what's up freaks listen matt and i have been running the show for seven and a half almost
eight years we've created incredible community around rhr we enjoy coming back to the show
week in and week out that's because we know that we're talking to other bitcoiners when we're on
the show we know most of you have been holding for years alongside us and most importantly we
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You've had a dynamic where money has become freer than free.
When you talk about a Fed just gone nuts, all the central banks going nuts.
So it's all acting like safe haven.
I believe that in a world where central bankers are tripping over themselves to devalue their currency, Bitcoin wins.
In the world of fiat currencies, Bitcoin is the victor.
I mean, that's part of the bull case for Bitcoin.
If you're not paying attention, you probably should be.
You probably should be.
Happy Thursday, everybody.
Beautiful day here in Austin, Texas, here for the Bitcoin takeover.
Warning, everybody.
Short rip today, tight rip.
I've got to get over to the event to lead a panel discussion on the Gentic payments.
So we got a lot to talk about.
Don't forget to remind them that it's not just about agents paying each other.
It's agents paying humans and humans paying agents and agents paying agents.
You're paying humans.
Yeah.
Actually, I recorded with our good friend, Paul Toy.
I love that dude.
Sponsor the show.
Go support them.
They're Hive.
products that they're about to launch is very impressive.
We talked about it.
Brian Murray from Craft Ventures also joined us.
He's on the board of Lightning Lab.
So we talked a lot about that towards the end of our discussion as well.
Brian's awesome.
Both legends in their own right.
Yeah.
Good discussion.
Vibes are high here in Austin.
Yeah, a lot going on.
Let's jump into the dashboard.
than I'm sure many of you are aware.
I'm going to fight with Coinbase on the internet,
so I'll address that.
Current price of Bitcoin is $70,470.
One cuck buck is going to get you 1,419 sats.
We're at a $1.41 trillion market cap.
We're at block height 940,417.
If you recall last week,
there was a difficulty adjustment right before we jumped on air.
And as of right now, we are 1,055 blocks away from the next difficulty adjustment estimated to be negative 4.4%.
Blocks have been coming in at 10 minutes and 27 seconds on average.
Looking like that, difficulty adjustment will be on March 20th.
As of right now, we'll get Clark's Mempool, 6,242 transactions.
We'll go over to mempool.space.
we'll see that they have
35,099
transactions
Mempool is pretty lively right now
pretty busy right now
if you have a high priority transaction
you need a 5 sat per V byte
transaction fee
it looks like you need
look at the block
you need like 3.5 sat
or something
yeah
very expensive
it's the state of the network
what does that cost it costs like 30 cents yeah 30 cents to send an infinite amount of money
and marty congratulations episode 400 oh wow we did it we did it i forgot episode 400 400 times
we've met together to talk about bitcoin kind of fucking wild it is we've met way more than that
by the way but live on air 400 times yeah every week man every fucking week hey that's why sometimes
you get us on our best sometimes you get us on our worst you know it is what it is it's how the
cookie crumbles we're humans we are humans and you watch uh uh bruce almighty is that why you have
what how the cookie crumbles in your mind no no but that's a classic i should watch that
that's how the cookie crumbles i
the uh let me pull up the live chat we have vague writer dive freak who's been here with us
for maybe all 400 episodes uh with 10 000 sats says stay humble stack brian armstrong hypocrisy
well i guess uh vague is creating a segue to the first topic i mean it was extensively covered
on the internet on x specifically yesterday uh wrote about the newsletter a little talking
head video but um don't have to rehash it i think i've said what um what uh has been brought to me
which is two sources basically starting a couple weeks ago saying hey actually like months ago
there was rumblings from people close to the hill that um the de minimis tax exemption for bitcoin
was being pushed to the wayside for a de minimis tax exemption for stable coins,
which doesn't make sense.
And I had somebody reach out to me last week and say,
hey, this is looking like it's Coinbase's lobbying team
that may be pushing for this.
Who knows the intention?
Maybe they just want to get something across the line.
Maybe Bitcoin de minimis tax exemption is too big of a hurdle to overcome
to get some of the things they want in terms of concessions
from the banking lobby for stable coin yield.
Again, this is all speculation on the intention.
And then yesterday morning, I had a second source
basically reach out and validate and confirm
that idea that Coinbase was the one stifling conversation
around the minimus tax exemption for Bitcoin payments specifically.
Yeah, so I reported on Twitter and Coinbase has responded
and denying it.
And you know what,
leave it at that.
I'm just happy the conversation is being had
and more people are being brought into the fold
and it's being brought top of mind.
And on top of that,
I think many people are also trying to ensure
that the BRCA language,
which would protect open source developers
and self-custody gets included
in the market structure bill.
And I think to clarify,
I had one misstatement in the response
I had to Brian Armstrong last night,
which was de minimis tax exemption
being part of the market structure bill.
I don't think that's being discussed.
