What's up freaks? This rip of RHR was brought to you by our good friends at CoinKite.
They produce the Cold Card Q, my favorite hardware wallet. It's got two secure enclaves,
it's got a full screen, full keyboard here. As you can see, if you're watching, if you can't watch,
just imagine something that looks like a BlackBerry. It allows you to create private
public key pairs offline in an arrogant fashion. Never have to connect the Cold Card Q to an
internet device you can sign transactions and pspts remotely in the most secure fashion if you're a
bitcoin power user and you're looking for the best security go pick up a cold card queue and go to
coin kite.com find the cold card queue there i think you go to cold card.com as well use the code
rhr for five percent off step up your security get a cold card queue this route was also brought to
by our good friends at stackwork if you're looking for a great way to make kyc free sets stackwork
has bounties go to stackwork.ai find their bounties page and contribute to the bounties
you can make bitcoin kyc free for completing the bounties if you're a developer looking to scoop up
some easy sets go check out the bounties contribute to them and stack some sets stackwork.ai
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.
our VPN of choice here at RHR is Obscura is built by a Bitcoiner for Bitcoiners. Carl Dung
did some very critical work for Bitcoin back in the day, but he decided to shift his focus to
bring privacy to everybody with Obscura. It is a VPN that cannot log literally by the way it's
designed. A lot of VPNs will hand ways say we're not logging. We're not logging. You can't trust
them. You want the VPN that cannot log. That is Obscura. Go to Obscura.net. Use the code RHR for
25% off when you sign up any of their deals. Make sure you're using it, particularly if you're in
one of these countries where the governments are becoming extremely censorious and targeting
citizens that exhibit wrong think you should be running a VPN. That VPN should be obscura,
obscura.net, code RHR, 25% off. This rip was brought to you by our official electrolyte
sponsor here at RHR, Salt of the Earth. You've been hearing Matt and I talk about it quite a bit.
I drink multiple packets of it a day
You gotta stay hydrated
That's why my face looks so good
That's why I'm getting buff
I'm able to get to the gym more
Because I'm hydrated
Matt, he's looking incredible
I'm sure you've all noticed it
You wanna know why?
Salt of the earth, baby
Go to drinkssauté.com
Use the code RHR
You're gonna get 15% off
I'm dead serious
It hasn't made my life way better
My wife, she's right behind me right now laughing
But she's laughing because she knows it's true
She drinks like seven a day
I drink a few a day
maybe seven a day too. Matt, I don't even want to tell you how much he's drinking. It's good.
It keeps you hydrated. It keeps you alert. Keeps you ready to go. Drink saute.com. That's D-R-I-N-K-S-O-T-E.com.
Use the code RHR for 15% off any order.
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.
First rip of 2026. Here we are.
Happy New Year.
Friday, January 22nd.
12-15.
January 2nd.
What did I say, 22nd?
I think you did, yeah.
Well, I have...
Matt and I were just reminiscing on the birth date of RHR.
August 22nd, 2018.
Ah, that's why.
Yeah.
You realize this is episode 390.
Pretty crazy.
Episode 400 should come in 10 weeks.
Mid-February?
Or excuse me, mid-March.
Unless we have some stimulus episodes.
Did you see what I named it?
The Cattle Bike is here at 2026.
Cattle Bike has started.
Marty asked me what we were naming the episode.
I was like, no spoilers.
You have to wait until we go live.
Got a little mini pump today
Up 3%
Approaching 91,000
Do we
Up only
Up only in 2026
We'll see
It would be great
I wouldn't mind it
If we're being honest with each other
I'm down for it
Yeah
A lot of doobers out there
So it'd be
We need some wind
and make it even more enjoyable.
I've seen the TA analysts that I follow.
They're saying we need to get over 93,000
and stay over for a few days,
and then we may have a legit reversal on our hands here.
So go for that area.
I'm staying up on stacks.
I thought the funniest analysis I saw was
the top was literally
when
was
when Brian Armstrong
spent millions of dollars on the
Up Only reboot.
Literally top ticked.
What was that? Early October?
Was it like $10 million or
something for the next season and he hired
Kobe? It was
$24 million.
But he also bought
Kobe's company, right?
yeah or whatever he wanted to hook up uh
god i'm blanking his his co-host ledger ledger yeah so that was a solid move by kobe he probably
didn't have to do that are we gonna would we sell out for 24 million dollars look if you sell
tftc if you sell tftc to coinbase i expect you to hook a brother up and uh
and have some kind of token multi-million dollar deal that that includes my name in it
it's funny you mention that apparently there's a bunch of private equity groups going around
scooping up niche media companies for for millions of dollars and yeah well hook a
hook a brother up don't leave me hanging i'll make sure i'll make sure you're taking care of
thank you you gotta pull unfortunately for us unfortunately for us i don't think tftc is so
isn't a marketable asset right now with some of the stuff that we cover
i um yeah i mean i i don't know i don't know how much uh
how much a company would pay for an RHR season,
but it's,
it's nowhere near,
it's nowhere near $10 million.
Yeah.
Well,
is that,
is that actually ever going to launch?
When,
when is that season supposed to come out?
I don't know,
but the bottom might not be in until they get that season done with.
So hopefully,
hopefully they do it soon.
Or no,
they're going to launch it in like two years and that'll be the top tech of the next cycle.
True. I don't know. I'm feeling pretty bullish right now.
I'm feeling good. I'm feeling good. I think, um, this has been a week of people recognizing that
there are systemic problems with centralized control of the government. And so that's a good
marketing for Bitcoin. Yeah. I mean, that's an understanding. Yeah. Um, before we jump into
the banter, the topics of the week.
Let's check the box here.
Go to Clark's dashboard.
We're at $90,820.
One cuck buck is going to get you 1,101 sats.
That's a palindrome sats per cuck buck right there.
We're at a $1.81 trillion market cap,
making our way back towards a $2 trillion market.
We are at block height, $930,595,
which means we did not have a difficulty adjustment
between last week's episodes.
In this week's episode, we are 797 blocks away, another palindrome, from the next retarget, estimated to be on January 8th, 26th, so that'd be next Wednesday.
Looking like a negative 1.1% adjustment as of right now.
Pretty far into this epoch.
That could change if price goes up, miners turn on.
Blocks have been coming in at 10 minutes and 7 seconds on average.
Clark's mempool has $2,729.
transactions in it and i just hit the wrong button there if we go over to mempool.space
already have it up they've got 68 423 transactions in their mempool hank guys fees are going up
high priority four sats per vbyte medium priority three sats per vbyte low priority
one sat per vbyte low priority not even getting so here it's so expensive
think of the children
i said i um yeah go on i sent i sent four bitcoin transactions on chain yesterday it felt good
i am so many of the bitcoin or happy new year's messages i received were so bearish on 2025
guys chin up 2025 is a great year 2026 is going to be an even better year uh fade the doomers
i'm not i'm not here for it yeah and just to put this in perspective thank you for bringing up while
while i pull this up and hand it to logan to pull up on screen and once you share obviously without
uh disclosing details of who said what but what were the type of messages you were getting
what a couple of them were you you were in the group chats with me oh my gosh yeah i mean but i
uh i don't know and i'm i will say for me personally 2025 was a great year it was a great
year for my family i think it was a great year for bitcoin it was a great year for all the projects
that i'm working on obviously i think it was a great year for 1031 open sats fantastic bitcoin
Policy Institute, fantastic. Bitcoin Park's finally going to be profitable because we're
launching a daycare. Chin up. I think vibes are high here. Co-sign everything there. It was a
great year. I welcomed my third child into the world, moved home to my homeland of the Philadelphia
area, close to my family. I've spent more time with my mom, brother, and sister collectively
in the last four months than we have probably in the last 15 years.
It's been great.
And to put things in perspective for everybody who's like,
oh, 2025, terrible year.
I always forget this chart until somebody surfaces it.
But this is like the signal that you look for.
You look at the yearly lows.
You don't look at the yearly highs.
