The Praxeology of Privacy: Endorsements, Foreword, Preface
The Praxeology of Privacy
A treatise joining the Austrian and cypherpunk traditions on the engineering and economics of privacy.
By Max Hillebrand
Endorsements
“Max Hillebrand’s book recommendations introduced me to two of my favorite books of all time. His own book is now added to that list. The Praxeology of Privacy manages to seamlessly apply Misesian logic to the Internet world we live in today, pointing out the dangers of the sunken cost of mass surveillance, and why the future still looks bright because of all the innovation in Freedom-go-Up technology that Max has dedicated his life to help manifest into reality.”
— Knut Svanholm
“Max has been working on and advocating for privacy for as long as I’ve known him, and The Praxeology of Privacy is the book I’ve been waiting for this whole time. This book bridges the cypherpunk ethos and Austrian economics, helping people from each tradition understand the other. In the modern era of state surveillance and control, The Praxeology of Privacy is a practical guide to defending your privacy.”
— Luke de Wolf
“The Praxeology of Privacy does an excellent job integrating the Axiom of Resistance into a comprehensive praxeological treatment of privacy as selective disclosure and strategic defense. In weaving together Austrian action principles, cypherpunk ethos, and software engineering, it offers a practical roadmap for building parallel institutions that raise the cost of surveillance. The synthesis is both coherent and timely, showing why resistant money, anonymous communication, and decentralized protocols matter well beyond any single technology. The core synthesis pertaining to action and resistance is powerful, and readers will gain a great deal from the book’s rigorous integration of theory and implementation. Highly recommended for anyone serious about building a freer future.”
— Erik Voskuil
“Max Hillebrand’s The Praxeology of Privacy builds on the thought of Mises, Rothbard, and Hoppe, as well as that of other thinkers, such as myself, to continue to extend the science of liberty to further domains and topics. Hillebrand dispatches with the notion of an independent ‘right to privacy’ not anchored in property rights in material resources. Privacy is not a separate property right; it’s what results when self-ownership and property rights are respected. Nonetheless, privacy is crucially important: it is the ability to selectively reveal oneself to the world, an aspect of purposeful behavior. Hillebrand also develops what he calls the axiom of resistance, based on Voskuil’s Cryptoeconomics, to explain how rights to control resources require the ability to resist external control. This is a fascinating and ambitious work, sure to delight and provoke those hungry for further exploration of praxeology and liberty.”
— Stephan Kinsella, author of Against Intellectual Property
Foreword
Paul Rosenberg
The Praxeology of Privacy is an extraordinary book, and the chief reason for me saying so is simple: I spent twenty years in the privacy trenches, and during that time I learned many lessons, at the cost of great time and effort. In this book, however, Max Hillebrand has gathered all of those lessons, and more beside, into a book that you can obtain for a modest cost, and from which you can deeply educate yourself in a fairly small number of hours.
I would have paid dearly for such easy to access information years ago.
There are, to me, three prominent benefits to this book. The first is simply that Max explains not just the things themselves, but why they are true and why they operate as they do. If you’re at all like me, this is the ingredient that holds the entire discourse together. Lists of facts are fine, but an understanding of how and why they operate is what makes the whole recognizable and intelligible — and memorable.
The second factor is one that I know from my years of friendship with Max, and which I’m especially pleased to pass along to you: Max has lived this, not just observed it. Max has lived the cypherpunk life. (Cypherpunks being privacy and encryption advocates.) He has had to put the ideas in this book to the test in real life, and for many years now. That inevitably strips the metal from the dross and is essential to any practical understanding of what works and doesn’t. Trial in the real world rips away misunderstanding and thin understandings like pretty much nothing else. So, nice-sounding ideas which couldn’t survive hostile contact with the world were stripped away before this book was written.
The third reason for my valuing this book is one you might not expect from the title: By the time you’re done you’ll have received an excellent education in economics. While this is far from an economics text, the overlap between human motivations, incentives and costs (monetary or otherwise) associated with all of this are perhaps best explained in economic terms. And so this best way of explaining exposes you to a great deal of economics along the way, even though it doesn’t feel like you’re learning economics.
For many years we’ve lacked this level of examination of privacy in human life and human affairs. Now we have one, and I highly recommend that you get a copy. You’ll need either this or a career in privacy to grasp the information economics of the 21st century. Please believe me that this way is easier.
