00:00 Hello, I'm Seth Simmons and welcome to season one, episode nine of Opt Out. Opt Out is a show where I sit down with passionate people to learn why privacy matters to them, the tools and techniques they found and leveraged, and where we encourage and inspire others towards personal privacy and data sovereignty. What is crypto anarchy? How can I opt out if my country has become too authoritarian or dangerous to remain in? This episode, we're sitting down with Pavel Lübdoch to chat about what crypto anarchy is and why it's an important approach and permanent residencies as a way to physically and financially opt out of broken systems.

Welcome on to Opt Out, Pavel. Hello, thanks for the invitation. Yeah, hopefully I got your name right. I realized before we started recording I didn't ask about that, but I want to make sure I got the pronunciation down. So I've been following you on Twitter for quite a while and I've seen some of your work with the Institute of Crypto Anarchy, but on this episode I did a couple episodes ago with Uri Bednar. He recommended that I look into the work you've been doing and potentially have you on the podcast.

I'm glad that he pointed you out because I think there's a lot here that we can cover that'll be great for the listeners. For those listeners who aren't familiar with you, would you mind just kind of introducing yourself a little bit about what you do? Okay, so again, my name is Pavel Lübdoch and I'm a cryptonarchist. Cryptonarchist is the person who believes that crypto technologies can help us to achieve both economic and personal freedom. So I started to use cryptocurrencies just because I consider or perceive cryptocurrencies as a liberation tool.

And also I'm voluntarist, which means that it's my life philosophy. I believe that all relationships should be mutually voluntary. I'm also a perpetual traveler. So I'm traveling all the time. Some people call me a bit more offensive global opportunist. So basically, I'm trying to use all benefits or advantages of different legislation or countries around the world. And also my technical background is IT security. So I have two ethical hacking companies.

So my main income is from like ethical hacking or penetration testing, security audits. And recently, I started a new company, which is a traveling agency, but it's not normal traveling agency. It's a liberation traveling agency. It's called Liberation Travel. Awesome. Yeah, I think we have a fairly shared background in the IT security space. That's my background, but more on the sysadmin side of cybersecurity rather than the hacking, ethical hacking side.

It's cool to see some crossover there. What was it that woke you up to the need for personal privacy? Okay, especially in Slovakia and also in the European Union, I can see that the situation with privacy is worsening over time. I mean, there are a lot of new laws and new legislation according to which we are basically losing our personal and economic privacy. For example, I'm going to talk about specific situation in Slovakia. In Slovakia, we have something what is called e-kasa, which basically means that if you visit any supermarket, if you visit any restaurant, any bar, and you pay by cash or by debit card or credit card, you pay by the information about the information about the information about the given transaction that you buy, I don't know, one bread and one bottle of vodka.

So this information is immediately sent to the tax office of Slovakia. So basically, basically now we have like a total surveillance of all transaction, all habits of citizens in Slovakia. Also in Slovakia, for example, it is not possible to buy anonymous SIM cards. So it means like mobile operators and it means also the government. Now without court order, they have full access to location data of all citizens in Slovakia. So basically the government, the state knows exactly your location when you have a speech on your phone.

So, and this just, and also, for example, now we have a new legislation which is called e-factura, or in English it's e-invoice, which basically means that you want to issue any invoice to any customer in Slovakia. Before you send this invoice to the customers, you have to upload or send this invoice immediately to the Slovak tax office. So basically they know all information about all issued invoices, even before these invoices are delivered to the customers.

So, and we are living in European countries, normally not considered to be like a totally trend country, like for example, China or Saudi Arabia or North Korea. So it's quite sad. And that was the reason why I started to care about privacy and I started to promote privacy. I refer. Yeah, it's, it's pretty crazy to think about that being something that's happening today. I don't think, I don't think word about that really spreads at least to the U S and I mean, we don't have, we don't have those that strict of measures in place for sure, but it does seem like things are trending that way.

I mean, especially there's a new bit of legislation being proposed that would give the IRS massively increased visibility into bank accounts and to inflows, outflows, massively increase IRS as a group and give them far more employees, that kind of thing. And that is like, even just that is a piece of what seems to be happening there with you. So it's crazy to realize that that's something happening in what is kind of commonly known as a relatively free normal country.

Like you said, in the EU, not, or in Europe, not, not North Korea or China or Russia or some other kind of more tightly controlled or known as tightly controlled country. That is pretty crazy. Yeah. And in addition, we also have the global intrusions to our privacy, for example, KYC is a nice example. So, and it's global. So, so we, we should also expect in the near future, like a, like a global intrusion to our privacy. Unfortunately. Yeah. Yeah.

It definitely seems like something that's spreading. And it's something that, that your eye talks about a lot is that those, especially those financial regulations tend to spread even with or without governmental approval, they kind of get pushed by governmental bodies and banks feel like they have to latch on. So KYC has become a pervasive problem really across the globe. Yeah. And that's exactly one of the reasons why we should embrace crypto and use crypto to opt out of the, like a traditional banking system.