And if you look at the yearly lows of the Bitcoin price over the years,
$76,329 was the yearly low that we hit in 2025.
And that's crazy to think about.
I think that was the lowest price in 2024.
The next highest lowest price of the year is $39,447.
So almost double the yearly low from 2024 to 2025, which is pretty good if you ask me.
Get over it.
And then we freed Ross.
literally the only real
the only real downer of 2025
on the Bitcoin side
was Samurai
getting the book thrown at them
but we'll free them in 2026
but yeah vibes are high
strong vibes only
fade the doomers
yes
we have an easy transition
into the list
in the primal live chat
where Soap Miner has zapped us
21,000 sats up only in taxation is theft.
You have him number one on the list.
Are you okay?
Did you see this post from him?
Yes.
I don't know.
When a freak says he's injured, I put it at the top of the list.
I don't know.
It seems like it's not a big deal.
And then he says prayers are more than welcome, which just got me concerned.
i have about 25 so he's talking about he lost movement as one of his arms i believe his left arm
um has about 25 you say that in the chat back still sore and can't move anything
or sharp pain shoot throughout it thanks what the fuck happened better brother
was it a physical injury or something just out of the blue that's what i'm curious hopefully
i mean so you said freak accident it got to be physical injury Anyway we got your back Soap Monitor
Hope you get better soon.
Rest up.
Take it easy.
Stop making soap.
Dude, delay soap shipments for two weeks.
It's fine.
We're going to do a little double-edged sword here
where we're going to add stress to your life
but also make your business more successful,
go buy the soap, soapminer.com.
You can code RHR.
You'll get a discount.
I forget it's 10 or 15%, whatever it is.
You're going to get,
you'll receive your soap in a month
because he's injured right now
and he's taking, he's going to rest up.
Doctor's orders.
I just, I just use the soap.
Literally.
That's great.
This is why you stock up on soap.
You should have extra bars in the pantry
just in case your soap producer hurts himself.
Shout out to Mav21.
Zapt us 21,000 sats.
No message.
Thank you, sir.
Appreciate the support.
Happy New Year.
Happy New Year to everybody out there.
2026, it's our year.
It's our year.
The year of the Great Awakening is upon us again.
The fifth time in a row.
Next up, unless Silver Squeeze continues.
I haven't been checking the price.
I've been tapped out as I was telling you.
Have you not been following this?
This is...
I've got my oldest.
It's historic, Marty.
We're on four days of my oldest having the flu,
and our priorities have been on him.
Oh, by the way, on that note, I forgot to mention,
we did have a Christmas miracle at my house.
On Christmas Eve, our toddler went upstairs,
took off his pants by himself, and took a shit in the toilet.
Super static.
Huge moment.
All by himself.
Our oldest, he was potty trained in literally 48 hours.
We did the no pants weekend, pissing and defecating in the toilet almost immediately.
Our middle child, however, we're going on a year of potty training.
And I'm very envious of your Christmas miracle.
I would kill for a poop miracle in our household.
Yeah, because they're around the same age.
I always heard that if you have an older sibling, it's usually easier because they see it happen.
We did the naked thing too, but I think the dogs make it more difficult because he just sees the dogs not shit in toilets.
So it confuses him a little bit.
But anyway, huge Christmas miracle.
We were pretty happy about it.
But anyway, Silver Squeeze.
first of all, I think I was a little bit hard on the precious metal freaks. I'm happy for you.
If you've been stacking physical for 10 years, not playing paper markets, waiting for your moment,
there's respect there. There's respect there. It is a battle of money though.
And at the end of the day, I think Bitcoin is going to win. So take that as it is. But
watching the silver squeeze is
to me
incredibly exciting
and specifically
the
disconnect between physical and paper
and
that amplified and compounded
globally. What is the
price in China? What is the price in Singapore? What is the
price in Japan? What is the price in London?
What is the price
where you can actually go to a store and sell it or
go to the store and buy it? Can you even get
physical?
And to me, that's fascinating. And we're kind of witnessing that in real time right now.
Obviously, I think it also shows a lot of the shortcomings of, you know, trading physical metal.
I mean, there's a bunch of reports out right now. It's hard to follow what's real and what's not because it's...
Yeah, did that bang?
One hour engagement.
Yeah, who knows? I don't know.
that banks are short but the one i was talking about was supposedly uh like china's blocking
all shipments uh physical out of out of country um it's just it's a very interesting dynamic
anyway the paper price is getting hurt right now but uh
I don't think that's the real price.
The paper price right now in New York is a little under $72.
I don't think you can get physical for that price right now.
Not even close, but who knows?
It hit $83.75 around there earlier this week.
i believe and if you see the paper price they just have like a wall in the 70s now
um what is the silver spot price it's saying 2359 that doesn't seem right is that right
no but there's been reports that like uh in some places the the the physical price is like 120
Once again, it's impossible to verify any of this stuff and shows a lot of the shortcomings with trading physical metal, especially at size.
But this is, I mean, if we're right, this is, you know, kind of a look into the future of what could happen in a Bitcoin, real Bitcoin versus paper Bitcoin squeeze type of scenario.
the omega candle is that what you're calling for here i'm not calling for an omega candle
no i know it is uh there were rumors that a bank's going to go under that started last week
nothing's materialized i saw some people speculating today it might be ubs um i would
caution anybody not to fall hook, line, and sinker for rumors of these banks falling.
I've been duped many times in the past.
It's one of these things where it doesn't really matter if you call it early, unless
you're trying to short a bank stock.
But if it does happen, I wouldn't get your hopes up until it's actually in the news and
verified.
And then there's been people watching repos.
Repos spiked.
That was partially, people are saying, is because of lack of liquidity in metals.
Well, there's other things too.
There's like window dressing at the end of the year that the banks need to do from a balance sheet perspective.
And so if you look at end of quarter, any year, the repo is going to increase around that.
But there is some noise with the silver stuff going on now.
I think that's a big question.
If repos still get tapped today, which we'll probably find out in 30 minutes, I believe, what that was like this morning,
then that would be
a signal that there is a little liquidity
crunch there
anyway
I think it's
fascinating to watch so that's why I
highlighted it
yeah
we're cheering on the squeeze
we're cheering on the squeeze here at RHR
you know it's got to me
it's got like GameStop vibes
it's like GameStop
mixed with mandibles
it's like sovereign debt
sovereign debt crisis in the game
in the post GameStop era
like when does Robin Hood turn off
paper silver buy button
that'll be I mean
if we're tracking
GameStop I believe that was
in March or April of 21
when they did that
first quarter fireworks
be aware freaks shout out to
Sean zapped us 21,000 sats.
Zappy New Year.
Clever what you did there.
I see what you did there.
A little punny joke with a zap attached to it to start the year.
I want to be clear on the silver stuff too.
Like Matt said earlier, I recommend buying and self-custodied Bitcoin.
I think it's far superior to silver.
But like I said, I'm going to cheer on the squeeze.
I think it's good to see the monetary medals succeed.
I mean, have you seen some of these flex posts?
Like, a guy's been stacking physical silver for 15 years
and just is like a picture of him in front of all of his coins.
I respect that.
Yeah, I respect that hustle.
Shout out you.
Yeah, shout out you.
Next up on the list, we're going to shout out BitChat.
It's been blowing up.
this is crazy this week i had not followed it you put it on the list what's going on in uganda
what first of all click his link click his profile picture logan i think he's got he's
got over two million followers so this guy's like the opposition leader in uh in uganda
um and he expects uh fuckery to happen around the elections uh so he's he's basically doing
my daily stay humble stack sats reminder but in all caps for people to download bitchat
which is just wild um but yeah he he basically expects he expects uh like internet to get shut
down censorship and whatnot and he wants his people to use bitchat to circum circumvent that
which i i just think is is just wild and pretty pretty crazy to witness
that is insane
wow
I'd like to see Freedom
Tech succeed
when is that
election?
also I love the all caps
I don't know
I don't know what the election is
let me ask
Thursday January 15th
is that when it is?
coming up
so
should see some fireworks
in a couple weeks.