Paul Rosenberg May 2026
Preface
Privacy is the precondition of every voluntary arrangement a free person enters into, and it is being engineered out of daily life. This book is about the conditions under which it survives. Privacy in the working sense developed here is selective disclosure: the power to choose what is revealed and to whom. Selective disclosure is a stronger notion than concealment or secrecy, and conflating the three is the main reason public debate about surveillance stays stuck.
The subject has become urgent because two infrastructures matured at the same moment. Cryptographic capability sufficient to protect ordinary communication, payments, identity, and computation is now in production: post-quantum signatures, threshold systems, zero-knowledge proofs, and computation on encrypted data are deployed and used. So is the observation stack assembled on the other side. Commercial spyware reaches opposition journalists, lawyers, and politicians through the phones in their pockets.^1^ Data brokers sell aggregated records to the agencies that once had to obtain them directly. Proposals in major jurisdictions would mandate scanning inside encrypted applications, removing the protection end-to-end encryption provides.^2^ Programmable money with spending restrictions defined by the issuer is moving from research into pilots.^3^ Two architectures are contending for default status. Whichever becomes common infrastructure will be difficult to replace inside the ordinary political calendar.
The pressure is not confined to any one population. A journalist protecting a source, a small business owner whose payment processor froze an account without explanation, a doctor whose patient records sit on a vendor’s server, a parent whose child’s school issues mandatory tracked devices, an opposition organizer in a country with hostile authorities, a developer who would like to ship a working system without an enforcement letter: all are operating inside the same observation environment, with the same primitives available to defend themselves. The question of who can audit, who can refuse, and who can build is no longer specialist.
This book joins two traditions that arrived at the same conclusions from different starting points. Austrian economics, through deduction from the fact that human beings act, established that privacy is structural to deliberation and exchange, that sound money is essential to economic coordination, that the state is systematic aggression on whatever scale its enforcement capacity permits, and that the socialist calculation problem makes central planning incoherent.^14^ The cypherpunk tradition, through cryptographic engineering grounded in agorist and voluntaryist thought,^15^ established that privacy can be defended in production, that sound money can be programmed, that systems can be built to resist control at a cost their operators can afford, and that the infrastructure can be open enough for any user to audit. Their synthesis is the purpose of this book.
An old and practical gap runs between them. Austrian writing rarely commits to the implementation question, and much of it stops at diagnosis; a state threatened by software will not be persuaded by another essay. Cypherpunk practice often commits to implementation before it has settled the political-economy question; it builds working cryptography that can still fail as a social system. Builders centralize what should remain distributed, make compromises that betray the purpose of the system, lose to incentives they never audited, and ship products that reverse the protection their technology provides. Theorists publish explanations of the trap and leave the tools to others. Each tradition needs the other, and what they share is enough to rebuild the defensive layer the surveillance era has dismantled.
The book is a treatise: a sustained argument that proceeds by definition, derivation, scope fence, and cross-reference. Each chapter states what it establishes, derives the conclusion from prior chapters, fences its scope against overreach, and points forward to where the derivation continues. Three axioms do the structural work. Mises’s action axiom treats privacy as a condition of purposive action toward chosen ends; Hoppe’s argumentation axiom treats privacy as a condition of rational discourse; Voskuil’s axiom of resistance treats privacy as a consequence of raising the cost of observation above the observer’s willingness to pay. The chapters operationalize these axioms against the cryptographic primitives that make the engineering possible.
The Austrian line this book inherits runs through Mises^4^ on action, Rothbard^5^ on property, Hoppe^6^ on argumentation, Hayek^7^ on the knowledge problem, and Oppenheimer^8^ on the state’s origin. For the cypherpunk line: May^9^ and Hughes^10^ on the political meaning of cryptography, Finney^11^ on running code, Nakamoto^12^ on sound digital money, and Voskuil^13^ on the axiom of resistance. Agorist and voluntaryist writing that shaped the cypherpunks’ self-understanding appears where it carries weight. The privacy claims the book defends rest on three rights that are common ground across the libertarian-Austrian tradition: self-ownership of the body, property rights in physical resources, and contract. “Privacy rights” as a freestanding category is not invoked; Chapter 6 develops the property-theoretic frame in detail and marks where the live intra-Austrian disagreements over patent and copyright sit.
