital euro","ecb","bis","freedom"],"url":"https:\/\/www.decentnewsroom.com\/mag\/newsroom-magazine-on-imwald-by-laeserin\/cat\/newsroom-magazine-on-imwald-by-laeserin-category-economy\/d\/-financial-repression-and-the-march-toward-serfdom"},{"title":"The Palantir World Order","slug":"the-palantir-world-order","summary":"When Edward Snowden blew open the architecture of mass surveillance in 2013, he bet his freedom on the power of an informed public to dismantle it. He lost. What he could not have anticipated was the next move, that the surveillance apparatus would not merely survive public exposure but would incorporate, issue a manifesto, list on the NASDAQ, and begin marketing its dominance as patriotism. The Palantir state is not coming. It is already here, already contracted, already processing your tax returns, your bank statements, your cryptocurrency wallets, and your medical records. It is the Jekyll Island pattern on steroids  except this time the creature being born is not merely a central bank but the operating system of civilization itself, with programmable money as its enforcement mechanism.","content":"The recent public release of Palantir\u0027s [*manifesto*](https:\/\/x.com\/PalantirTech\/status\/2045574398573453312) on Twitter has sparked significant backlash, to put it mildly. Drawing from *The Technological Republic: Hard Power, Soft Belief and the Future of The West*, a [*book*](https:\/\/techrepublicbook.com\/) by CEO Alex Karp, the document outlines the corporate ideology and vision for the future that Palantir is actively constructing.\n\nHowever, based on the principles articulated in this manifesto, and the furore it has generated online, it seems evident that the world they envision is not one where most people (myself included) would want to live in. It paints a dystopian vision of a technofascist society that will arise out of the complete replacement of democracy with technocracy. This manifesto is merely a roadmap for manufacturing consent for the permanent surveillance state they intend to build and profit from.\n\n## **The Eternal Conflict, Restated**\n\nThe 2013 revelations by Edward Snowden provided irrefutable evidence of what had long been dismissed as mere conspiracy theory; which is that the US government, alongside allied intelligence services and major tech firms, had built a global surveillance network of staggering proportions. Programs such as PRISM, XKeyscore, MUSCULAR, and Boundless Informant represented industrial-grade systems designed for the mass harvesting of email content, phone metadata, location records, and browsing histories from hundreds of millions of unsuspecting individuals who had committed no crime and attracted no specific suspicion. Snowden\u0027s objective was not to embarrass the NSA, but rather a gamble on the power of an informed public to demand democratic accountability.\u00a0\u00a0\n\nHis gamble was that the revelation of these unconstitutional mass surveillance programs would trigger so much public outrage that they would become political hot potatoes and ultimately be shut down. He sacrificed his career and his freedom on that bet and he lost it. Following brief periods of outrage and minor legislative tweaks, the surveillance apparatus returned to its status quo, with data flows remaining uninterrupted and contractors maintaining their access. This outcome demonstrated that public approval is unnecessary once a population has been conditioned into a state of learned helplessness through decades of propaganda regarding security tradeoffs\n\nThe Palantir manifesto is built on this same foundation and its authors know it. In fact when one looks at it objectively and in detail it\u2019s built on the same authoritarian ideas that have been around for ages; which is that some people, by virtue of their technical capacity, their power, their patriotism, or their civilizational clarity, are entitled by birthright to govern and exert authority over everyone else.\n\nThe individual in this vision is not a sovereign agent. They are a data point with obligations to serve the machine without question, to comply with its every diktat, to be legible to systems they did not consent to and cannot audit or escape. A collision course of those that believe in centralized coercive power versus decentralized and distributed power.\u00a0\n\nThis is not a left versus right issue. It is the perennial question of whether human civilization will be organized around consent or managed through force and specifically, whether the extraordinary technical capabilities of the current moment will be deployed to liberate individuals from institutional dependence or to make that dependence invisible, and permanent.\n\n## **Fascism Is the System, Not the Bug**\n\nTo understand the Palantir manifesto correctly, one must understand what fascism (i.e. state directed capitalism) actually is and distinguish it carefully from both free markets and straightforward government socialism, because it is neither, and its apologists exploit that confusion deliberately.\n\nUnlike pure socialism, under fascism the government isn\u2019t running factories; rather it is the quiet administrative fusion of private capital with state power, creating structures and policy frameworks that privatize profit while socializing cost, risk, and coercive enforcement. It is the system in which corporations do not compete in markets but they capture regulatory environments, secure monopolistic government contracts, and use the state\u0027s unique powers (taxation, surveillance, enforcement, warfare) as inputs to their business model. Under this regime, the corporation and the state do not merely collaborate; they interpenetrate until the distinction between public authority and private interest effectively dissolves into a single, unaccountable apparatus.\n\nThis is Palantir\u0027s operating environment and its aspiration. The company does not sell to markets in any meaningful sense. It sells to governments. Its core revenue base is military contracts, intelligence community agreements, and law enforcement partnerships. Its core product, data fusion and predictive analytics, is only valuable at scale, and the only actors with the data volumes and coercive authority to make it valuable at that scale are states. Palantir is not merely serving the government; it is quietly, algorithmically *becoming* it.\u00a0\n\nThis is no longer conjecture. Almost a week ago, contract documents obtained by the watchdog group American Oversight and [*reported*](https:\/\/theintercept.com\/2026\/04\/24\/palantir-irs-contract-data\/) by The Intercept revealed that since 2018, Palantir\u0027s Lead and Case Analytics platform has been processing IRS data including individual tax returns, bank statements, FinCEN transaction records, and cryptocurrency wallet data across Bitcoin, Ethereum, and Ripple, all for a contract worth over $130 million. The system cross-references identified crypto wallets against dark web data harvested from exchanges including Coinbase. The surveillance layer is already here and fully operational.\n\nThis is how the interpenetration of corporation and state becomes self-perpetuating. The more deeply Palantir\u0027s architecture embeds in government operations, the more government depends on Palantir to function, the less leverage government retains in the relationship, and the more any proposed reform or oversight mechanism requires the cooperation of the very platform being reformed or overseen. The company becomes, as the manifesto clearly intends, the operating system of state power and you do not interrogate the operating system.\u00a0\n\nThe manifesto documents this ambition in plain language. The assertion that Silicon Valley has an \u0022affirmative obligation\u0022 to participate in national defense; the argument that the market has failed in critical domains and private visionaries (i.e psychopathic billionaires with a Malthusian worldview) must now step in; the casual dismissal of \u0022theatrical debates\u0022 about AI weapons development, these are not just philosophical positions. They are the terms under which a company proposes to make itself sovereign.\u00a0\n\n## **The Soft Fascism of Point Five**\n\nPoint five is one of the most revealing statements in the document, and it deserves to be read with the utmost attention to fully grasp its implications:\u00a0\n\n\u003E *\u0022The question is not whether A.I. weapons will be built; it is who will build them and for what purpose. Our adversaries will not pause to indulge in theatrical debates about the merits of developing technologies with critical military and national security applications. They will proceed.\u0022*\n\nIn other words any objection to Palantir\u0027s militarized AI agenda can be dismissed as unnecessary debates and any moral question is dismissed as a luxury the nation cannot afford. The logic is identical to that deployed in every consolidation of emergency power in modern history: the stakes are too high for deliberation, the enemy too implacable for restraint, and only we, the chosen ones,the competent, the technologically sophisticated, the already-positioned can be trusted to act. The civilian population is invited to participate by surrendering their agency and their souls to their Palantir overlords. They must trust the plan..\n\nTheodore Kaczynski, famously known as the Unabomber whose bombing campaign killed three people and maimed twenty-three, nonetheless correctly identified, in his [*manifesto*](https:\/\/www.washingtonpost.com\/wp-srv\/national\/longterm\/unabomber\/manifesto.text.htm), the process by which technological systems acquire autonomous momentum and begin to reshape human society in their own image rather than in accordance with human values. His analysis of surrogate activities (the way technologized societies redirect human purpose into managed pseudo-goals) maps uncomfortably well onto the Palantir manifesto\u0027s vision of civic participation.