Let's see if BitShot is there when the people need it.
It likely will be.
It's a pretty simple tech.
We got Drew Cattlebike zapping us 21,000.
Sats, Noster's taking off in 2026.
Zap Cooking and Runster are great additions.
2026 is a year of value for value.
I said it last year.
Value for value.
If you're looking at Podcasting 2.0,
If we're looking at what happens here week in and week out on our live stream on Primal,
the SATs revenue has been going up pretty consistently.
Again, it's nothing to completely run a business on,
but it is in a material upswing, I would say.
I would not be surprised if we can make Primal, other Noster clients more popular,
get more adoption.
If we can get more adoption of podcasting 2.0 apps like Fountain,
fountain which is also an austere client we can uh see value for value explode in 2026 i co-sign
your message drew cattle bike it's a grind it's a grind it's uh gradually then suddenly thing
but i'm quite optimistic and on the primal side specifically we have
um some really awesome updates in the next just they'll be they'll be rolling out over the next
few months.
What?
It's going to be a good Q1.
Yeah, you're going to love it.
You know what else you're going to love?
The Human Rights Foundation
sent out their top 15
Freedom Tech projects in 2015.
I thought this was a great format.
We might steal this for
open sets.
I like the format.
Shout out to the day you're after.
I don't think they're in any particular order,
but we'll pretend they are because our good friends
in Maple AI are at the top of the list.
So we got Maple AI, Cashew, OpenCode,
which Rob Hamilton and I were texting about earlier this week.
He's a big OpenCode bull right now.
Codemos, El Voto, Tollgate, Bidax, Vexel, PTC Pay Server,
OG, getting some love.
Shakespeare. Shout out to Alex Gleason. If you want a vibe code on Noster, go check out Shakespeare.
ARK. Very bullish on ARK as well. Silent payments.
I'm very excited about silent payments.
It would be so helpful for us with OpenSats payouts.
Bitcoin aid for Myanmar, Routster, and Tondo.
So lean into silent payments more.
Why would that help you guys out?
Yeah.
Because we have to, we send to a,
every month, every month we're sending out
about a million dollars to 200, around 200 grantees.
And we need a fresh address from them every fucking month If we just had a fixed silent payments address then we could just take it from them once not have to re addresses every month
It would make our lives so much easier.
Is this like an iteration of BIP47?
Do you realize that we're verifying 200 Bitcoin addresses a month?
Yes, I know.
Um, I, uh, no, this, this is a, a, a, a, a different method to accomplish a similar goal, um, that requires, um, that, that doesn't require the notification transaction that BIF 47 requires.
The notification transaction is nice because it means you can restore everything directly from chain and it works better with light clients.
If you remember, we covered Craig Raw of Sparrow Wallet released Frigate, I think, which is a attempt at creating a performant silent payment server that's specifically geared to it because it requires a lot of on-demand scanning of the chain to see when you get back.
payments um but yeah it's really promising basically we just need more wallet support
now at this point yeah and this is another thing gradually then suddenly they keep and so i'm sure
your freaks are aware so i had a little lapse in memory here because reuben sompson proposed this
in 2022 in march of 2022 um and it's again one of those gradually then suddenly things you put an
idea out there you work on it for three going on four years and we're getting to the point where
wallets are going to be able to implement it um talking of trade-offs here
i think i'm just like going through the site now because bob cannot pre-generate addresses with
silent payments he needs to keep checking to find new payments from the point he generated the
payment code because the scanning is relatively costly silent payments require more compute and
bandwidth as matt just described there um also uh even though this may sound like a major hit
to user experience thankfully we can already drastically improve sync performance by rolling
out potential outputs like non-tap root outputs tap root dust outputs which are um larger than
or equal to a thousand sats or all potential silent payment outputs spent since you last
scan so there's optimizations and this is on the verification side for the wallets um
and that was a another interesting thing i had my memory jogged on and sort of wallet software
particularly hardware wallet software and my conversation with uh jonas nick and mikhail
kudinov from from blockstream talking about their hash based um signature schemes for
post-quantum Bitcoin.
And that's going to be
one of the major trade-offs
is on the wallet verification side.
Like how long does it actually
take to sign
and run through all these signatures?
So we need beefier,
secure enclaves
on hardware wallets.
Yeah, I mean, look,
I think that's part of the reason
we don't rush into these things.
Let me make them opt-in.
um i uh by the way uh so that was that that freedom tech projects recap was on hrf's newsletter
financialfreedomreport.org um it was like their new year's edition uh the one the one uh project
that i think should have gotten a mention that didn't get a mention um and i pretty much co-signed
everything they've listed there was uh payjoin dev kit is something i'm very excited about
and has made really, really great progress this year.
So I think that could be huge.
I think specifically what to watch in 2026.
I want to see some major brokers and exchanges
add pay, join support.
It actually will save them significantly on fees
at the same time as providing better privacy guarantees
to people.
So it fits really well.
Do you think that's how it has to be marketed?
What?
implementing pay join development kits across these exchanges because we want to
save fees on transaction.
Yes.
Yeah.
I mean,
like if it's a KYC exchange,
obviously it's not giving you any privacy benefit with the exchange.
It does mean that broadly it's adding more plausible deniability to like the
pool of transactions just because even in a heavily regulated,
environment like there's not perfect information sharing between all these different services
especially if they're in different jurisdictions stuff like that but i think the main benefit we'd
see is uh lower fees for both the users and the services um and then second of all just a
normalization of the transaction type right um if if a major exchange is accepting pay join deposits
and withdrawals, then more wallets will support it and it'll become more normalized.
Yeah.
A lot of these things die if it's only a few wallets.
Like I saw, why not BIP47 PayNIMs for OpenSAT stuff?
It's because there's just not wallet support.
There's not significant wallet support.
The only two that I know of is Ashigaro.
And I don't think Sparrow removed it.
It had it for a while in Sparrow.
But we don't want to force users to...
We don't want to force grant recipients to use specific wallets.
We need to use something that has got broad acceptance.
you know and maybe that changes with bit 47 i don't think it will but that's that's the that's
the thought process how and that's why we're not and to be clear that's why we're not using silent
payments right now right like they can you can install cake wallet and receive on silent payments
but we're not going to tell our grant recipients they have to use cake wallet yeah oh i see btc
wrestle says blue wallet it supports yeah i was going to say blue wallet has it as well
how trivial or hard is it going to be to add
silent payments to wallets
do you know any idea i think the hardest part
the hardest part on the light client side is dealing with the sync ux
um honestly like bib 47 shows some of that too anyone who's used bib 47 has been in the situation
where payments don't show up right away um and specifically on android you can do background
sync so the user doesn't really think about that um but on iphone it's really hard to do background
processes they they cut the background processes so you end up loading your wallet and then waiting
there to see payments come through now that we're talking through this that's the hardest part
and the hack on this is probably going to get easily implemented via bdk
bitcoin development kit or something like that
let's have bdk at silent payments as an easy bolt-on modular feature yeah they don't have
they didn't have bdk lists on the list either they've made a lot of progress this year
A lot of reasons to be bullish
Fade the doomers
Highest lowest price ever
Last year
Bullish
Highest lowest price ever
Shout out to you guys at OpenSats
You were sharing this chart
In the group chat yesterday
It was incredibly impressive
The quarterly OpenSats board meeting
You guys shared your grantee
growth per month total grants approaching 400 we're sitting at like 345 right now where is that
up into the right up into the right the grind continues yeah we'll we'll release like a full
uh 2025 year in review report gg's been uh
uh very busy so i told him don't worry about it like we can get it out you know this week or
something it doesn't have to be on new year's um but we'll release a full report but uh bullish as
hell uh we keep shipping and huge shout out to the freaks who continue to support open sets we
couldn't do without you guys but yeah this blows me like it's just to me this puts a lot of our
hard work into perspective uh every everyone has an opinion on how open sets should be run oh this
this thing got too much money this thing got too little money you're not giving out enough grants
like look look how many grants are given out we're fucking shipping super efficient as transparent as
as possible um and we don't take a cut of any donations trying to lead by example there's a
lot of scammy charities out there um you can do it the right way
yeah i wish some of these this fraudulent federal grant money was going towards open
sass something productive yeah exactly you guys are crushing it i know you you already know you
do a good job of it but just blinders fade the haters thank you sir on that topic uh you freaks
have probably heard me say this in the past um but a huge initiative this year is we really want
to get the monthly individual donations up.
