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Matt and I have been talking about privacy and the importance of using a VPN for seven years now, literally seven years.
I believe at least once every episode or two.
It's like, hey, make sure you're running a VPN.
I think it's especially important today where you have governments in the UK, other parts of Europe, all across the world, really trying to introduce digital ID and curbing speech with hate speech laws.
Make sure you're protecting your privacy and shielding yourself from government surveillance as you're perusing the web.
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obscura.net, code RHR, 25% off. This rip was brought to you by our official electrolyte
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I drink multiple packets of it a day
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You've had a dynamic where money's become freer than free.
If 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.
Can the devs do something?
below 90k again
did you see all the
rumors are circulating that all the
Zcash devs quit
I don't think there are rumors
I think there was a walkout
the board of directors of the electric
company
trying to push through things
that the Zebs
we're calling them Zebs now
Zcash devs did not like they all left
in protest
is that what they call them do they actually call them Zebs
No, I just made that up.
Yeah, Zcash is down, but it looks like 15% today on that news.
Well, guess what?
They're going to create their own electric company.
They're going to come back and they're going to be better than ever.
And the Winklevoss twins are going to say,
hey, we're backing these guys.
Zcash is stronger than that.
That's what I saw.
That's why I said it was like a rumor, right?
because they're not actually quitting Zcash.
They're just launching a new company.
You don't want to build the roadmap
that the board of directors
at Electric Company is putting forth.
It's such a fucking shitcoin.
Anyway, for your stable stack side,
Zcash is a shitcoin.
But yeah, on the topic of,
I mean, I think
a lot of us were pretty bullish this week
and it'd be nice if the Bitcoin devs
could fix the Bitcoin price.
Thank you.
Well, maybe with the Zcash walkout, we just need to convince them, like, hey, look at the Bitcoin price.
There's a ton of market cap here, a lot of upside potential.
Maybe you should come fix the Bitcoin price.
We got to convince the Zebs to become Bebs, right?
Yes.
Yet.
And here, what a week.
I was thinking yesterday, I was like, all right, what are we going to talk about?
and then thought for 10 seconds.
I was like, oh, there's a lot going on this week.
We've got a tight rip, coffee rip.
Thank you guys for joining us.
As you may be able to tell, that is on the road.
I've got a TFTC to record at 10.30 a.m. Eastern,
and the schedule is conflicted, so we have a coffee rip.
Shout out to you, Carlos.
I know these are your favorite rips.
I hope you're in the live chat right now.
but we'll jump right in the Clark's dashboard.
Carlos missing a coffee rep.
You hate to say it.
Ryan's in the dashboard.
I didn't,
I forgot to give the freaks a heads up.
So that's on me traveling and I've lost my voice by the way,
freaks.
So apologies on that front,
but anyway,
dashboard continue.
Current price of Bitcoin is 89,740 cuck bucks.
One cuck bucks and get you 1,114.
sats were to 1.79 trillion dollar market cap we were at block height 931 413 which means we had
a difficulty adjustment between last week and this week it was a negative it happened earlier today
uh we're at 21 blocks ago so earlier this morning negative 1.2 percent difficulty adjustment
blocks are coming in at 10 minutes and 11 seconds on average.
We have 1,995 blocks still.
The next adjustment estimated to be as of right now on January 22nd,
2026 and not reliable estimate here,
considering we're only 21 blocks into this difficulty epoch,
but it's looking like a negative 35% downward difficulty adjustment.
Blocks been coming in at 16 minutes and 44 seconds on average since we,
adjusted earlier today.
There are 7,665
transactions in Clark's
mempool, which is high, which
would make sense if blocks have been coming in
16 minutes and 30 seconds on average.
If we go over to mempool.space,
we'll see they have 85,754
transactions. And their mempool
getting expensive, high priority,
four sats per vbyte,
medium priority, two sats per vbyte. If you're willing to wait,
one sat per vbyte will
suffice.
That is the state of the network.
Did you see our colleague at 1031, John Arnold,
sent us a teeny-weeny zap?
A teeny-weeny zap?
What did you zap us?
I don't have a...
John, can you zap with size, please?
210.
The Razor Fund.
Wow, I'm the...
John.
I think he's telling me to shave.
I think you should send me more money
if you want me to shave, John.
I think he wants you to shave your chest.
I think this is the most buttons you've had unbuttoned.
He's getting some chest hair visibility.
I actually buttoned them up before he went live.
And I see silent.link zapped us 42,000 sets.
Thank you, sir.
I love silent.link.
It's a fantastic service.
You see him for Bitcoin.
It is.
Bitcoin medium of exchange.
Like I said, I'm
recording an episode of TFTC
about an hour and 15 minutes from now
with Nick Slaney from MoneyDevKit.
You don't have it on the list, but maybe
you have one of them on the list.
I think
Bitcoin is a medium of exchange.