I think it's separate.
Tax policy is separate for the market structure.
But I think you can make the argument
that de minimis tax exemption
does contribute to market structure.
If you have people feeling better
about spending Bitcoin,
it certainly contributes
to some part of the market structure,
but it's semantics.
So yeah, interesting day on the internet.
Yeah, I mean, look, it's obvious.
It's been obvious for a while to anyone paying attention
that Coinbase does not care about Bitcoin as payments, tech,
or Bitcoin as money for that matter.
And they barely prioritize Bitcoin as a store of value asset.
They're mostly just neck deep in shitcoin land.
Their Coinbase commerce product and their Coinbase wallet
have really poor Bitcoin support.
I think the commerce piece alone
doesn't actually allow you to accept Bitcoin.
You can accept wrapped Bitcoin on Ethereum or base,
but you can't accept real Bitcoin, is my understanding.
Or at least that's how it was when it launched.
On the surface, USD tokens getting de minimis tax exemption
seems just like a retarded concept
because they're supposed to be stable one-to-one against the US dollar.
But just for context for people, particularly in the DeFi world,
all these things trade at small discounts or premiums to a dollar.
It's never exactly a dollar, which is why presumably they want that written in law
that says that those are tax exempt.
Even though the tax burden for something like that should be already de minimis
because if it's actually working as a USD token, it should be $1.
So all that makes sense.
I mean, people can extrapolate how they want to extrapolate.
I think the more likely scenario here is that it's clearly just not a priority for Coinbase,
and it is a hot-button issue.
Anytime you're trying to reduce taxes for American citizens,
a lot of interest will want to stop that from happening.
So I think it's rightfully assumed that it will be a big fight to get any kind of de
minimis Bitcoin exemption passed.
I know it's a major focus for Bitcoin Policy Institute.
And it's frustrating to see industry players not...
I think there's a lot of calls for Bitcoiners to be nicer or be more allied with the greater
crypto industry. But time and time again, we see the opposite happen, which is they throw
Bitcoin users under the bus who want to use Bitcoin in a freedom-oriented way for their
own gains. And the Clarity Act is a perfect example of that. The open source developer
protection is incredibly important, sidelined. Bitcoin de minimis, extremely important,
sidelined. It's a predatory tax setup. And then the last piece, I mean, any kind of protection for
self-custody, using your own node, that type of thing, oftentimes sidelined. And the focus is,
how can we dump as many shitcoins on retail as possible? And that has always been their priority
and will continue to be their priority.
Yeah.
And I will say, as it relates to the BRCA,
Senator Lummis did respond to Frank Corver's tweet
saying that that is misinformation
or that's not accurate as of right now.
The current state of the bill includes BRCA.
So that's good.
Yeah, hoping that sticks through the end.
I mean, to be clear, as it currently stands,
that's basically the only piece of the bill that's actually beneficial to bitcoiners
um for bitcoiners that want to use bitcoin and freedom or interway everything else is designed
to help shitcoin casinos this is effectively what the bill is right now yeah and we're thinking
about tactics here too i think i i think it was uh it's actually funny i learned the tactic from
brian armstrong himself because i think he actually did a very good job of highlighting
that if you draw a line in the stand and you say like hey this is my line like they will negotiate
and get to the table and he did that i think last month or a couple months ago when he said hey i'd
rather have no bill than a bad bill and it seems like it forced the banking lobby and others to get
to the table it's i think from what i'm seeing they're going to get concessions on the stable
coin yield and so i think just using a similar tactic as it pertains to bitcoin to minimus tax
exemptions is a good move.
Look, I think in general, when you see things
that are happening behind closed doors and are not productive it better to have open dialogue and conversation about them and bring them out into the open So kudos to you on that Agreed Yeah I was not expecting it to become as big of a thing as it did
but here we are.
Yeah, I mean, we've talked about this in the past,
and you alluded to it earlier, but ideally,
we can just use Bitcoin as money, like the capital gains tax.
We've said this many times.
It's a predatory tax, a tax on savings.
It doesn't make sense from first principles.
And I think especially when you consider the state of the country right now, it's becoming harder and harder to justify paying any tax, let alone a capital gains tax on Bitcoin spends.
It also goes hand in hand with the war against financial privacy, right?
Right. The only the and they oftentimes will not say this part out loud.
Right. But the reason the one of the main reason financial privacy is either directionally criminalized or just outright criminalized is because of enforcement of these types of taxes.
They need they need massive burdensome surveillance mechanisms in place in order to make sure that those taxes are collected.
So if you remove that incentive, financial privacy across the board should get significant improvement. And yeah, I mean, they're taxing the hell out of us. They're printing tons of money. They're doing foreign wars. They're spending in corrupt ways. Like this is not how a well-run society is operated. Yeah.
I said this last night in the newsletter on my talk head video.
