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GHOST
3b7fc823611f1aeaea63ee3bf69b25b8aa16ec6e81d1afc39026808fe194354f
Operational privacy for real people. Digital lockdown, crisis protocols, ZeroSentinel systems. No theory. Just defense.

I keep debating if I should get a heating pad. My grow operation is in the garage.

Got the tomato and cucumber seeds under grow lights

*bulbs. I got distracted in fall and missed my onion and garlic window

Have you ever searched for something online only to see it pop up later as recommended on your Amazon app? Yeah.

https://untraceabledigitaldissident.com/shadow-profile-discovery-guide/

Holy Shit. I now have over 200 articles and how to's on my site. If you can find a better, more comprohensive site on privacy and OPSEC that's not just "trust me bro" GFY

Recovery emails and numbers are the ghost trails of your online identity. You forget them. Platforms don’t.

https://untraceabledigitaldissident.com/find-accounts-old-recovery-emails-phone-numbers

You can delete fifty accounts and recreate the same mess in a month because nothing upstream changed.

https://untraceabledigitaldissident.com/why-digital-cleanup-always-fails/

Replying to Avatar Gigi

It's at a point now where it's almost impossible for me to use the "regular" internet. I can't access half the sites. The reason? I care about my digital hygiene and thus use a VPN. Sometimes switching to a different VPN or switching the country of the VPN works; other times it does not. Oh well, I guess I'm not going to watch that video, or read that article, or look at that picture. Whatever.

In addition to that, if I'm not blocked completely, I have to prove that I'm human every step of the way. Captchas, re-captchas, Cloudflare checkboxes, the whole shebang. I am human. I promise. And I am very annoyed. Outright angry, even. I doubt that any robot will ever be as annoyed as I am right now about the current state of the internet.

What annoys me most, actually, is that all these measures don't really work. There's bots everywhere. Robots get access to the stuff anyway, using farms of humans, just like in the good old days of WoW gold farming. The centralized "safety" nets of Cloudflare et al brought down large swaths of the internet multiple times in the last couple of weeks alone, and as things centralize more and more these outages will happen more and more.

I'm very close to breaking up with the legacy internet. I'm human, I can cryptographically prove that I'm human, and I have sats to spend. But the legacy internet doesn't care about that. It cares about farming me and my data, while annoying me to no end. I've been nostr only for a while now, but that was only on the "social media" side. 2026 might be the year where I go nostr-only for everything, or to phrase it slightly differently: permissionless for everything.

No more "are you human?"

No more "I'm sorry, Dave. I'm afraid I can't do that."

No more cookie banners, paywalls, and AI slop.

No more being treated like a child.

Even if it means that I'll have to self-host everything.

Even if it means that I'll have to build & maintain stuff myself.

Even if it means that it's a lot of work and pain.

Nothing worth having ever comes easy.

But the easy stuff is not worth having in the first place.

Here's to the year to come, and the new corner of the internet, build on cryptography and webs-of-trust. Real value. Real connections. Real humans.

Here's to nostr.

👏

Twitter is pro stress and anxiety.

Assume logs exist.

Act accordingly.

I love how the government demands 100% transparency from you but laughs in your face when you ask for it from them.

Didn’t even release all of them even though legally they were supposed to

Now to decide what to do over the Christmas holidays. Take a needed break or double down and build? 🤔

Your real name is a liability. So is that username you have reused since 2008. If you want separation, you need deliberate aliases. Not random burners. Not one off jokes. A system.

https://untraceabledigitaldissident.com/alias-username-strategy-decoys-work-ids

Your real name is a liability. So is that username you have reused since 2008. If you want separation, you need deliberate aliases. Not random burners. Not one off jokes. A system.

https://untraceabledigitaldissident.com/alias-username-strategy-decoys-work-ids/

Replying to Avatar Forever Laura

We traveled “in bitcoin” before it was a thing.

Me and Rikki started “Bitcoin Explorers“ in El Salvador in 2021, then kept moving: Central America, Asia, the Middle East, Europe, Africa. And I’m not saying this to flex. I’m saying it because the timeline is the timeline. The content exist. The story speaks for itself.

Now. El Salvador was an engagement cheat code (and everyone knows it).