So for example, Liberation Travel is completely crypto only company. So we don't use any bank accounts and we do business in multiple countries without the bank account at all. And it's feasible. It's possible. And every year it's more easy. Yeah. I didn't realize you were crypto only. I know that's something a lot of people talk about. That seems kind of like a pipe dream and hard to actually accomplish in real life. But how has that been being a crypto only company that works in multiple countries?

Has it been a very difficult experience for you all or something that's been relatively straightforward? Okay. Okay. So you need, for example, you have to be compatible with traditional customers, for example, our traditional suppliers, because not everybody accept crypto. So in this situation, you have to use crypto to set up payments. SEPA payments, which means crypto to wire transfer payment gateways. So basically send crypto one to some specific place and they just generate wire transfer behind you.

Also, you should use like crypto debit cards. But the problem is that if you do want this international business without bank accounts, you are still facing KYC. So you need to do KYC for these crypto to fiat services, basically. Yeah. Yeah. I'm definitely looking forward to hearing a little bit more about liberation travel. I think it's a really fascinating concept. What is a common myth about personal privacy that you've run into? Good question.

Okay. If I have nothing to hide, I don't need to worry about my privacy. Yeah. That's been a very common one that other guests have brought up on the show before that people like to share that concept of if there's nothing, nothing that I'm doing is technically legal right now, or I don't view anything that I'm doing.

10:00 doing is wrong they feel like privacy is not something they need to care about yeah yeah okay so um the thing is that even people here in slovakia or the europe uh they um despite the fact that they don't trust governments for example in slovakia most or probably most people they don't trust governments we we had really bad experiences with the uh totalitarian regime in the past like 40 years ago but despite of this fact uh most people they don't care about privacy and they are not aware that uh maybe this government uh doesn't misuse their personal information they they monitor they gather about them but it's quite likely the next government will do that and unfortunately most people are not aware of this fact what's a what's a way that you try to help wake people up to the need for personal privacy when like especially in that background when they've seen what a an authoritarian regime or a dangerous government can do what's kind of an approach you take to try to wake people up to the need for privacy in case that happens again yeah so

the first thing for example i'm trying to explain explain them that they shouldn't expect any privacy for like public services uh like social networks or uh gmail so so i'm trying to explain them that all information all kind of information they put to social network is basically like a public information public information so they shouldn't expect any privacy for these public services and i'm also trying to explain them they they shouldn't use like a traditional gsm calls because uh like a it's super cheap and super easy to buy like a imc i i'm imci catcher and intercept calls and so i'm i'm trying to to persuade people to use signal whenever it's possible and um when we are talking about like financial privacy i'm explaining people to switch to or cryptocurrency and when cryptocurrency then truly anonymous cryptocurrency like monero for example so depends how deep the given person wants to go yeah i don't i don't think a lot of people realize how easy it is to use signal audio calls to replace phone calls it's been a really nice option that i've

started switching to more and more and one thing i like about CalyxOS which is the mobile operating system that i run it's a version of android um it natively integrates signal so when you're using signal and you go to hit to call a number if that contact is on signal and already like in your signal address or your signal contacts it'll allow you to call them directly that way it's been a really nice way to to gain some privacy rather than again like you said relying on regular gsm calls which are both definitely surveilled by the cell phone provider that you're using and obviously could be also surveilled by people around you who trying to intercept that so it's a it's a nice little way to improve your privacy quite a bit especially when you're needing to do any kind of audio call i also use CalyxOS i'm a big fan of the system uh before i use graph graphene and graphene was fine but i'm like a the the the app guy so i use like more than five or six hundred hundred apps wow and so really a lot of apps and the

thing is that in case of graphene um i couldn't use many of these uh because uh graphene doesn't support uh micro g and the colleagues is great and uh maybe you notice that if you use if you want to use like a traditional gsm call on your graphene and on your colleagues uh operating system it just shows the the the app shows you uh you are using insecure call you shouldn't you shouldn't do that yeah i love that warning banner that pops up every time you're in a a regular phone call just keep reminding people what what kind of privacy compromises they're making by using regular phone calls it's a really nice little touch yeah i really like it yeah so people should be avert that they shouldn't trust like traditional gsm calls and traditional sms text messages yeah yeah for sure i definitely agree there um one of the kind of questions that i love feel that i like to ask people who come on to opt out is what's something that you feel like almost no one agrees with you on good question okay so so uh

i believe that we deserve absolute privacy absolute privacy like i'm going to explain you the thing for example in um in germany you have cows communication club you know this biggest hackers club in the world they organized ccc cows communication congress and these guys these hackers or maybe i would say like most hackers they they really appreciate privacy and they are focused on privacy i mean especially you know like um prop like we are talking about system privacy like private uh private communication like private uh i don't know uh storage or everything like that but but what is quite what is quite interesting about about this ccc community which represents a majority of hackers in europe uh when uh when i start to talk about like a financial privacy uh it's taboo for them and they usually think that uh we shouldn't have any financial privacy because we should pay taxes interesting uh and therefore we should reveal this information at least to the tax office and and so for so so so for example