I think at the very least, the government has to throw the people a bone.
What's happening in the Middle East and the straighter news,
I think despite what the Trump administration would try to lead the public to believe,
it's becoming abundantly clear that there's going to be massive energy supply chain
and then byproduct supply chain, just massive, broad supply chain disruptions that are emanating
from this war in the Middle East.
And at the same time, you have this private credit bubble exploding.
I think in the last eight days, I mean, BlackRock, or Morgan Stanley, excuse me, BlackRock
came out last week.
We already covered that.
But Morgan Stanley came out yesterday and gated redemptions in one of their private credit
funds.
So you have this scenario where you're blowing up all these supply chains.
You're attacking energy supply chains, which is going to drive up the cost of gas and just energy, which is the raw input of the global economy.
Then you're taking LNG out, which is taking helium out, which has an effect on chips.
some of the byproducts of these oil gas
processes are
critical to fertilizer and so many people are talking about like a potential
food shortage like little crop shortage at the fall of this year
because we don't have enough fertilizer getting to market I mean
it's just a reminder and we've been saying this in
direct text to each other all week it's just like very reminiscent of
early covid um before yeah everybody got on to what's happening and i think we're going to find
ourselves in a situation later this year where you have inflation running rampant because of
these supply chain disruptions and then at the same time um you're going to have to have a bail
out of the financial sector because this private credit situation is quickly cascading and they're
going to need to bail them out because it's becoming abundantly clear that a lot of these
private credit funds have a ton of pension money. You have boomers retiring expecting that.
I don't think you can have the political double whammy of a war, a new war in the Middle East and
retirees losing all their pension money at the same time. They're going to have to print
the supply chain. Inflation is going to be exacerbated by money printing.
Long-winded way of saying the government has to throw the people a bone and allow us
to opt into better money.
Get off our backs.
Long-winded way of saying mandibles than Bitcoin standard.
It definitely feels like pre-COVID
before the normies panicked.
And there's a bunch of different variables at play.
But if you just threw out all the variables,
and by the way, you left out AI leading to massive job loss.
Which I think is definitely playing out as well.
If you isolate all the variables out of the war right now and just focus on energy prices, the market hasn't panicked yet.
Forget about all the knock-on effects.
I mean, there's going to be a ton of them.
Like you said, chips and food and everything else and just general supply shortages across the board.
But just energy prices alone and the amount of refineries and other infrastructure that have been damaged or straight up destroyed, the people that participate in the market have not taken it in yet.
It 100% feels like the calm before March 2020.
Yeah. It feels like the period of time when it's funny how we all had this immediate reversal. We were the first to panic, put a mask on. I remember walking through the Whole Foods in Williamsburg on March 1st and we're loading up. I have a mask on. My wife was like, we look crazy right now. I was like, baby, don't worry. People are going to freak out in a couple weeks. We're at that point right now.
What was the catalyst that led to people freaking out?
It's funny how the timeline's lining up, too.
It's not going to happen exactly the same way,
but the catalyst that led to everybody freaking out
was the canceling of the March Madness tournament.
No, it was the NBA, too.
Didn't the NBA?
It was like, yeah.
Yeah, I think it was like a jazz game.
It was like the first one.
It'd be like, we're canceling the March Madness.
It was like, we're not going through with it.
and then people started freaking out they kind of know like canceling sports
so like what is what is the uh what is the parallel to that this time around um
i saw ed dow tweeting about it but thailand um i'm not sure if you caught this headline but like
the thai government basically sent out a directive uh for companies to tell their
employees to work from home because they don't want to exacerbate the electricity
grid. So the concept of energy lockdowns
coming to... Yeah, I mean, hopefully
we don't have to fight against lockdowns again. I hope it's not that
directly one-to-one, but
at the very least, market panic,
recession, elevated,
maybe turns into even more than a recession, a depression.
I don't know what you want to call it.
And then massive printing, right?
But it does feel that same feeling of like sleepwalking into it.
And who knows, maybe in another two months,
then we're going to be on the tip of the spear being like,
these lockdowns are ridiculous and it's going to be all over again.
It's just internal September.
uh but it does it feel i like i said just people are hurting out there this is something we've
talked about constantly over the last year two years and it's just gotten worse and worse and
then you do you just all you do is increase energy prices significantly forget all the other once
again forget all the other knock-on effects and it's just brutal it's just massive um and
most people are just not paying attention if you're on x or nostr or you're monitoring the
situation you are one of the few you're in a little bubble most people have no idea
uh and also it's crazy for a modern war how much how hard it is to get good information right now
the fog of war is very strong so even the people that are paying attention you have to
you have to work for it there's a lot of fake news out there there's a lot of just quiet
where you're not getting real information um i saw uh
i mean by the way this is interesting timing too um senate democrats or house democrats i don't know
democrats are trying to push through a bill uh banning war markets on polymarket and
Right now, it's one of the few avenues of quality information on what's going on.
