I was twelve years old when I got scammed in Runescape. Someone tricked me out of my items — I don't even remember what they were now — and something clicked. Not anger. Curiosity. How did they do that? How does any of this work?
That question led me down a path I'd spend the next two decades walking. Hacking forums. Cryptocurrency. The Darknet. I had no idea I was forming an identity. I was just a kid who wanted to understand the systems everyone else took for granted.
At eighteen, I went to register to vote. Asked the lady at the booth: “What happens if I don't register?”
“Nothing,” she said.
So I didn't. Arrogant first-world thinking, sure. Taking democracy for granted. But even then, something about putting my name on a government list felt wrong. They already knew I existed. Why would I volunteer to make it easier to track me?
I told people I'd only vote for whoever was building the better internet. My vote didn't matter anyway.
It took me years to find the words for what I was. Cypherpunk. Libertarian. Disciple of Austrian economics. I was orange-pilled with Bitcoin in 2011, seventeen turning eighteen, and I knew I'd opened Pandora's box.
I am a first-generation digital native. I was a geek long before it was remotely cool. I've been to the dark side. I learned to cherish my privacy while recklessly exposing myself at other times.
This is where that journey led.
The forums where I grew up
At sixteen, I was deep in the online hacking communities. Hackerforums. worm.ws. Oblivi0n. Evilzone. Script-O-Matic. I moved through them learning everything I could — SQL injection, proxy chaining, packet scripting, memory manipulation.
I wasn't just watching. I ran trojans that infected hundreds of thousands of computers. Mostly I used them to DDoS people off video games. Occasionally I skimmed a little gold or items from game accounts — never drained anyone, just grabbed a bit here and there. Hundreds of thousands of gamer computers meant millions of accounts across hundreds of games. I applied social engineering constantly, testing what I'd learned from Kevin Mitnick's The Art of Deception (downloaded from The Pirate Bay, naturally). I got good at it.
I'm not proud of everything from that era. A forensic psychologist once commented during an interview that I said the word “hacker” with pride. He wasn't wrong. Looking back, some of what I did feels out of character now — but it shaped me. That world taught me how systems actually work — not how they're supposed to work, but how they fail, how they're exploited, how the gap between security theatre and actual security is measured in destroyed lives.
Why the brand, not the name
My name isn't a secret. You'll find it if you look. That's fine.
But this brand is deliberately built around the ideas, not the personality. I made decisions in my life. I served time for them. The system won in that regard — I'm a reformed man. Australian law constrains how I can commercialise certain aspects of my past — the literary proceeds provisions of the Proceeds of Crime Act are real and apply to me.
I hope that if this becomes successful that the Courts of Australia may find that this work genuinely served the public interest — that it educated, that it contributed something worth protecting. Sadly, in my experience, I doubt this will be the case. Overreaching government power is a matter of absolute power corrupts absolutely. Alas in Australia, we have no bill of rights. Freedom of speech is at best given token appreciation.
The cypherpunk tradition has always been comfortable with pseudonymity. Satoshi disappeared. Moxie Marlinspike built Signal under a pseudonym for years. The Hated One has never shown his face.
The ideas should stand on their own merits. If you need to know who's writing this before you'll evaluate the arguments, we're probably not going to get along anyway.
Second-class citizen
What matters is what happened after I got out. Despite being a law-abiding citizen, I am a second-class citizen.
I tried to invest my inheritance. Applied to every stock platform in Australia. Rejected by the vast majority. Vanguard accepted me, but I suspect they're just slower than the rest — that rejection is coming too.
I've spoken to compliance team after compliance team. They tell me the same thing: we won't do business with you.
The major banks closed all my accounts years ago. Almost a decade later, I tried to restart my life with smaller banks. Bank Australia closed my account citing their intelligence department. They express posted my debanking notice. Express posted. Like it was urgent that I know how unwelcome I was.
I called industry after industry. IT? Corporate wouldn't hire me — I'd raise their insurance premiums. Construction management? Surely the industry of second chances. No. I'd never make it past the onboarding cadet program.
I tried law. Thought maybe I could argue my way through it. The FUD overcame me. I closed that door myself.
I love finance. I help people with it constantly, guiding discussions, explaining the rigged system. I knew I could never get my financial adviser licence. That made me sad, because I would have helped people beat the system and charged fairly for it. I knew it in my soul.