That's just monthly reoccurring donations.
So I don't have to spend the next decade as a volunteer trying to raise money.
So we know how much money we're getting.
That's opensats.org monthly.
We'd convert your fiat directly into Bitcoin as soon as we receive it.
So it's like you're stacking sats to open source developers.
Yeah.
Let's fucking go.
Next on the list, big news, long awaited.
You like to see promises made, promises kept.
The team at Fedi made a promise when they launched that they would open source the Fedi stack on the 17th anniversary of the Bitcoin Genesis block, January 3rd, 2026.
So that is happening tomorrow.
Been close with the Fedi team as they've been building this out.
It's been a long process, a Herculean effort to get federated Mint, Chalmea Mint technology live and working.
And that was another good thing in 2025.
Obviously, Fetty Mint, the protocol had some problems.
I believe that was 2024 with the DNS bug.
They fixed and everything that I'm seeing and hearing around the Fetty Mint protocol is very bullish these days.
I absolutely love to see it. Yeah. To be clear here, there's two things, right? There's the
Fediment open source protocol. And then there's Fetty, the for-profit company. Fetty, the for-profit
company, their app has been closed source, and that will be open sourced as of tomorrow.
The Fediment open source project is independent of Fetty, the company, and that has been open
source the entire time. We actually just gave a grant to one of the lead maintainers, Brad.
I'm not going to try and attempt his last name. But we gave him a grant out of OpenSAT's long-term
support grant. Particularly one of the things I'm really proud of is the long-term support grants.
um i had brad on civil dispatch earlier in the year cd 178 in september um great conversation
but one of the the key wins that they had is you know i've i've long said that both cashew and
fediment right so cashew is single sig charming e cash fediment is multi-sig charming e cash
they will live or die based on on how difficult it is to run the servers because you need more
servers and you need them to be able to be run anonymously and on the fediment side you know
you mentioned the dns dependency right you need to have like a domain and domains can get banned
and hit put on spam lists and stuff but also there's a v there's historically been a vps
dependency. And one of the things Brad's been working really hard on, and I think it's live,
at least in beta form, is being able to just run a Fediman instance on your Start9 or other home
server at home privately, which I think is absolutely massive. Which also reminds me,
on the Cashew side, one of the projects that I'm very excited about for 2026 is Orchard,
which attempts to make it much easier for people to just you run caching mints at home privately with a really pretty UI on how everything is functioning and what going on there
So big wins on both those fronts.
Again, critical infrastructure necessary to make this easy.
I've said it once, I'll say it again.
I think Chami and Mintz, whether they're launched via the Cachie Protocol or the Fediment Protocol, are the manifestation of Hal Finney's idea of a free banking system built on Bitcoin.
There are obviously trade-offs, third-party centralization, custody trade-offs specifically, but I think the privacy and low-fee benefits are pretty massive.
And again, you don't have to put your whole stack in HOMI and Mint.
But with that being said, the permissionless nature of these protocols, I think, is very undervalued.
We have the potential to build a new native banking stack on permissionless open source protocols in Cashew and Fediment.
And I think that's extremely powerful, extremely undervalued as it stands today.
You can literally go download, fork some open source code and build sci-fi banking infrastructure on top of Bitcoin using Bitcoin as a reserve asset.
Products like Orchard are critical stepping stones to making that easier for everybody to tap into.
Cosign.
We got next Phoenix D dashboard.
Do we have any boosts?
We do.
We pull these up.
We found ourselves in software updates.
We have found ourselves.
It's hard.
We don't have the clear delineation of the Human Rights Foundation story of the week.
We did the...
Yeah, I can see this.
Our largest zap on Noster, on the video on Noster, was 22,122 sats.
AI is Yang.
Bitcoin is Yin.
Yin is underrated.
Oh, I didn't say who it was from.
Who is it from?
Milky.
Shout out, Milky.
Thank you, sir.
All right.
Top boost from Rabbit Hole Recap.
389.
Silver squeeze.
We got one to read from our boy, Mike Clear.
22,222 sats.
Two's across the board.
Palindrome.
Boost.
Thank you for your service, gentlemen.
And Mike, thank you for your service, whether it's at BitBlockBoom or what you guys are doing at Exergy, what you've done in Colorado with Bitcoin mining there.
Your service is not going unrecognized either, sir.
Thank you for your service and thank you for the stats.
Thank you, sir.
That's all.
What do we got next?
set at phoenix d dashboard has been released self-hoster interface you'll get real-time
balance of payments channel management send receive with qr codes l and url support 100
open source docker ready yes there's yeah i think this is i think this is uh independent of async
um so async is most famously known for phoenix wallet on mobile which provides a very user-friendly
way to use lightning and on-chain um it's you can just send it on-chain utxo and it automatically
creates a channel you can easily spend from that lightning or on-chain um but they also um
they also manage uh they maintain their own lightning implementation called declare
And they have something called PhoenixD, which makes it relatively easy to accept 24-7 payments if you're a merchant or something like that using Phoenix's infrastructure.
I think they charged a flat 1% fee on that.
You don't have to run a node.
You don't have to manage liquidity.
They do all of that for you.
But it was all terminal-based.
There was no UI.
So this guy created a nice, easy UI to manage it and see how your payments are doing.
I wonder if this was vibe-coded.
I mean, hopefully not.
Hopefully it was at least artisanally reviewed after it was vibed.
Well, I mean, it was just a dashboard giving you visibility into your Phoenix D server.
did you see what have you been playing me opus 4.5 at all it feels like agi
uh it's definitely not agi it feels like it though it's extremely extremely powerful
my prediction for 2026 is that there will be no agi um but uh you know i i think you have to be
very careful when you're vibing stuff related to money um and one example i'll give is uh
i love the chain duel guys um you know chain duel the the pvp game uh for sats um yes they were
they were hosting it on a home server, the main chain dual instance.
And I think it was an umbrella and, uh,
they like half set up LB hub and it was exposed on clear net and someone
drained all of their money, took all their money. Um,
and why do I bring that up? I bring that up just because, you know, it,
If you can send and receive money from something, it's not just a dashboard.
And it looks like this guy's dashboard you can send and receive money from.
So just something to be aware.
And I think people just need to be very careful with that stuff.
Agreed. Agreed.
When money is on the line.
Or like, what's the other one?
the date doxing app
that was vibe-coded
and all the KYC information was leaked.
Called like the T or something like that?
Yeah, that was earlier last year,
maybe six months ago.
The T app.
Yeah, so like don't, you know,
don't half-ass security
if privacy or money is online.
i actually i think that's one of the really interesting things about how
alex gleason's shakespeare project handles vibe coded payments
because they're you're not actually vibing a wallet it's just using nostril wallet connect
and lightning address so you're just like you're basically just you're integrating the hooks but
you can't actually send and receive money from the code,
which kind of protects you from there.
And you're actually, you're not storing login credentials
because you're using Nostra private keys.
So you're offloading all that issue,
which is credentials and money.
And you're offloading that on the side
that's completely unrelated to the Vibed app.
Yeah, there's a way to do it.
I think that's the right way to do it.
Shout out to Alex.
I mean, it's a really ironic conversation
considering our next story,
which is...
Which is...
They're intentionally next to Redfoot.
Yeah.
But...
That's pretty cool.
I think it's awesome, yeah.
And I think Nick and his co-founder are awesome.
I had a great conversation with them
a couple of weeks ago.
but Nick is former block and he went out on his own and launched his own
company alongside his co-founder called money dev kit.