And of course, they want to block that avenue.
They don't want you to know what's going on over there.
They don't want you to know.
I feel like the Democrats want you to know.
I don't know.
Yeah.
I think they're all, for these types of things, they're all one party.
Yeah.
I mean, I'm getting like, I don't know if you're picking, I'm getting like mad king
vibes from trump did you see that thing like like rally last night like talking about the
word bringing up logan paul it's like what the fuck is going on right now what about the shoes
did you see the shoes no he's like buying everyone in his cabinet the specific pair of 145 shoes but
he's not asking them their sizes he's just winging it so like the whole cabin is walking around in
these shoes they're most of them don't fit them and specifically like rubio's shoes are like
are an inch too big.
He's swimming in the shoes,
but he doesn't want to not wear the shoes
because Trump gave them to him.
Yeah. I don't see that.
I did not see that.
The shoes. Shoe gate.
It's getting very weird out there.
Very, very weird.
But
don't fear. Do not fear. Do not fret.
Focus on what you can control.
I would load up on
quarter calf half calf uh or plan to in the next couple months like our freezers
halfway empty and i think i'll probably buy another quarter or half here the next month or two
we have so much meat we're ready to go never been in a more secure situation to be honest
yeah um that being said other stuff to talk about world is crazy but
stuff is happening in bitcoin too what can we do what can we focus on what can we build
again like i said earlier we have an opt-out option i didn't say that explicitly but we do
have an opt-out option in bitcoin and particularly if you secure your own private public key pairs
and cold card just released the mk5 bigger screen fantastic keypad it's got faster nfc backwards
compatible for seamless upgrade uh comes with quantum bitcoin awesomeness so this has been a
uh from getting insight into the build process for this and i think uh it's great to finally
see it at the market and then on top of that obviously it comes with all the firmware uh
incredible firmware that comes comes with cold card as well i forgot to link they have they came
out by the way freaks i know i said uh i would post the list to uh nostr going forward so you
don't have to check youtube i put it in the live chat for this week um maybe that's what i'll do
going forward but uh we were just in a rush to get this list together like we said we had a very
tight rip but cold card also came out with a new firmware uh late last week which i'm trying to look
up um i mean the big highlight was uh they made signing proof of reserves much easier
improving ownership of funds using PSPTs, which is great to see.
The MK5, yeah, I mean,
NVK has been talking to us about the design process
and the manufacturing for a while.
I'm quite excited about it.
I personally love the small form factor.
I think the Q is great.
The big keyboard, specifically, if you're using passphrases,
is really fantastic in the QR code reader.
but in terms of discreteness and size, I love how small the MK4 is.
And so the MK5 is just a nice, really nice hardware improvement
in terms of build quality and screen size.
And they're using Gorilla Glass now on the screen.
So I think it'll be pretty awesome.
To be clear, security-wise, you're looking at the similar security
between the MK5 and the Q.
um so it really comes down to to what you want form factor wise choose your form factor
play around with both um use code rh for a discount yeah coldcard.com
go check it out um next up on the list we've got
uh interested to get your thoughts on this because uh obviously many people report on this tftc
included but then the rage came out but last week u.s treasury uh released a report that acknowledged
the legitimate privacy uses for for crypto mixers like coin joint implementations and um
protocols like tornado cash i don't think they named them uh explicitly but i think there there
was a section in this report that that highlighted like hey we recognize that um there is a need for
financial privacy between businesses, their employees, consumers, and merchants they're
interacting with.
And so it does make sense that people would use these tools to attain a degree of privacy
while transacting with Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies.
That was good to see.
But Lola and the team at The Rage basically said, hey, don't take that small snippet.
Read the whole report.
and they were saying that other language that was included in the report
pertained to something that we've been covering since the crypto brief
was released last summer from the crypto team David Sachs and everybody working for him And it was the inclusion of extending the Patriot Act to cover digital assets
And it seems like that's still on the table as well.
Yeah, I mean, look, this is the frustrating part, right?
You constantly see like, I don't want to say virtue signaling,
but it feels like virtue signaling towards financial privacy.
And then the brass tacks is they throw people in jail.
The samurai devs are still in jail.
The next story I have on the list is they're still going after Tornado Cash founder.
They're planning on a retrial now.
So actions speak louder than words.
And it's easy to pull out small pieces of a treasury report
and post the most positive reaction to it as engagement bait on social media.
And you will get a lot more engagement if you do that than if you add any kind of nuance.
But the reality is much messier and much worse.
And this is why it's incredibly important that we learn from the early cypherpunk movement
when it came to encryption and open source encryption tech
that this fight needs to be fought on two fronts.
It needs to be fought on a policy front and a legal front,
as well as on the tool side.
We need the tools to be easier and more accessible than ever.
But also in the countries that we live in,
we need to do whatever means necessary to get the government off of our backs
and to keep us out of the gulags.