i'm trying just to be consistent consistent with the privacy which means i think that we deserve absolute privacy including financial privacy but these people who are not crypto anarchist they they don't agree with me i mean most technical people uh hackers are not anarchist or they're leftist in some way and then they don't agree that we we should deserve like a absolute privacy so this is like a quite controversial topic yeah i think the the key thing for me there is like even for those that agree with paying taxes and paying taxes to the state as a as a fine concept um which obviously some people are fine with that some people aren't but even for those that agree with that i would think that they would be fans of financial privacy that is opt out so essentially kind of like what monero provides as a cryptocurrency where i gain privacy every time i'm transacting but if i choose to i can reveal details about some of those transactions to someone else like an example would be i can use monero for my business all day long and then

it comes time to pay taxes i can reveal the details of transactions as necessary to pay those taxes properly that's one of the things where like even if you don't agree with like abolishing the state or any kind of like removal of taxation or any kind of those concepts i would i would hope that people would be on board with financial privacy that is opt out so you can choose when you need to reveal that information um but i know that's there's there's a lot of conflict within especially i feel like with the ccc community there's been some interesting interactions around cryptocurrencies uh specifically maybe we should say that uh like this absolute privacy i mean including financial privacy it's not compatible with the mandatory taxation but when we are talking about the concept of voluntary taxation i think it's completely fine you know like if you say that the taxation should be voluntary people should pay just because they want support the system that it's completely compatible with like absolute privacy you know what because you can just

say okay these monoros uh these models are for the state i'm going to pay taxes voluntary yeah yeah i definitely agree as long as the tools are there that's a it's not something that's incompatible at all yeah but of course it is just utopia because nobody will do that um so you've you've already talked quite a bit about crypto anarchy but i think it's a really fascinating topic and ethos and it's something that i've been kind of becoming more and more of a fan of as i learn more about it um but would you mind kind of breaking down what crypto anarchy crypto anarchy is and why it's such an important topic to you okay so um maybe i should explain that like a real anarchy i mean like a real free market anarchy or uh anarcho-capitalism uh doesn't exist anywhere and it's still utopia just in brains of minds of many people but the thing is that crypto anarchy is is a real thing

20:00 What does it mean? It means that in cryptoanarchy, basically, we can achieve absolute anonymity, which means that it is not possible to enforce any regulations or any laws. And thanks to cryptoanarchy, it is possible to achieve like a ideal, voluntaristic society, because in cryptoanarchy, because it is not possible centrally enforce any regulation, because you need to ask people if they agree. The cool thing for me, like a cryptoanarchy is just the fully working implementation of voluntaristic society based on mutual contracts or mutual decisions.

And that's super cool. And that's why in cryptoanarchy, we can have like a dark market or free markets where people voluntarily sell or buy any product. And why we can have like multiple different identities. We can have multiple reputation profiles, for example. So I love cryptoanarchy just because for me, it's like a fully working implementation of a voluntary society, which is based on voluntary contracts where coercion is not possible. And it's important to say that in cryptoanarchy, unlike in the physical world, coercion is not technically feasible.

Yeah, I think that's one of the reasons why cryptoanarchy is kind of stuck out to me is because it takes an approach that is, to me, more realistic than, like you said, some of the other more utopian ideals, especially because cryptoanarchy can function even when you're in a state that is authoritarian or that is not aligned with the things you agree with or tries to coerce into a lot of things that may be bad. And I love that cryptoanarchy is a very portable concept.

You can build these cryptoanarchy or cryptoanarchist communities or societies, even if you're within another community or society. It doesn't need to be like everyone living on an island together, creating this perfect ideal or everyone in a country working together. It can really be you choose to opt out. You choose to take these approaches, to use these tools well, to engage with this different community, to contribute and trade in a parallel economy.

And you're choosing to do all these things. You're not forcing anyone else. And you can't be coerced into another type of system outside of that if you choose to use that and you use the tools well, which makes it a really fascinating concept for me. And we can also say that there are like multiple anarchist movements. And one of my favorite one, it's called agorism. And the thing is that agorists are basically very practical anarchist. And so I think cryptoanarchy can be like a heaven for agorists where they can do business and where they can do what they want, basically.

So, yeah. Like, to be sincere, I was super fascinated about the cryptanarchy. Maybe I should explain how I started with the cryptanarchy. Yeah, that'd be great. It started with the, like, before Bitcoin. It was maybe, oh, it was maybe 2008 or 2007. And I revealed, like, I studied Tor and Onion Services. And I just realized that it's possible, like, technically to create a website or create a service where it's technically impossible to find out the origin where it is physically located.

I'm just talking about the Onion, the Onion Services. And then I also started to analyze I2P, which is alternative to Tor. And I just realized that we can run, like, almost completely anonymous services. And then Bitcoin came. And then I realized that now we can have even, like, anonymous cryptocurrency. Okay, like, 12 years ago, Bitcoin was anonymous. Like, we, or at least be considered it to be, like, anonymous cryptocurrency because nobody, nobody in that time was thinking how it is possible to misuse Bitcoin.