So I thought: financial counsellors. They volunteer their time. They have an exemption from needing an Australian Financial Services Licence. Charities are the only ones who hire them. I've cracked it. I can help people.
I sent emails to every professional and visible authority in the industry. Email after email came back: no.
Two people bothered to actually call every agency on the South Coast for me. A TAFE teacher who worked two days a week as a financial counsellor in the prisons. And an executive officer from the state professional body.
The charities gave the state body their honest answer: they wouldn't hire me because they'd be worried their government funding would get cut.
Equal chance. Yeah right.
I'm not a privacy purist (and neither should you be)
I must admit — I can be a hypocrite.
One part of my life, I've near-abandoned my privacy values. I am white-pilled. I believe in e/acc — effective accelerationism. I live and breathe AI.
I unfortunately trust the companies and the rule of law when I click “do not train on my data.” I am blatantly aware that my data is open for lawful subpoena, or even an AI company employee going through my conversations for whatever reason their policy permits. Yet context is king.
I often joke that I'll be first in line to upload my mind to the cloud. To integrate my consciousness with AI. I'd likely be part of the radical biotech of the near-future.
But it's simple: anything you type into AI is the same as saving it to your Google Drive unencrypted. If anything, it's probably safer than that — at least it doesn't get scraped by Google's AI. Yin and yang, even in information privacy.
The things I do with AI day to day are profound. The empowerment and depth of my ability to navigate the world has gone leaps and bounds. I may be giving my data over, but I am gaining a life-changing amount of autonomy. Autonomy to not give money to the knowledge middlemen of society. The professionals.
I learn how to change taps. Maintain my car. Mow the lawns effectively. Without paying anything but a small subscription relative to the money I save each day.
For my family and I, I've saved easily $100,000 in professional fees this year. I know because the professionals we've dealt with have been surprised by the amount of leg work we've done — our bills have been drastically less than they would have been. A human in the loop is still needed, liability if anything is the only reason. Insurance in the form of an authority is all a professional becomes once you have a deep understanding and ability to use AI.
So no, I'm not telling you to delete everything, go off-grid, and communicate only through encrypted dead drops. Privacy isn't about paranoid maximalism. It's about choosing what you expose, to whom, and why.
The problem isn't sharing data. The problem is having no choice about it.
The word that gave me permission
All those closed doors. All that rejection. And yet I kept coming back to the same question: what am I?
I was sitting in a jail cell. Someone on Download This Show called themselves a technologist. I knew straight away — that was me.
I'd struggled for years to explain my skillset. I'm no computer scientist. I'm experienced with information technology but I wouldn't call myself a coder. Yet I can read, understand, and synthesise the tech world for laypeople. I dropped out of school. Studied IT just for the sake of doing something. But I was self-taught through and through.
A technologist. Most specifically, a privacy technologist. My entire life has unintentionally had countless years dedicated to learning, experimenting, and sharing about this topic. My authority is as organic as it gets.
So here we are.
What this site is for
I want to help the everyday person become sovereign. In their privacy. In their finances. In whether or not they share what the government demands from them.
I strongly believe the more people who learn how to lock down their information and wealth — beyond the reach of thugs in suits who can't touch it without consent — the better.
We saw what happened with gold in the 20th century. Confiscation. Controls. Citizens forced to surrender their savings to the state.
We saw what happened with privacy in the 21st century. Governments and cyber criminals eroding away the layers that protect sovereign citizens. Sometimes working together. Sometimes indistinguishable from each other.
Then there's the Big Print. Austrian economics screaming scam while they call Bitcoin a Ponzi. What do you call the fiat system? The magic money. The mouse-click money with infinite print. A system where the everyday person's savings go down — a hidden tax people are totally unaware of because it isn't taught in schools. What government would fund that program? Ha! Well, hopefully we can break the cycle.
The cypherpunks saw this coming. They built tools — encryption, decentralised money, sovereign identity systems — that give ordinary people the same protections governments reserve for themselves.
Those tools are better now than at any point in history. The infrastructure exists.
This site teaches you how to use it.
The four pillars
1. Privacy technology that actually works
Setup guides and configuration tutorials for the tools that matter. Encrypted phones. Secure messaging. Privacy-respecting email. VPNs that don't sell your browsing history to corporations and governments. Password managers that don't get breached. Self-custody solutions — from hardware wallets for those starting out, to steel backups and seed memorization for those who want no third parties in the chain at all.