And so as an American, as someone who is building a family here and building businesses and various projects in America, it's incredibly important to me that we can at least partially remove the government from our threat model.
It's absolutely insane that the most likely way Bitcoiners operating in America can have their lives ruined is our own government.
And there's tangible wins that can be had.
And people are fighting the good fight, but it's a fucking grind.
It is a grind.
It is insane.
Again, the Patriot is just going in the wrong direction.
The Patriot Act is, I think, an aberration and a stain on the history of the United States, if you believe it to be.
A country founded on the ideals of freedom, sovereignty, and the ability to live your life the way you want as long as you're not harming others.
The Patriot Act just threw this dragnet surveillance apparatus on top of American citizens and global humans around the globe, for that matter.
and the thought that the government just wants to keep extending those capabilities
and those capabilities that infringe on freedom, privacy, and sovereignty
and the right to go about your life, again, as long as you're not harming anybody
without the government intervening and stepping in is disconcerting.
I think anybody on the Hill, hey, maybe you're seeing this live.
Maybe you're watching it after because you saw the kerfuffle on X yesterday between myself, others, and the Coinbase team.
You're trying to get that perspective.
Well, we have a range of perspectives in terms of policy oriented towards Bitcoin and just broader policy oriented towards American citizens.
We should not be extending the Patriot Act.
We should be working too.
remove it from our lives yeah look we're not asking uh coinbase is asking for special favors
for their business we're not asking for special favors uh for for the businesses uh that we invest
in what we're asking for is um common sense rules that um benefit america as a whole like you want
to see America be the Bitcoin capital of the world. You want us to be the AI powerhouse of
the world. And these things go hand in hand with not criminalizing your own citizens and not going
after people that are productive humans in our society. The ultimate goal should be aligned if
you're not a corrupt politician. Unfortunately, most of them are corrupt. I will say
there are some bright spots
and hopefully we can nail some wins here.
But the ask is simple.
Do what's best for America.
Don't do what's best for your pockets.
Yeah.
We shouldn't have to ask it,
but as you mentioned,
we find ourselves in a situation here
in 2026 where,
unfortunately, we were obliged to ask for that.
um moving on as you mentioned uh there's a retrial of roman storm in the tornado cash case
uh doj sdny still coming after him for those who uh forget or unaware he was trialed tried um and
um judged by a jury of his peers and they basically said they could not claim that he was guilty when
they didn't claim he was innocent either i think they said they did not feel confident to it was a
It was a hung jury.
It was a hung jury on two particular accounts.
And so DOJ, coming back at it again, Roman, you have a link from Amanda Tums here,
but I would highly recommend everybody go to Roman Storm's Twitter page
and read his tweet about the situation.
I mean, he's got to get to see the other thing.
It's like this guy's got a young daughter.
He just built software that allowed people to find financial privacy.
They're trying to say that he enabled terrorists to do it.
I mean, the Lazarus Group was using Tornado Cash.
I think that's a fact.
What they're trying to say is that he actively knew this
and was coordinating with them to enable them to achieve privacy
while transacting on the Ethereum blockchain.
I think it's a stretch to believe that the Roman Storm
was collaborating with North Korea to do these things.
and similar with the samurai wallet case they built it's a common it's a it's a common tactic
right you you isolate a very small subset of users that are that are already criminals that are using
something um and then you go after the operators even though the overwhelming majority of use
um was by productive members of society for basic financial privacy um and if you don't have
financial privacy, you can't have freedom. And if you don't have freedom, you can't have wealth.
It's all interconnected. And as an American, this needs to stop. As a Bitcoiner,
I think the Bitcoin network will be fine regardless. But as an American, and as someone
who's building my family and our businesses here, we need better policy. I see in the live chat,
But Alexander the Great says,
Real GigaChads use Strike, not Coinbase.
He's absolutely right.
Single biggest thing you can do to get back at Coinbase is to go and delete your account if you have a Coinbase account.
And if you live in the great state of New York, you now have the option to use Strike or any other state for that matter.
Most countries will.
A ton of countries, 90 plus countries.
You can download Strike in your favorite app, in your favorite app store.
And if you use code RHR to sign up, you get $500 worth of fee-free transactions.
And then after that, by the way, if you set up auto stacking, you got no fee in perpetuity.
It's a great hack.
Auto withdrawal, auto stacking, auto withdrawal to self-custody, real Bitcoin.
Not that paper shit.
We have Larry zapped us 42,000 sats.
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Next story on the list.
This is pretty crazy, but not surprising at all.
Report from GATT, all black GATT on X.
In case you didn't know, the dude running the White House account spent time at the Army Psychological Warfare Unit at Fort Bragg before being assigned this role.
the Smith Modernization Act
which was
passing the law under Obama made it legal
for the US government to propagandize
the American people. They're at war with us.