So then I revealed Bitcoin, I just realized that now we can, like, implement free markets, which can be anonymous. And I was fascinated by reputation models with a combination of e-score services. So basically, when you combine these two things, you can do, like, a trusted business in a completely untrusty environment. And this was really fascinating for me. Yeah. So, so, so, so cryptocurrency for me basically became when I revealed the first dark markets and the system, how exactly it works.

Yeah, something I've been kind of coming around to as well is I think everyone gets a bad view of darknet markets and only sees the negative side. I mean, most people only think that the, or think that the only things that go on there are, like, heavy drug trade and that kind of thing. But there's, there's a lot of other economy there. And even if the current darknet markets are used for, like, mostly drug trade or something, that's just, for instance, I don't actually know that that's the case.

I don't have hard numbers on that. But even if that's true, the actual things that can be empowered and created using the same technology is, like you said, a really big breakthrough that finally we have the ability to build and serve anonymous services like a darknet market or another, yeah, just a darknet market. But now we also have the financial side because we can perform transactions without relying on the state and without surveillance by the state or other people by using cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin or Monero.

And the combining those two things can build a very powerful piece of crypto anarchy and really a lot of different ethoses and approaches to the world because you can build an economy that exists outside of the norm. And you can build an economy that exists outside of ties to real world identity, which is such a big, important thing and something that'll, I think, only become more and more important as time progresses. Maybe I should add that firstly, I became crypto anarchy and after I became crypto anarchyist, I became libertarian.

This is quite interesting because libertarianism is not so popular in Europe like it is in the US. Because in the US you have the third strongest political party, libertarian party. But libertarianism doesn't have tradition in Europe. So it took me like another two years just to reveal all these, I mean, Austrian economists, for example, or anarcho capitalists and all these people who were basically talking about the same thing like Timothy C. May, who was very influential for me.

And he wrote like, like, Kryptonarchist Manifesto. He wrote Cypheronomicon, which was very crucial document for me that thanks to this document, I definitely became Kryptonarchist. And I also, and also that was the reason why we started to Paralelipolis. Before we get back to Pavel and learn the history behind Paralelipolis and Paralel Economies, I wanted to take a few seconds out of today's show to introduce and thank OptOut's new sponsors, Cake Wallet and LocalMonero.

Cake Wallet is a key tool that I use when participating in the parallel economy, as it allows me to easily and quickly use Monero for private by default payments on the go. It's available in both iOS and Android, and is a fantastic way to get started buying and using Monero with a simple and easy to understand user experience. I regularly onboard new users to Cake Wallet and hope that it will help simplify and ease your journey into cryptocurrency.

If you're interested in purchasing Monero for the first time, we're hoping to bring others in as an ethical Vex lock. I'd recommend you look at using LocalMonero, like I do, to buy and sell Monero while maintaining your privacy and avoiding invasive exchange surveillance. LocalMonero is entirely peer to peer and is an important part of getting users into the financial aspects of crypto anarchy, as we've been talking about in today's episode. Thank you to both sponsors for their incredible support and partnership.

And I hope you'll take a moment after the episode to learn more about both in the show notes or at optoutpod.com/sponsors. Thanks. I'm not sure if Yudai has already explained the history of Paralelipolis.

30:00 only police but this is also a very interesting project he talked a little bit about it but i'd love to hear more about kind of how you went about kicking that off and um also wanted to hear a little bit about the institute of crypto anarchy and kind of like your work around that and and what that is okay so this is like okay i'm going to i'm going to with a very brief history of parany police so um in 70s last century um in czechoslovakia we had totalitarian system like a communist system and we used to call this system um normalization because it was it was almost impossible to change it was impossible to change the system it was impossible to make demonstration or any protest or anything just because secret government agents we call it ashtabay which is like a czechoslovakian version of kgp so basically czechoslovakian kgp agents were infiltrated in the whole society and so nobody nobody could trust nobody so this so that why it was technically impossible to change the system similar situation is probably in the north korea in in these times and

in the 19 1977 or 1978 there was a movement like a dissident movement led by vatsel havel vatsel havel was the first czechoslovakian president he became president of free free democratic country who became president in 1989 like almost 10 years later and so in the in the in the late of 70s there was like a underground dissident movement in czechoslovakia and um there was one guy his name was vatsel bender who was who was mathematician so uh he had like really abstract mind and this guy uh he he just um he just says he's uh that okay we have to live in a totally true society we cannot leave because borders were closed and so people were basically stuck in the prison you know in their countries like in north korea so we have to live in this totally totally true totally true country but what we can do we can build pro society and we can do like a parallel culture which will be like a culture with without censorship alternative underground bands for example uh we can create pro education like a education which will be out of