Obviously
not as popular
as many would lead you to believe,
but if you look at this week,
or like the last month particularly
BitChat which we have on the list
we'll talk about that more in depth
but they've added
the ability to send eCash
via the CashU protocol
within BitChat
there was a demo floating around
of Cali doing that
earlier this week we had Rumble
release there
oh it's a great wallet
yeah
creator wallets
non-custodial
it's a big one
they also have buy sell
or just buy on it, right?
They have MoonPay buy, I think.
I wouldn't be shocked if they have MoonPay buy.
No, they definitely have MoonPay buy
because everyone's favorite Grumpus
was complaining about the spread on Twitter about it.
Favorite Grumpus? Who's that?
Well, Pleditor.
Oh.
He called it a scam because there's a spread.
just don't buy
don't buy the rumble if you don't want to
everything's got to be perfect
if it's not perfect
you're a scammer
shout out to Mav21
21,000 zap
in the live stream
I think the rumble news is pretty fucking big
it's pretty massive
did you see
did you see that they
so rumble
while it is
is on-chain Bitcoin, Tether, and Tether Gold.
And they're going to add Lightning soon, hopefully.
They used Tether's wallet dev kit to build the whole thing,
and they want it to be self-custody.
So it's difficult to set up easy-to-use self-custody Lightning wallets,
so they're working on it.
But did you see that they came out with the SATS competitor
for Tether Gold, Skudos?
No. What is it?
then
I think it's one one thousandth
of a tether gold is called
a scudo now
which is I guess a callback to a
Roman coin called of the same name
so
you heard it here first Freak stay on the stack
scudos
it's not as
not as catchy
scudo
a new on-chain unit where one scudo
equals one one thousandth of x-a-u-t
scudo
I think in the announcement they call it the people's unit
I kind of like that
the people's unit
it's got a little innuendo to it
yeah
yeah so
I think it's big
I'm recording with Nick Slaney from Money Dev Kit
at 10.30
I'm sure many of you have seen
him vibe coding on Replit.
I think they have an official money dev kit
sort of integration with Replit.
And so if you're vibe coding,
you can basically incorporate what they're doing
to receive Bitcoin in a non-custodial fashion
rather trivially as well
for your vibe coded apps if you're out there.
Yeah, MDK is cool.
I like what Nick and his co-founder are building over there.
So good week for the Minium Exchange.
Even though the price is down.
Maybe that's why the price is down.
People are spending Bitcoin
to people who don't want to hold it.
The reason the price is down
is because everyone's buying eSIMs
on silent.link.
Topping up the data.
That would mean that silent.link
is dumping immediately.
I find that hard to believe.
I doubt it.
Yeah, it's just,
I mean, he runs BTCPay servers,
so I assume he doesn't.
Yeah.
All right, to the list,
Maduro Raid, number one.
Do you think they waited until after RHR to scoop them up?
I think they knew that we would have been all over it
had they done it on Thursday night Middle of the night Was it Friday into Saturday or Saturday into Sunday It was right after RHR
Traditional markets were closed, right?
Like only Bitcoin was open.
So yeah, maybe it was Friday night,
2 a.m. Friday night or something.
Yeah.
On Saturday morning.
A lot of speculation.
What's your take?
There's a couple different angles here.
I mean, all the angles.
Obviously, we talked about it a couple weeks ago.
Like the boats, the narco boats, probably just a facade.
I like the UAV take.
Obviously, Venezuela has a ton of natural resources,
oil, gas, gold, rare earth minerals.
Silver.
Guyana is there.
Scudos.
A lot of scudos.
And then, I don't know, there's the QAnon.
I don't know if it's QAnon even, but there's theories that election fraud was being run via Venezuela.
I don't know.
Do you want to bet on it?
No, I don't want to bet on it.
But, I don't know, the whole, I mean, in and out within four hours, and then you had this sort of.
I mean, it's pretty impressive.
Very impressive.
Well, that's where we're getting to.
Then you had the perp walk where Maduro was wearing
15 different outfits in the span of 24 hours.
And he did not seem perturbed at all.
He actually seemed pretty happy.
I don't know.
You got to play it that way, though.
Regardless.
You think it was an organized, negotiated,
trade, right? Yeah.
That's the vibe I'm getting. I don't
know with any degree of certainty.
Well, I don't know how
we can prove that or not.
Maybe it'll be more clear in the future.
But we can definitely
prove whether or not your theory of
him
being involved in election fraud
and turning
state's witness or whatever, and I'd be
happy to bet that I don't think that's the case.
But we'll see.
I want
Marty had to pay me 100,000
sats this week because he lost the BipBond's
bet. So I'm ready to
re-up with a new bet.
You went into waste-lice.
I
don't know.
A couple things.
First of all, Polymarket
was wild
in the lead-up
to it. There was some
insider that
Polymarket working and designed
created a fresh account.
but like 400k on Maduro getting captured,
which I'll just keep repeating
is like just the wildest time we live in
with all these prediction markets
and the implications of them.
Then there was the other polymarket piece
that like a bunch of people lost money
on betting on an invasion
because this was technically not an invasion.
And I just remind everybody,
always read the fine print
if you are going to gamble on these things.
and the fine print in that case was actually very clear.