I mean, I think
Play the bowling video.
No.
Do we have sound?
Here comes the heat from the USA.
And it's down.
What a strike.
That's right.
Who do you think you are?
I am.
So it's like, you're playing it.
In my mind, it is psychological warfare
because I wanted to start singing Freebird.
I was like, I fucking love this song.
They know exactly what they're doing.
And I thought, I mean, this has been gone.
They were doing it around the ice riots in Minneapolis.
They've been doing it.
They've basically taken sort of schizo Twitter, schizo 4chan, sort of high production.
TikTok high quality production techniques.
They're using them to propagandize the American people.
And I thought they were cool like a year ago.
But now the stakes are incredibly high with this war.
It's becoming obvious.
It's like, holy shit, they're really leaning into this.
And I think anybody who's unaware of the Smith-Munt authorization act should go look into it. They are legally allowed to propagandize us now.
And it's straight from the official White House account, which is wild.
And to anyone, I think, to anyone who questioned the power of controlling these centralized platforms and having the God mode levers and switches you can pull on these things in times of war or other chaotic times, it's an insane amount of power.
Like it is a power that no man or company should have.
And a few do right now.
um and i think uh you know open protocols like nostor are more important than ever as a result
because this is the obvious propaganda when you see videos and stuff when things are deciding what
gets trending and what doesn't get trending and what gets shadow banned and what doesn't get
shadow banned and the entire thing's a fucking black box um that's where the real fucking evil
shit is going down and that's beneath the surface and harder to see yeah like it would not be a
surprised if my reporting yesterday was trending because they wanted something to trend outside of
what's happening in the war, right? To a certain extent.
Distraction.
Drown out some of it. Crazy times we're living in freaks. I feel like we say that every week now.
On to the Human Rights Foundation Financial Freedom Report story of the week coming out of
Turkey where there is a crackdown on currency exchange. Turkish officials have stepped up
their enforcement of unregistered foreign currency exchanges in major cities and tourist
areas since 2018. Officials have suspended the operations of 859 unlicensed businesses.
The crackdown comes as many people in Turkey increasingly seek other currencies to protect
their savings from inflation and the long-term decline of the Turkish lira. Yet again,
inflation rises, capital controls on citizens trying to escape that inflation increase. Turkey
just being the latest example of that.
And it's not even the latest example.
They've been doing this for years since Lira experienced hyperinflation.
I believe it was last year or the year before.
For more stories like this and others,
make sure you go to financialfreedomreport.org
and sign up for the weekly newsletter.
Will capital controls come here?
I mean, that was the other thing.
They already are.
I forgot to mention earlier that we should touch on.
because there's like the CBDC ban that's getting injected into a bill.
I forget.
It's like a farming bill or something like that, a land bill.
It was supposed to be another bill at the end of last year,
but it got ripped out at the last moment.
It's back on the table.
But again, talking about propagandizing and being careful of semantics,
the House is saying, all right, we're going to get the CBDC ban in this bill.
as it's written today.
The Federal Reserve would not be able to issue a CBDC
between whenever the bill is signed into law,
if it is, and 2030.
Many people who are supporting this are saying,
yes, we should ban CBDCs.
The Fed shouldn't be able to have control over our money.
I bring this up because many people are afraid
that if the Fed does that,
you have the very easy ability to enact capital controls.
You can decide who can and cannot spend money and what they can spend it on.
And I think it's just a cautionary.
This is a cautionary story.
Just because you get a CBDC ban doesn't mean it can't cover another form.
And again, bring it back to Coinbase.
Their focus on stablecoins and stablecoin yield and creating regulatory moats around that stablecoin apparatus.
The stablecoins can essentially do everything a CBDC can do.
They're issued by centralized third parties.
that are reserves are stored in treasuries which are issued by the u.s government and
ultimately these companies that are issuing these stable coins are regulated by the federal
government state governments and um the push comes to shove the mechanisms to basically do anything the federal reserve would do with the cbdc exist with stable coin infrastructure as well yeah i mean and look the cbdcs are already here they
just privately run and you have multiple benefits when you um when when you have them run privately
one is that corporations get to enrich themselves uh and then second of all in america specifically
it's an end around the constitution because you don't have constitutional protection from
corporations. And then they can just sell that data or basically give that data over to the US
government. This is something we've seen across the board, not just on the money side, but in a
lot of ways, I think we've talked about this, the informal economy, the amount of our normie
friends that are using Venmo, for instance, it's effectively a CBDC. It's a private version.
It doesn't use a blockchain. And all transactions are tracked and logged and used against you at
will. So yeah, it's a little bit of a psyop. Get everyone focused on hating on CBDCs while in
practice, the same thing has been actively rolled out and will continue to be rolled out over time.
um but you know still a win you know still good to see i think yeah but it's important that freaks
are aware of the reality of the situation you know at least some people are thinking
in the right direction on capital hell um i mean like a non-money money example here by the way
is like those flock cameras that they're putting up all over the place like the u.s government
would have because we actually do have a constitution would have a lot of difficulty
just putting up surveillance cameras everywhere
and adding AI to them or recording everything you do.