this government indoctrination uh he was thinking about like a pearl free market even or about pro legal system so he uh he wrote probably police manifesto and he wrote it in 1970 77 or 78 78 and he declared that uh the society uh the society is only free society when it tolerates or it accepts existence of pro-life society and and that was all and many years after nothing happened and uh this probably but only police uh manifesto was completely forgotten project and eight years ago we especially with you right and some other friends uh who are artists like a contemporary artist we reveal this concept this like a this concept is like 40 years old the the the the vassalbender is not alive anymore so he died like many years ago and we revealed this concept of parallel police manifesto and because we are crypto anarchist we realized that now thanks to crypto technologies thanks to uh anonymization decentralization cryptocurrencies now we can achieve this pearl society but slow what's low benda was dreaming dreaming dreaming uh dreaming of and we

can achieve this society thanks to ex thanks to existing crypto technologies and we were so fascinated by this idea that we started uh parallel police in uh in prague and later in in bratislava and one of the branch of the spiral police it's called institute of crypto anarchy it's in your crypto anarchy is a word game because uh you know like anarchy and institute and institution you know so so it's and we know that so is it just contradiction in some way it's definitely the contradiction like an institute of anarchy well what's that and so so so we used this word game and we started institute of the institute of crypto anarchy to promote ideas of uh like digital liberty or digital freedom and um liberation technologies especially crypto i never connected the dots on the the paradox there in the name so i'm glad you connected the dots there for me yeah it's part of those yeah yeah never clicked that you can't really have an institute of crypto anarchy although maybe you can because you have freedom due to

crypto anarchy i don't know um yeah it's a it's parallel nipolis and that whole idea is something that's been fascinating to me i i do hope that i can get out to prague and and visit and just kind of see it in action um but it's one of those like the the delay between when uh the kind of creator of that concept came out with it shared it and when it actually kind of seemed to take hold and parallel nipolis like you mentioned before a lot of that is due to just you need these privacy preserving tools to be able to have a parallel economy a parallel society a parallel culture parallel education because having to do that in the physical world without those protections is so incredibly difficult um yeah and so so so this is interesting that like the concept of parallel polis uh is 40 years old and uh because like 40 years uh uh ago we didn't have technologies like these digital technologies we have now um uh this pro police uh or this pro society work in a really limited uh like a physical space it it work in prague between

some families you know uh for example in prague there were many families of many dissidents and they uh they educated their children for example uh so so what is the cool or the best advantage of this digital technology is that now we are talking about the global product society not about some specific local pro society but the global you know and this is like it's super cool yeah yeah for sure i mean even even us connecting is something that only can happen because we're able to have these these digital connections and building these these global cryptoanarchy societies we're able to connect and have this conversation and share it obviously this is not something that's private or that we're we're hiding or something that's uh kind of a parallel society or something but getting these concepts out there thankful for the the medium that we have here to be able to to get that information out one of the other things that you're you're involved in and that really kind of piqued my interest and was a fascinating

concept to me and you mentioned it a little bit earlier on the show but is uh your liberation travel company that you started that's crypto only and that helps people acquire a new permanent residency do you mind breaking down a little bit more like what that service is and why that may be of interest to people listening to the podcast okay maybe i should explain the ideology behind this uh service or behind this company because i um okay i decided to to to launch this company just because of ideological reasons not because of money okay the money money is of course like extra benefit i i appreciate it but the thing is that as i told you before i am a voluntarist and i strongly believe that all relationships uh should be like mutually voluntary and because i'm consistent voluntarist i also refused any uh one of a enforced relationships for example by the government to citizens you know and the thing is that um imagine the situation that you have uh for example you have a couple uh you have a man who is to run and you have his wife for example and she's she's victim of his tyranny

and uh it's it's definitely the one-way relationship because she cannot leave she cannot leave from this relationship and because she cannot she can't leave from this relationship uh this man is basically she can't be exploiting this fact and she uh he can even like a uh increase his tyranny just because uh he knows exactly that she cannot leave and the thing is she cannot leave just because for her

40:00 Exit cost for leaving from this involuntary relationship is just too high. For example, she's dependent on him because she doesn't have money, for example, or because they have together children or whatever. So the thing is, just because of high exit cost, she cannot leave from this involuntary relationship. And just because she cannot leave from this involuntary relationship, he can increase his tyranny in many different ways. Okay, and now just switch to current society we have now.

For example, in Slovakia or the US or many countries, the thing is that while many entrepreneurs or many companies are staying in the country, despite the fact that the governments are crazy and they're introducing the new regulation and they're increasing taxes and do all these bad things, they can do that just because for these entrepreneurs or these small companies, it's very expensive to leave the country, for example, or to move their business out of the country.

So it means they have high exit cost. And in Liberation Travel, we decided to help all people who are looking for freedom and we are helping people to decrease their exit cost. So for example, many people that are not aware that it's really cheap or quite cheap just to give up the residency and obtain the residency, for example, in Paraguay. So we are helping these people to opt out of the system, to leave, for example, from the European Union, to get more freedom or also more privacy, and not to be a victim of tyranny in the European Union, for example.

