[Music]
Hey everyone, welcome to Freedom Tech Wrap for the weekend of January 6th.
My name is Marks and this is going to be a weekly source for news and project updates in the freedom technology space.
We all live in this world where we're so interconnected constantly and freedom technology gives you a little bit of that control back
where you can decide when you want to connect, how you want to connect, who you want to connect with
and really all about where your data is living and who has access to it.
Freedom Tech Wrap is an independent show so if you want to support what we're doing
you can use Value for Value in your favorite podcasting 2.0 app and we'd really appreciate it.
So this format is a little bit different than what I was doing before.
These are going to be short, concise and just bring you all the hits from the week
and I'm hoping to do this on a weekly basis.
This is the first week of the year so what a great time to start.
With that let's jump right in. We'll do news first and then we'll do some project updates.
The first news story for the week is a new reporting requirement within the United States.
If you receive more than $10,000 or more in Bitcoin or crypto in a single payment
you are now required to report that to the IRS and you have to do so within 15 days
and it includes all sorts of personal information.
You have to include their names, their addresses, social security numbers for anybody involved in the transaction.
Now this is somewhat of an onerous reporting requirement.
There's a lot of people who speculate that this is not even constitutional,
that it violates a couple different amendments.
If you want to read a good write-up about it you can check out tftc.io.
Marty Bent did a good article about it.
There are also plenty of people on Twitter, Jerry Brito being one of them, who have reported on it.
So go check that out. Important to know.
One of the examples that Marty uses on his article is that he talks about if you have a contractor
who came in to work on your house and you don't know this person.
You're both strangers but you ask them to do some work and then on their way out they're like,
"Hey, do you do Bitcoin?" and you pay them in Bitcoin.
And then they're like, "Oh, by the way, can I get your social security number?"
You're like, "I don't want this to be that kind of relationship.
How do I trust you as a person that I barely know to safely guard my social security number
and not steal my identity?"
So this seems like it's fraught with all sorts of identity theft potential.
So definitely keep an eye on this.
And really, if you live in the United States and you have concerns over this,
raise those concerns to your elected officials
because this is not something that will just go away on its own.
Okay, next up we have Forbes.
Forbes did a write-up about Bitcoin's role in human rights and global empowerment.
It's a great article. A lot of it talks about Alex Gladstein and the Human Rights Foundation.
And then it goes through and showcases a few different individuals and projects around the world
that are using Bitcoin to truly empower people who are trying to rise up in life from difficult circumstances.
So I recommend you check that out.
Speaking of Alex Gladstein, Ian Burrell, who's a columnist, a reporter, does a lot of work in Africa.
He did a write-up this week where he traveled with Alex to Malawi in Southeast Africa.
And they visited some remote regions where Bitcoin has really actually helped improve the power grid
and is bringing electricity to a small village.
And so his write-up is great.
It talks all about just the effects that that has on human life
to be able to have power at night and in the early mornings, as well as throughout the day.
The ability just to do simple things like cooking food in a much faster manner
and not having to go out and harvest charcoal from the forest and then burn that charcoal to cook their food.
And this is all made possible by Bitcoin mining operations that come in.
And they pay for the build-out and then they can be the buyer of last resort of that electricity.
So great write-up.
Interesting thing about Ian is that he was supposedly a pretty big critic and pretty negative on Bitcoin leading up to this.
But this article is very positive about it.
So I don't know if his tune is changing or if this is simply just a very kind of objective view on it.
But go check that out.
You can find that on unheard.com.
It's called the African village mining Bitcoin.
Next, I want to talk about a couple of websites that I've come across as I've been putting together this show.
The first one is called Free for Developers.
It's free-for.dev.
And it is a giant list of freedom.
And I shouldn't say freedom, but it's a giant list of cloud services that you can use for free as a developer.
So it talks about all the different free tiers.
For example, one of the most famous ones is AWS, you know, giving you a free year of using their services.
So check that out.
And then it looks like I don't know if these two sites are related.
Another one is called trackawesomelist.com.
And it also has updates on just awesome projects in the open source world and things that you can use for free.
Specifically, like in cloud computing.
Okay, OpenSats.
If you're not familiar, OpenSats is an organization that provides support by way of grants to developers who are working on open technologies.
A lot of the developers are in the Bitcoin and the Nostra space.
So they did their 2023 year in review.
There's a big blog post on their website about it.
They go through and talk about the financing that came in and how they kicked off Nostra grants this year.
The real highlight is that they provided 90 grants.
And a big chunk of those were for long-term support.
And then the majority were for project-specific support.
So really cool.
I love what OpenSats is doing.
Okay, two more stories.
First one, Lynn Alden.
That is a name that you probably recognize both in the macroeconomic space, investment space, and then really in the freedom technology space.
She published her January 2024 newsletter.
So go check that out.
It's chock full of great, great info to kick off the new year.
And then lastly, NextCloud, another big project in the freedom tech world.