\n\nPoint six calls for compulsory military service. What else are you going to be doing after AI has taken all the jobs? Point seven promises soldiers the best software based weapons. Point eight complains that federal compensation is inadequate to attract talent. The manifesto envisions a society organized around the imperatives of the technological-military complex, in which human beings are optimally allocated to serve institutional needs.\n\nWhat is conspicuously absent is any discussion of what people are *for*, what they are permitted to want, or how they might live outside the system\u0027s requirements. It is, to borrow Viktor Shvets\u0027 meteorological borrowing, a [**Fujiwara Effect**](https:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Fujiwhara_effect)*;* multiple hurricanes of control converging into a single, cataclysmic system: the debt crisis requiring financial repression, the security apparatus requiring data integration, the AI arms race requiring permanent militarized research infrastructure, all spiraling together into something that looks, from close enough, merely like governance.\n\n## **The Jekyll Island Pattern**\n\nThe most sophisticated element of the emerging Palantir order is not its military contracting. It is the financial infrastructure being quietly constructed around it. G. Edward Griffin\u0027s meticulous investigation of the Federal Reserve\u0027s origins in *The Creature from Jekyll Island* revealed a mechanism that has been used by every subsequent consolidation of elite power.\n\nFirst a crisis is identified or manufactured, a solution is proposed by the very parties who will benefit from it, the solution is framed in the language of national interest and public safety, and the resulting institution becomes a permanent extraction mechanism answerable to no democratic constituency. The Federal Reserve Act of 1913 was passed because the panic of 1907 had demonstrated, its architects argued, that the nation required a \u0022lender of last resort,\u0022 a stabilizing institution that would protect ordinary Americans from financial ruin.\n\nWhat Americans received instead was a cartel mechanism that privatized monetary creation, socialized monetary risk, and has presided over the destruction of roughly ninety-six percent of the dollar\u0027s purchasing power in the century since its founding.\n\nThe structural parallels to our present moment are not difficult to miss. The \u0022crises\u0022 justifying the new surveillance-industrial order are not difficult to enumerate: terrorism, financial crime, adversarial AI, and cryptocurrency-enabled capital flight. Each crisis produces legislative architecture that concentrates power in institutions accountable to no voter. [*FISA courts*](https:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/United_States_Foreign_Intelligence_Surveillance_Court) operate in total secrecy, producing binding legal interpretations no citizen may read or challenge. [*The PATRIOT Act\u0026#x20;*](https:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Patriot_Act)normalized mass collection of communications metadata.\n\nAs decentralized monetary instruments, like Bitcoin, threaten to give ordinary people a genuine exit from the surveillance financial system, Congress has manufactured two new instruments of containment: the [*GENIUS Act*](https:\/\/www.congress.gov\/bill\/119th-congress\/senate-bill\/1582\/text) and the [*Clarity Act.*](https:\/\/www.congress.gov\/bill\/119th-congress\/house-bill\/3633\/text) This is the world the Palantir manifesto is written for, and it is written by people who understand it with far more clarity than most of their critics.\n\n## **The Stablecoin Trap and the Monetization of Serfdom**\n\nDollar-backed stablecoins are America\u0027s attempt to extend monetary hegemony into the digital age by essentially creating a new channel for petrodollar-style recycling where foreign demand for USDT and USDC indirectly finances U.S. government debt. This is the Stablecoin Standard: not monetary freedom but monetary imperialism in a new form. Stablecoins work precisely because they route around traditional banking, yet that same feature makes them politically intolerable when geopolitical pressures mount. The GENIUS Act is the resolution of that tension, in favour of the state.\n\nThis bill deserves to be understood for what it is. The GENIUS Act, while framed as sensible stablecoin regulation, effectively mandates that any dollar-pegged digital asset be issued by a federally supervised entity, fully backed by U.S. Treasury instruments, and subject to the complete suite of Bank Secrecy Act compliance requirements. Consider what a mandatory stablecoin regime actually produces in practice. Every transaction is recorded on a blockchain that is permissioned, monitored, and ultimately controlled by federally licensed entities. Every wallet can be frozen by regulatory fiat. Every payment pattern is available for algorithmic analysis. And who builds that algorithmic analysis layer? Who holds the contracts to process Treasury data, FinCEN reports, and the surveillance outputs of FISA-authorized mass collection? The answer is not mysterious.\u00a0\n\nIt\u2019s at this point that the fusion of corporation and state achieves finality. The Federal Reserve provides the base money, the Treasury issues the regulatory mandate, and the stablecoin issuers lay the financial rails. Meanwhile, Palantir provides the invisible surveillance layer that makes the entire apparatus functional. No single act of Congress creates this Leviathan, and no democratic process ratifies its birth. It simply *becomes*, acquiring sovereignty through technical indispensability until the distinction between the central bank and the military-intelligence complex dissolves into a single, unaccountable operating system.\n\nMeanwhile, thanks to disruption brought on by both economic upheavals and AI, the permanent underclass gets CBDC based Universal Basic Income; which, if you believe UBI will arrive without strings attached, you have not been paying attention to how power works. Any implementation of UBI at the scale being contemplated will be some permutation of social credit: consumption-monitored, behaviour-contingent, and denominated in the very programmable stablecoins (.ie. CBDCs) that make total financial surveillance trivial. The state understood this, which is why it moved so quickly. The stablecoin is the company scrip of the surveillance state; accepted everywhere within the system, worthless outside it, and increasingly the only monetary form the system will permit.\n\nThe warmth of collectivism, delivered through the infrastructure of control. This is the monetization of serfdom. .\n\n## **Bitcoin as Structural Dissent and the New Underground Economy**\n\nAgainst the Palantir architecture, Bitcoin is not primarily a financial instrument. It is a financial weapon for defending your own sovereignty and the distinction matters more than most people who discuss Bitcoin professionally seem to understand. To grasp its full significance, you need to reach back further than Satoshi Nakamoto. You need to reach back to Hans Sennholz.\n\n[**The Underground Economy**](https:\/\/cdn.mises.org\/The%20Underground%20Economy_3.pdf)*\u0026#x20;*\u0026#x77;ritten in 1984 , the year Orwell chose for his dystopia, not coincidentally, Sennholz documented a phenomenon that governments have always found both maddening and inexhaustible: the underground economy. His central observation deserves to be read as prophecy.*\u0026#x20;\u0022The underground economy,\u0022* he wrote,*\u0026#x20;\u0022is as old as government itself. It springs from human nature that makes man choose between given alternatives. Facing the agents of government and their exactions, man will weigh the alternatives and may choose to go underground.\u0022* Every tightening of the regulatory vise, every new layer of taxation and surveillance, every additional mandate layered onto productive human activity, produced the same result: a compensatory expansion of the shadow economy operating beyond the state\u0027s line of sight. The underground did not defy human nature. It *expressed* it.\n\nSennholz was careful to draw a distinction that governments have always deliberately obscured: the underground economy is not the criminal underworld. It is comprised of otherwise law-abiding citizens seeking refuge from wrongs inflicted upon them by the state; electricians working off the books, physicians bartering services, farmers selling at flea markets without sales tax remittances, moonlighting teachers who spend their days lecturing students on the wisdom of government regulation and their evenings cheerfully ignoring it. These are not criminals. They are rational actors responding to a system that has made productive, above-board economic life increasingly costly, surveilled, and punitive. As Sennholz observed: *\u0022In a free society without economic planners and regulators, there would be no regulated economy and no underground. All productive activity would be free.\u0022*\n\nWhat Sennholz could not have foreseen in 1984, writing before the internet existed in any meaningful public form, was the specific instrument through which the twenty-first century state would attempt to finally close the exits he was documenting. The underground economy he described was cash-based and geographically local, its invisibility was a function of physical proximity, social trust, and the practical limitations of government auditing capacity. The IRS could not audit every plumber who took a weekend job painting a neighbor\u0027s fence. The tax authorities could not monitor every garage sale, every barter exchange, every envelope of cash passed between a dentist and a carpenter.\n\nThe Palantir order intends to change this permanently.\n\nThe programmable stablecoin infrastructure being constructed under the GENIUS Act is, in its essential function, a machine for eliminating the underground economy entirely, not by addressing the regulatory overreach and confiscatory taxation that Sennholz identified as its root causes, but by making financial invisibility technically impossible. The cashless, fully surveilled economy that Sennholz noted the underground was already making \u0022a mockery of\u0022 as a popular forecast in 1984, the Palantir state intends to impose it by regulatory mandate, denominated in programmable dollars that can be frozen, redirected, or conditioned on behavioural compliance before a single dollar reaches its intended destination.