There is a common phrase: “he/she woke up today and chose violence”.

I like it. It is funny. But it is imperfect.

“Violence” is now a verbal defensive phrase that means too much. To “wake up and choose violence” in the modern parlance of people who know zero struggle means to choose public verbal opposition. Okay, sure. But not really.

I woke up today and chose rhetoric. Not violence.

I spent years doing mixed martial arts competitively. I know violence. I am trained in a dozen ways to choke someone out, and have been choked out in’s dozen ways. I have had a 200 pound male fireman try to beat me unconscious and fail to do so. Even that wasn’t really violence, since it was controlled. Assholes on my trailer park bus stop in my teenage years were violent.

Verbosity isn’t violence. It is rhetoric.

I woke up today and chose rhetoric. I woke up today and chose to defend noncustodial privacy tools with language and resources. Coordinating messages between entities shouldn’t be a crime per se.

Bitcoin is anti-fragile and will continue to be so, thanks to all the people who work hard for it. But it is not without a fight.

Privacy is necessary in a free society in the digital age. A Cypherpunk’s Manifesto made this clear three decades ago and is still true.