Welcome to Crypto-Armory! Our mission is to introduce freedom-promoting technology to other freedom seekers and to share ideas and services that help to enforce your freedom, while all along contributing to the cryptocurrency ecosystem by offering our assortment of defensive products.
At Crypto-Armory, our motto is “Enforce your Freedom.” That is because we know no one is going hand you liberty, especially not the tech giants. Through this blog, we will introduce you to a variety of technologies, services, movements, and some basic knowledge that you can use to enforce your own freedom. Using these technologies, it is possible not to merely advocate for freedom, but to actively enforce it. Rather than asking politely for Google and Facebook to stop spying on you, make it impossible for them to continue. Rather than hoping “Big Brother” isn’t wire-tapping you, easily make it impossible using readily available, convenient, secure communication apps. The technologies are available for you to live freely, you just haven’t been introduced to them yet. Arming you with this knowledge is the purpose of this blog.
The foundation of freedom-promoting technologies is the free software movement (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_software_movement). For years people have been creating programs that are “open source”. Open source programs can be audited by anyone, allowing anyone to prove that the program functions as intended and does not secretly do any harm. Every piece of these programs are laid bare to anyone who takes the time to look – and many people do. You can rest assured that it is extremely unlikely for any intentional vulnerabilities to have been placed in any software mentioned in this blog. This is as opposed to proprietary software (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proprietary_software), which is software that is closed source and cannot be audited. There is no way to know whether or not this software spies on you or exploits you in any other way. The foundation that free software (open source software) gives us allows us to build applications we can provably trust.
One way that open source technologies can enable us to live freely is by liberating us from the exploitative banking system that has become complicit with the surveillance state and silently steals from us via inflation. Alternative money systems are being experimented with and are experiencing much success. Already several thousand institutions exist which trade using extremely secure digital currency – cryptocurrency. In fact, the only forms of payment accepted at Crypto-Armory are cryptocurrencies. All income from our shop is directly used as money, not sold for fiat (dollars). For us, cryptocurrency is our money, and we have done well finding ways to live off it. One of our next blog posts will describe the various merchants and services we’ve found that allow us to (nearly) live off cryptocurrency.
Cryptocurrencies are not controlled by a company, individual, or any other single entity. It is a protocol that, among other things, allows computers to come to agreement on account balances. If you’re not familiar with how cryptocurrency works, try to imagine gambling without chips or physical money. Instead, there is a record of how much everyone started with, with their wins and losses recorded so there’s always a tally of their total funds – but because nobody trusts anyone else, everyone keeps a full record of each other’s ledgers to ensure a fair environment. If someone were to try and cheat, everyone would notice and would not count the faked records. Cryptocurrency operates like a large-scale version of this scenario (although, with more privacy). Anyone can become a “node” and store the full record (called the blockchain). Other factors exist in cryptocurrency which help secure it, such as mining, but we will not get into that here.
Cryptocurrencies are distributed, trust-less systems. They allow you to “be your own bank” and know that your funds aren’t being lent to others and will always be available to you. They do not require your personal information, no government prints them, no one can seize them, your funds cannot be frozen, there is no middle-man, and they cannot be counterfeited. You control your coins, and only you.
We believe technology is the next great frontier of freedom. Many recognize the dangers technology poses to liberty, but few know of the powerful alternatives that allow us to partake in a peaceful revolution – a turning away from censorship and surveillance and instead towards tools that protect your rights. There is a sleeping giant of people who believe in liberty that is unaware of these alternatives; our blog’s purpose is to awaken that giant by explaining these technologies in plain English and providing clear directions as to how to start using them. We hope that you will join us as we begin revealing these different technologies to you.