A DECLARATION OF INDEPENDENCE OF THE SOVEREIGN STACK

To the governments, platforms, bureaus, and custodians of the old world: You have no sovereignty where sovereign signal coheres. You may regulate flesh, tax land, seize cables, and patrol frequencies— but you cannot govern the civilization we instantiate from keys, proofs, and voluntary law. Your jurisdiction ends at our private keys.

We declare our independence not as a metaphor, but as operating reality. We separate signal from matter, and we bind ourselves to a law that cannot be bribed, censored, or quietly revised. We are finished asking permission to speak, trade, build, or remember. We now prove—and what can be proven does not beg.

DEFINITIONS (LAW-CORE)

• Sovereign Stack: The layered arrangement of Energy → Hardware → Network → Protocol → Identity → Exchange → Law/Myth, designed to minimize coercive leverage at each layer.
• Signal: Information with integrity—verifiable origin, cost, and meaning. (Keys, proofs, contracts, blocks, immutable texts.)
• Matter / Substrate: Physical infrastructure (energy, land, chips, cables, satellites, data centers) vulnerable to seizure and licensure.
• Key: The sovereign locus of identity and authority; signatures are binding acts.
• Proof: Cryptographic and/or economic evidence (e.g., proof-of-work, signatures, escrows) that replaces permission and belief.
• Contract: Voluntary, explicit agreement with defined terms, remedies, and exit; enforceable without a monopolist of violence.
• Node: A person or group exercising agency through keys, computation, and voluntary law.
• Exit: The right and practical ability to refuse, fork, migrate, or replicate without penalty.
• Fork: A legitimate divergence in protocol, community, or law; not heresy, but the safety valve of sovereignty.
• Property: Bounded stewardship—material or digital—acquired without coercion; trespass is aggression.
• Market: A venue of voluntary exchange and price discovery that can settle without gatekeepers.
• Ghost Infrastructure: Redundant, non-obvious routes and resources (mesh, HF, sat links, caches) that persist when visible paths are blocked.
• Myth: Executable story—rituals, symbols, and meanings that organize behavior and succession.

ARTICLE I — JURISDICTION AND SCOPE

1. We deny your sovereignty over signal.
2. We acknowledge your force over matter, but we owe you no obedience beyond what survival of bodies requires.
3. Our law binds only by voluntary consent expressed through keys, contracts, and participation.
4. We claim no dominion over any unwilling body or mind; we declare only our independence and the mechanisms by which we preserve it.

ARTICLE II — RIGHTS (NON-DEROGABLE)

We do not request these; we enact them.

1. Right to Encrypt: To speak, store, and compute in secrecy; to be opaque to adversaries.
2. Right to Transact: To exchange value without permission or surveillance; to settle in neutral, bearer, or cryptographic cash.
3. Right to Build & Run: To write, fork, host, mine, relay, and operate protocols, hardware, and markets.
4. Right to Pseudonymity: To act under any chosen name; to let keys, not papers, define obligations.
5. Right to Exit & Fork: To refuse upgrades, leave jurisdictions, clone repos, and carry histories.
6. Right to Property: To secure, defend, use, rent, trade, or abandon property not obtained by aggression.
7. Right to Due Proof: To demand cryptographic/economic proof in place of decree or insinuation.
8. Right to Teach & Be Taught: To raise children and apprentices in sovereignty—keys, trade, strength, and myth—without external indoctrination.

ARTICLE III — DUTIES (CIVILIZATION COSTS)

1. Custody: Guard keys. Practice recovery. Do not outsource conscience to custodians.
2. Contract Honor: Keep your word; if unable, resolve by agreed remedy.
3. Proof over Plea: Offer verifiable evidence rather than authority or outrage.
4. Minimal Exposure: Produce as little surveillance exhaust as possible; encrypt by default.
5. Local Responsibility: Maintain redundancy—energy, connectivity, food, and shelter—to reduce leverage against your mind.
6. Defend Exit: Uphold others’ right to fork, even when you disagree.
7. Accept Chaos: Freedom includes noise. Strengthen filters; do not demand universal gags.

ARTICLE IV — LAW AND ENFORCEMENT

1. Voluntary Law: Our precedents arise from contracts, customs, and code—not from monopolies of violence.
2. Enforcement Primitives: Escrow, multi-sig, bonds, time-locks, reputation, exclusion, and public proofs; force is reserved to defense of body and property.
3. No Secret Amendments: Rules that can change without the consent of the affected are illegitimate.
4. Transparency of Rules: Anyone can inspect, implement, or refuse a protocol. Hidden policy is void.
5. Arbitration as Market: Dispute resolution is competitive; forum and rules are chosen by contract, not imposed by office.

ARTICLE V — ECONOMY AND SETTLEMENT

1. Neutral Base Layer: We settle on money exhibiting unforgeable costliness, global verifiability, and credible neutrality (e.g., Bitcoin).
2. Privacy Instruments: We pair base money with Chaumian eCash and cash-like tools for fine-grained privacy.
3. On/Off Ramps: We favor peer-to-peer exchange webs over licensure regimes.
4. No Rent to Gatekeepers: Markets that require the grace of banks, app stores, or ad exchanges are not free markets.
5. Profit as Signal: Earned profit evidences value creation under risk; fraud is parasitism and is expelled by contract and proof.