\n\nWe have already seen Canadian truckers\u0027 bank accounts frozen by regulatory fiat within seventy-two hours of a political decision. Regulatory overreach led to the de-banking of political organizations, firearm dealers, and cryptocurrency companies not through legislation but through informal regulatory pressure on financial intermediaries, the practice euphemistically known as [*Operation Chokepoint*](https:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Operation_Choke_Point). The underground economy *\u0022thrives wherever, in the judgment of taxpayers, the government exactions are exorbitant and unjust.\u0022* Here is the underground economy\u0027s twenty-first century form, arrived in a shape Sennholz would have recognized instantly in its economic logic even if its technical implementation would have astonished him.\n\nBitcoin is the Sennholzian underground economy, operating at global scale, with a fixed monetary policy that no emergency session of any legislature can amend. It not only is foundation for a parallel economic system but is the biggest opportunity that sovereign individuals have at conducting commerce peer to peer outside of the fiat system, which will soon be a node in the Palantir world order.\n\nThe Federal Reserve made possible a warfare-welfare state whose scale no gold-constrained treasury could have sustained. Programmable stablecoins will do for surveillance capitalism what the Federal Reserve did for military Keynesianism: they will make the previously unaffordable not merely affordable but automatic. The difference is that the Federal Reserve\u0027s monetary expansion was at least nominally transparent. The programmable stablecoin panopticon will operate through the friction-free automaticity of code, with behavioural conditioning baked into the monetary infrastructure itself, administered by compliance algorithms running on Palantir\u0027s platforms.\n\nBitcoin\u0027s proof-of-work consensus, its fixed twenty-one million coin supply, its permissionless validation, its resistance to seizure when properly self-custodied, these are not just technical specifications. They are cryptographic guarantees to a property rights system that exists outside the jurisdiction of any state and beyond the contractual reach of any surveillance contractor. Running a Bitcoin node is an act of monetary self-determination. Holding Bitcoin in self-custody is the digital analog of holding gold outside the banking system; except that gold can be confiscated at gunpoint, as Roosevelt demonstrated in 1933, while properly secured Bitcoin cannot\n\nIronically the banks have already figured out which side of the divide they are on. Fourteen of the top twenty-five U.S. banks are now building Bitcoin products, several explicitly for high-net-worth clients only. JP Morgan. Wells Fargo. Citigroup. The very institutions that spent a decade dismissing Bitcoin as a criminal payment rail now quietly build infrastructure to give their wealthiest clients access to precisely the properties of sound, unseizable, unsurveillable money. Large corporations rarely participate in the underground economy because they are too visible and too exposed to regulatory scrutiny. The banks are not building Bitcoin self-custody tools. They are building Bitcoin *custody* products, held on your behalf, within the regulated perimeter, fully legible to regulators. This is the preferred financial system in the coming Palantir world order; where the elites own assets outright, including Bitcoin and everyone else is holding a derivative that tracks the price without conferring any sovereignty.\n\nYou know who isn\u0027t building Bitcoin products? The brainwashed mostly middle class folks who believe the Jamie Dimon inspired propaganda of Bitcoin being a scam. These are the future UBI recipients and compliance-tracked stablecoin users. These \u201csmart skeptics\u201d will receive their digitally administered basic income in a form that can be frozen, redirected, or conditioned on behaviour before they can spend it on anything the system has classified as undesirable.\n\nSennholz concluded with an observation that should be carved above the entrance to every central bank in the world:*\u0026#x20;\u0022As the regulated economy stagnates or withers away, the underground economy endeavors to take its place.\u0022\u0026#x20;*\u0026#x54;he regulated economy he was describing in 1984 was already staggering under tax burdens, regulatory mandates, and the interaction between inflation and progressive taxation that was silently pushing workers into higher brackets while their real incomes declined.\u00a0\n\nForty years later, U.S. public debt sits at 122% of GDP. The financial repression needed to channel private savings into public debt at below-market rates will be systematic, and continuous. The Palantir state will attempt to close every exit from cash, barter, off-books employment, unlicensed enterprise by making all economic activity digitally legible and therefore taxable, freezable, and conditionally permissioned.\n\nAgainst this total-surveillance financial architecture, Bitcoin is not a speculative asset. It is not digital gold in any merely metaphorical sense. It is the underground economy\u0027s final and most technically sophisticated form, a parallel monetary system built to be exactly as resistant to state control while becoming the new standard for Bitcoin circular economies which are already in existence today in various parts of the world. It is what the underground economy becomes when the underground economy has access to cryptography, game theory, and a globally distributed network of nodes that no single government can shut down.\n\nThe creature from Jekyll Island wore a central banker\u0027s suit. Its successor wears a Silicon Valley hoodie and calls itself a technological republic.\n","image":"https:\/\/blossom.primal.net\/e51736542156c946c9e3b701310b4be1d7018b9565f0e1bc5364bdc095203a85.jpg","pubkey":"54609048284d2a151c8df625f40c389d423ed057fcef927db88956d28e22ba03","kind":30023,"createdAt":"2026-04-30T23:11:02+00:00","publishedAt":"2026-04-30T16:42:44+00:00","topics":["bitcoin","palantir","ai","surveillance state","freedom","privacy"],"url":"https:\/\/www.decentnewsroom.com\/mag\/newsroom-magazine-on-imwald-by-laeserin\/cat\/newsroom-magazine-on-imwald-by-laeserin-category-economy\/d\/the-palantir-world-order"}]},{"slug":"newsroom-magazine-on-imwald-by-laeserin-category-society","title":"Society","summary":"","image":null,"url":"https:\/\/www.decentnewsroom.com\/mag\/newsroom-magazine-on-imwald-by-laeserin\/cat\/newsroom-magazine-on-imwald-by-laeserin-category-society","articleCount":1,"articles":[{"title":"On Medieval Marriage","slug":"on-medieval-marriage","summary":"We need to remember why marriage exists.","content":"I\u0027m reading a piece of historical fiction, at the moment, focused on the life of farmers in the M\u00fcnster of the Reformation Era. (That\u0027s worth its own, longer article, because the story is absolutely wild.)\n\nThe thing that seems timely to me, so far, was the difficulty with which men were able to marry. We tend to think of marriage as something women dream of and men suffer through, but all historical counts (and modern dynamics) suggest the precise opposite. Our view of marriage is heavily skewed by the short postwar era in which marriage rates exploded along with personal wealth, as the automobile allowed people the opportunity to move further away from their workplace and afford a home (and a wife). In the Americana Era, weddings were reduced to extravagant personal parties, involving lots of shopping and fun, with the associated divorce frequently arriving soon thereafter.\n\nIn the medieval age, men typically worked, saved, studied, trained, and prepared until they were at least mid-20s to mid-30s, before they were _allowed_ to marry. His father, her father, and their masters and lords had to agree, as your marriage effected their tax income, their future laborers, and determined who inherited the right to work, inhabit, or control property and licenses. In addition, he would have to afford the merchet (marriage) or amobr (virginity-taking) tax to the lord, as well as providing for things like dowries and a home.\n\nAbout 15-20% of women never married. The modern marriage rates match the medieval and Victorian ones. Rather than being some historical aberration, this is the historical norm. And, like in those days passed, marriage skews toward the upper-middle and upper classes. Marriage is primarily focused on attaining, preserving, maintaining, and passing on property rights and wealth. Then and now. And this preservation of property and wealth is why divorce was uncommon, and still should be.\n\nWhat modern men haven\u0027t yet figured out, is how to structure society so that most women are again willing (or coerced) into going along with their marriage plans. Without rampant divorce. This is the next societal sexual evolution, that we can expect, but maybe it will never arrive and humans will simply go extinct. Women are not, and never have been, the catalyst to turn such a situation around. They are often better off without marriage, so long as enough _other women_ marry. The tragedy of the marital commons, so to say.","image":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/ccrenfaire.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/06\/Wedding.jpg","pubkey":"dd664d5e4016433a8cd69f005ae1480804351789b59de5af06276de65633d319","kind":30023,"createdAt":"2026-05-10T18:49:32+00:00","publishedAt":null,"topics":["relationship","marriage","society"],"url":"https:\/\/www.decentnewsroom.com\/mag\/newsroom-magazine-on-imwald-by-laeserin\/cat\/newsroom-magazine-on-imwald-by-laeserin-category-society\/d\/on-medieval-marriage"}]},{"slug":"newsroom-magazine-on-imwald-by-laeserin-category-nostr","title":"Nostr","summary":"","image":null,"url":"https:\/\/www.decentnewsroom.com\/mag\/newsroom-magazine-on-imwald-by-laeserin\/cat\/newsroom-magazine-on-imwald-by-laeserin-category-nostr","articleCount":3,"articles":[{"title":"I changed my mind about nostr","slug":"I-changed-my-mind-about-nostr","summary":"Why rejecting decentralized protocols today might be like refusing to use the web in 1995","content":"I was wrong. Not about social media, the low effort posting problem is real, and removing corporate incentives doesn\u2019t fix it. But I drew the wrong conclusion from that diagnosis. I walked away from decentralized protocols entirely, and I think that was a mistake.