So that's all. Yeah, it's definitely a fascinating concept. And I think normally, I mean, mostly what we've talked about here on this episode and normally we talk about in past episodes is kind of gaining digital self-sovereignty. But with something like Liberation Travel and giving up your residency and switching to another country, it can be an approach to give you more physical self-sovereignty by moving to a place where legislation is more friendly to you, to your business, to your practices, or just a more free place, which is a really fascinating concept and one I think more people should explore.

I'm in the U.S., so things are, like you mentioned before we started recording, a little different for changing residency. And legislation is a little weird in the U.S. because there's a lot of state-specific legislation. But we've seen quite a bit of this concept of moving to a place that better supports your freedoms, that better allows you to do what you think is best for you. We've seen a lot of that happening throughout the U.S., especially over the past couple of years as we've been going through this COVID craziness.

There has been a massive move across the country out of states that are more restrictive, more authoritarian in their measures, into states that are more free, that are supportive of people's rights, supportive of people's freedom and inability to do what they want. And we've also seen in the past a lot of movement based on tax laws of individual states. So something like liberation travel, making that process easier for people who are in other countries to switch countries is, I think, a very valuable thing.

And like you said, just reducing that exit cost and reducing the complexity of that and making people aware of that is a very important concept. So I'm glad that that's around. Maybe I should say that changing your permanent residency is just a very small part of the whole process of decentralization or opt-out of the system. It's just a small part. Because you also, I like the flag theory. You definitely know the flag theory. So you should do the same for your company, for example, for your bank account, if you use traditional banking.

You should do the same for your healthcare insurance. So you should do the same. Just try to find the best country where they are treating you the best for each aspect of your life, not only for your permanent residency, but basically for everything. So we should say it's a global, it's a very complex thing. And changing your permanent residency is a very small part. And even if you're like the U.S. citizens, you're a citizen, there are options. Many of my friends, they moved or they're moving to Puerto Rico, for example, which is the U.S. territory.

And they have special tax advantages, for example, for U.S. citizens. Yeah, I actually didn't know that. I'll have to look into that a little bit more. A little bit more information, but I know that many, many crypto people are just moving to Puerto Rico just because I think for, as I know now, it offers the best benefits. Yeah, yeah, it'll be good to explore. And I know that a lot of the listeners are from the U.S., so it'll be good to share more about.

Maybe if you have more info, I can include that in the show notes later on for people who are interested on that specifically. And I'll obviously definitely include Liberation Travel website. But something that struck me as you were talking about that is that when we choose to opt into the concept of crypto anarchy or to these parallel economies like you've talked about here and like you and I talked about on Episode 7, it gives you a lot more freedom to be able to change your physical self-sovereignty, to be able to change your country of residence.

And when you've made that move into a global parallel economy, you're a lot more flexible in what you can do. So that can be another incentive for people to start kind of getting familiar with parallel economies, start getting familiar with ways that you can contribute and also just ways that you can make money and start to build up a kind of a memory of good deeds, as you're sure I said, and the parallel economy and get your foot in that door so that especially as things seem to be progressing in many countries towards a more authoritarian system, if you're already deeply embedded and understand and comfortable with parallel economies, if you do need to make some sort of physical move as part of your opting out and opting into more self-sovereignty, that familiarity with parallel economies can be a huge, huge bonus and really free you up to be much more flexible in where you can live and where you can work and where you can have residency in.

Definitely. Maybe I should add that if you are willing to be flexible and global, you can achieve definitely more both personal and economic freedom. So the and also if you're willing to use crypto and embrace crypto many different aspects of your life, you also can obtain like a lot of new freedom and privacy as well. Yeah, very, very much so. And on that topic, you talk a lot about cryptocurrency and you mentioned that Liberation Travel is an entirely cryptocurrency centric company. Why we've talked about this already, so maybe just a summary, but why is cryptocurrency important to the causes you work towards?

And then you also specifically mentioned Monero. So I'm just curious what you see as valuable in Monero as a tool in your toolkit. Yeah, yeah, I'm a big fan of Monero. So I'm using Monero daily and maybe, for example, some of our customers, they ask us that if they can pay us by fiat, by wire transfer, for example. And my typical answer is no, it's not possible because we care about financial privacy of our customers. I love it. So just because we care about financial privacy of our customers, we don't accept any of our transfers.

I'm sorry. Yeah, it's something that I've tried to kind of press home with a lot of people is that not only is using cryptocurrency something that gives you a lot of freedom, but using a cryptocurrency like Monero that's privacy preserving protects you and it also protects the people you're transacting with. So if you have the ability to use that and to prompt other people to use that with you, you're helping everyone's privacy, even theirs. It's an important thing, especially when I'm talking to merchants about acceptance of Monero.