I test everything I recommend. If I say a tool works, I've used it — often under conditions where failure would have real consequences.
2. Cypherpunk philosophy and history
The ideas behind the tools. Why encryption matters. Why decentralisation isn't just a technical preference. Why the cypherpunks saw the surveillance state coming decades before the rest of us.
Understanding the philosophy changes how you use the tools. It helps you recognise threats, evaluate trade-offs, and make decisions when the tutorial doesn't cover your situation.
Austrian economics — Mises, Hayek, Hazlitt — provides the clearest framework for understanding why privacy matters economically.
Hazlitt's core insight is simple: bad policy looks good because we see its benefits but not its costs. A government program creates 500 jobs — that's visible, countable, a great photo op. But the taxes that funded it quietly killed 600 jobs elsewhere in the economy. Those jobs never existed, so no one mourns them. No one even notices.
The same logic applies to surveillance.
Governments always show you the crimes they prevented. The drug bust. The terrorism plot foiled. The child predator caught. These are real, visible wins — and they're used to justify every expansion of monitoring power.
What you never see: the journalist who didn't pursue a corruption story because they knew their sources would be exposed. The entrepreneur who didn't build an encrypted communications tool because they'd end up on a watchlist. The protest movement that never organised because everyone assumed they were being watched. The whistleblower who stayed silent.
You can count arrests. You cannot count the ideas that were never shared, the businesses never started, the movements never formed. The costs of surveillance are invisible — which is exactly why governments pretend they don't exist.
I'm working through Hazlitt's Economics in One Lesson right now. You'll see these ideas woven through the content here.
3. Bitcoin and financial sovereignty
Bitcoin is the first money in history that no government can print, no bank can freeze, and no border can stop. That's not hyperbole. That's a technical description of how the protocol works.
I cover Bitcoin from a sovereignty perspective. Not speculation. CoinJoin and privacy techniques. Self-custody that actually protects your keys. Lightning Network for private, instant payments.
I was orange-pilled in 2011. I've watched this technology evolve from cypherpunk experiment to global financial infrastructure. I've also watched every government response, every regulatory crackdown, every attempt to capture and control it.
4. The “debanked” experience
A Binance survey found 58% of Australian crypto users want unrestricted access to deposit funds into exchanges. AUSTRAC has acknowledged that debanking can have a “devastating impact” on legitimate businesses. Coinbase has called Australian banks' debanking practices “systemic”.
I've lived what most people only read about in policy papers.
Being debanked is clarifying. It reveals which parts of the financial system are essential, which are merely convenient, and which alternatives actually work when you need them.
This pillar documents that journey. What I learned. What I'd do differently. How to build resilience before you need it.
New Australian crypto legislation is expected in 2026. The conversation is changing. These experiences matter beyond my individual case.
The technology stack
This site runs on infrastructure that reflects its values.
Privacy-respecting analytics. No Google Analytics. The analytics run entirely on my server — cookieless, no personal data collected, no third-party processors. You won't see a cookie consent banner here because there's nothing to consent to.
Privacy-respecting email. No Mailchimp. No ConvertKit. Subscriber data stays with Tutanota — a German provider with end-to-end encryption and no advertising business model. When you give me your email address, you're trusting a company whose entire existence depends on protecting your privacy, not monetising it.
Bitcoin accepted. Products can be purchased with Bitcoin. Your purchase, your money, your choice.
These aren't marketing features. They're demonstrations. If I'm going to tell you privacy technology matters, I should be using it myself.
What happens now
I may be screaming into the void. Maybe someone will see it. Maybe it'll open someone's eyes and empower the sovereign individual in them.
Start with the pillar content as it publishes over the coming weeks.
Reach out if you have questions. I read every email.
The cypherpunks built tools that give ordinary people protections that governments once reserved for themselves. Those tools work. The infrastructure exists.
The only question is whether you'll use it.
The future I'm building toward
John Perry Barlow wrote in 1996 in his Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace: “We will create a civilization of the Mind in Cyberspace. May it be more humane and fair than the world your governments have made before.”
Winston Churchill said something similar decades earlier: “The empires of the future are the empires of the mind.”
The future I envision is both of these. It is in cyberspace. It is in the mind. Through privacy technology, the powers of overreaching governments will be tamed. Through encryption and decentralised systems, individuals will hold ground that no state can take by force.
May it be more humane and fair than humankind has managed in the past.
That's the bet. That's the work.
— The Privacy Technologist