And the idea is, you know, super easy,
similar to Phoenix D is like super easy integration of,
of Bitcoin payments into your website or service without managing liquidity.
I think they're charging a 2% fee.
um but don't quote me on that um but anyway he's showing how easy it is to
vibe up an app on replit um and then just add money dev kit to it
oh yeah i mean it's pretty simple what they're doing right it's just simple api call
yeah i mean i think in this case too uh and i haven't tested this out but my assumption here
is that the vibe part is not actually touching any of the send and receive money so i assume you
you separately are logging into your money dev kit account um to to send and receive so
it should be
relatively secure
in that regard.
And with that,
with both PhoenixD
and MoneyDevKit,
the idea is that the user
is generating their own
private keys so that
they're not a money transmitter
and that they don't have
to do KYC on users.
It's a beautiful thing.
The infrastructure
becoming more robust,
getting easier
to integrate Bitcoin into your everyday life,
into your products.
Shout out to Nick and the team at MoneyDevKit there.
Moving on, this is a pretty interesting story
broken on Noster.
It seems like there's an ongoing DDoS attack
on joint market makers where random Nick,
not serving, Onion constantly sends
order book requests through directory servers.
Makers and directors mostly cope with the load,
but the log files, which have a hard-coded debug log level,
grow several gigabytes per hour and crash many makers.
Join market seems to have been under the radar since its launch.
Now it seems like there's a significant attack on it.
Yeah, I mean, this is a classic denial of service attack.
it's going to be pretty hard to
like the solution here is not a real
is not that great of a solution
which is just delete logs
often
but we'll see
I mean I didn't see
a waxwing comment on this yet
so I'm sure they're looking into it
but yeah
this type of attack it would be used effectively to reduce the anonymity set if you were trying to
de-anonymize joint market users by taking makers offline
not great not great we haven't talked about joint market in a while
for those who are unaware it's a coin join marketplace particularly for pretty significant
stacks of Bitcoin.
Very big target on its back,
particularly from people
who would like to figure out
who owns what Bitcoin.
All right, next on the list,
we have a new Maple model
has dropped.
So Maple has incorporated
um
what is k2 just launched apparently kimmy k2 gbt5 yeah kimmy k2
frontier thinking zero data tracking
in gbt5 grok 4 and claude sonnet 4.5 which is pretty pretty crazy open source models competing
with
top tier
closed source
bottles
which is an
inflection point
many people have
been talking about
waiting for
so this is cool
so it's a reason
yeah I mean
it's fantastic
it works really well
I've been testing
it out
especially with
the
you combine this
with the web
search
really good
strong
yeah
Okay. Now we get to the meat of this week's news headlines outside of Bitcoin.
We have two Zaps first.
Okay.
Oh, yeah. You like how you just put it as a list item without any links to anything?
Florida Justin's up 26,262 sats at the fiat mines are joining late grateful for the freaks
and value you bring to my life and family.
Thank you, sir.
Appreciate you.
Sui Generis John, 21,111 sats.
This is a de minimis, non-reported gift.
Fuck the IRS.
What's that say?
Thupithycle.
There we go.
Thupithycle got me.
Did you see what he said on
Our announcement post
No
I think
Let me see if I
Our announcement post
He said
I plan to make you guys
Say really stupid shit for money
Yeah
You got me to do it
Thank you for your support
Appreciate you
all right
it's molly dick hair fraud how do you want to start this holy shit um
it's bad it's really bad
it's such a betrayal
it's uh and it's been going on for a while right that that's what i think is the most
interesting thing of um the last week is for some reason or another i don't know if it was the way
that nick shirley the 23 year old investigative journalist man on the street um broke the news
and maybe it's just like the packaging of in the format of the content and combined with timing but
this has been going on in minnesota for at least seven years probably more i mean there was
investigative reports in local news stations in 2018.
I think I saw one in 2016 too.
Obviously, many people have already been indicted and charged with fraud
as it pertains to this particular daycare loophole
that the Somalian community in Minnesota has seemed to be exploiting
pretty aggressively.
Yeah, there's definitely tapped into a zeitgeist
and people are rightfully pissed off.
yeah i mean uh first of all i love the zoomer boomer uh alliance uh uh pretty fucking cool
yeah and nick's getting all the attention but uh dave the boomer seems to have done a lot of
the research and then he needed his uh he needed a zoomer ally to teach him how the internet works
cameras and shit um but yeah dude it's fucked up i mean i some of you freaks might have called my
joke when i said bitcoin park will finally hit profitability because you're going to launch a
daycare it's it's so like honest americans are out here working their ass off um paying a shit
ton in fucking taxes and these guys are just running a explicit scam in the order of i mean
do we have a total amount of money yet?
It's like billions of dollars.
I mean, in Minnesota alone,
I believe the fraud tally is up to $9 billion at least.
And this is not isolated to Minnesota.
And it's not isolated to the daycares either.
That's more than FTX.
That's fucking insane.
And not only was it explicit,
you know these weren't real daycares it's very obvious if you did any bit of due diligence
supposedly they were transferring millions of dollars of cash in suitcases in carry-on
suitcases through the airport and declaring it they were like oh yeah i'm just traveling i mean
you kind of have to declare i don't know how you would try and sneak millions of dollars in cash in
your backpack. It seems like it'd be pretty fucking obvious. But there must have been,
so many people are complicit in this. Like there's, there's no way that this happens
under the radar and no one realizes. Well, that, I mean,
I think there, again, a lot of the focus has been on the Somalian immigrants. So I will say,
I think they all need to go back. But they did not do this alone. They did not come here from
Somalia and figure out how to exploit these Medicaid loopholes to get all this money.
There were people on the ground, NGOs, legal advice. There are puppeteers above the Somalians
who orchestrated and architected all this infrastructure and basically gave them the
glove service to exploit this and it's becoming very clear that a lot of these daycares and
the other fraud that they're doing is like travel services for for old people where they're buying
cars and not actually taking people anywhere but getting a ton of taxpayer money and they're
funneling it back to politicians and i think it's and that's the other thing too it's i've been
trying to sort of grapple with this over the last few days, because obviously there is a lot of
Democrat influence in this particular scam and a lot of funds been flowing back to
Democratic campaigns, but they've also been going to Republican campaigns. And I think
this is turning into a left versus right issue. And I do think the left is definitely more religious
in this particular type of scam, but the right to think that they're not sort of stealing taxpayer
money via fraud in the military industrial complex whatever like i think that's incredibly naive
like the the federal government itself is completely fraudulent on both sides of the
aisle they just have their different flavors of how they're siphoning off taxpayer funds
yeah i mean i wouldn't be surprised if over half of all government spending is fraud
this is just a staggering amount of money um and i think we're already starting to see the early
signs of people seeing this in other states as you said not just daycares not just somalis um
i mean i think the somali community specifically in minnesota is particularly egregious
um and even anyone even kind of associated with it should be deported um but uh i think this is
is way worse than just that at the surface and it's definitely both sides um
i mean what like i mean we've seen uh it's it's gotten to the point where the overton window is
like people aren't even surprised with this shit it's just like they they expect it they expect
this fraud but i think once you see it firsthand and see how staggering the numbers are it really
pisses it pisses me off it pisses a lot of people off um it's a it's you're breaking the social
contract you're completely breaking the social contract why are we working our asses off um
and paying tax dollars when you're just gaslighting us yeah and you think i mean
and you think about the social consequences particularly long-term social consequences
i mean it's a very big theme in the country over the last couple years is the fertility crisis and
The fact that younger millennials and Gen Z specifically aren't getting married and having children,
and their number one reason for not doing so is they don't think they can economically afford it because of how expensive childcare is.
The fact that they're not able to get good jobs, and even if they are, inflation is ravaging them.
And meanwhile, you have millions of people being imported and then just handed the taxpayer money that we're all paying.
I have done my taxes for 2025 already, and my tax bill is tens of thousands of dollars that I don't know if I want to pay.
It's like, hey, why would that money be better spent on me and my family and supporting my business and local economy?