It was like the U.S. has to hold territory in Venezuela
for it to be counted as an invasion,
which is clearly not the case.
They did like this organized handoff, right?
It's like Maria Mercado or whatever,
the Venezuelan opposition leader that won the Nobel Prize.
They like Trump like completely rugged her
and then just put in...
Delcy, who was the second in charge.
Yeah, Maduro's incredibly corrupt ballplayer over there.
Yeah, did you read the background on why they made that decision?
Apparently they were vetting Machado
to see whether or not she could actually come in and maintain power.
She's not even in the country.
Yeah.
Yeah, I mean, it was pretty weak on her part.
Did you see she dedicated her Nobel Prize to Trump?
Yeah.
Yeah, I mean, we'll see how it plays out, right?
There's a long, long history of American military interventions
in South America and other places throughout the world
that have gone horribly.
but it does seem
like Hegseth
and the Trump administration
are trying to be
very deliberate
and reserved
in how they handle
this situation
and pragmatic
which
might not be
the best outcome
for
Venezuelan
opposition
or freedom fighters
but
could be
a very strategic
outcome for
American interests.
And one thing that was learned
in Iraq
was we,
we,
fuck,
George Bush and his administration
completely disbanded
the entire Ba'ath Party,
the entire bureaucracy,
fired the entire army.
The whole army then became ISIS and shit
because you had a bunch of young,
trained guys that were unemployed.
And it was part of,
it was a significant part of the reason
why everything was like an absolute disaster there.
So you can kind of see the reasoning
that if they have a corrupt, established leader
that's already in place
with all the mechanisms
that she has to control the country
and operate the country,
that it could be very, you know,
much more pragmatic
than trying to do a complete regime change
and nation building type of situation, right?
Yes.
And it aligns very well
with the national security strategy that was written,
I believe, in the beginning of December, late November.
I mean, every president, I believe when they come in,
they have to write a national security strategy.
And historically, they've just been part of the process.
What's the word I'm looking for?
It's like going through the motions.
You write one, and it's like, okay, here's the thing.
We won't reference it.
But this one was a stark sort of delineation from national security strategies and prior administrations.
And he basically said, hey, we want to bring back the Monroe Doctrine.
We don't want to be in the Middle East.
No, it's the Donroe Doctrine. Get it right.
The Donroe Doctrine is here.
Many people were wondering if that was just posturing and if they would follow up.
and I think this Maduro extraction
is a validation of like,
yeah, no, we're dead serious
about this national security strategy.
We want to own the Western Hemisphere.
And they're already talking about Cuba,
Colombia, Nicaragua, follow-ups.
And that's what I worry.
Let's not get above our skis here.
They are definitely going to get above their skis.
I think they're feeling very cocky right now.
I mean, Venezuela too is very resource-rich.
And the Chavez government has been very influential in then funding a lot of these other dictatorships, right?
So him being removed already immediately has impacts on Cuba and Nicaragua.
China, Russia and Iran too.
Obviously, yeah.
So it should be interesting.
A while times – I mean I just want to be absolutely clear.
If this wasn't a negotiated deal with a staged abduction, and if it's even close to what happened on the surface just from an execution point of view, it is absolutely wild what they pulled off in terms of an outcome.
There was no U.S. military losses.
I think the reports are that they killed
like 32 Cuban elite security guards,
like their special forces in the compound.
And then they abducted him and his wife
and then brought him back to New York for trial.
And supposedly his wife is heavily involved
in the secret police and stuff too.
so like she's not like an innocent
wife figure
which is part of the reason why at least they say
that they took her as well
but that's I mean that's a pretty
there's like a there's a bunch of situations where that plays
out with you know helicopters going down
long invasion what about just
the dichotomy of hitting you know
like just cruise missiling the compound versus
like actually trying to go in and abduct.
Pretty wild.
Very wild.
What do you think of the Bitcoin theories in this one?
Oh yeah, then there's the rumor that there's 600,000 Bitcoin.
They probably have a stash of Bitcoin.
600,000 seems aggressive and large.
That would take a lot of discipline for them to stack and hold it
when they're a poorly run corrupt government
is not the best vehicle for stacking large amounts.
But there probably is a decent amount of Bitcoin there.
I wonder, we obviously have no idea who controls it.
A bunch of that Bitcoin was seized by Maduro
when he stole it from citizens, right?
From specifically Bitcoin miners.
But then other Bitcoin is believed to have been done
with oil deals, which makes sense.
because Bitcoin is ideal money
in a non-trusted,
when you don't trust your counterparties.
And then presumably,
we've known for a while
that the Maduro administration
was mining Bitcoin themselves.
There's a couple of interesting aspects here
on the Bitcoin side.
First of all,
to the quantum piece,
I think it's kind of,
once again,
here's another example.
It's like,
oh, a quantum attacker
steals a million Bitcoin and we're going to freeze the protocol over it.
But the US government flies Blackhawks into a sovereign nation
and abducts their president and then forces them to hand over the private keys.