\n\nLet me explain what changed my mind.\n\nRecently I\u2019ve been spending time with nostr, a stupidly simple protocol for decentralized communication. And I mean simple in the most generous sense: it is almost shockingly minimal. There are no servers to trust, no central registry of identities, no algorithmic feed you can\u2019t escape. You are a cryptographic key pair. Your posts are signed events broadcast to relays. Anyone can run a relay. Anyone can build a client. That\u2019s more or less the whole thing.\n\n\u003E The web didn\u2019t solve human nature either. People used it to spread gossip and misinformation from day one. We built on it anyway.\n\nWhen I first encountered this, my instinct was familiar: here we go again. Another decentralization experiment that doesn\u2019t address the real problem. And it\u2019s true, nostr doesn\u2019t fix the low-effort nature of social posting. You can still fire off a half-baked take in thirty seconds. The protocol is indifferent to quality.\n\nBut I\u2019ve been thinking about the wrong question. The question isn\u2019t whether nostr solves the social media problem. The question is whether open, decentralized protocols for communication are worth participating in as they develop, even if individual apps built on top of them are flawed.\n\nThink about what the web looked like in 1995. It was a mess. Most websites were embarrassing. The tools were primitive. The content was thin. A reasonable person could have looked at early Yahoo and Geocities pages and concluded: this encourages low-effort publishing, anyone can post anything, there\u2019s no quality control, I\u2019ll stick with books. They would have been right about all of that. They would also have completely missed what was actually being built.\n\nWhat was being built wasn\u2019t any particular website. It was a layer of open infrastructure, HTTP, HTML, URLs, that no single company owned. That foundation is why the web could accumulate thirty years of value without any one entity controlling the toll booth. The bad content on early websites was a distraction from the thing that actually mattered: the protocol itself.\n\nNostr is a protocol. Not an app, not a company, not a community. The apps built on it range from Twitter clones to encrypted messaging to long-form blogging to marketplaces to git repositories. The protocol doesn\u2019t care what you build. It provides identity and message-passing with cryptographic integrity and no central authority. That\u2019s the foundation. What gets built on top is the open question.\n\nI used to think my job was to find the perfect platform, one that would make me a better, more thoughtful communicator by design. I was looking for a product to solve a personal discipline problem. Nostr doesn\u2019t do that. But neither does the web, and I don\u2019t hold that against it.\n\nWhat the open web gave me was the ability to publish this blog, on my own domain, using open standards, in a way that no company can take away or bury in an algorithm. Nostr offers something analogous for social communication: your identity travels with you, your follows are portable, no relay can silence you globally, no company can shut down the protocol. These aren\u2019t small things. They\u2019re the conditions under which anything interesting can be built without asking permission.\n\nThere\u2019s a window for this. Open protocols succeed when they gain enough adoption that the network effects lock in the openness, when walking away from them becomes genuinely costly. The web hit that inflection point. Email hit it. If nostr or something like it hits it, we get a communication layer that no one owns. If it doesn\u2019t, we continue with what we have, which is a handful of corporations mediating nearly all human digital communication.\n\nI think that\u2019s worth participating in. Not because the current apps are great, many of them aren\u2019t, and my original criticisms apply to how people use them. But because participating in protocol development while it\u2019s still early is how you influence what gets built. The people who shaped the early web weren\u2019t just users. They were building, experimenting, arguing about standards, making tools.\n\nI\u2019m not suggesting everyone rush to nostr. Most people have no reason to. But I\u2019m a person who cares about how the infrastructure of communication gets built, and I\u2019ve decided it\u2019s inconsistent of me to stand on the sidelines of the most interesting experiment in open communication protocols happening right now, while grumbling about the apps built on closed ones.\n\nI\u2019ll keep writing on my website. Long-form still demands effort in a way that short-form doesn\u2019t, and nothing about nostr changes that. But I\u2019ve stopped treating protocol skepticism as sophistication. Sometimes it\u2019s just caution dressed up as wisdom.","image":null,"pubkey":"67c2341647e53e55744f1374469ed0f2ff4d3d87843216da6ff4dd9b37e51c2b","kind":30023,"createdAt":"2026-04-12T22:57:55+00:00","publishedAt":"2026-04-12T22:57:55+00:00","topics":null,"url":"https:\/\/www.decentnewsroom.com\/mag\/newsroom-magazine-on-imwald-by-laeserin\/cat\/newsroom-magazine-on-imwald-by-laeserin-category-nostr\/d\/I-changed-my-mind-about-nostr"},{"title":"Is Nostr Actually Censorship Resistant?","slug":"Is-Nostr-Actually-Censorship-Resistant-5blu76","summary":"Nostr is often touted as decentralized and censorship resistant, such that even speech that would normally get a person banned on social media platforms can readily be found perusing popular Nostr clients. Is that actually the case though? I offer my opinion in this article.","content":"I have seen a lot of \u0022#Nostr\u00a0isn\u0027t actually censorship resistant\u0022 posts lately. It\u0027s nothing new. There has always been a bit of it in the past in various forms, and it is generally those same forms that are still repeated:\n\n\u003E \u0022Nostr isn\u0027t censorship resistant, because my posts are all hidden on Primal.\u0022\n\n\u003E \u0022...because Amethyst covers my posts with a warning for users whose follows have reported me too many times.\u0022\n\n\u003E \u0022...because the feds could raid the 5 relays you are using and your posts would all disappear.\u0022\n\n\u003E \u0022...because relays can blacklist you so you can\u0027t post to them anymore.\u0022\n\n\u003E \u0022...because Web-of-Trust keeps new users\u0027 posts from being seen by anyone.\u0022\n\nEvery one of these supposed evidences that Nostr isn\u0027t actually censorship resistant demonstrates ignorance about what that really means, and how it works on Nostr as compared with centralized, legacy social media, or even other attempts at decentralization, like Mastodon.\n\n## The Censorship Status Quo\n\nIf your account gets banned on Facebook, that\u0027s it, you\u0027re done. You have to start over and hope you can get everyone who was following your old account to follow your new one. If your post on X gets taken down for violating \u0022community standards,\u0022 there is no third party X client where it will still be visible to people. If you get shadow banned on TikTok so that the algorithm never surfaces your content, there is no alternative app you can point your followers to where they can choose a different algorithm that will show them your videos again.\n\nThese platforms are silos where a single company controls the client applications and\/or web interfaces, the user data stored on their servers, who can create an account, and how their posts will be (or won\u0027t be) shown to other users. If they take censorious actions against you as a user, your only recourse is to beg them to reverse it, and if they refuse then you are out of luck. That, my friends, is ***actual*** censorship, since the unilateral actions of ***one controlling entity*** can prevent your speech from being seen by any and all users of that platform.\n\nEven on Mastodon, if you anger the admin of your home instance, they can ban you and you have to start over with a new identity. Your previous social graph ***does not go with you***. A deletion request is also sent to other instances, and most of them will comply with it by deleting your posts. So, even though the ability to censor is spread between various instances, it is trivial for a single entity to effectively censor you if you get on their bad side.\n\nOn Nostr, all of these censorship vectors are mitigated, if not outright eliminated. Censorship resistance means that more individuals or entities would need to collude with one another to effectively keep a user\u0027s speech from being seen by most or all other users. Let\u0027s see how that works in practice by looking at some of the specific claims that Nostr is not actually censorship resistant.\n\n## Censorship by Nostr Client Devs\n\n\u003E \u0022Nostr isn\u0027t actually censorship resistant, because my posts are all hidden on Primal.\u0022\n\nOne client may decide to completely hide the posts made by a particular npub. There is no system I can imagine where this level of censorship cannot take place. If you rely on a piece of software created by someone else in order to see content from other users, the developer of that software will ***always*** have the ability to hide posts they don\u0027t want you to see for one reason or another. Nostr is not censorship resistant because it can somehow prevent software developers from hiding the posts of users they don\u0027t like. There is no way to prevent that while maintaining a fixed public key as your identity so that other users can reliably follow your posts.