Moxie Marlinspike unearths a 2006 journal entry about scrapping metal in Pittsburgh

Moxie Marlinspike — the cryptographer behind Signal — posted an old journal entry, dated roughly 2006 and titled “Scrap,” recounting his early days renovating a derelict house in Pittsburgh. West-coast naivety about winter met reality fast: no working utilities, sub-zero cold, thread sealant frozen solid in the tube while he tried to fit gas lines by hand. The piece is a warm, self-deprecating memoir about squatting, plumbing, and salvaging materials from scrap lumber and forgotten pallets.

The core anecdote is about Pittsburgh’s metal ‘scrappers.’ A cast-iron bathtub left in the back yard vanishes overnight, teaching him that anything heavy and metallic set outside will be hauled off for raw material. Months later he weaponizes this, and two aging scrappers named Ron and Wade — half-deaf, communicating entirely by shouting — arrive to take a broken furnace out of the basement. What follows is a slapstick, genuinely dangerous ordeal: 17 steps, a claustrophobic panic attack, a man scrambling over the furnace, and an axe taken to a stuck pipe. The payoff for all of it: steel at four cents a pound.

Editorial note: this is a personal essay, not a cybersecurity or technology news item — it carries no security, product, or industry angle. It surfaces on Hacker News purely because of the author’s stature in the field. Tags below reflect that context (the author’s identity and community), not the essay’s subject matter, which is entirely a memoir.