A reader from the Austrian tradition will find the theory operationalized. Cryptographic primitives translate through economic analogies, and the engineering arguments are formally compatible with the axiomatic method. A reader from the cypherpunk tradition will find the economic and praxeological frame much of the tradition already draws on implicitly: why these systems matter beyond their technical merit, which compromises preserve their purpose and which destroy it, and how the sound-money and cryptographic projects converge into a single operational stack. A reader from neither tradition, who senses that something has tightened and wants to understand why, will find the argument accessible from first principles. The only prerequisite is seriousness.
Privacy is part of the conditions under which human beings deliberate, exchange, save, coordinate, and live unobserved when they choose to. The strategic claim the chapters develop is simple. State predation depends on state observation. When observation gets cheaper, predation gets cheaper; when observation gets more expensive, predation recedes. The engineering that raises the cost of observation is the engineering this book is about.
Endnotes
^1^ Citizen Lab at the University of Toronto, https://citizenlab.ca/, is the primary empirical source documenting commercial-spyware infections of journalists, dissidents, lawyers, and politicians across more than thirty state customers. Pegasus from NSO Group, https://www.nsogroup.com/, is the reference product; WhatsApp LLC v. NSO Group, Case No. 4:19-cv-07123 (N.D. Cal. 2024), produced the first major civil accountability ruling against a spyware vendor.
^2^ EU Regulation on Child Sexual Abuse (“Chat Control” / CSAR), proposal COM(2022) 209, https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/?uri=CELEX:52022PC0209; UK Online Safety Act 2023, Section 122, https://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/2023/50/section/122. The European Court of Human Rights held in Podchasov v. Russia (App. no. 33696/19), February 13, 2024, https://hudoc.echr.coe.int/, that a statutory requirement to weaken end-to-end encryption “cannot be regarded as necessary in a democratic society.”
^3^ Atlantic Council, “Central Bank Digital Currency Tracker,” https://www.atlanticcouncil.org/cbdctracker/, tracks more than one hundred jurisdictions across research, pilot, and live phases; Human Rights Foundation, “CBDC Tracker,” https://cbdctracker.hrf.org/, focuses on the civil-liberties implications.
^4^ Ludwig von Mises, Human Action: A Treatise on Economics, 4th rev. ed. (Irvington-on-Hudson, NY: Foundation for Economic Education, 1996; orig. 1949), https://mises.org/library/book/human-action. The foundational text of praxeology: economics derived by strict deduction from the action axiom, the fact that humans act purposefully to remove felt unease (Part One, esp. pp. 11-29). An actor whose plans are observed by adversaries is degraded in his capacity to achieve his chosen ends; this consequence of the action axiom is the praxeological ground on which the book’s treatment of privacy rests. Mises’s separate argument that monetary calculation requires private property and real prices (pp. 200-231) supports the socialist-calculation thesis cited at note 14. The Mises Institute hosts the full text without charge.
^5^ Murray N. Rothbard, Man, Economy, and State: A Treatise on Economic Principles, 2nd scholar’s ed. (Auburn, AL: Ludwig von Mises Institute, 2004; orig. 1962), https://mises.org/library/book/man-economy-and-state-power-and-market; and Rothbard, The Ethics of Liberty (New York: New York University Press, 1998; orig. 1982), https://mises.org/library/book/ethics-liberty. Man, Economy, and State extends Mises’s praxeology into price theory, capital, and production structure, grounding all exchange in voluntary consent. The Ethics of Liberty grounds individual rights in self-ownership and the non-aggression principle, establishing the property framework the book’s privacy argument inherits throughout.
^6^ Hans-Hermann Hoppe, The Economics and Ethics of Private Property: Studies in Political Economy and Philosophy, 2nd ed. (Auburn, AL: Ludwig von Mises Institute, 2006), https://mises.org/library/book/economics-and-ethics-private-property. Hoppe’s argumentation ethics derives property rights from the performative presuppositions of rational discourse: anyone who argues must already presuppose self-ownership and control of the means by which they argue, since denying that control is self-refuting. Chapter 4 develops this framework as the normative basis for treating privacy as a condition of rational discourse.
^7^ Friedrich A. Hayek, “The Use of Knowledge in Society,” American Economic Review 35, no. 4 (1945): 519-530, https://www.econlib.org/library/Essays/hykKnw.html. The canonical statement of the knowledge problem: prices coordinate dispersed local knowledge that no central authority can collect or process, and any system suppressing the price mechanism also suppresses the information it carries. Hayek, The Constitution of Liberty (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1960), Part II, develops the related argument that freedom is partly defined by the space where one’s plans need not be disclosed to authorities.