\n\nIf every post you made was from a new public key, then it really ***would*** be impossible to target you specifically for censorship, and some Nostr clients can do exactly that with an \u0022anon mode\u0022 toggle, such as Coracle or Anonostr, but that also precludes you from building a following, since no one knows what public key you will be posting from next, and as soon as there is a way to determine what key you will be posting from, client developers will also have a way to hide your posts again.\n\nNostr\u0027s censorship resistance in this situation is owing to the fact that if one client hides your posts, they are still visible on ***every other Nostr client*** without any action required on your part. Your posts are not censored to the same degree as they would have been on a centralized platform, since one client developer\u0027s actions do not result in your speech being hidden from most or all Nostr users. Your speech is being suppressed, but that suppression is nowhere near as effective as it would be if one entity controlled all of Nostr. Thus, Nostr is more resistant to that suppression of your speech than would have been the case elsewhere.\n\nThis fact also tends to keep clients from getting ban-happy and censoring absolutely every npub that has said something unkind about them. There\u0027s really no point in doing so, since those users\u0027 notes will still be visible on every other Nostr client. Therefore, the only npubs that tend to get censored are those that the client devs believe will negatively impact the experience of their users. They may be wrong in that assessment, but ***they have the right to make it***, and if you don\u0027t like it, the answer is quite simple: Use a different client, and encourage your followers to do the same if they aren\u0027t already. As you do, don\u0027t forget to note that this option in itself would ***never*** be available to you on centralized social media platforms. Your account would be completely useless and you would have to start over from scratch.\n\n## Censorship by User Reports\n\n\u003E \u0022Nostr isn\u0027t actually censorship resistant, because Amethyst covers my posts with a warning for users whose follows have reported me too many times.\u0022\n\nWhat was said above about a single client hiding a particular user\u0027s posts from other users is equally applicable here. Though you might be able to call it a form of censorship by speech suppression, it is not at all censorship to the degree that centralized platforms are capable of, since it only applies to those who use that particular client, and users of other clients will still see your posts without the need for you to take any action.\n\nIn this particular example, though, what is being called censorship is not really censorship at all. The client developer is not targeting the speech of any user or group of users for suppression whatsoever. The posts that are covered with a warning, and whether any posts get covered at all, is determined entirely by the users themselves, and it is different for each individual user based on who they are following and who those follows have reported. That\u0027s ***not*** censorship. That\u0027s user-controlled feed ***curation*** with a sensible default that can be adjusted to the user\u0027s preference.\n\nIt might be legitimate to classify it as censorship if the user wasn\u0027t aware that any post had been hidden. For the user to reasonably be considered in control of what posts they see, they must be ***aware*** that there are posts that are not being shown to them. In this case, the client ***does*** show the user a warning message in the place of the hidden note, with an explanation of why it was hidden, and the user can ***immediately choose to show it anyway*** if they prefer. In no sense can this be reasonably characterized as censorship.\n\n## Censorship by State Actors\n\n\u003E \u0022Nostr isn\u0027t actually censorship resistant, because the feds could raid the 5 relays you are using and your posts would all disappear.\u0022\n\nThere are many ways in which this example of Nostr\u0027s supposed lack of censorship resistance is just silly. Nevertheless, I wanted to include it not only because I have actually encountered it in the wild, but because it provides an opportunity to discuss ways that users can proactively prevent themselves from being censored, even in this extremely hypothetical instance.\n\nFirst, if the feds, or some other interested party, decided that the best way to keep your speech from being seen on Nostr was to physically raid the relays you set on your relay list and take them offline, it is unlikely that this would make your posts \u0022disappear\u0022 from Nostr entirely. First of all, there are various other relays that aggregate notes from known relays, and your notes would almost certainly be available on some of them. Any users reading from those aggregators would still see your previous notes.\n\nSecond, you can post your notes to ***more relays than you are advertising*** in your relay list. Several clients give you this option natively, such as Nostur and Nostrudel. You can also set a blastr relay, like wss:\/\/filter.nostr.wine, as one of your write relays, and every time you post a new note, it will be sent to several additional relays that are not advertised in your relay list. That way, if all of your preferred relays go down for any reason, fed raid or otherwise, all you need to do is publish a new relay list that includes a few of the relays where your notes were blasted, and you are back in business like nothing ever happened.\n\nThird, you can keep a ***private backup*** of your notes and easily broadcast them to more relays any time you want, using tools like NostrSync or Archivestr. You can even do this on a regular basis, if you don\u0027t want to set up a blastr relay. None of this requires any special hardware. Just go to one of these tools\u0027 websites, create an archive of your notes pulled from the relays you are currently writing to, and then broadcast it out to several additional relays. Then make note of which relays you broadcasted to, so you can switch to them in the event your current relays are no longer online.\n\nIf you ***really*** are concerned that a government entity would be so threatened by your speech that they would resort to raiding the servers hosting your notes, then I hope you have really solid op-sec, because the most effective way to shut down your speech is to find ***you***, not the relays you write to. Aside from that, it is also a good idea to select relays that are not located in the same jurisdiction. Choose relays that are in different countries, and even better if those countries are not always cooperative with one another.\n\n## Censorship by Relay Operators\n\n\u003E \u0022Nostr isn\u0027t actually censorship resistant, because relays can blacklist you so you can\u0027t post to them anymore.\u0022\n\nThis is very similar to the contention that a particular Nostr client can hide your posts from their users. Yes, a particular relay operator ***can*** prevent you from posting to their relay. That\u0027s not censorship, though. It is ***their relay*** to do with as they please. After all, you are not being censored because there are relays that only allow people who have paid the operator to post to them, are you? You are not being censored because some relays only allow those within a certain social group to post to them, are you? No. You can still use any number of public relays that allow anyone to post to them. If they choose to ban you, then you can just switch to using different ones. There are nearly 1,500 known relays to choose from that you can peruse at Nostr.Watch, so one relay, or even a sizable percentage of relays, banning you has absolutely ***no impact*** on whether your notes will be seen. Just update your relay list to some relays that haven\u0027t banned you and keep on posting.\n\nThis is why Nostr does not use home instances or home servers like Mastodon. That makes you beholden to ***one particular server admin*** who has the power to unilaterally ban you. Relay operators can\u0027t do that, because your identity is not intrinsically tied to a particular relay.\n\nBetter yet, if you are really convinced that a majority of relay operators would be ***so offended*** by what you have to say that they would ***all*** ban you, you can run your own relay. Yes, this requires a bit of technical know-how, but that is part of the cost of being nearly universally offensive online. Moreover, there are tools like Nostr Relay Tray that make it incredibly easy to run a personal relay that others can read from via clearnet without exposing your home IP.\n\n## Censorship Via Web-of-Trust Filters\n\n\u003E \u0022Nostr isn\u0027t actually censorship resistant, because Web-of-Trust keeps new users\u0027 posts from being seen by anyone.\u0022\n\nI am sympathetic to this argument, because while Web-of-Trust (WoT) is very effective at keeping spam from showing up in my feed, it also can keep posts from legitimate new users from showing up until they have managed to get a few followers. Depending on how reliant the bulk of Nostr users are on WoT to curate their feeds and their replies, it could make it incredibly difficult for new users to gain any traction, leaving them feeling like they are shouting into the void, until they finally leave because the only response they got back was from a bunch of bots.\n\nThat said, I am not aware of any WoT filters that are turned on by default. The end user has to ***manually*** opt-into using WoT to curate what they see. This takes WoT definitively out of the category of censorship, since it is not imposed by any client upon their users, but is entirely an optional means for users themselves to decide what content they want to see.\n\nThere are two main ways that WoT can be implemented for the purpose of limiting what posts a user sees in their feed. The first is by a Nostr client that shows posts or replies only from within the user\u0027s WoT. If I recall correctly, this was originally used by Coracle and Primal to ***expand*** the number of notes that users would see in their feed, rather than reduce them, because the default feeds only showed notes from a user\u0027s follows, but WoT allowed notes to be displayed from within a user\u0027s \u0022network.