Or am I just going to hand it over to the IRS to have them funnel it to some scam?
That's likely what's going to happen with the money.
And the over to window, I think a tax revolt is completely justified.
The case for it has never been stronger.
And it's just figuring out how to do that.
because you're not going to vote your way out of this.
You have to star them of their revenue.
And I think this is a big, this is going to be a big issue.
This is going to be make or break for this current administration,
how they respond to this, if it's another half-assed.
Because we think, like earlier, we started the year.
We bookended the year with incredible fraud being laid bare
at the beginning of the year with Doge and USAID.
There's been no arrests there.
I think they've stopped funding for it, but there's been no arrests.
There's been no accountability there.
And then we end the year with Nick Shirley laying bare this Somalian daycare fraud, which is spreading like wildfire.
It exists, it seems like, in every state.
So why are we paying taxes?
The income tax was supposed to be temporary.
It was supposed to be for the uber wealthy.
I don't know if you've seen the stats, but people are running the stats out there.
if 50% of the annual federal government budget is fraud,
which it seems highly likely to be,
and you were to eliminate that fraud,
you could eliminate income taxes
for anybody making less than $600,000
and be able to fund.
No, we should just cut taxes.
No taxes.
Tariffs only.
Tariffs and printer only.
It's clean.
I like it.
I like it's clean.
It's very clean.
if uh trump wants to dominate in the midterms that's what he should do
i'm not holding my breath though um i uh
yeah i don't know this is uh it's fucked up it's incredibly fucked up
uh it's crazy watching it spread on socials um
i mean i think uh you know i'm uh i've definitely not minced words when it
comes to Elon. But I think if it wasn't for X, it would have been hard for it to go viral the way
it went. I mean, people were comparing X numbers versus YouTube and other mediums. This is a
perfect example of the type of thing that would get crushed in the past in terms of view and reach.
So I think that is a positive sign. I will say, just keep in mind that X numbers for views are
incredibly inflated. It's like if you scroll past and then autoplays for two seconds, it counts.
And you can see that by comparing our show's numbers, for instance. Anyone who has a show knows
the dirty secret is that X numbers are insanely inflated. But still, presumably, if X didn't have
this more laissez policy we wouldn have seen as much virality to it Um but just to put my tinfoil hat on real quick um
since you've been, uh, uh, dealing with family flu,
um, when did Shirley break this story?
I think it was the 23rd, the 23rd.
I know where you're going with this.
I like it.
The 23rd, specifically Somali fraud in Minnesota.
Well, there's tons of fraud everywhere.
The 25th, Israel recognizes Somaliland, the breakaway state in Somalia, as a sovereign country.
Somaliland, they're the first to ever do that since the 1990 separation.
Somaliland recognizes Israel as a sovereign country.
Israel agrees to build a military
Israel gets permission to build a military base
on their coast
which is like perfectly
perfectly geopolitically aligned
with the Red Sea entrance
right across from Yemen
like if you
I love playing civilization
like you want that
primo spot for a city
drop a
drop a naval base right there
and then he comes and visits
visits Trump
and spends New Year's with Trump
and does this whole America tour.
And so what would be the motive for doing that?
Well, I think there's rightfully a lot of hate
towards the Somali community right now in America.
I mean, people are like, re-watch Black Hawk Down,
which you should, by the way.
My dad took me to that when I was way too young,
but it really shaped my adulthood.
But yeah, so it fosters hate,
but also like I wonder, you know,
how much of that money was going to,
was funding the non-Somali land government.
Al-Shabaab.
So that's a theory.
I'm not sure how far I've fallen down this rabbit hole.
So the theory is that.
There's terrorist finance.
Yeah, it's about Israel in conjunction
with um u.s politicians and ngos was using this medicaid fraud to funnel money to somalians who
were living in minnesota other places in the country spending that not going to work but then
also as you mentioned earlier they're going through tf tsa with duffel bags full of cash
millions of dollars sometimes going back to somalia and the theory is that they were paying
off el shabab to basically get the okay from on somaliland so that israel could do this they had
to grease the hands first but wait it could be that direction but it could be the opposite
is al-shabab on the somaliland side or the somali side who are they i'm not sure i think i think it's
on the somali side hey i'm not a somali expert but from the rabbit hole that's what i'm saying
so then they cut them off they want to cut them off uh so that they can make this somaliland
split up be better right well that's what well i hear they're greasing them to make the somaliland
thing that's like all right we're gonna give you enough money where you'll let us take somali land
and build a military base but then they threw them under the bus
it's all right when they did it yeah
i don't know something reeks there that's uh it stinks
and then at the same time uh like calls for war with iran of
Yeah.
Trump is tweeting about it.
That's why I'm not holding my breath on Trump actually doing something like this.
Because you see his true social posts.
He's like, we're ready to support the protesters of Iran.
He's supposed to be the anti-war president.
He's like, okay.
You implicitly said we could potentially put people on the ground in Iran on the first day of the year, 2026.
While we have this massive domestic boiling point that's been reached and people are incredibly pissed off.
not be good um we have a 42 000 sat zap from silent link he says please support bunker guys
i was actually talking to him on signal and help walk him through that zap um
nsec bunkers specifically so you don't need to put your nsec in
primal to zap if you're using primal um yeah like i said we have a lot of big updates coming
this year and uh specifically i think the bunker aficionados will be very happy uh with broader
support in that front but anyway silent.link i love it fantastic you can get a no kyc e-sim
um pay for it with bitcoin get data around the world works really well
and it's cheaper than a lot of the alternatives i think the prices are very reasonable it's
prepaid so you you only pay for the data you use which is particularly great for me because a lot
of the time i'm just on wi-fi so why pay a monthly bill we got um another zap from northwest arkansas
bitcoin club i believe i can't see the full name 21 479 sats daycare opening next week
for real though we have our first meetup saturday january 3rd at pure to pure can
pure can coffee pure can it's like a play on puritan pure can coffee at 9 30 a.m january 3rd
that's tomorrow 9 30 a.m saturday be sure to ask them if they accept bitcoin yet i've got a big
old shot around the corner square terminal i'm dealing with the guy trying to like i'm like hey
went in two weeks ago i was like hey do you guys accept bitcoin he said no we're working on it i
went in this morning i was like hey did you get the bitcoin thing figured out he's like no like
i gotta i gotta figure out my pitch to him i'm gonna go i'm gonna be they should have made it
they they gotta make it easier um specifically like if the user doesn't want to if the merchant
doesn't want to keep the bitcoin they just want dollars um it shouldn't require like some kind of
admin setup like it's just dollars anyway um but yes you know the product's relatively new so
they'll they'll turn some knobs pull some levers and make it make it easier and better to use i by
the way on the silent on link thing i think if you use code rhr you get a discount um when in doubt
just put code rhr into places yeah try it everywhere everywhere amazon whatever it may be
um props for props are due we're just sitting on the federal government but
good props for props are due uh major nfa tax stamp update it yesterday
we can still see 100 over this the 200 federal tax is eliminated for most commonly transferred
nfa items like suppressors short barreled rifles and short barreled shotguns
the to me this is both one of the big wins and the big misses of this administration
And the win is that you no longer have to pay $200 to register an SBR or a suppressor.
But the loss is that they're still requiring an unconstitutional list and registration of people that have them.
Otherwise, you get thrown in jail for 10 years.
Or if you're the weavers, you get killed over it.
So, I mean, that list is unconstitutional.
Hopefully this is the next step towards that because the argument historically since the 1930s has been, oh, it's not unconstitutional because it's a tax.
But now there is literally no tax.
Anyway, it's been crazy.
If you've been watching it, that went live January 1st.
And I guess unofficial numbers have like 90,000 submissions or 100,000 submissions.
People are submitting potatoes and oil filters and stuff because there was an inadvertent spam filter, basically, because you had a $200 payment that you no longer have.
So people are just registering 100 different items at a time.
So it should be interesting to see how they handle that.
But it's kind of wild to witness, which is why I had it on the list.