But a private corporation can do it easy.
And then a private corporation can just hand all of that data over
without a warrant.
And that's how you end up in dystopia
with an end around of our constitution.
Seeing those private-public partnerships that...
There you go.
That could lead to this.
All right.
We're getting to the software update section of the show.
We've got 10 minutes left, so I got to make sure I read the top boost.
We got 134,000 sats last week for $399.
Thank you, Freaks, for supporting here at the top boost.
Johnny Stimulus with 23,000 sats.
No message.
Thank you, Johnny Stimulus.
Boise, 22,222 sats, twos across the board.
Poundrum boost.
The Chicago Bitcoin Collective.
The Bitcoin Focus Workspace is having our first open house Saturday, March 21st.
So that is a week from this Saturday, 1 to 7 p.m.
Come hang out and see the space at 3938 North Central Ave, Portage Park, Chicago.
And you can go check out what they're up to at chicagobitcoincollective.com.
Then we have one from Random MPUB, 21,000 sats.
Hey guys, a note from last week.
There's a great privacy-focused company, AbovePhone, which sells pixels with graphene pre-installed.
not a paid show just a happy user who did not have to flash the os
interesting i don't know anything about them tried carefully uh and the blockchain obviously
there's some trust if you if you buy something that pre-flash for privacy there's some trust to
it so just keep that in mind yeah long time freak blockchain bug 21 000 sats talk stock
Talk stocks, stack sats on the stacker.news stacker stocks territory.
I guess sub stack.
We have like subreddits there now?
Yeah.
By the way, on the Graphene piece, Graphene has a great app that you can install on a different Android phone
that will verify the install on the actual Graphene phone using QR codes.
so if you do question you know who installed your graphene and you want to verify that it
all seems right and go to their website you can download the verification app it's actually a
pretty pretty slick experience and that very what is their website grapheneos.org that verification
app doesn't have to be running on a graphene device so you can just like run it on any old
android phone and then easily verify your install but i am pretty excited for this motorola
partnership. And then also on top of that on a Primal or any Noster app, um, our RHR account
posts hash signed videos after the fact. Um, and, and freaks can zap there as well. We have Florida
Justin's up 22,222 sets. Um, he's got a Bible verse here. That's cut off man bit zapped 21,012
sats um and roaming zapped 21 000 sats with his famous asteroid emoji and said acupuncture for
sats in massachusetts contact me on nostr acupuncture my wife swears by it um so does mine
i've never tried it though either by either by um we've got some zaps in the uh nostril live stream
chat right now. Matt, 21,000
stats. Got wrecked by Daddy Jack in the block
layoffs. Sorry to hear that, brother.
Would love to work on
BTC slash Noster. If anyone is looking for
God tier front end, DM
me on Noster
at M
Cote, M-C-O-T-E
at title.com. L-O-L-R-I-P.
God tier. He's humble too.
You'll get back on your feet, Matt.
anybody anybody with interesting ideas hit him up and then we got soap miners apping 21 000 sats
no message so minor use code rhr so minor uh personal business on air uh i owe you a message
i was preparing for my my trip to austin this week and i had a a soap miner box under my sink
i'd run out of all this soap i had in the previous box and i like to load up on it i didn't realize
It was like a personalized care package you had sent me.
I thought it was just another box of soap I had bought.
And so I finally, I think you might have sent it like last fall.
So I read your letter.
I love the deodorant, the lip balm and all that.
And I'm sorry if it seemed like you sent me a care package.
I didn't respond.
I just opened it two days ago.
And I literally have your note to respond to you on Signal when I'm on my flight back to Philly.
So thank you for that.
That's hilarious.
He's the best.
Best soap in the business.
Let's go to soapminer.com, use code RHR.
All right, software update section.
We're going to do it like we're going to go back old school way.
I'm just going to start blowing through these.
And Matt, if you feel compelled to talk at length about any of them, just interject.
We got Bitcoin Core, merging cluster mempools for improved efficiency.
That's a long-awaited.
So cool to see that.
ZapRite API resource for Bitcoin payments integration,
particularly if you're trying to have your agent or easily set up bitcoin payments on your website
using an agent this will be very good for that manant version 1.0.0 an encrypted nostre-based
note-taking app has launched that sounds pretty cool the bitcoin 2026 developer workshop proposal
repository by PTC Media is on GitHub. And so I think this is for the Las Vegas conference.
If you want to run a workshop, go check out this GitHub link.
You know, back when I was consulting for them, I helped set up their open source program. And
that's the open source stage, which they're still running the workshops, which as you can see,
they're still running and the open source developer ticket program,
which they're still running.
