Wealth, freedom and privacy.

Image by Matthew Henry

When talking about wealth, freedom and privacy, a good place to start is with this quote:

“You will never be free without privacy. Privacy is not secrecy, it is the ability to selectively reveal yourself to the world. It is a prerequisite for freedom because private information may be used to control you.

You will never be wealthy without freedom. It is a prerequisite for wealth because otherwise it is not your wealth.” Matt Odell

There are countless examples of why it is important to protect your privacy. Now I know many are going to say, give me some examples. Well why not stop and have a little think yourself. Think about every single military conflict in human history. How many strategists do you think would have set out to plan the offence or defence in the open?

Another really great argument for privacy is the I have nothing to hide. Sure, that may be the case, but I always enjoy asking the following question back: “why does your post come in an envelope and why do your file away or shred your bank statements, why don’t you leave them at your front door” or “awesome, I’ll pop around later today to install a camera in you and your wife’s bedroom”. Now, let’s take this a little further, think mobile phone camera, your children and bathing.

Privacy ensures our freedom and ultimately protects all our future wealth. So the question is how do we get there? The answer is not overnight. It’s a process that takes years and new smarter ways are constantly being found to harvest your data, so you are going to have to be on your toes to turn the tide. Remember the saying:

“If its free, you are the product”

If it is free, ensure the software is open source and a not for profit organisation. Also don’t be afraid to pay for services that protect your privacy, if anything does go wrong, you will have recourse to damages if your privacy rights are infringed. Think about all the free services you are currently using at the moment.

Like everything, the best place is to start. Find a couple of reliable people and sources who specialise in privacy / cryptography and see what they are doing. What messaging / calling apps and social media platforms are they using (Signal) and which ones are they not using?

For email, start by migrating your financial and legal accounts to services that have encryption build-in (ProtonMail) and if you have other accounts like gmail, use PGP. This is a great article I found and had PGP on gmail setup in an afternoon - How to use PGP encryption with Gmail. Use the PGP keys you generated with desktop and mobile apps like Canarymail.

Start using VPN (ProtonMail have a service for paid subscribers); Tor (See Brave browser options), 2FA and password managers.

Also remember, owning Bitcoin on an exchange is like owning gold in a vault you have no access to or having fiat in a bank account that you can be removed from (recent examples in Canada and Russian reserves should be something you are taking note of). Start your journey with hardware wallets (Ledger, Trezor and ColdCard), self hosted multisig: (Sparrow Wallet, Electrum) and maybe even build your own dedicated node: (Umbrel)

In the end, try not to over complicate things and take it slow. There will be ups and downs along the way, but remember you have to start somewhere. There are some incredible resources here: https://citadeldispatch.com/

No sponsored content, no affiliate links, no ads - The content above provides education as to general privacy and security practices. Should you choose to apply the practices described in linked content in anyway now or in the future, you do so at your own risk. Nothing shall be construed as providing consulting, financial advice or general advice.