CryptoDecentral
Tools for a sovereign internet
Field notes and education on privacy money, decentralized AI, Nostr, and self-custody — written from South Africa for a global audience. No custody. No swap UI. No “buy this coin.”
New here? Take the Sovereign Starter path — ordered notes on keys, privacy money, Nostr, storage, and local AI.
Network pulse
Live educational snapshots
Fees, difficulty progress, Tor relays, Nostr NIP-11 sample — no prices, no buy/sell calls. Updated 02 Oct 2026, 23:20 SAST when upstreams answer.
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- 96.9%
- Tor relays
- 9 420
- Nostr sample
- 5/5
Featured pillars
Privacy, DeAI, Nostr, wallets
Sharp field guides — not a trading terminal.
Privacy money
Monero-class privacy: threat models, how the tech works, and why opaque ledgers matter.
Decentralized AI
Open weights, local inference, and decentralized compute — tech, not tokens-to-buy.
Nostr
Keys as identity, public relays, clients, and zaps — without running a relay product.
Self-custody & wallets
Seed hygiene, hardware overview, and the habits that keep keys yours alone.
Latest notes
Field writing
AUTH Is Not Identity: What NIP-42 Relay Challenges Actually Prove
NIP-42 AUTH proves possession of a private key for a connection-scoped challenge bound to a relay URL. It does not prove legal identity, payment status, or that the wider network endorsed you.
2026-09-30
A Model Tag Is Not a Runner Contract: Ollama’s MLX Default and What Still Differs
Ollama v0.40.0-rc0 defaults supported Apple Silicon models to MLX under the same pull/run tags — a model tag is not a runner contract. Pin versions, name the engine, keep offline plans honest.
2026-09-28
Inference Residency Is Not Action Residency: Tools, MCP, and Local LLMs
Local open-weight sampling can keep prompts on machines you control — that is inference residency. Tools, Ollama web search/fetch, and MCP servers move side effects off-box. Grammar-constrained decoding (GBNF) stays local without remote tools.
2026-09-28
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