Since I have your attention for the moment, I’d like you to ask yourself a question: What is it that drives you in life?

Do you yearn for the feeling of safety? By seeking power, status, wealth, and fame?

Is it cravings for pleasure that motivate your actions?

Does a sense of obligation to others, or even your past self, that informs your decisions?

Have you embraced nihilism and feel a bit puzzled about why I’m even pursuing this line of inquiry, since nothing ultimately matters?

Or is it none of the above?

When I look at the world today, I see a lot of problems (which I have blogged about). Mergers and acquisitions are threatening to create monopolies that choke the life out of us. The increase in authoritarianism. Enshittification enabled by the centralization of our technology, exacerbating the loneliness epidemic. Influencers and parasocial interactions. Being forced to rent, rather than simply own, things. The AI bubble that enables corporations to collude against the working class.

Many of the people who are the driving force behind these bad outcomes are responding to a poisonous incentive structure, but most are simply malicious and cruel.

If we continue to let them have power, let alone increasing amounts of power, they will only use it to hurt us and everyone we care about.

But if you seek power for yourself, you risk becoming just like them. Look at how many people live long enough to become the villain. “Absolute power corrupts absolutely,” as it were.

So what’s the winning move? They hold all the cards, and if you want to change anything, you have to play their game, right? You have to do what you’re told or be crushed by an insurmountable system, right?

…Right?

Fuck That Noise

Of course the corporate monopolists, AI tech bros, blackpilled accelerationists, right-wing extremists, status quo-worshipping Democrats, blockchainiacs, billionaire-owned media companies, algorithm-driven social media platforms, surveillance capitalism-driven advertisement industry, insurance companies across the board, anti-science conspiracists hanging onto every word of grifters, and corrupt government officials play their role in the system that benefits them.

That’s just basic game theory!

Here’s the thing to keep in mind: You don’t have to follow their lead. Whenever they give you a dichotomy, it’s time to look hard for a third option.

Your choices in life aren’t as simple as: Do evil, or stand by and let evil be done. Seizing power from tyrants doesn’t mean you have to continue to hold onto that power yourself.

Use selflessness strategically, in a manner driven by compassion and a community-first focus. Redistribute power. Install mechanisms to prevent it from being concentrated again. The purpose of a system is what it does.

To Seek Dreams

When I made my fursona many years ago, I decided that his last name would be “Dreamseeker”. This was both a reference to a powerful weapon for the protagonist in the Nintendo DS port of Chrono Trigger, as well as an aspiration.

The truth is, none of the problems I’ve mentioned above are really new. Hackers have been chatting about many of them, often worded differently, since the inception of the cyberpunk genre. Anyone that has paid attention in history class will recognize echoes of the past in every bad decision made today.

I’d been deeply interested in privacy technology–specifically cryptography–for many years before I even decided Soatok’s fur color. The only things that have changed in recent years are the stakes and the wider public awareness of these issues. After all, I was critical of Twitter for years before Elon Musk bought it and named it after his relationship with his wife (zing!).

However, I recognize that it’s difficult for non-technical people to understand or appreciate the technical work I’ve been doing, and blogging about, for all these years.

So let’s recap some of this work, and contextualize it for people who don’t dabble in linear algebra for fun. (Sorry Freya.)

Soatok’s Current Projects

Public Key Directory for the Fediverse

• Specification: https://github.com/fedi-e2ee/public-key-directory-specification
• Implementation: https://github.com/fedi-e2ee/pkd-server-go

In order to communicate privately with strangers (who may or may not later become friends), you need some way of knowing how to send messages that only they can read.

The way to do this involves something called a “public key”, which is really just a specific large number that, when combined with the appropriate algorithm, provides the intended privacy.

But how do you know which “public key” is correct for your recipient?

And how do you build a system that lets you answer this question without relying on some trusted authority to certify which “public key” belongs to which person?

That’s what this project sets out to solve. It builds a directory on top of a public, append-only ledger with a mathematical proof of a message being included in its history.

I’ve been blogging about this one for a while, and have been developing the specification publicly.

The reference implementation is new: I only released it earlier this week.

Once this project is fully mature, it will be easier to build private messaging on the Fediverse.

Additionally, software developers will be able to write Auxiliary Data extensions to establish a minimum level of trust in their own protocols.

COCKTAIL-DKG: Distributed Key Generation

• Specification pull request: https://github.com/C2SP/C2SP/pull/164

In August, I decided to write a fork of a distributed key generation protocol called ChillDKG after the authors confirmed they were only interested in supporting the Bitcoin curve.

In the months since, I’ve talked with several professional cryptographers and now have a draft specification with two co-maintainers.

If you don’t know what this means, don’t worry too much. Just know that it’s a building block towards the next project’s success.

FREEON

• Blog post: https://soatok.blog/2025/08/09/improving-geographical-resilience-for-distributed-open-source-teams-with-freeon/
• Source code: https://github.com/soatok/freeon

I debuted FREEON during a talk at DEFCON Furs 2025 (then with one fewer E, because I was unaware of the trademark held by the Chemours company).

FREEON addresses one key operational weakness of digital signature algorithms.

Remember how, above, I said there was a thing called a “public key”? Well, there’s also a “secret key”, which is mathematically related to the “public key”. You can use some kinds of secret keys to produce signatures, which are valid for the public key in question. It’s an important property for building secure protocols.

However, it’s not always required that your “secret key” exists in one location. You can use a suite of techniques called “Threshold Cryptography” to perform calculations, over a distance, without any of the participants ever knowing the full “secret key”.

