Introduction

Why this book

You are probably reading this because you attended PROOF in Vilnius on 27 September 2026, or because someone shared a link with you.

A conference lasts an afternoon. You listen to good talks, you agree with most of what is said, you promise yourself to change a few things, and on Monday morning ordinary life resumes. Habits last for years: the messenger you use, the way you handle passwords, the place where you keep your savings. They decide how exposed or how free you are far more than any talk does.

This book connects the afternoon and the habits. It takes the ideas from the stage and turns them into things you can set up on your own phone and your own computer, with clear steps and without a technical background. Reading a chapter takes about 10 minutes. Acting on it takes longer, and the book says how much. Every chapter contains actions of 5 minutes, most then ask for 1 to 3 hours that you can spread over several evenings, and a few include a project for a weekend.

Nothing here asks you to change your whole life. You change a single habit and then, when you are ready, another.

3 proofs

The 3 parts are named after the 3 themes of the conference.

Proof of Privacy is about protecting your messages, your passwords, your browser, your email and your network connection. It comes first because the other 2 parts rest on it.

Proof of Autonomy is about depending less on gatekeepers, the few large companies that can close your account, change the rules overnight or lose your data. Its chapters cover keys instead of accounts, Nostr, replacing Big Tech services one at a time, and hosting a few things yourself.

Proof of Work is about protecting the fruit of your work, your income and your savings. Money tends to lose value over time, sometimes fast: in October 2022, annual inflation reached 10.6% in the euro area and 22.1% in Lithuania, according to Eurostat. Most of what you own is also held, watched and sometimes frozen by someone else. You will compare the places where value can live (bank accounts, shares, gold, Bitcoin and, for advanced users, Monero), then learn to use Bitcoin, a tool in that list that you can hold and verify by yourself, provided you keep your own keys.

All 3 parts ask who holds the keys, because in practice that person is in control.

How to use it

Chapters are independent, so you can read them in any order, and skip what you already do. Each part opens with a short essay, and every chapter then follows the same path: the chapter in brief, what goes wrong today, the idea behind the solution, a choice of tools, a step-by-step tutorial, mistakes to avoid, resources to go further and the sources of the facts quoted.

Each chapter ends with a checklist of 5 actions, and all of them feed the global checklist at the end of the book, where you see everything on a single page. Every action carries an effort tag, (5 min), (1 hour) or (weekend), so you can do the 5-minute ones today and keep the weekend projects for later.

The book is designed to work offline once it has loaded. There is no account to create, and the pages load no third-party script and no tracker. Like any website, the server that hosts them still sees your IP address when they load. Your progress is stored only in your own browser, so it starts again from zero if you clear your browser data or switch to another device, because nobody else keeps a copy of what you have ticked.

A word on tools

For every need, this book lists several tools, never a single one, and none of them paid to be here. The conference has a single sponsor, Bringin, and whenever it appears in these pages it is named as the sponsor and shown among other options. The same goes for any tool connected to a speaker.

Tools change. Apps get bought, abandoned or slowly made worse: Skype, launched in 2003 and bought by Microsoft in 2011, was retired on 5 May 2025 and its users were sent to Teams. A recommendation that is right in September 2026, when these pages were checked, may be wrong in 3 years. Principles move more slowly, and 3 of them guide every choice in this book:

1 question ties these principles together and runs through every chapter: "who is the trusted third party, and can you check?" Encryption, open source or a respected brand do not settle it, because a setup is only as decentralised as the trust it rests on, whether that trust sits with a company's directory, a server, an app store or a hardware maker. A well-run third party is often a good choice, especially at the beginning, and the chapters show where the trust sits so that the choice stays yours.

Bitcoiners have a saying: "Don't trust, verify." It applies to this book too. Every dated fact links to its source, so compare what you read here with other sources, test things with small steps, and if you find a mistake, report it to the PROOF team.

Sources

NextProof of Privacy

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