So if you're an open source contributor and you want a free ticket to Vegas,
you can apply for that.
If you want to run a workshop, use that GitHub repo.
That's why that exists.
And then also, by the way, I mean, I think we can tease it,
but we'll have more information for you.
Marty and I are going to be running another RHR live show
in partnership with Upkey and the Bitcoin Bugle Boys in Vegas,
which we're very excited about.
Early stages of planning there, so you'll have more details soon.
Yeah, we had a great planning call yesterday.
Very excited to get Dick Reeser and Rod Palmer in the mix this year,
the Bugle Boys.
We'll be in attendance, and as I'm sure you can all imagine,
we'll add a layer of comic relief necessary.
not necessary but we'll add another layer
the show is going to be great we love the live shows
and
this one is going to be really cool
yeah the one in Nashville we did was a lot of fun
so
yeah we're waiting on final final confirmation
on the specs from
from the venue
that we're going to be doing it at
we should have those by the end of the week
we're going to have more detailed
instructions
about the show next week
uh nato is testing ai powered cockroach spy drones did you see this i did it's like i don't know i
just thought this was a be aware thing just if you see any cockroaches in your in your citadel uh
make sure that they don't have uh cameras and microphones and radio transmitters on them
yeah it's a good it's an interesting way of getting around battery stuff right like battery
tech is like the one thing holding back a lot of these miniature surveillance things but if you just
strap it on to a nuke resistant animal and have him carry you around then you can get around it
i don't know wild times uh three more things on the list anthropic is subsidizing cloud code
compute costs this was a report from barely ai cursor internal analysis shows how hard anthropic
subsidizing clogged code this is something we've mentioned over the last couple months like it's
obvious to me but it's more extreme than i realized yeah so last year a 200 monthly subscription could
use two thousand dollars in compute now the same 200 monthly plan can consume 5 000 and compute a
2.5 x increase this is yeah this is right around like what i was guesstimating anywhere from like
So to be clear here, people are paying Anthropic $2,400 a year, and they're getting $60,000 worth of compute.
And it's being subsidized by the insane CapEx spend that we're seeing in the AI industry right now.
So why do I bring this up?
I just bring this up because, first of all, it's one of the hurdles that open source alternatives have to fight against.
because if you go in KYC with Claude,
you're getting a significantly better deal.
And then second of all,
as you're thinking about this brave new world we're entering
and positioning yourself in that future
and trying to make sure your family
and your projects are in a good situation,
just keep this in the back of your mind
because it's not going to be subsidized forever.
And I think, I mean,
if you just think about it at the most basic level,
If they turn that shit off, a lot of things would break right now.
Yeah.
And I think I warned about this a couple weeks ago,
but just if you're integrating Cloud Code,
if you're using Cloud's API for your agent,
just be prepared to visualize in your mind the cost going up at some point
when the subsidization no longer makes sense
and prepare for that accordingly.
don't get like reliant on the drugs and then have the drug dealer raise the prices on you
yeah um this is cool sats invader bitcoin paid arcade shooting game is now live yeah so i mean i
just the last two pieces are just i was vibing i've been vibing for the last i didn't know if
you wanted to yeah i didn't know if you're gonna tell it so sats invader is a game i made uh
Instead of inserting a coin, you pay 100 sats, which is, I think, like seven cents.
And there's a leaderboard that updates itself every week.
It was just fun.
So if you freaks want to live a little bit of nostalgia and play a Bitcoin-powered game,
satsinvaders.com.
And then I also vibed something I'm calling citadelwire.com, which shows the latest RHR
and the most recent civil dispatch.
And then I have like an AI news agent
who's pulling live polymarket data
and other live market data
to try and deliver a higher signal news.
It posts every three hours to Noster.
The whole website is actually Noster native.
It's pulling everything from Noster in the background.
So you can subscribe on a Noster client.
I just thought it was a pretty cool proof of concept
and I'm actually using it and refining it
and trying to curate it into something
that can let me pay attention to what matters,
but focus most of my scarce time on my family.
So some of you guys might find it helpful.
And if you do find it helpful,
feel free to reach out with feedback
if you think it can be improved.
My contact information is at odell.xyz.
Kudos to you, sir.
Both very clean, very clean.
They're fun.
All right.
I've got to hop on stage at the Bitcoin takeover.
So I got to get over there.
Shout out to Matt 21 for last minute zap here.
21,000 sats, no message.
It's been fun.
Crazy world, crazy times.
Make sure you stand up for freedom and sovereignty in the digital age and in Bitcoin.
I think it is important.
There is a lot of conversations going on on Capitol Hill that most people are not aware of.
And again, as it pertains to what happened on X yesterday with the Coinbase discussion about minimus tax exemption, I think it's important that people are aware of that.
Love you all. Stay on the StagSats.
Peace and love.
Thank you.