And we're like, oh, that's just normal. That's fine.
We're not going to freeze those Bitcoins.
I think there's a logical fallacy there.
If anyone that supports freezing quantum, quote-unquote,
quantum vulnerable coins preemptively,
I think needs to reckon with the fact that
if that's what you support,
why don't you support freezing
when there's a military attack to steal Bitcoin?
And then I think the second piece that's interesting
is there's a bunch of naive fairytale Bitcoiners
that are like, oh, Bitcoin fixes this,
it stops wars, blah, blah, blah.
This is a perfect example of the types of military engagements
that you will continue to see under a Bitcoin standard
because obviously Bitcoin does not stop wars.
What it does do is it removes the money printer from the equation
so you can't fund super long, inefficient forever wars
through that silent tax, through the inflation tax.
And it doesn't have the same ring to it to say Bitcoin stops wars.
bangs when you say that out loud, saying Bitcoin forces war to be more efficient and more pragmatic
and more tactical does not hit the same. But that's the case, right? And so you look at
a situation like this, it's like the US government, US military spent a smaller amount of money
in a very tactical engagement
to potentially seize Bitcoin resources
and strategic location
in terms of Venezuela's location
at the mouth of the Caribbean and the Panama Canal.
And that's a perfect example
of a cost-benefit analysis
that in a post-Bitcoin world
could make financial sense
for a country to do it.
Bitcoin not bombs
I think the
yeah
the hope of like
yeah
the hope of like
I mean the whole
Bitcoin ending war
I think it's this
I don't want to call it
maybe it's not a pipe dream
but it's certainly a stretch
like
I like to be optimistic
if it can happen
like if you take the money printer out
people are forced to
engage in
legitimate commerce
and once you have that
at scale
the
incentive to go to war
decreases, which I can see too.
It's not going to end war.
No, it forces
warfare to be more efficient.
It the human condition changing the money doesn stop war
we've been on a gold standard in the past
there were still wars
there's plenty of governments that have shit currencies
that don't really have access to a printer in practice
that do wars
so it's just like logically does not flow
So, sorry to burst your bubble.
I know people like hearing it, but Bitcoin does not fix this.
Going back to the Venezuelan government Bitcoin stash,
whether or not they have 600,000, I'd be shocked if they have 600,000 Bitcoin.
Maybe over time they've accumulated that much,
but I would find it hard to believe that they did not burn through a large amount of that,
Especially when you consider how long they've been accumulating or interacting with Bitcoin going back to 2017, 2018 when the price was much lower.
But I think I'm pretty confident.
I think I've written about it.
I think we've talked about it.
There have been confirmed reports of the Venezuelan government using Bitcoin in oil trades.
And the way they would use Bitcoin is they would do a trade with Russia, Iran, China for oil.
They would demand to get paid in Tether.
and then they would immediately sweep that tether into bitcoin because they understand the
centralized third-party risk that exists with tether as an entity issuing that stable coin
that can freeze your stable coin so they were using bitcoin as this neutral sovereign reserve
asset to make sure that their their funds weren't frozen and then the other theory uh of how they
accumulated some bitcoin is gold swaps they have a ton of gold like we mentioned earlier and with
a ton of gold underground and above ground in Venezuela.
And apparently, I believe with China or somebody,
they did a gold swap where they gave them
a large amount of gold in return for Bitcoin.
And I think they have a bunch of stuff.
I think they have a couple billion dollars worth of gold
stuck in a UK vault too, right?
Yeah, yeah.
Did you see that?
Yeah.
So it would make sense that,
because they got frozen in that they got sanctioned,
They refused to deliver the gold from the UK vaults.
And I think after that, they're like, all right, let's diversify out of gold and into Bitcoin.
It can't be frozen.
But point being is whether you like it or not, this acutely validates Bitcoin's value prop.
You have a rogue nation state recognizing that they're vulnerable to the whims of central authorities in other monetary domains, particularly the fiat and even the gold system.
So they turn to Bitcoin because they can trust it much more than they can in those systems.
And so maybe a hard pill to swallow, but this is why Bitcoin exists.
100%.
And then the last piece I would say
is
if
Bitcoin is seized
by the US government
they should give it back to the
Venezuelan people. There's almost zero shot
they will. They will probably just
put it in the Strategic
Bitcoin Reserve alongside the other stolen Bitcoin
they have there.
But
I do not like
the
I do not have respect for the cheering of the stolen Bitcoin
going into the US Strategic Bitcoin Reserve
even though that's what's probably going to happen if it does exist
yes, I agree with you
but I want to put the case forward
Donald Trump, I know you listen to the show
Donrow Doctrine, I respect it
I agree with it, I think we should be focusing on
our locality, the western hemisphere
and you have an opportunity here.
Let's be clear.
There's no indication that we know where the Bitcoin is
or that we have the potential to get control of it at this point.
So this is all speculation theory.
But if we do have the ability, and like you said, Matt, I agree,
I think it should go back to the Venezuelan people.