The algorithm used by FREEON is called FROST. You can see where the pun comes in.

However, FROST by itself doesn’t give you a good protocol for Distributed Key Generation. Instead, it specifies an “honest dealer” approach, which unfortunately requires the “secret key” to ever exist in one place. The previous project, COCKTAIL-DKG, aims to address this shortcoming.

“OK, What Does This Mean?”

It means that, when these two projects are mature, open source software developers that are distributed across many nations will be able to release software in such a way that no one nation can compel them to release malware or backdoors in their software.

This means not even a $5 wrench will get them what they want.

![XKCD comic 528 “Security”

[Cueball is holding a laptop up in two hands, showing it to his Cueball-like friend who is examining it while holding a hand up to his head. Above the top of the panels frame, there is a box with a caption:] A Crypto nerd’s imagination: Cueball: His laptop’s encrypted. Let’s build a million-dollar cluster to crack it. Friend: No good! It’s 4096-bit RSA! Cueball: Blast! Our evil plan is foiled! [Cueball is holding a closed laptop down in one hand while giving his Cueball-like friend a wrench with the other. The friend reaches out for it. Above the top of the panels frame, there is a box with a caption:] What would actually happen: Cueball: His laptop’s encrypted. Drug him and hit him with this $5 wrench until he tells us the password. Friend : Got it.](https://i0.wp.com/soatok.blog/wp-content/uploads/2025/08/xkcd-538-dark.png?fit=448%2C274&ssl=1)XKCD Comic

That’s why FREEON stands for FOSS Resists Extralegal Executive Overreaching Nations.

Beyond The Horizon

Beyond the work I’m actively doing, there are a few ideas I have for the future.

Private Subscriptions on Fedi

In Imagining Private Airspaces for BlueSky, I entertained the idea of “Premium Limited Audiences” as an ad-free monetization strategy for BlueSky.

Essentially, become a Patreon alternative where users pay for the ability to decrypt messages that are otherwise published through ATProto. This lets artists and creators make recurring revenue for their work and introducing platform deniability (if you cannot decrypt it, how could BlueSky know what’s pornographic or not?) to the mix.

BlueSky hasn’t shown any interest in my ideas. But that doesn’t mean we couldn’t build something like this on the Fediverse.

Imagine, for the moment, that two distinct companies were formed tomorrow.

1. Fedipurse — a payments gateway for the Fediverse that processes payments and vends private tokens (e.g., PrivacyPass or GNU Taler, NOT a blockchain) that can be redeemed by others
2. Awwdiences — an open source Fediverse-enabled Patreon alternative software that leverages the W3C’s ActivityPub E2EE work to provision access to MLS groups that distribute the keys to decrypt exclusive content, accepting tokens from Fedipurse

As long as the two entities have no shared ownership, the recent tactic of censorship being enforced by payment processors will be harder to pull off:

• Fedipurse only sees purchases and redemptions (in addition to whatever KYC information is legally necessary to process the payments)
• Awwdiences is federated, and each instance only sees Fedipurse tokens being transferred
• Fediverse instances only see ciphertext being posted
• Actual users, with their end-to-end encrypted Fediverse client software, are the only ones that are aware of what is actually being sent/received

This structure gives very little leverage for payment processors to make demands to Fedipurse, and also provides anti-porn weirdos with little-to-no actionable receipts from which to form their complaints without paying to subscribe to these content creators themselves.

Anyone that claims to care about “free speech” should come to bat for sex workers (who have traditionally been unbanked). Otherwise, they don’t have an internally consistent worldview.

The Education Underground

I won’t mince words: The Trump Administration and PragerU want to lie to your kids about American History and Science.

It’s up to us to tell the truth and teach forbidden knowledge to everyone that will listen. To that end, I propose building an underground, distributed classroom.

If the Republican-led Department of Education wants to ban “Critical Race Theory” and so-called “gender ideology”, fuck ’em. I say we teach it ourselves, in a way that they cannot censor or control.

However, it would be foolish or unfair to expect the teachers and librarians that are under constant assault by conservatives and significantly underpaid and undervalued by society to do even more unpaid work.

So this project cannot begin until we have a way to pay them a living wage for their hard work educating the youth. Fortunately, I just outlined such a possible mechanism.

Looking Forward

I hope it’s easy to see the kind of world I’m working towards with these projects:

• People can communicate privately with each other, without the permission or surveillance of wealthy business interests or authoritarian governments.
• People can earn a living through creative work through subscription services that cannot reliably censor them for drawing adult artwork.
• The software developers that build and maintain these privacy technologies can resist an overreaching local government by building resilience in their own governance, by putting community first in their prioritization.
• All of this is possible with less centralization, and thus, less enshittification.
• The same systems we create that allow sex workers and furry porn artists to make a living, can also be used to fund teachers, librarians, and even journalists.

Privacy for the public. Transparency and accountability for the powerful. Resilience for science, history, and truth.

I recognize it’s not all sunshine and rainbows, naturally. Any technology we build to help queer people resist oppression can be appropriated by networked harassment sites to keep their operations afloat. But that’s law enforcement’s job to deal with, not mine.

I also recognize that the probability of failure is very high. My words to not have much weight outside my immediate friend circle.

Hell, to most people, I’m just a nobody with a weird hobby that doesn’t matter. And that’s fine.

But whether these ideas take off has very little to do with me, truly. Success is in the hands of the people that will read my words and decide they want to help make it happen.

Will you seek dreams instead of power or pleasure? The choice is yours, and yours alone.