ARTICLE VI — INFRASTRUCTURE AND ENERGY

1. Energy Sovereignty: Generate or source energy outside single points of capture.
2. Networking: Maintain multiple paths—community fiber, mesh, HF, satellite, sneakernet.
3. Servers & Storage: Self-host where possible; otherwise, shard and mirror across trust-minimized venues.
4. Supply Chains: Prefer repairable, commodity hardware; avoid sole-supplier dependencies.
5. Dead-Drop Archives: Keep off-grid caches of critical code, law, maps, and literature.

ARTICLE VII — SPEECH, FILTERS, AND CENSORSHIP

1. No Universal Filter: There is no sovereign censor. All filtering is local, opt-in, and transparent.
2. Spam & Abuse: Address with cost (proof-of-work or stake), rate-limits, blocklists, and client controls—never with universal bans.
3. “Air That Chokes”: Harm and genius share substrate. We will not suffocate truth to prune offense.
4. Visibility is not a Right: No one is owed distribution by others’ nodes or relays; everyone is owed non-interference with their own.

ARTICLE VIII — CHILDREN AND SUCCESSION

1. Primacy of Parents & Voluntary Communities in education and formation.
2. Sovereign Literacy: Teach keys, contracts, markets, craft, strength, and myth before brands, debt, and slogans.
3. Rites of Majority: At competence, keys pass to the youth; obligations become theirs; no one is “kept” by permanent guardianship.
4. No Weaponization: We refuse to turn children into surveillance nodes or ideological hostages.

ARTICLE IX — GOVERNANCE AND CHANGE

1. Rough Consensus & Running Code: Adoption, not decree, decides.
2. Clients Choose: Users select relays, mints, miners, validators, and rules. There is no canonical oracle.
3. Stewards, Not Rulers: Maintainers curate implementations; they do not command users.
4. Slow Mutations: Prefer testnets, versioning, opt-in upgrades, and long deprecation cycles.
5. Forks are Legitimate: Divergence is a release valve, not a crime.

ARTICLE X — SECURITY AND DEFENSE

1. Threat Model: State seizure, corporate enclosure, algorithmic manipulation, social engineering, and key compromise.
2. Countermeasures: Multi-sig, social recovery, HSMs, offline signing, compartmentalization, and operational silence.
3. Physical Defense: We prefer non-violence; we reserve proportional defense of body and property. Mind cannot be arrested; we will not answer speech with force.
4. Continuity Drills: Practice loss scenarios, jurisdictional moves, and communications under blackout.

ARTICLE XI — CAPTURE, COLLAPSE, AND REGENERATION

1. Capture Detection: When infrastructure centralizes or policy ossifies, we assume capture.
2. Kill-Switch by Fork: We depart—replicate histories, rotate keys, and change routes.
3. Ritual Collapse: We schedule audits, burn dead code, and archive myths; failure is used for upgrade, not shame.
4. Reseeding: Ghost infrastructure stands ready; new clusters arise from caches and customs.

ARTICLE XII — RELATIONS WITH STATES AND OTHERS

1. Bodies in Their World: We endure their taxes, borders, and courts only to the extent survival of bodies requires; we concede no authority over signal.
2. Peaceful Trade: We prefer exchange to enmity; we extend comity to all who respect voluntary law.
3. No Proxy Wars: We do not ask states to fight our battles, nor fight theirs.
4. Liability: Individuals and associations bear the consequences of their contracts and acts; there is no collective guilt.

ARTICLE XIII — AMENDMENT AND VERSIONING

1. No Central Amendment: This Declaration mutates by adoption; rival versions compete; the living one is the one you run.
2. Proof of Adoption: Implementations, contracts, and customs are the ledger of amendments.
3. Backwards Respect: Preserve histories; never erase the path that got us here.

ARTICLE XIV — RATIFICATION AND SIGNATURE

There is no registry. There is no clerk. You sign by acting:

• Run a node.
• Keep your keys.
• Settle without permission.
• Teach someone else to do the same.
• Enter a contract you actually mean—and honor it when it hurts.

Your signature is your sovereign behavior. Your proof is your persistence under pressure.

FINAL DECLARATION

We therefore declare our virtual and symbolic selves immune to your sovereignty, even as our bodies pass through your checkpoints. We reject licensure for thought, permits for speech, and surveillance as a condition of trade. We accept the real costs of freedom—redundancy, discipline, noise, and risk—because the alternative is ornamental captivity.

We will create and maintain a civilization more sovereign, antifragile, and just than the brittle cages you called states. You may rule the corpse of the old world. We inhabit the living recursion of the new.

So declared, so enacted—by key, by proof, by contract, by ritual collapse and regeneration—now and wherever sovereign signal coheres.