And if you truly do want a strong, robust Western hemisphere
where people, particularly nation states,
they're operating in negotiations and in commerce with good intentions,
both counterparties have good intentions,
it would be a great strong signal to say,
hey, we're letting the Venezuelan people keep their Bitcoin.
It is theirs.
Their government acquired it off the sweat of their brow.
You obviously are in a position where we want you to be stronger
and you need to build up.
and here's a good foundation,
a nice Bitcoin strategic reserve for your country
is a good foundation to begin building that.
I think that would be a great step forward
and a great sign of, hey,
we legitimately want to make the Western Hemisphere stronger.
Is it the Trump administration did that?
Will they do that?
Will they ever even get control of the Bitcoin?
Who knows?
I think I agree with Matt.
Yeah.
I mean, if you're trying to get control of the Bitcoin, right,
how would you do it?
instead of hitting the leader with a cruise missile,
you would abduct him and interrogate him, right?
That's the only way you're going to get access to it.
Yeah.
But just to be clear here,
once again, this is also like a fairy tale,
but obviously if President Trump is listening,
I actually think it shouldn't be,
like it shouldn't be given back to the Venezuelan government
as their own strategic reserve.
I like the idea.
It's very unique in Bitcoin that you could do that
is like literally have the US government airdrop
an equal portion of sats to every single citizen of Venezuela.
And I did the math.
It's a great fucking meme number.
There's 28 million Venezuelans about.
And if there's actually 600,000 Bitcoin,
and that's 2.1 million sats per person.
And you can just airdrop it directly to the people.
Well, now you've got my juices flowing.
You do that and you're, hey,
there's been a large diaspora out of Venezuela
as the Maduro regime, Chavez and Maduro,
took over and destroyed the country.
Many Venezuelans left the country,
millions coming to the United States alone.
And if you're trying to solve an immigration,
these people were truly refugees,
but I think if Maduro is out
and there seems like the potential to rebuild Venezuela exists
and you want to incentivize the Venezuelans
who participated in diaspora and came to the United States
and said, hey, we're going to airdrop this Bitcoin
but you've got to go back to Venezuela.
Could be a nice little carrot there too.
We've interacted with tons of Venezuelan Bitcoiners.
Another thing we should note on this story, too, is Venezuelans, I think on a per capita basis, were some of the strongest Bitcoin adopters in the early days because they were going through hyperinflation.
Notoriously, they spun up a bunch of mining operations.
Matt mentioned they got seized by the Maduro regime.
And so there's a ton of Venezuelans that I've personally interacted with that Matt has over the years that are extremely happy with what's going on right now.
So I'm happy.
And again, I think it's still early days, fog of war, less than a week out from the Maduro extraction. It's yet to be determined whether or not it will be a smooth transition or it'll be in the overall benefit of the Venezuelans that were subjected to the wins of the Maduro regime.
I want to be optimistic and hold out hope that the Don Roe Doctrine is true and they do want a strong Western atmosphere.
And so it was cool to see all the celebrations and the tears of joy that were coming across the internet last week because people were really suffering.
100%.
All right.
do we have
I guess it's early
it's a morning rep
let me just check my email
I'm not seeing
not seeing
a financial freedom report out yet
so we don't have a
Human Rights Foundation
financial freedom report
though we'll just make one up
we talked about it last week
it seems like the interest
in bitchat in uganda specifically has increased over the last week cali's been showing some charts
of download numbers coming out of uganda i think i think he said one percent of the country has
downloaded bitchat it's over on android alone it's over a million downloads yeah and so we
mentioned it last week but they have a big election coming up a week from today uh thursday january
15th, much speculation that the incumbent administration is going to shut off the internet
to prevent people from communicating because they're likely going to execute some election
fraud.
And so to curb or to front run the internet shutdown and the shutdown of communication
networks within the country, people have been fleeing to download.
not fleeing, but have been rushing to download BitChat.
What are you showing us, your coffee cup?
Is there a monkey back there?
I don't know, I just had to get up real quick.
Oh.
This is my way of turning off the camera.
So in a way to sort of front-run this and get ahead of it,
many people in the country have been urged to download BitChat,
which, for those who are unaware,
it's an app that you download,
and it communicates using Bluetooth.
So if you're within proximity of other users,
you can communicate with.
If you hit a critical mass of people,
that sort of range with which you can communicate with people
expands pretty massively.
So a week out from the election,
many people are downloading BitChat
to be able to communicate as it's going on
and to highlight election fraud if it happens.
And I think this is an incredible example of freedom tech.
And it will be very interesting to see
the impact this has next week during the Ugandan elections.
And did you see that the Ugandan government was like, we've developed the technology to block BitChat.
And people in the comments are like, you don't have the capability of blocking Bluetooth.
You're just fucking making shit up.
It's radio waves, brother.
And supposedly, Callie's working on the Android side using direct Wi-Fi connections, which extends the range.
significantly.
And you can't do that on the iPhone side,
but because
BitChats cross-compatible,
it still indirectly
benefits iPhone users because
if it goes iPhone to Android
then to Android to iPhone,
you get significantly
more range.