\u0022 Coracle iterated on this to develop client-side WoT scores that were unique to each user\u0027s view, and they could limit the feed and replies to only display notes from users who met a minimum WoT score set by the user. Jumble implemented the ability to filter based on WoT just for replies, since that is where the most obnoxious spam typically occurs, leaving no filtering on original posts. But all of these filters, regardless of client, have been ***opt-in only***, leaving it in the user\u0027s hands to determine whether to take advantage of the feature.\n\nThe second way Web-of-Trust has commonly been implemented is by relays. In this case, a relay can be set up with a whitelist of users who are permitted to post to it based on the relay owner\u0027s Web-of-Trust. This relay type was particularly popular before clients were fetching notes directly from the relays in a user\u0027s follows\u0027 relay lists in what is known as the outbox model. Back then, Nostr clients would only read notes from the specific relays the user listed as \u0022read\u0022 relays, so they could easily reduce spam by only reading from paid relays and WoT relays. That doesn\u0027t apply so much today, but even if it did, the choice to use a WoT relay is one made by each individual user. It is not imposed upon users, and therefore it cannot be legitimately classified as censorship.\n\n## Conclusion\n\nIn summary, many of the supposed examples of censorship still being possible on Nostr don\u0027t really count as censorship at all, because they are not examples of some authority like a client developer targeting specific posts, users, or topics they don\u0027t like and hiding them from their users without their knowledge and without any simple recourse. Most are actually 100% in the control of users themselves to determine what they do and do not see in their feeds. These tools are ***absolutely essential*** for users to have at their disposal, and we need to see ***more*** such tools implemented in other clients, so that users have the ability to curate their experience in accord with their own preferences.\n\nThose ways that actual suppression of speech is still possible on Nostr are greatly mitigated by the flexibility users have to choose between a wide variety of different clients and relays. If one client censors you, it doesn\u0027t really matter so long as there are still a number of other popular clients where your notes can still be seen. Yes, this means that some level of censorship ***can occur*** and ***is occurring*** on Nostr, but it is far less effective than it would be on any centralized platform. This severe reduction in the effectiveness of any effort at censorship is all that is meant when we say that Nostr is censorship resistant. We do not mean that the ability to censor particular users or groups of users is eliminated entirely. That is actually impossible to achieve.\n\nIt is my opinion that Nostr has proven itself to be the ***most*** censorship resistant social publishing protocol to date. There are still plenty of improvements that can be made, and tools that can be built to push censorship resistance even further, but I have yet to see anything else that comes close to Nostr ***in practice***, though some claim to be just as capable of censorship resistance in theory.","image":"https:\/\/relay.brightbolt.net\/c8719c5e4b89a9e4c7b9e65e58e1e837355683883cda9b8b61fe0fdb604ca3ef","pubkey":"b7274d28e3e983bf720db4b4a12a31f5c7ef262320d05c25ec90489ac99628cb","kind":30023,"createdAt":"2026-07-06T18:11:17+00:00","publishedAt":"2026-05-31T03:38:07+00:00","topics":["longform","nostrguides","censorship","nostr","censorshipresistance","freespeech"],"url":"https:\/\/www.decentnewsroom.com\/mag\/newsroom-magazine-on-imwald-by-laeserin\/cat\/newsroom-magazine-on-imwald-by-laeserin-category-nostr\/d\/Is-Nostr-Actually-Censorship-Resistant-5blu76"},{"title":"Private communications over public infrastructure","slug":"private-communications-over-public-infrastructure","summary":"Today I want to write down some thoughts on what it really means to have private communications over public infrastructure, and whether such a thing is even possible at all.","content":"# Private communications over public infrastructure\n\nToday I want to write down some thoughts on what it really means to have private communications over public infrastructure, and whether such a thing is even possible at all.\n\nThis article was motivated (or should I say triggered?) by several things. Part of it comes from the current state of DMs in Nostr. Part of it comes from the privacy claims different projects make. And part of it comes from recent conversations I have had, also because I care about privacy. Privacy is crucial. We need to fight for it, and if we get it wrong and just assume things are private when they are not, things are going to get very scary.\n\nI want to set the ground first, then look at the privacy model and tradeoffs of the main DM approaches around Nostr: NIP-04, NIP-17, Marmot, Nostr Double Ratchet, and NIP-4e.\n\nFirst things first: private communications and encrypted communications are not the same thing.\n\nPrivate communications usually depend on encryption to protect message content. But encryption alone is not enough to make a communication system private. You may encrypt what you say, yet still expose who you are talking to, when you are talking, how often you are talking, where you are connecting from, and how large your messages are. A third party can still learn a lot. This is metadata leakage, and in many cases, it is enough to build a revealing picture of relationships and behavior between different parties without reading a single message. Metadata is not \u0022just data.\u0022 It is actionable intelligence.\n\nIn other words: Encryption protects what you say; privacy protects that you said it at all.\n\nThat distinction matters a lot in Nostr because Nostr was never designed as a private messaging network. It was designed to be an open network built around relays. Those relays are meant to be queryable, subscribable, \u0022dumb\u0022, and easy to use as public dissemination infrastructure. That design is powerful for openness and censorship-resistance, but it is hostile to strong privacy by default.\n\nThe next thing I want to clarify is the concept of public infrastructure. From the perspective of this article, it refers to shared, openly accessible systems or mediums, sometimes controlled by a third party, that anyone can use but that lack inherent controls to prevent interception, inspection, or eavesdropping by unauthorized parties. In this context, that includes networks, protocols, and services like relays.\n\nPublic infrastructure fights privacy at every layer, which is exactly why the distinction between encryption and privacy matters so much here.\n\nOne historic precedent makes this easier to understand. During World War II, encrypted radio traffic itself was not always immediately decryptable, but the metadata around that traffic was already useful. Timing, frequency, origin, volume, and communication patterns helped infer enemy movements, unit locations, and operational behavior. In other words, not being able to read the message did not mean the communication was private. The metadata still spoke loudly, and that lesson maps uncomfortably well to modern digital systems.\n\n\u0022We kill people based on metadata,\u0022 stated by Michael Hayden, former director of the NSA and CIA, during a 2014 debate at Johns Hopkins University.\n\n\u0022Metadata absolutely tells you everything about somebody\u2019s life. If you have enough metadata, you don\u2019t really need content.\u0022 Stewart Baker, former NSA General Counsel\n\nThat is also why I am skeptical every time I hear privacy claims built on top of public, observable infrastructure. If the substrate is public, queryable, persistently collectable, and operated by third parties, then metadata becomes part of the threat model whether we like it or not.\n\nIn Nostr, this problem becomes very concrete.\n\nEven if a DM standard encrypts the content, an observer can still learn a lot. If the observer is a relay operator, it can see when a client connects. It can see the IP unless the user adds another protection layer such as Tor or a VPN. It can see when an event arrives. It can store traffic over time and build heuristics. An external observer with access to the relay stream may also infer a lot, depending on how much metadata the event exposes publicly.\n\nI also think it is useful to distinguish two different kinds of observers throughout this article.\n\nThe first is an external observer. This is someone who can collect publicly visible events from relays, subscribe to public streams, and analyze what is exposed in the events themselves. An active observer could also infer the arrival time of an event even if its timestamp is randomized. This observer does not necessarily run the relay.\n\nThe second is a relay operator observer. This observer has a much stronger vantage point. They can see connection timing, source IPs unless users hide them, exact arrival timing, authentication attempts, and all the relay-local heuristics that never appear in the event itself.\n\nThat distinction matters because some protocols hide more from the external observer than from the relay operator. A scheme can look much better at the public event layer while still leaking a lot to the operator actually serving the traffic.\n\nThere is an attempt to mitigate part of this for external observers with relay auth, aka NIP-42, which allows clients to authenticate to relays. That can help a relay restrict access to sensitive events. But NIP-42 is not a privacy cure. It is a gatekeeping mechanism. In practice, it requires the client to reveal its identity to the relay in order to gain access. And for a relay to know which private events a user is allowed to fetch, those events usually need enough routing information to tie them to the relevant participants. That is useful operationally, but it comes with a clear tradeoff: access control becomes entangled with metadata exposure.