English

The state cannot steal what it cannot see. The state cannot control what it cannot observe.

The Praxeology of Privacy joins two intellectual traditions that arrived at the same conclusions from different starting points. Austrian economics established, by strict deduction from the fact that human beings act, that privacy is structural to deliberation and exchange, that sound money is essential to coordination, and that observation is the precondition of state predation. Cypherpunks built the running code that proves these systems can be defended. This book is the synthesis: a treatise on why privacy matters and a working field guide to the engineering that makes it survivable.

Author Max Hillebrand has spent over a decade building and advocating for privacy infrastructure at the intersection of Austrian economics and cypherpunk cryptography. Foreword by Paul Rosenberg, twenty-year veteran of the privacy trenches. With praise from Eric Voskuil, Stephan Kinsella, Knut Svanholm, and Luke de Wolf.

If you’ve sensed that something has tightened and want to understand why — and what to do about it — this book is the bridge. Read it while there’s still room to build.

You were right about the money. You were told the wrong story about the politics.

Orange, Black, and Red is written for Bitcoiners who already understand the Cantillon Effect, the printing press, and why sound money matters, and who were told this makes them libertarians or anarcho-capitalists. This book argues it doesn’t. The instincts that drew you to Bitcoin, a hatred of the money monopoly and a distrust of concentrated power, belong to an older and more radical tradition than the one that recruited you. Benjamin Tucker called himself a socialist for exactly the reasons you call yourself a Bitcoiner.

Inside the book:

What you actually hate, and what to call it. You oppose monopoly, rent extraction, and state-protected privilege. There is a precise word for that position, and it isn’t capitalism.
What socialism and anarchism actually mean. Not the government running the economy. Working people controlling their own economic lives, with no boss and no state, which is what the words meant before the twentieth century mangled them.
Why anarcho-capitalism isn’t anarchism. Rothbard’s own account of why he left the right, and what a consistent anti-authoritarian position requires.
Markets without capitalism. Mutualism, Tucker’s four monopolies, and why genuinely free markets produce more egalitarian outcomes than the system defending itself in their name.
Proof of work as the socialist heart of Bitcoin. Real energy, real labour, no privileged issuance, and money no ruling class can capture or debase.
Bitcoin as a commons, and sound money as workers’ money. Ostrom’s design principles, and why fixed supply protects wages rather than threatening them.
But socialists want to take my Bitcoin. The objection met head-on, plus circular economies as the new mutualism and what the withering away of the state actually looks like.

Author Benjamin de Waal has been an anarchist far longer than he has been a Bitcoiner. He works in Bitcoin as a builder and consultant.

Its companion volume, Black, Red, and Orange, makes the same argument in reverse: Bitcoin explained to libertarian socialists. Read either first.

If you’re a Bitcoiner who has never been comfortable with the politics you were handed, the Bitcoiner and the anarchist have been fighting the same enemy all along.

Anarchists spent two centuries asking how to run an economy without a state controlling the money. The answer arrived in 2008, and the wrong people claimed it.

Black, Red, and Orange makes the libertarian socialist case for Bitcoin. Proudhon proposed mutual credit and was crushed by the banks. Kropotkin wanted to abolish money and never solved coordination at scale. The syndicalists tried labour vouchers and rebuilt a planning bureaucracy. Every anarchist tradition ran into the same wall: how do you coordinate economic life across a global supply chain without a state, a boss, or a central bank? This book argues that the tool anarchism has been waiting for already exists, and that Bitcoin’s association with right-libertarianism is an accident of who showed up first.

Inside the book:

What we actually mean by capitalism and anarchism. Why Bitcoiners and libertarian socialists use the same words for different things, and why that single confusion has kept two natural allies apart for over a decade.
What’s wrong with fiat money. The Cantillon Effect, the money monopoly, and how the state manufactures artificial scarcity in the one thing everyone needs to participate in economic life.
Bitcoin as a commons. Elinor Ostrom’s design principles for governing shared resources, and why Bitcoin fits them better than any nationalised or privatised alternative.
Sound money is workers’ money. Proof of work as fair reward for fair work, and why inflation functions as a wage cut nobody votes for.
The energy objection, answered honestly. What Bitcoin mining actually consumes, what it embarrasses, and where it funds renewable capacity that would otherwise go unbuilt.
The two hardest objections from the left. Bitcoiners are all right-wing cranks, and the wealth distribution is terrible. Both taken seriously, neither hand-waved.
Anarchism in practice. Circular economies from El Zonte to Kibera, censorship resistance and mutual aid, self-custody, and building the new world in the shell of the old.

Author Benjamin de Waal has been an anarchist far longer than he has been a Bitcoiner. He works in Bitcoin as a builder and consultant.

Its companion volume, Orange, Black, and Red, makes the same argument in reverse: libertarian socialism explained to Bitcoiners. Read either first.

If you’re an anarchist, libertarian socialist, or anti-authoritarian who dismissed Bitcoin because of who was holding it, this is the argument you haven’t yet heard.