Hell yeah.
And then of course, there's two pieces.
Yeah, go on.
I was going to say, I don't know if they're going to write about it this week,
but go sign up for the Financial Freedom Report.
They'll definitely be right about that, is my guess.
I'm at an HRF event right now,
and one of the main topics is BitChat
and the success of BitChat.
And also the impact of Vibe Coding
in its creation and development in the first place.
So it's just wild to see. It's cool to see.
It empowers people. And just to be clear again,
there's two aspects of BitChat.
You have the mesh that's direct peer-to-peer,
and then you have the global chat rooms that are using Nostr.
And there's also the DM functionality,
that if you're not near someone, you can then switch to Nostr-based DMs.
Obviously, we've seen authoritarian governments in the past
cut internet during election times.
that's why
there's being this push to BitChat
in the first place. So if they do do that
only the mesh part of BitChat
will work. Obviously
the Nostra aspects won't.
And then the last piece I would
just say is
do you see the opposition
leader?
He has two million followers.
And
it's just like every morning he's just all
caps like download BitChat which is just
a crazy thing.
so we'll keep you guys
abreast of that I guess by the time we record
next week if it's on Thursday
Uganda's
a few hours or
probably six or seven hours ahead of us
I would imagine
so there should be some news next week
when we're recording
you can look out for that
alright software updates coin swap version version 0 has been released
Come on.
Tapper's using swap protocol.
This protocol allows faster swap rounds,
unified funding, contract transactions,
cheaper fees for swap recovery,
and better anonymity set for increased privacy.
So this is a really cool project and we're funding it out of OpenSats.
And they specifically asked me to sound the horn to all the ride-or-die freaks out there to test it and provide feedback and help contribute to the project.
So go check it out if it interests you.
It's obviously privacy-focused.
Bitcoin swaps.
Go check it out.
Mention boost.
Probably one of the
bigger successes
at OpenSats this year.
Pretty cool to see.
Just quietly,
quietly grinding it out.
Up, up, up, up, up.
All right.
Top boost from Rabbit Hole Recap,
390 the 2026 cattle bike
none to read on
fountain
none above
21,000 cents
do we have any on
primal
alright sure
nope
high sap was
2100 cents
reminder freaks
if you're new here
we read
every zap or boost
that's over 21,000 sets
anything in the
the top four
we read the top four
over 21,000 sets
alright we've got a couple
in the Primal live chat
21,000 sets from Bill
Long Island Bitcoin meetup
tomorrow January 9th
a tap room
in Ronkonkama
at 6.30pm
all freaks welcome
interesting
Friday night
Bitcoin meetup
what do you think
about that
not my vibe
but I support it
yes
the commoner
21,012 sats
palindrome
zap
let's fucking go
let's go
freedom tech
winning out
I see weirdo robot
in the comments
asking for a link
to coin swap
the coin swap repo
I do have a link
it will be in the show notes
but I will also put it
in
the Nostralide chat
I'm going to beat you to it
no you didn't
you failed
send me money
alright next up
join market
is there an update on
the DDoS attack that we talked about
last week
So this is the guy who announced the DDoS and the mitigation of rotating log files.
This is just cool to see.
Like, JoinMarket has been around for a while.
I mean, this kind of came out of nowhere.
It caught me off guard.
It's a full...
Yeah, go on.
So as I said, JoinMarketNG, it's a full rewrite of all JoinMarket components in modern Python, focusing on performance, maintainability, and extensibility.
While maintaining compatibility with the existing JoinMarket network, wire rewrite, reference implementation, has served the community well for years.
And we're deeply grateful for all the contributors, for all that the contributors have done.
However, the project has no longer actively developed 181 open issues and 41 open pull requests and had architectural limitations such as relying on Bitcoin cores, Berkeley DB wallets, which were deprecated in version 26.0.
So it seems like Jewry Market has been neglected in mower here.
And I imagine others are picking up the reins and modernizing it
and making sure that's updated and maintained.
So cool to see.
I absolutely love to see it.
Actually, that just reminded me,
I unintentionally forgot to put it on the list,
but there was a bug in Core V30
that had people...
Drop legacy wallets.
Well, specifically, it was if you migrated...
It was really bad.
If you migrated a legacy wallet,
so that's what reminded me,
like a Berkeley DB legacy wallet,
I think it would wipe all wallets
that were attached to the core client.
I think obviously that's not great.
And core maintainers also agree with that,
which is why they announced it
and then removed the core 30 release from the site,
from their site.
But to be clear,
a very small subset of users could be affected by this.
I think in general,
most people just don't use core as a wallet to begin with.
This does not affect anyone who's using Sparrow to connect to their node, for instance.
It's actually people that are running wallets within Core.
The second piece is, obviously, you need to have a really, really old wallet that you're then migrating.
And then also without a backup.
If you have a backup, you wouldn't be affected, obviously.
You could just restore from backup.
so it definitely shouldn't be
dismissed
you know as
something that is trivial but also
I think on the other side of the extreme
making it seem like it's like
the end of the world type of situation
is wrong
as well
yes
and it looks like not implemented this
as well too so be aware
if you're running NOTS.