\n\nSo the question I want to explore in this article is not whether Nostr can carry encrypted messages. It clearly can. The real question is whether it can support private communications over public infrastructure in a strong sense, or whether what we really get are different degrees of content secrecy with different amounts of metadata leakage.\n\nThat is the lens I want to use for the rest of this article.\n\n## NIP-04\n\nNIP-04 was the first DM standard Nostr had. Today it is deprecated and explicitly marked as not recommended in favor of NIP-17, but it remains the cleanest example of the distinction I am trying to make.\n\nIn NIP-04, the message content is encrypted, but the event metadata is highly revealing. The event is authored by the sender\u2019s real pubkey, although anyone could use an ephemeral pubkey. The receiver is identified in a `p` tag. The timestamp is visible. The event kind is visible. And the ciphertext size is visible as well.\n\nThat means the content may be hidden, but the communication pattern is not.\n\nIf you are an external observer collecting these events, you can map who is talking to whom and when. If you are a relay operator, you can usually do even better because you also see connection-level information and exact receipt timing. Even if a client tries to blur some timing details, the relay still sees when the event actually arrived.\n\nSo what does NIP-04 really give us? It gives us encrypted content, but it leaks social graph information, timing, sender identity, receiver identity, and payload size. That is already enough for strong traffic analysis. You do not need to decrypt anything to extract valuable intelligence from it.\n\nThis is not even a controversial interpretation. The specification itself warns that it leaks metadata and says it should not be used for anything that really needs to be kept secret, except perhaps in combination with authenticated relay restrictions from NIP-42.\n\nThat said, there is one thing NIP-04 does have going for it. Since sender and receiver are explicit, it works relatively naturally with relay authorization models. A relay can restrict access to the parties involved because the parties are visible in the event. But that convenience is also part of the privacy failure. The same metadata that helps a relay gate access also helps an observer understand the communication graph.\n\nSo NIP-04 is simply encrypted communication, but not private communication in any strong sense. It is the perfect example of why those two ideas must not be conflated.\n\n## NIP-17\n\nAfter NIP-04, Nostr moved toward NIP-17, which uses NIP-44 encryption together with gift wraps. This was a real step forward.\n\nThe biggest improvement is that NIP-17 does a better job hiding the sender from the public outer event. The gift wrap is authored by an ephemeral key, and the actual message with the real sender is carried inside nested encrypted layers. On top of that, clients are encouraged to randomize timestamps to make simple timing correlation harder.\n\nAll of that is meaningful. I do not want to undersell it.\n\nBut I also do not want to pretend it solves the problem.\n\nThe receiver still needs a way to receive messages. In practice, that means the outer event still carries routing information for the receiver. An active observer can see that gift wraps are being delivered to some receiver-facing key. It can observe timing, volume, relay overlap, and ciphertext size. If the observer is a relay operator, it can also observe connection behavior. An external observer may not get the full picture that NIP-04 leaks publicly, and that is an important improvement, but important metadata is still available.\n\nThere is also another tradeoff that matters for the broader story. Gift wraps help obscure purpose because the same mechanism can be used for more than just DMs in Nostr. More specifically, the kind gift wraps use, 1059, is not exclusive to private chats. That is genuinely good for privacy, since not every gift wrap is obviously a chat message. An external observer seeing a kind 1059 event cannot automatically conclude that it is DM traffic. But the same design also creates a broad spam surface. An attacker can cheaply create many gift-wrap-looking events for a target receiver and force the receiver to spend resources figuring out which ones are real, or bury them under a pile of fake gift wraps. This spammy nature is also why some relays do not accept them.\n\nI do not want to focus too much on UX in this article, but this is one of those places where privacy and usability pull in different directions. NIP-17 also gets awkward with relay authentication because the sender uses an ephemeral key, so it does not have a clean way to prove it should be allowed to fetch these events.\n\nSo I would describe NIP-17 as a meaningful improvement over NIP-04, especially in sender concealment, deniability, and reduced public visibility. But I still would not call it fully private communication. It is better encrypted communication with a more cautious metadata posture, but not a complete escape from metadata leakage.\n\n## Beyond The NIPs Umbrella\n\nThe Nostr repository itself mainly gives us NIP-04 and NIP-17, plus the new NIP-4e, which is still a PR. But there are other serious attempts to push the privacy and security model further. The two most relevant ones for this discussion are Marmot and Nostr Double Ratchet.\n\nThese two are interesting because they do not just tweak the outer format of Nostr DMs. They bring in much stronger messaging primitives. Marmot brings MLS. Double Ratchet brings the family of ideas popularized by Signal. In both cases, the cryptography becomes substantially more ambitious, giving us things like forward secrecy and post-compromise recovery, which neither NIP-04 nor NIP-17 gives us.\n\nThese terms, forward secrecy and post-compromise recovery basically mean that if a private key is compromised, an attacker should not automatically be able to read historic messages or future messages.\n\nThat matters, but it still does not let us skip the transport question.\n\n## Marmot\n\nMarmot combines MLS with Nostr. MLS, short for Message Layer Security, is a serious group messaging protocol designed to provide strong content confidentiality, authentication, forward secrecy, and post-compromise security for groups. It also scales much better for larger groups than Double Ratchet. Those are not small properties. They are major upgrades compared with the simpler encrypted-message schemes we find in NIP-04 or NIP-17.\n\nThis is something that should be said clearly: MLS gives Marmot genuinely strong secrecy properties at the message layer.\n\nBut the problem I am exploring here is not just message secrecy. It is private communications over public infrastructure. That is where the picture becomes more complicated.\n\nMarmot maps MLS artifacts onto Nostr events and uses relays as a dissemination layer. That means things like key packages, welcome flows, group events, and group routing all have to live within a public relay environment. The protocol tries to preserve privacy through encrypted payloads, private MLS group IDs, ephemeral outer pubkeys for group events, and other techniques. Those are meaningful design choices, and they do improve the situation.\n\nBut there is an important nuance here. The private MLS group ID and the relay-facing `nostr_group_id` are not the same thing. In theory that is good because the real internal MLS group identifier stays private. In practice, though, the relay-facing `nostr_group_id` still behaves like a stable public routing identifier. That means it is observable, it is collectable, and it is spammable in the same way gift wraps are. So even if it is not the real MLS group ID, it still creates a public handle that observers and attackers can use.\n\nThis matters even more because Marmot traffic is not especially hard to identify from the outside. If a user publishes key package events on kind 443, or on kind 30443 in the newer transition, that already signals that the user might be using Marmot. And if an observer subscribes to group messages which are kind 445 events, they can infer Marmot group traffic directly. Those event kinds are not generic cover traffic. They are much more revealing than NIP-17 gift wraps, whose kind 1059 can be used for several different purposes in Nostr.\n\nFrom my perspective, I do not think its current design gets Marmot to strong privacy in the way some descriptions suggest.\n\nThe reason is simple. Marmot still operates over public relays. Even if the content is well protected, relays and active collectors can still observe that Marmot is being used. They can see when certain group identifiers become active, when bursts of traffic happen, how much data is flowing, how large the messages are, and which relays appear to be involved. An external observer can infer protocol usage from the specific Marmot kinds used and from the stable routing surface. A relay operator gets all of that plus the usual network-level vantage point, exact arrival times, and IP-level heuristics.\n\nThere is another issue: MLS is not just cryptography. It is also coordination. That burden becomes harder in Nostr because relays are a dissemination substrate, not an ordering oracle. Multiple admins can race. Offline members can come back with stale state. Welcome flows and commits need careful discipline to avoid drift.\n\nThis is not mainly a privacy problem, but it matters because every time a protocol needs more coordination over weakly ordered public infrastructure, the system inherits more complexity, more observable recovery patterns, and more room for operational fragility. As I already said, I do not want to turn this article into a UX piece. But this is exactly one of those places where the search for stronger privacy and stronger secrecy can make the total system harder to operate.\n\nSo my conclusion on Marmot is nuanced.