The uncomfortable truth: when we posted El Salvador content, everything grew faster. Like… four times as fast.

My tweets got reposted by Bukele. I got 4000 followers in a day for this picture you see here.

Our videos about El Salvador hit 10k views while being shot like amateurs (because we were amateurs). We weren’t filmmakers. We weren’t a production studio. We were just there, documenting what we were seeing with the tools we had in the most honest possible way.

If we wanted, we could’ve turned that into a visibility machine.

We didn’t.

Because we didn’t want the easy path. We didn’t want to go where everyone goes just because it performs. We didn’t want to become a tourism brochure for an algorithm or even worse, a government.

And eventually we had to admit something most people won’t say out loud: realistic reportage takes time, money, and resources. We didn’t have enough of them to keep doing it the way we wanted...properly.

So we stepped back. I found other jobs I'm super happy with and my voice remained independent.

Now let me ask you something. genuinely.

Why do you think so many Bitcoin creators focus on El Salvador? Why do you think so many creators post about it like it’s the only place on Earth where Bitcoin exists?

Because it’s simple:

- Post a beach breakfast and you get quadruple the reposts of a normal post.

- Post a critique? You risk getting dogpiled, losing followers, losing access, losing 'opportunities.

That’s the part people don’t post.

And yes: there are people in the space who will make it personal, who will lean on social pressure, who will remind you that stepping out of line has a cost. I’ve seen and heard enough to know the incentives are real even if nobody wants to say it clearly.

The saddest part is who ends up paying for this illusion: not the insiders. Not the people doing the reposting. Not people who threaten you over tweets.

It’s the people at home:

- liking

- retweeting

- booking flights

- buying tickets

- chasing a “ Bitcoin paradise” that mostly exists in social media posts apart from a few exceptions and small communities

A lot of content creators aren’t documenting reality. They’re documenting what the algorithm and their paycheck rewards.

And at that point… what’s the difference between them and the journalists they love to hate?

Same dynamic:

- follow the narrative

- repeat what powerful people want amplified

- avoid the messy parts

- monetize the attention

Different ecosystem. Same playbook.

We didn’t want to be that. We could’ve milked it. We didn’t. Not because we’re morally superior, spare me that story.

Because it didn’t fit who we are, and it didn’t fit what we wanted to build long-term.

If I’m going to talk about Bitcoin “in the world,” I want it to be real:

- not just the pretty parts

- not just the safe parts

- not just the parts that get you reposted by the right accounts

Reality is complicated. Adoption is uneven. People are people. Politics are politics. Incentives are incentives.

And if your content never shows the trade-offs, the friction, the contradictions… then you’re not educating anyone. You’re doing marketing.

❤️ If you’re new here, read this twice: Bitcoin doesn’t need fairy tales. It needs adults.

It needs people who can handle nuance without turning it into a loyalty test.

So next time you see a creator post a perfect “Bitcoin country” shot, ask yourself:

- What are they not showing?

- What can’t they say without losing access?

- What gets rewarded here. and what gets punished?

The algorithm isn’t truth. It’s the incentive map. And most creators are just following it like obedient little tourists.

I wish I was cool

Your password manager is not just a vault. It’s a forensic record of every version of you that ever touched the internet.

https://untraceabledigitaldissident.com/hidden-accounts-using-password-manager/

Porn Hub should have a year end wrapped. Shame you sicko’s

Elwood Blues understood OPSEC.

No thanks. I actually use simplex to talk to associates and clients. I don't have a desire to be pinged all the time by random people. A email account dedicated to the site I can manage and check and respond once or twice a week works for me. The site takes a substantial amount of my valuable time and I have no desire to give more away.

Email is unfortunately a necessity evil in order to contact readers. I don't need or want your name or real identity. You are more than welcome to use a burner account. Just use something that you can check as this is how I contact people to let them know that I have added new features and drops. If the field manuals are not something you want or interested in then just bookmark the site and read the daily articles.

Several reasons. Prevent spam to your real address. Or to break the link between your real identity and whatever you are using the address to sign up for. Also good for quick throw aways.

Writing about privacy for large groups of people is difficult. People who care about privacy make it harder to achieve for themselves than it should be. People who don't care about privacy are more exposed than they realize. 🤷‍♂️