You love to see the trolling of the American people to their government.
We've still got that fight in us.
um we talked about it last week some updates here uh trying to cargo ship for pick it up
you see you can see that i was a little bit tired this week so my uh the titles of my list items are
kind of phoned in um but uh two things first of all i saw a lot of takes like oh we'll just cut
out all the ships we'll just we'll just if war breaks out we'll just we'll just blow up all the
cargo ships and um i posted this after rhr last week but the number of cargo ships in the water is
fucking insane amount you can't just blow up all the cargo ships um but the second piece i wanted
to cover was this uh x post uh do you see the other post there logan the other link there
um since last week uh there's now there's photos of uh them putting you know those um you know how
our aircraft carriers have uh the slingshots that like launch the planes quicker on a short runway
uh china's added that to their little cargo ship demo thing uh to launch uavs big uavs uh from
from the decks of cargo ships and as you can see that thing's on wheels so you just you can
do it on land you can roll it onto a ship whatever and also you have a super high-res vision of this
of the missiles in the cargo ships and the reason i bring this up specifically is
well first of all that's pretty scary in terms of capability but second of all
like china's been working on this ship for a while like the reason this shit is going viral
and everyone knows about it is because they want us to know about it.
Like that is the technique here that's going on.
So just be aware and keep that in mind when you're thinking about this stuff
is that, you know, China obviously wants people to believe
that any cargo ship can be weaponized very easily.
And that's why we know about it.
it was very reminiscent of uh the u.s and the allied forces strategy world war ii remember
they set up the uh the fake tanks and stuff on the one island
yeah but those are like inflatables yeah as like a diversion i mean if you look at those uavs they
look like inflatables on this they're like wrapped in no they have well they're they're
wrapping them so we don know what underneath them but yeah i think i mean the point is it Could it be a diversion Is it like a diversion It could be
It could be, which is why I bring it up.
But also like if I was them,
if I'm going to put my Civ hat on again, you know,
in terms of force projection, we have them beat,
and we've had them beat for a while.
um and they've you know they've they've countered in different ways they've they've built you know
their islands which are like basically like stationary aircraft carriers with anti-ship
missiles on them in disputed territory um but they've they've they're crushing us in terms of
uh commercial ship production um so this seems like an obvious obvious win for them like why
build a purpose-built aircraft carrier when you could have a thousand cargo ships with missiles on
them and uavs um more distributed harder to take down a fleet than a than a massive carrier
makes a lot of sense yeah much cheaper
so be aware
be aware
they want us to know
they're signaling
we would not see
as Matt said
we would not see this
if they didn't want us to
so
see where it leads
will they come to the defense of Iran
is that how World War 3
is going to start
we're going to
go bomb Iran
on behalf of Israel
and then China's going to come
defend Iran
and we get dragged in
hopefully not
speaking
speaking of Israel
I'm sure all of you saw the clip or many of you have.
There was an Israeli billionaire, Shlomo,
calling for restricting free speech in the United States
using the power of AI as a...
Think of it, children.
Just play it, Logan.
It's actually three minutes.
Don't play it.
It was three minutes.
Yeah.
Oh, wait, this is the 35-second clip.
Play the 35-second clip.
Okay.
We can't hear you.
I don't have the audio totally set up in my away.
Okay, you're fine.
You're fine.
But anyway, he basically just said...
I got the verbatim quote here.
I know it's difficult to hear,
but it's time to limit the First Amendment
in order to protect it.
Retarded.
This is what we're up against.
And Logan, pull up that.
I know you can't play it either,
But I mean, this is, again, bringing it back to Israel. I think that's one thing that went under the radar in 2025 was these anti-Semitism free speech laws that went into effect. I believe in Florida, maybe Texas as well, which are supposed to be bastions for freedom.
But there really is this attack on free speech and the First Amendment here in the United States.
And particularly as it pertains to, and they're using anti-Semitism as the scapegoat.
And this guy, I believe, is the Attorney General of Florida said, he's standing against the First Amendment saying you don't have the right to harm other people with your words and to say things that have negative meaning.
it's completely insane that you have
he's either the lieutenant governor or the attorney general
I forget which one exactly
but they're coming for speech here in the United States
they're coming for the first amendment
you can't harm people with speech
people can get offended
but that's an indictment on
their relatively
thin skin if you will
as long as you're not inciting violence or anything like that you can say whatever you want
yep um and to be clear the israeli billionaire was not
uh he wasn't really going he wasn't using the hate speech angle which was interesting it was like
ai and deep fakes and uh
uh like inciting mob tactics and stuff because of ai um like ai it was like an ai safety argument
um anyway it comes in many different shapes and sizes uh but this has
been a constant fight it will be a constant fight um
and uh yeah i mean i think this is why tech like nostr is so important
incredibly important freedom tech it's going to win at the end freaks it's going to win in the end
you got to keep building it on the topic of ai safety um the next story is about grok
basically going ham on trump being a pedophile uh on x these last few days have did this hit your
radar yes i didn't see this one of uh xi jinping but i have seen the trend of people asking grok
to remove the pedophile i saw with a picture of trump i saw one of trump and bb was uh paint the
pedos face black and the war criminals face red um and they they paint they painted bb red and
they painted trump black um i don't think yeah i don't think i don't think uh the people leaning
on the epstein stuff like i don't think there's uh convincing evidence at least to me that he's
a pedophile i'll be clear and say that um i think he probably is and i think it's probably crazy
I think it's a little bit crazy how normalized that thought is.
Is the sitting president of the United States?
I mean, look at this tweet.
This tweet has 8.4 million views.
We already said views are overstated on X,
but still it's a staggering amount of views.
And it's pretty much just people like, oh, wow,
like Grok is based and saying it as it is.
um i mean this also goes hand in hand by the way with like i'm kind of curious on your opinion like
grok basically like undressing ladies in the comments uh i haven't seen have you seen this
they're like they're just putting women in and bikinis um
which i mean i think is an interesting uh first of all i think uh
it's being used in an harassment role.
But I think it's an interesting thought process
because I think that's the world we're going to.
And bikinis is like the step before, you know,
fake nudes of anyone you want.
Which is going to be, I think, a hard thing for society to grapple with.
Yeah.
It's going to be,
sovereign individual predicted this,
The ratio of signal to noise is going to be insanely low.
There's going to be very little signal and a ton of noise that you have to develop the mental fortitude and capabilities to filter.
It's not going to be easy.
On the Epstein Trump stuff, I asked the freaks to send me any deep dives they had on the Epstein list last week, if you remember.
and one of them sent me this website,
EpsteinSecrets.com.
Logan, can you pull it up?
It's pretty crazy.
Like you're telling me like Trump is not,
is not caught up in this shit.
Let me see.
They have them, they have them with 3000 connections.
So this is like, you know, the meme of,
Charlie from Always Sunny with like all the
like the wall with all the lines
moving
all the lines between people or whatever
this is like an automated version of that
with the Epstein list
like all the Epstein dumps
that have been public
connecting people and you can put different people in
so like
for instance
just I mean he's definitely
also involved put Bill Clinton in the
top instead
i think if you go to if you go to dashboard he's like no go to dashboard you don't have to sign in
go to people and entities maybe 1386 mentioned how do we get back to the line graph the line chart
Anyway, all of these guys are connected.
I think this shit is really bad.
I see a Jane Doe in here.
Who's Jane Doe?
I don't think we'll get any real substantive answers
or repercussions from any of this shit either.
No.
Which, oh yeah, look at that.
Look how crazy that is.
And by the way, that's not...
No, you can't put your way out of it.
Stop paying taxes.
Save your money in Bitcoin.
I mean, it is like...
You laugh because it's like, oh, we all know.
We've talked about this many years in the past.
We used to get very uncomfortable when I would bring it up.
It's like, hey, what is the only other way?
What is the logical thing here?
It's like, you can't vote your way out.
Both sides are corrupted.
They're literally taking our money, stealing it from us at gunpoint and handing it to frauds.
