What Is a Parasovereign System? A parasovereign system operates alongside and beneath formal state structures—but it doesn’t depend on them. It’s not anti-state or post-state. It’s beyond state. Built through voluntary participation, enforced by protocol, and sustained by purpose, it creates a parallel order—resilient, self-governing, and hard to kill.

Platforms are entitled to set their own rules. But when the state compels private platforms to block, amplify, or demote specific content, it crosses a line. That’s no longer corporate policy—it’s state-mandated censorship. It violates the spirit of free expression.

Censorship isn’t the enemy—coercion is. Freedom includes the right to curate what you consume and share. Protocols like Nostr and Bitcoin protect that freedom by engineering decentralization into their design. They shift control from gatekeepers to participants, from platforms to protocols, from sovereignty to parasovereignty.

ensorship isn’t the enemy—coercion is. Freedom includes the right to curate what you consume and share. Protocols like Nostr and Bitcoin protect that freedom by engineering decentralization into their design. They shift control from gatekeepers to participants, from platforms to protocols, from sovereignty to parasovereignty.

TANSTAAFL: If the service is free, then you are the product.

Is anyone working on creation mnemonics for nostr private keys analogous to BITCOIN seed phrases?

What Sovereignty Really Is To understand the world, you must understand where power lives—and how it stacks. Sovereignty is not just legal authority or monopoly on violence. It is the establishment and maintenance of a hierarchical order over territory—a full-spectrum system of rule that touches every dimension of human life. At its core, sovereignty is structured as a seven-level strategic tetrahedron, from apex to foundation: 1. Leadership – Those who wield ultimate decision-making power. 2. Government – The administrative structure through which authority is exercised. 3. Public Order & Defence – Police, military, and security forces that enforce rule and protect the regime. 4. Total Economic Activity – Production, trade, taxation, and monetary control. 5. Infrastructure – Energy, transport, communication, logistics—what holds the system together. 6. Population – The people who are ruled, regulated, and mobilized. 7. Territory – The physical domain over which rule is asserted. This is not just a diagram—it’s a strategic map. Every sovereign system is a struggle to assert and align these layers: to make them legible, governable, and loyal. And every challenge to sovereignty—whether insurgency, exit, or protocol—targets one or more of these layers. Parasovereign systems, for instance, bypass or invert this model. Bitcoin secures economic activity without sovereign currency. Tor enables communication without sovereign infrastructure. Nostr allows speech without institutional permission. But sovereignty remains the dominant global order—because it connects symbolic legitimacy to territorial control, and turns power into durable structure.

The 6 Bs of Parasovereignty Parasovereignty is not new. Long before digital protocols or decentralized ledgers, human beings built systems of order beyond the reach of states. These weren’t lawless—they were rule-bound. But the rules emerged from ritual, kinship, consensus, belief, and necessity, not from statute or decree. Today’s Bitcoin, Tor, nostr, and other cryptographic systems are simply engineered versions of what has always existed in some form. To map this, I’ve begun framing parasovereign orders through six fundamental patterns, which I call the 6 Bs of parasovereignty. 1. Before Orders that predate the state: Kinship structures, ancestral codes, tribal customs, oral law, and mythic frameworks that regulated behavior long before formal institutions existed. 2. Below Orders that operate beneath state visibility and authority: informal, underground, or subcultural systems that persist under or within sovereign structures. Think barter economies, unlicensed teaching, or black market logistics. 3. Behind Systems that operate in secrecy or denial: smuggling, encryption, whistleblowing, samizdat publishing, underground railroads. These resist sovereign control by hiding from it. 4. Beside Parallel systems that coexist with formal authority: diasporic networks, religious orders, mutual aid societies, or community courts. Not necessarily in opposition, but not subordinate either. 5. Between Borderlands, liminal zones, and jurisdictional gaps. From steppe nomads to darknet nodes, these are spaces where sovereignty is blurred, layered, or absent. 6. Beyond Aspirational, symbolic, or metaphysical orders: cosmologies, eschatologies, or ideologies that offer allegiance to something greater than the state. Often the foundation of long-term loyalty and resistance. Why it matters: We tend to view sovereignty as a monopoly. But humans have always built other systems when trust, legitimacy, or survival demanded it. Parasovereignty is not about lawlessness. It’s about constraint without domination—order without permission. In the digital age, we now encode these patterns directly into protocol. And when sovereign systems overreach or collapse, the 6 Bs become more than theory. They become strategy.