Didn't Luke say
they weren't affected?
Was that wrong?
I saw somebody pointing out that
the same
code was implemented in NOTS.
I don't know.
Could be wrong.
I saw Luke
on Noster said he hadn't merged
that pull request yet, and it wasn't
part of NOTS.
It's a good reminder, first of all,
to back up your wallets.
Make sure all your wallets
are always backed up.
Ideally offline on steal.
Oh, I see,
Jerry said Luke was mistaken
and they were affected too.
Take it as you will.
But second of all,
like I think it's another example
that like
there's better ways,
there's better ways
to use Bitcoin
than to use
the built-in wallet functionality
of core or not.
Not best practice, in my opinion, at this point.
Beware. Legacy addresses are addresses with a one in front.
And so if you're using Bitcoin Core as a wallet
and you're planning on upgrading and you have Bitcoin in addresses...
Yeah, but I think this is...
Is it like IP address day?
No, no, no.
I think you could have a legacy format wallet.
It's like how it's stored in the database.
I think you could use it with new addresses,
but it's like an old created wallet.
It's just like moving to the new HD wallets.
But I don't know.
Maybe I'm wrong there.
Never use that functionality in Core.
Be aware.
All right, next up on the list, big update from Primal.
Primal signers here.
Absolutely massive.
We're very excited about it.
You can now sign into Primal Web without an extension.
It's time to fade all the extensions.
I absolutely hate needing an extension to use Nostra Web Apps.
And so now to sign into Primal Web,
all you have to do is scan a QR code.
It uses the open, you scan a QR code with your phone with the Prima mobile app.
Your keys stay on your phone locally and everything gets signed from your phone in the background.
And it uses the open NSEC bunker standard, which is, it's funny because this is what silent.link was asking for last week.
And we were testing it while he was asking for it.
I knew it was in the pipeline.
but that means that if you're using
NAC or another NSEC
Bunker compatible signer you can also
sign into Primal Web with that as well
you obviously don't need to use the Primal app
and it also means with the
Primal app you can sign into any
other Nostra app that supports
NSEC Bunker
if it's on your phone
and you can't scan a QR code
because you're in
your phone browser
you can also just copy and paste
the NSEC bunker code
without exposing your NSEC.
So it opens up
just easy interoperability
with pretty much every
Nostra web app
for Primal users.
The Primal team,
it's really impressive
that they pulled this off.
Specifically on Android,
it was relatively easy to do.
On iPhone,
on iOS,
they kill background processes.
It's really hard to have
a background process
constantly running.
But we got it approved through the App Store, which is no easy feat.
And the way we did it is it plays ambient noises.
We curated a bunch of ambient sounds that play because it's a media player.
So it's like if you have Spotify or Tidal in the background,
you can mute the noises if you don't want to listen to jungle sounds or something
while you're signed into Nostra apps.
but the UX flow is just incredibly smooth
so I implore people to try it out
test it out
give us feedback
there's
a lot of unfounded
hate out there for Primal
I saw some haters saying
this is another example
of
us trying to lock in users
or creating a walled garden
which is just retarded
because it's actually the exact opposite feature
You can sign in. You can use Primal without ever providing an NSEC to the Primal app.
And you can now use the stream for some reason.
Uh-oh.
Are we still recording, though?
I don't know. I hit resume. I don't know if I kept recording.
Let me see.
Oh, I just got like a three-second guy here. I went back.
You want to do it again?
It's on again. Are we live?
I think we're live.
We're live.
Are we live?
What did we lose?
Do we have the recording?
We're back.
Recording should exist.
I just don't know if it was recording
while the stream dropped.
YouTube's back. Twitter's back.
I don't know what we missed.
did the freaks hear that we have huge updates coming for Primal
and that this is just the first of many?
I'm pretty excited about it.
And to the freaks that aren't aware,
1031 is the largest investor in Primal
and we're heavily involved in development.
Looks like we're up on Twitter and YouTube.
I think Noster is down, but people are flooding to the alternatives.
But I was going through a diatribe.
Why do we use this?
Because you don't have to give up personal information.
You create a private-public key pair.
You can be pseudo-anonymous.
You can detach your identity and any personal identifying information
from your social web of trust account.
And that is very important, especially in these days
when companies like Ledger are continuously
collecting data
having it stolen from them and leaked on the internet
there was a third
Ledger leak
that was announced this week
I mean to be clear I think
just before we move on to that
like
yes it's huge that you can use
Nostra without permission that you can use it
you know without providing
intimate personal
information to big tech social companies
but I
I think the verifiable data, the fact that all data is signed is going to be absolutely massive, particularly on video, on photos, but also on text posts.
And to the example of, we'll use Venezuela as an example again.
While Venezuela was going down, everyone was, they wanted to monitor the situation and they were checking Polymarket and they were checking X and stuff.
And it's really hard to see which data is real and what is real and what is fake.
There's a lot of shit going on out there.