\n\nI think Marmot substantially improves content security and secrecy compared with simpler DM schemes. Thanks to MLS, it brings real forward secrecy and post-compromise security, and that is a serious advancement. But I do not think public Nostr relays let Marmot honestly claim strong private communications in the broader sense. Metadata observability and public collection remain very real constraints.\n\n## Nostr Double Ratchet\n\nNostr Double Ratchet is the closest thing in this space to bringing a Signal-like messaging primitive into Nostr instead of relying on simpler static encryption flows.\n\nDouble Ratchet gives us stronger secrecy properties thanks to forward secrecy and post-compromise recovery. Instead of deriving a static conversation secret and reusing that basic relationship forever, the ratchet evolves keys as messages are exchanged. In practical terms, that means a compromise now should not automatically reveal all past messages, and if the compromise ends, future secrecy can recover after fresh ratchet steps.\n\nThat is real progress. Just like with MLS, I think this should be acknowledged clearly rather than buried under transport criticism. If the question is message secrecy, Double Ratchet is much closer to the state of the art than NIP-04, and in an important sense it also improves on the baseline security model around ordinary NIP-17-style direct messaging.\n\nAt the same time, Nostr Double Ratchet does not get to cheat physics.\n\nThe messages still move through Nostr events and relays. And here the event kinds matter more than they may seem at first glance. In this design, the encrypted outer transport for ordinary ratcheted messages uses kind 1060. That is important because kind 1060 is not generic cover traffic. If an external observer sees repeated kind 1060 events, they can reasonably infer that this specific messaging system is in use, just like in the case of Marmot.\n\nNot every part of the protocol is equally revealing. Invite and AppKeys records use kind 30078, which is a general application-data kind in Nostr and does not by itself prove that Double Ratchet is being used. Encrypted invite responses use kind 1059, which blends into the broader gift wrap universe. Shared-channel bootstrap also leans on kind 4. So there is some reuse of more generic Nostr surfaces. But the core ratcheted message transport still stands out.\n\nThat means the outer layer is still informative. An external observer can learn that kind 1060 traffic is happening, see the outer event pubkeys, timestamps, traffic bursts, approximate message sizes, and repeated communication rhythms. Even if they cannot read the content, they can still cluster activity, try to infer which identities or devices are active, and distinguish steady chat traffic from bootstrap traffic such as invites or device-management updates. Those flows also use protocol-specific kinds that do not blend into the general Nostr event stream.\n\nThe relay operator learns even more. It sees exact arrival times, subscription behavior, source IPs unless users hide them, and the full local timing picture that never appears in the event itself. At the same time, Double Ratchet does seem to avoid one of the more obvious metadata problems we saw in Marmot: ordinary traffic does not depend on a stable public routing identifier in the event itself.\n\nThere is also a tradeoff here around scale. Double Ratchet is naturally attractive for 1:1 communication because it gives strong secrecy with relatively clear security intuition. But it is not the most natural fit for large fanout by itself. The moment it tries to scale those guarantees into more complex group and multidevice environments, the protocol surface and complexity grows quickly. The Nostr Double Ratchet project itself includes multidevice identity mapping, session management, and sender-key-style group messaging, and that is powerful, but it also shows the cost of pushing stronger security models over a public relay substrate. The event kinds used reflect that expansion. Once a system needs separate kinds for encrypted transport, invites, device authorization records, shared-channel bootstrap, and group sender-key flows, an observer gets more protocol fingerprints to work with even if the message bodies remain sealed.\n\nSo my take is that Double Ratchet is a major upgrade in secure messaging properties, and it may improve privacy in a limited sense by making traffic less trivially interpretable. If I have to choose a protocol for 1:1 communication over Nostr relays, it would be this one. But it still does not solve the central problem of public infrastructure. The relays still know that communication happened. They still see timing. They still see patterns. And if the infrastructure remains public and observable, those patterns remain part of the attack surface.\n\nJust a side note to finish this. Neither Marmot nor Nostr Double Ratched play well with relay auth, NIP-42.\n\n## NIP-4e\n\nNIP-4e is a bit different from the other things I have covered so far, because it is not really trying to be a standalone DM protocol. It is better understood as an auxiliary mechanism that can be used together with schemes such as NIP-04 or NIP-17.\n\nIts core idea is to decouple encryption from identity.\n\nThat may sound subtle, but it solves a real problem. Many Nostr patterns assume the identity key is also the key used for encryption, including self-encryption flows used for syncing data across devices. That breaks down in setups where the identity key is intentionally not present on the device, like bunkers, threshold signing systems, secure enclaves, or other more sovereign key-management architectures. NIP-4e tries to fix that by letting a user keep a separate encryption key and distribute that capability securely across devices.\n\nFrom an architectural point of view, I think that is a good idea.\n\nIt improves key hygiene. It makes local encryption workflows more practical. It lets someone keep their identity signing setup more isolated while still doing encryption on-device. And it fits better with a world where people want a stronger separation between identity authority and application-level encryption.\n\nBut if we bring it back to the main question of this article, the answer stays modest.\n\nNIP-4e does not suddenly make communications private. If you use NIP-4e together with NIP-04, you still inherit the metadata exposure of NIP-04, even if the keys used are not the real keys. If you use it with NIP-17, you inherit the strengths and weaknesses of NIP-17. What changes is not the public nature of the transport, but the keying model.\n\nIn fact, the protocol introduces its own observable artifacts through announcements and device key-sharing events. That does not make it bad. It just means it should be evaluated honestly. NIP-4e is useful infrastructure for decoupled encryption and multi-device sovereignty. It can support other DM standards. But by itself it is not a privacy breakthrough.\n\n## Conclusions\n\nSo, is private communication over public infrastructure even possible?\n\nAfter going through all of these approaches, my answer is: yes, in some sense, but not really.\n\nPublic infrastructure fights privacy at every layer.\n\nSpacially if the infrastructure is publicly reachable, queryable, and persistently collectable, then metadata becomes part of the system whether the protocol authors like it or not. That does not mean encrypted messaging over public infrastructure is useless. Far from it. It can still be extremely valuable. It can still raise the cost of surveillance. It can still make censorship harder. It can still improve user sovereignty. But if we want to be honest, we cannot collapse all of that into the word private and move on.\n\nSo I do not think the honest story is that Nostr already has private messaging. I think the honest story is that Nostr has several attempts at encrypted messaging, and those attempts sit at different points in a tradeoff space between secrecy, metadata exposure, complexity, scalability, and usability.\n\nThat is not a failure. It is just reality.\n\nIf anything, I think the most dangerous thing we can do is use imprecise language and teach users to trust guarantees the system does not actually provide. Honest language is part of security. If a protocol has strong content confidentiality but weak metadata privacy, we should say exactly that. If a system makes observation harder but still possible, we should say that too.\n\nNostr can absolutely be a powerful substrate for encrypted and censorship-resistant communications. I believe that. But if what we want is truly private communication, then public infrastructure is still an adversarial environment. And the more honestly we admit that, the better chance we have of building and designing systems that improve things for real instead of just sounding private.\n\nI intentionally kept this piece focused on privacy rather than UX, even though the two constantly touch each other. But it is hard to read through these protocols without noticing that better secrecy and a better privacy posture often come with costs in complexity, spam resistance, coordination, recoverability, or general usability.\n\nEncrypted is not the same as private. Public infrastructure is not a neutral carrier. And if we want private communications on top of public systems, we have to be far more demanding about metadata, far more honest about tradeoffs, and far more precise in the claims we make.\n","image":"https:\/\/blossom.primal.net\/3429ee14e7c548b522a86fd5d3a30714a06494b48fab3ac804dd909d47c55678.png","pubkey":"40b9c85fffeafc1cadf8c30a4e5c88660ff6e4971a0dc723d5ab674b5e61b451","kind":30023,"createdAt":"2026-04-22T12:37:08+00:00","publishedAt":"2026-04-22T12:37:08+00:00","topics":["nostr","dm","privacy","encryption","messaging","nip04","nip-04","nip17","nip-17","gift-wrap","marmot","mls","double-ratchet","signal"],"url":"https:\/\/www.decentnewsroom.com\/mag\/newsroom-magazine-on-imwald-by-laeserin\/cat\/newsroom-magazine-on-imwald-by-laeserin-category-nostr\/d\/private-communications-over-public-infrastructure"}]}],"chapters":[],"stats":{"totalCategories":4,"totalArticles":13,"totalChapters":0}}