They're importing people from around the world who do not share our values and not respect our customs or norms or our communities that we've built over the course of centuries.
And they're quite literally pillaging the country.
What are we to do?
I think the only logical thing is to cut off their revenue.
and I think that there are people taking this seriously so
um I will say on the record uh that I have paid a shit ton in taxes uh I continue to pay a shit
ton of taxes and I encourage the freaks uh to uh I know I know pay their pay their taxes
this is a hypothetical I'm just saying I'm just trying to explore the
in minecraft i'm just exploring the problem space of like what what do you do look the
fucked up part uh is all taxes are unconstitutional um and they have a gun to our heads and they're
going to make an example they they've made examples of people uh that have gone against
them they will continue to do so um uh it's incredibly fucked up um and under that under
under those auspices,
as someone who really cares about his family,
I'm not gonna encourage anyone to do a tax revolt.
But I mean I think what can be done and it an interesting game theory there I mean we give Peter Schiff a lot of this shit which he deserves but his dad I mean fought taxes on constitutional grounds and he died in jail for it
So there's a game theory there in the beginning if people are trying to push in this direction.
I mean, obviously, I'd much rather see just taxes get abolished.
Same.
Which I support.
But, I mean, look, the U.S. government is surveilling people's $600 Venmo transactions and then paying out billions of dollars to fake daycares in Minnesota.
It's treasonous is what it is.
but meanwhile we have guns to our heads and and uh that's that's the scenario we're operating
under right now that's almost like uh we're open open air prison slaves in a uh in a large country
do your work yeah i mean i give us our give us our 40 and go about your day to stop complaining
i think it gets even more bleak when you uh combine that with uh the big tech stranglehold
on our digital lives and how intertwined they are with big government um i mean uh
someone someone was critiquing mandibles than bitcoin standard because they said no it's more
like 1984 and fahrenheit 451 um yeah it's little pieces of all this shit you know they like they
got you addicted to scrolling not paying attention moving from one thing to the next
pumping everyone with drugs over medicated population shitty fucking food
burning books
rewriting history
like it's a combination of all this shit
telling you not to believe your lying eyes
that's the like
the Nick Shirley thing
the whole
I mean so
that's the thing
that's the other thing
like we're at this weird inflection point too
because the reaction to the Nick Shirley video
was so predictable.
I mean, there was many people like,
all right, here's what CNN and NPR
and all these mainstream media companies
are going to do.
They're going to, number one, attack Nick Shirley
and not actually cover the fraud happen.
They're going to investigate themselves
and there'll be press conferences
with a bunch of Somalians with kids
that are supposed to be attending the daycares
and saying, yeah, yeah, look, we're doing it.
It happened.
do you see the one guy the one somali who was like yeah someone broke into our daycare and stole our
records who does like that's not a real thing people don't steal documents from people he was
wearing he was wearing $2,500 glasses too and then there was another it was a somali woman like in a
burka but she had like a five carat ring on like we're running a legitimate business here it's like
Did you see the one of the Somali woman who was clearly reading a pre-prepared speech and one of the lines was fraud is bad and she was so confused why it was in there that she just like freaked out and walked off stage.
She started crying.
Clown world.
It's so bad.
It is bad.
I'm going to need to go have a beer about it after this week.
Shout out to pseudo Carlos.
Carlos, excuse me.
Long time OG freak.
Maybe number one freak in terms of minutes of this show listened by one listener.
21,000 sats.
No taxes.
Who will build the roads?
I will build the roads.
If I have to build the roads to avoid this humiliation ritual, this paying taxes so that my money just gets funneled to overt fraud, I will learn how to build roads.
Carlos, I'll build your road for you.
I will say that, yeah, first of all, I think private enterprise is more than capable of building roads.
I know Sudo Carlos knows this.
But I also, you know, I think there's a little bit of nuance to my thoughts around taxes, which is that like the more local you get, the more reasonable they are.
The particularly egregious ones are the federal taxes.
um but like if you're in like a small town small town usa
like the local government's governing over you know a couple thousand people
there's way less room for corruption there um and as a result i think those those types of taxes
are more ethical and you're always you can you can easily move right you can move to the next
town over move to a different jurisdiction as you get bigger it becomes more coercive
in the u.s we have an exit tax uh so you don't have the free movement of capital
to vote with your feet states it can be very expensive to move between states
some people are just not financially able to move between states
um we're seeing california for instance right now they're going after billionaires and a bunch of
billionaires are moving out of the state but uh there's a lot of people that can't afford to move
out they're stuck their job can't go remote you know and their their house is illiquid and where
most of their net worth is and they're stuck yeah i'm happy you brought up california because there
was a great tweet that i'm trying to find hopefully we can pull up but another thing too is like our
billionaire class like let's not pretend that they're without any blame i think we have the
worst wealthy elite in human history in terms of taste and actual civic duty being recognized
and people actually leaning into it uh instead of like henry ford and rockefeller who spent their
wealth to build up their dominion their locality we have bill gates spinning up the bill and melinda
Gates Foundation to force vaccinations and kill all the cows across the world.
And that was, I'm looking for-
They buy up all the farmland.
Yeah.
I've retweeted so much.
I've been, if you've been following me on X, you'll know that I'm very pissed off about
this fraud and just been mass retweeting anything, talking about it.
but uh there's basically a tweet out there that the worst thing that could happen california
the state government specifically is if um as if the billionaire class basically stood up and said
hey we'll fund a bunch of this stuff we'll build this high rail system that you've spent 17 billion
dollars on but haven't laid a foot of track yet um and i think there is some onus on the wealthy
elite in our country to step up and begin funding the stuff outside of the purview
of the government instead of like bezos what are you doing with your second wife and
turks and caicos at like a napkin club you're supposed to be like third richest man in the
world you gotta have better taste we need billionaires better taste did you see the cloud
flares uh ceo no his new year's post what was he doing let me see if i can find it
everyone's like now we know why the outages are happening
well in california i mean why are you finding that like in california the the state audit
committee that's uncovered 70 billion dollars worth of fraud across that i mean like a bunch
of other things and now they want to put a five percent wealth tax on billionaires it's like what
are you going to do with this money like you you've proven that you're they're just going to
waste it that's why i do think like yeah like you should look you should you should stand up for
your community if you have the means but california i think it's too far gone like i think
specifically in the california case you have to cut off the spoiled child and you have to just move
you have to cut them out i mean i don't know like i don't know if you saw like rocanna like
fighting with billionaires on x it's like the time for arguing is over you just move
um logan pull this up i know you're not gonna have sound but i don't think you need sound
press play oh god
it's like these tech these tech people it's like they never had and this is why this is why it
for younger generations too kids this is probably going to come off terrible but you should be
throwing keg parties at like 17 and interacting with your friends obviously taking ubers to
wherever you're going and not drinking and driving.
But like we need – it's like these people never had fun
when they were teenagers, like good old-fashioned fun.
And they're trying to relive it in their 50s and 60s.
Yeah, I mean Bezos definitely did not.
He was a geek.
You can support the geeks and bring the geeks to the party
so they don't wind up like billionaires without any taste
and doing things that they think are cool
that are objectively fucking horrible.
Yeah, I mean, I think it's important to realize here
that Cloudflare is basically an extension of the government
and operates a mafia-style business
where they take down your website if you don't use them
and put them in the middle of all your traffic.
So I'm not too surprised.
I mean, his PR guy is probably like, what the fuck are you doing?
Why did you post that?
But no, they can go fuck themselves.
And just a really creepy video.
Yeah.
All right.
First rip of the year.
I think it was a good one.
Yeah, I want to be clear.
Vibes are high.
We need Freedom Tech more than us.
So focus on what you can change, you know, build up your local communities, raise strong families, opt out with Bitcoin and other freedom tech like Noster.
I guess that's where the optimism is.
We're under 90,000 again. We need you guys to go smash by right now.
Oh, fuck. Our prediction is already off.
Number go up needs to happen if we're going to get out of this. So go do your part.
okay love it happy new year's streak stamblestack sets peace and love