And the truth of the matter is,
if you're using something like X,
the only way you know if something is real or not
is you're just trusting Elon.
And if you're using Facebook, you're trusting Zuck.
If you're using TikTok, you're trusting the CCP
and Larry Ellison.
It looks like he's going to get the US one.
But I think that's going to become more and more
of a clear win for Noster
as an interoperable, verifiable data set.
And we'll make it particularly well-suited
for quote-unquote monitoring the situation.
But yeah, onto the Ledger leak.
God, they are so irresponsible over there.
I think this is the third time personal information
has been leaked out of Ledger.
And there's already been many cases
where people are getting robbed and having home invasions.
their families are being put at risk
because Ledger is not prioritizing
customer safety
and I think
they should be shunned from the industry
in a big way
so look
we'll read your
customer's got this email
Dear customer, Global E
recently identified unusual activity
on a portion of our network
immediately after we became aware
of the unusual activity in our cloud systems
We took action to contain and ultimately secure our systems.
We retained independent forensic experts to conduct an investigation into the incident and were able to determine that some personal data including name and contact information were improperly accessed
So, trusted third parties. Ledger should be shunned. No focus. Feel bad for the Bitcoin team
inside of Ledger because they are pretty elite.
And then the other thing I would highlight here is, it's another example, by the way,
that the rise of LLMs,
the rise of these AI models
makes it really easy to sift through these data leaks
and combine the data leaks with each other
and cross-tabulate data.
So you can take this ledger leak, for instance,
and you can be like,
okay, which email addresses are in here
and what other leaks,
It's not even just ledger leaks have shown home addresses or other information.
And you can get in a nice table that shows all the information.
And it's pretty scary.
In terms of personal data being leaked and compromised on the internet and then used against people, we're very much in a brave new world.
It's easier than ever to weaponize this on an individual level.
against people.
Yeah, and that is why at Rabbit Hole Recap
we choose to partner with CoinKite
because they build the best hardware wallets
and then on top of that they collect
as little PII as possible,
personal identifying information,
and then they also wipe any data that they do collect
when they make sales,
when they sell products after 90 days.
And so they're actively deleting user information.
Can't verify, so trust me, bro.
But I think I be kidding It impossible to verify that information is deleted but it is It deleted every 90 days as it should be
They take it very seriously.
Just in general, best practice is to not use a home address for shipping,
where you're going to ship things to.
Consider a P.O. Box or some other kind of office address or something,
non-home address type of situation.
But that information is deleted.
And the other big thing that Coldcard does
is they don't do any marketing emails and stuff, right?
Like a lot of these ledger attacks,
these ledger leaks have been
because they have marketing lists
to send you promo emails
and try and sell you on whatever new products
that they're releasing constantly.
And CoinKite just doesn't do that.
They don't have any third-party dependencies.
They don't send out any marketing emails.
And they should absolutely be applauded for that.
So, yeah, I love CultGuard.
I think they do a really good job.
I use it.
I use it for my companies.
I use it for our projects.
My family relies on it.
Our businesses rely on it.
And you can use code RHR for a discount.
Well, not only that.
we've got a new bundle
we've got a special bundle
on CoinKite too
when you get the RHR bundle
you'll get two queues
a magic internet money sats card
to hand out at a wedding
if you haven't done that already
and then a steel plate backup
as well
I think you'll get 10% off
if you use the RHR code
for that bundle particularly
to be clear it's not up yet
but it's supposed to be up by end of day
so
yeah you'll get a bigger discount
if you use the RHR bundle
if you do the RHR bundle,
which I personally like.
Even if you don't do multi-sig,
I like the idea of having two cold cards because you set up the first one then you back it up to steal and then you restore from the steal to the second one
And then so you'll know that you actually recorded your seed correctly and that you practice the restore process.
And then at that point, you have the two cold cards that are mirroring each other.
They're the same wallet.
And they're obviously pin protected with the secure element.
So you can kind of think of them like your seed with the lockbox around it.
Like it's a safe with your, with your, with your seed.
And then you have, you have the third backup, which is a physical steel, uh, you know, water
resistant, fire resistant, analog offline, um, plate.
And I think, so then you, you can put the two gold cards in different places and you
put the steel somewhere where you make sure that no one can get access to the steel because
obviously they can spend their money if they get access to it.
is a really good setup.
And then to Marty's point,
Sats cards are just a great way to gift Bitcoin.
So I think it's a cool bundle.
It is a cool bundle.
That's all we have on the list.
I know you're busy.
And on a bit of a somber note,
you were aware of this last week, man.
That's why we pushed it up.
My aunt is very close with us.
She was rushed to the ICU last week.
Now she's on hospice, and it looks like today may be her last day on this earth.
And I just wanted to use that to send a message.
Cherish time.
Cherish your time on the planet.
Cherish time with your family.
Shout out to Aunt Nancy.
This one's for you.
I'm sorry, brother.
That sucks.
And yeah, time is scarce.
make the most of it
love you all freaks
Stan will stack seven
peace of love