They have posted a new developer site that walks through and has different tutorials and developer tool info for building apps for NextCloud.
All right, let's go into the updates.
First up, our friends over at Wavelike.
Wavelike is a project that is an independent music site where musicians can upload their music and then they can get paid directly when people like their songs.
So that's awesome.
Really enjoy listening to it.
The update here is that their Android app is live now.
You can go download APK and load it on your device.
And then for iOS, it is still in beta.
It's been in beta for a few months now, but you can go sign up through TestFlight and check it out on iPhone.
I've been listening a lot.
A lot of great music on there.
It obviously is not as robust as the likes of Spotify or Apple Music and such, but there's still some great things that I've discovered on there.
So go check it out.
And then, yeah, if you like a song, support the artist.
Send a little bit of money.
OK, let's jump over to the AI world.
We have Unleashed.Chat.
So Unleashed is another one of these projects that lets you run your own chat service, your own chat GPT, if you will.
And then you just pay for the server usage that you do.
A big one that kind of started this was PlebAI.
You can go to PlebAI.com and check out that project.
Very similar.
But Unleashed.Chat is running their own.
This one is fed with live Nostra data and also has options for other data embedding.
So that's really cool.
It's like chatting with chat GPT, but having the live Internet being fed into it.
They also did an update here where they are storing data in Redis now, so it'll load much faster when you're running your chats.
There's a lot of power in using other chat services that are not part of big tech, really.
Being able to run them on your own at home or using distributed services where you spread around where you're chatting.
You're not centralizing all your information.
Let's go over to the encrypted messenger space.
This is a guy by the name of Jiraj Bednar.
He has a long write-up that compares different encrypted messaging services.
He just updated his article.
So I'll put it in the show notes, but you can find him, Jiraj@nostra.fan.
You can use that to look him up on Nostra.
He's got a great write-up, great comparison of all the different services out there that allow you to do secure encrypted messaging with friends and with colleagues.
Over in the home server space, we have Start9.
They have updated their Bitcoin Node client to Bitcoin Core 26.0.
That gives you the option to enable v2 P2P transport protocol.
So if you'd like that, go ahead and update.
And then with Umbrel, they just announced a new app for downloading YouTube videos to your Umbrel.
So you can have your home server download YouTube videos for you.
Over in the Bitcoin space, we have Fetiment.
Just did their 0.2 release.
And even though it's a 0.2, it's actually quite a major release.
People are saying that this is mostly feature complete now.
And so you can run an e-cash system that you can feed with Bitcoin and then run in a distributed, federated manner.
And they're hoping that this can be, from now on, just mostly bug fixes and backward compatibility.
So that's really cool.
And then right on the heels of that, we have the Mutiny wallet.
They did a 0.5.1 release where they did a bunch of work and improvements to integrate with Fetiment.
So Mutiny up to now has worked really well with obviously Bitcoin on chain, but then Lightning Network.
And now they're working with Fetiment.
So a lot of options going on, which is really cool.
We have a new Bitcoin wallet called Aqua.
And they just released.
And it does Bitcoin, Lightning, and Liquid.
And that's a unique thing that you haven't really seen much yet.
And that is wallet support for the Liquid network.
Liquid last year finally provided the ability to be a little more federated.
And so I think we're going to see a lot more things happening in that space.
OK, and last on Bitcoin, we have a new piece of hardware.
It's another space heater that's available.
There's a few of these out there.
Most of them started off as DIY, but now people are starting to create actual products around it.
But you take a Bitcoin miner that produces a lot of heat, and you channel it into an enclosure that acts like a space heater.
So now you're heating your room, heating your home, but you're also mining Bitcoin at the same time.
This one comes to us from Canan or Canan.
I don't know how you say their company name, but they're out of Singapore.
And they make Bitcoin ASICs.
So the product is Avalon Nano 3.
You can check it out on Indiegogo if you want to preorder it.
And they're going to ship this year.
Last update is a small project that was just posted to GitHub as well as posted on Noster.
It's called NHTTP.
And it is trying to do Noster over HTTP.
If you're familiar with Noster, it's an open protocol that allows you to send messages to other people or other nodes and relays.
And then you can build all sorts of really interesting things on top of this.
You really could build almost an entirely new internet on top of Noster.
Noster uses WebSocket technology under the hood for passing around and relaying all the information.
So this user, Youle, has decided to try and build it on HTTP instead of WebSockets.
A big reason for this is trying to solve the mobile bandwidth issue.
Noster uses a lot of bandwidth, and so when you're on a mobile device, that can be quite hefty.
And the hope is with HTTP, potentially reduce that quite a bit.
And with that, we're going to call it a wrap.
This is the Freedom Tech Wrap.
Weekly updates, news, project updates in the freedom technology space.
I hope you enjoyed this.
I'm going to be bringing this to you weekly.
If you have any projects that you would like us to start tracking, hit me up on Noster.
My name is Marks@NosterPlebs.com.
You can find me there.
Until then, take care and remember to live independent.
[Music.]
you