It's an important thing I talk about because they're able to better protect their own customers' privacy and data by using something like Monero for financial payments. So maybe I should say that, for example, in the European Union, there is a new legislation and the European Union, they want to ban our truly anonymous cryptocurrencies, including Monero. So it's quite likely in the following month, Monero will be

50:00 prohibited in the european union which is like totally crazy but it's just happening it's um it's it just proves that the governments they really want to have full control over financial privacy of their citizens because otherwise i can't find any explanation why they are doing that yeah i'm hoping no legislation like that actually comes to pass but i'm certainly certainly expecting it at some point i think that makes it all the more important that people explore cryptocurrencies like monero specifically get familiar with how to use it find ways to acquire it on sites like Bisq or LocalMonero and find just again just like many of the things we talk about in the show get comfortable with using these tools get familiar with them so that when the time comes where you need them you already have it you already have it at your disposal you're already comfortable with using it it's very important that you get comfortable with these things before it's something that becomes a necessity yeah and this is quite interesting about uh eastern eastern europe

as i told you we don't trust our governments so if our governments um if our governments decide to to ban more to ban monero it's very likely that after this decision everybody starts to use it good little inverse effect that they want ban something which only shows that it works and then more people wake up to the need to to use a tool like that inverse effect is very likely in eastern eastern europe so the the citizens are doing exact opposite what politicians say well so i know cryptocurrency is a key part of the tools that you use uh to opt out but what are some of the other tools that you use regularly to opt out that you recommend uh others to take a look at and then why maybe i should uh like a small promotion of the project which is called incognito i'm sure you know this project incognito incognito.org it's a decentralized uh open source mixing service so basically you can mix uh without kvsc uh without any like background checks any crypto to any crypto uh so i really like this project incognito and um there is uh also there is like a fork of signal which is

called i think uh molly is it molly not sure like more like a fork of signal which means it's like a it's called uh session is that the one you're thinking session yeah yeah yeah yeah so it's a metadata free fork of signal i also like this project but unfortunately nobody nobody uses it uh so what what else okay so so maybe i should say what i use uh my laptop uh i use like a purist libra laptop so which is like a super secure physical laptop with the hardware switches or kill switches and my operating system i use now is Qubes Qubes operating system which is probably the most secure operating system where each application or each service is in a specific virtual machine so you need to have a lot of like memory but it's super safe because you can specify like different permission for each virtual machine regarding my phone i i used like a graphene now i switch to colleagues i really like colleagues operating system because it's a good compromise between usability and privacy so you could still have like a lot of privacy and still like 99 of all android apps just work and that's i

really like it uh what what else okay so maybe i should say that for example i don't i don't use my sim card in my phone because uh as i told you uh slovak mobile operators they know exactly uh where all slovak citizens or slovak users of their slovak sim cards are so uh so what i did i just uh redirected my slovak uh phone number to some anonymous voice over ip number uh so i'm still able to pick up pulse uh but i don't need to use my sim card in my phone and so the mobile operators and the state cannot track track me they don't know exactly where i am but i don't know exactly what i am so this is also like a thing i use um i'm trying to use uh monroe i prefer i prefer monroe if sometimes i also use bitcoin but i try to mix bitcoin or multiple project maybe you know wasabi my good friend behind the project wasabi which is like a bitcoin mixing service there is also competition which is called Samourai but my favorite project as i told in the beginning is incognita so i like incognita.org it's my favorite project um what else it's a good list

all right i had okay okay um maybe maybe then um um at the end of this um talk i'm going to send you my presentation about my 30 uh best privacy apps so i can send you the link that'd be amazing best 30 privacy apps i'm i'm using yeah yeah i'll include that in the show notes for sure and you mentioned Qubes specifically and that's something that i've been wanting to check out i just got a laptop which i haven't had a laptop for a very long time um i got a system 76 laptop and i'm using pop os on it um i've reflashed it but that's what comes normally with theirs but i've i'm gonna dual boot Qubes and start to learn to use that because i i've heard lots of good things that it's a also a good um balance between security privacy and usability it doesn't just make everything too difficult but it also builds in a lot of protection so i'm excited to check that out just one note Qubes operating system is used by default by snowden i did not know that it's his favorite operating system i think yeah it makes sense

yeah and the last question that i have for you is what advice would you give to someone who's just starting to realize the need for personal privacy fortunately in these in these days there are a lot of sources a lot of uh websites where you can find a lot of information how to uh care about your digital privacy uh maybe maybe people should uh look more for open source solution uh it is necessary necessary to say that if some something some software is open source it doesn't mean necessary it's super secure or secure it just it just means this software is auditable so anyone can read the code and that's that's uh like a key advantage of security so uh so maybe people should check open source solution um but unfortunately people are really lazy and they're on and and so so for example they just trust one company like apple or google so they're they're stuck and they're using their solution um so so for these people i just recommend to to make like a regular security updates that's that's that's all what they should do

um this is like cool about android that uh unlike ios you can use alternative uh operating system uh where the google spike functionality is completely removed we are talking about the CalyxOS for example or teen so so so so for example calyx can be used by anyone it's quite easy to use it it's like a very friendly i think you don't you don't have to be like a geek to use calyx yeah no i definitely agree i think the the usability is is very well built so if you can get a pixel phone which is what you need to hardware wise to install CalyxOS it's it's something that i think really anyone could pick up and start using um as long as you do it with microg enabled which is one of the options that you get when you're doing the initial setup but it is it's surprising how easy it is to use while still remaining secure and giving you great privacy escape from google's ecosystem even though it is android like you said it strips out all of the the google tracking the google bloatware all of that stuff yes exactly and maybe i should mention that

when we're talking about the like a operating system for laptops or like normal computers what is quite good is to use some platform some operating system which is not targeted by zero-day exploits like windows or mac os so maybe you should also i also recommend people to check linux absolutely