^8^ Franz Oppenheimer, The State: Its History and Development Viewed Sociologically, trans. John M. Gitterman (New York: B. W. Huebsch, 1914; orig. Der Staat, 1908), https://mises.org/library/book/state. Oppenheimer’s canonical distinction between the “economic means” (voluntary production and exchange) and the “political means” (coercive expropriation) establishes the analytical basis for treating the state as predatory by origin. Albert Jay Nock, Our Enemy, the State (Caldwell, ID: Caxton Printers, 1935), applies this framework to American history. Both works underlie Chapter 4’s treatment of state surveillance as predation.
^9^ Timothy C. May, “The Crypto Anarchist Manifesto” (1988), https://www.activism.net/cypherpunk/crypto-anarchy.html; and Timothy C. May, “Crypto Anarchy and Virtual Communities” (1994), https://nakamotoinstitute.org/library/virtual-communities/. May predicted that public-key cryptography would produce irreversible changes in the scope of government regulation, the ability to tax and control economic interactions, and the way trust and reputation function, formulating the political program before the infrastructure existed to execute it.
^10^ Eric Hughes, “A Cypherpunk’s Manifesto” (March 9, 1993), https://www.activism.net/cypherpunk/manifesto.html. The operational complement to May’s manifesto: where May identifies the political stakes, Hughes specifies the engineering requirement. Privacy must be defended by anonymous transaction systems and open cryptographic code, not by trusting institutions. Hughes’s definition of privacy as “the power to selectively reveal oneself to the world” is the definition this book adopts.
^11^ Hal Finney, “RPOW: Reusable Proofs of Work” (August 15, 2004), https://nakamotoinstitute.org/rpow/; and Finney, “Bitcoin and me,” BitcoinTalk (March 19, 2013), https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=155054.0. Finney’s RPOW system was the direct technical predecessor of Bitcoin’s mining mechanism and the first working implementation of a transferable digital token backed by computational work. He was also the recipient of the first Bitcoin transaction (from Nakamoto, January 12, 2009), and his account of early involvement describes Bitcoin as the culmination of the cypherpunk project.
^12^ Satoshi Nakamoto, “Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System” (October 31, 2008), https://bitcoin.org/bitcoin.pdf. The nine-page whitepaper introducing Bitcoin: a decentralized electronic cash system using a proof-of-work chain to achieve consensus without a trusted third party. The privacy model in Section 10 is built on pseudonymity and key separation. The whitepaper is the founding document of the cryptocurrency field and the first working demonstration that sound digital money can be engineered without a central issuer.
^13^ Eric Voskuil, Cryptoeconomics: Fundamental Principles of Bitcoin (Libbitcoin Institute, 2020), https://github.com/libbitcoin/libbitcoin-system/wiki/Cryptoeconomics. Voskuil’s axiom of resistance holds that a Bitcoin security model presupposes people willing to defy state coercion at personal cost; without this assumption, Bitcoin reduces to a permissioned database. The axiom is the third structural premise this book employs alongside Mises’s action axiom and Hoppe’s argumentation axiom.
^14^ Ludwig von Mises, “Economic Calculation in the Socialist Commonwealth,” trans. S. Adler, in Collectivist Economic Planning, ed. F. A. Hayek (London: Routledge, 1935; orig. Die Wirtschaftsrechnung im sozialistischen Gemeinwesen, 1920), https://mises.org/library/essay/economic-calculation-socialist-commonwealth. The paper that launched the socialist-calculation debate: rational economic calculation requires private ownership of the means of production and real market prices, and no socialist planner can replicate either. The calculation problem and the knowledge problem (note 7) are complementary: together they establish that central planning is incoherent in principle.
^15^ Samuel Edward Konkin III, New Libertarian Manifesto (Koman Publishing, 1980; 2nd ed. 1983), https://agorism.info/NewLibertarianManifesto.pdf. The founding document of agorism: the path to a free society runs through counter-economics, peaceful voluntary exchange operating outside the official economy, not through electoral politics. Konkin coined the terms “agorism” and “counter-economics.” The voluntaryist tradition, associated with Carl Watner and the journal The Voluntaryist (https://voluntaryist.com/), reaches similar conclusions through principled non-participation. Both strands shaped the cypherpunks’ conviction that building working systems matters more than winning political arguments.
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