1:00:00 There are many user-friendly Linux distribution items, for example, Ubuntu, but many of them. I think everybody can find his favorite or her favorite Linux distribution. So also start with Linux because Linux users are minority, so they are not targeted by so many zero-day exploits. Or also the alternative can be like a Chromium operating system, which is also not targeted by so many zero-day exploits. Maybe I should explain what does it mean, zero-day exploit?

Yeah, sure. Zero-day exploit is basically a tool which is used to exploit the zero-day vulnerability. And zero-day vulnerability is the vulnerability which is not known by companies or software producers like Google, Apple, Microsoft. So because they don't know about this vulnerability, they cannot release, they cannot publish security updates for the given vulnerabilities. And therefore, zero-day vulnerabilities and zero-day exploit have really high market value and they are sold on the, not only dark market, but legally they are sold.

And there's like huge zero-day business. And many companies that are just buying these zero-day exploits and they're making like really nasty spy-verse, for example. Yeah. Like Pegasus. Yeah, I was going to say a really good example of that is some of the tools that the NSO group makes, one of which is Pegasus. And the recent vulnerability for iOS, Mac OS, iPad OS, watch OS, all of the Apple ecosystem was vulnerable to, again, a zero-day vulnerability that has been exploited, I think they said, since February, since February was their estimate on when it first came into use.

And it's been used to perform targeted attacks against people since February and only just a few days ago was learned about and patched by Apple and had an update pushed out. So those kinds of things can be very dangerous. I mean, thankfully, zero-days normally aren't going to be used for dragnet surveillance. So it's generally only going to be used if you're a specific target of surveillance. But they definitely are an important thing to be aware of.

And that's a good reason to keep up with updates on whatever system you're using. And just try to stay in the know, too. Because like with the Apple update, it was important that as many people as possible knew that they needed to patch and patched immediately rather than waiting on that because it was a very big vulnerability. Which is quite interesting is that Pegasus used maybe 90% of all zero-day exploits were like iOS-specific. So it basically attacks iOS devices, not Android, which is quite interesting.

Yeah, I wonder if that's just because of their target, like makeup, maybe their main targets are using Apple devices. It was interesting that the focus of their work mostly seems to be around iOS and variants, which is pretty interesting for sure since Apple is normally treated as like the most secure operating system approach. Yeah, there is one explanation is because you have just one version of iOS or like a multiple version, but it's everything is the same basically.

But the thing about Android, you have like so different Androids. Each cell phone producer has different Android version with different libraries, with different everything. So just to customize or create exploits for so different version of Android, Androids can be just like too much costly, you know? Yeah, thanks for breaking that down. I think the concept of zero-day vulnerabilities is an important one for people to understand. I'm glad that you broke that down for us.

Well, that is all I had to go through today. Thank you so much for taking the time out of your day or evening to sit down with me and chat. It was a really good time. I learned a ton and I'm really excited for listeners to get a chance to listen and learn the work you do, to learn more about crypto anarchy and just to continue to learn more tools and approaches and ethos that they can absorb in their quest to gain more privacy and to opt out. Okay, thanks a lot for the invitation and have a nice day.

Thanks for listening. Thanks for listening and I hope you enjoyed this episode of Opt Out. If you did, please take a moment and subscribe to the podcast. Or if you're already subscribed, share it with one friend or family member this week. As always, you can check out the links to our guest content and contact info, as well as links to all of the tools we discussed in today's episode in the show notes or at optoutpod.com. Now get out there and opt out this week.

For this week's project to help you opt out, I'd recommend you take a look at Monero, a privacy-preserving cryptocurrency that we talked about in today's episode. Monero is a cryptocurrency that focuses on being digital cash, something that is private by default, directly peer-to-peer, and yet digital and decentralized. Monero is censorship-resistant and ensures that only you can see and control the way you earn, save, and spend your money. The best way to learn more about Monero is to check out the official website at getmonero.org.

And if you'd like to buy some Monero, I'd highly recommend you check out one of our sponsors, LocalMonero, and find a payment method you're comfortable using. Once you have some Monero, I recommend a mobile wallet for storing and using your Monero's Cake Wallet, our other sponsor here at optout. If you have any more questions, please don't hesitate to reach out to me or jump into Matrix or IRC and chat with the vibrant Monero community.