[FREEDOM TECH RAP]
What's up everybody?
For the week ending March 16th, my name is Marks.
This is Freedom Tech Wrap.
Freedom Tech Rap is a weekly source for news and project updates in the freedom and independent technology space.
We live in a highly connected world.
Freedom Tech lets you decide how you want to connect and where you want your data to live.
Freedom Tech Rap is an independent show, so if you want to support what we're doing,
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Your support and your feedback are greatly appreciated.
Now, this is going to be a bit of a shorter episode because we had spring break. Woo!
So I was a bit checked out.
But I got some great stuff for you, especially some major news this week that I wanted to deliver,
even though you've probably already heard it, but let's get into it anyways.
First up, Craig Wright is not Bitcoin creator Satoshi Nakamoto, judge declares.
That's right. If you have been connected at all to the Bitcoin world,
you will know that there was a major ruling coming out of the UK
where it was determined that Craig Wright, proven legally that Craig Wright is not Satoshi.
So I'm going to bring you the article from Wired, even though there were plenty of write-ups about it.
There was an alliance of people called COPA, which is Crypto Open Patent Alliance,
funded by Jack Dorsey as well as many others, including companies that are in the Bitcoin space.
They took a lawsuit against Craig Wright, and I'm going to read a bit from the article here.
"The evidence is overwhelming," says Justice James Millar,
delivering a surprise ruling at the close of the trial.
First, that Dr. Wright is not the author of the Bitcoin white paper.
Second, Dr. Wright is not the person who adopted or operated under the pseudonym Satoshi Nakamoto in the period 2008 to 2011.
Third, Dr. Wright is not the person who created the Bitcoin system.
And fourth, he is not the author of the initial versions of the Bitcoin software, he said.
The ruling brings to a close a six-week trial in which the Crypto Open Patent Alliance,
a non-profit consortium of crypto companies,
asked the court to declare that Wright is not Satoshi on the basis that he had allegedly fabricated his evidence
and contorted his story repeatedly as new inconsistencies came to light.
"After all the evidence in this remarkable trial, it is clear beyond doubt that Craig Wright is not Satoshi Nakamoto,"
claimed Jonathan Huff, legal counsel for COPPA, as he began his closing submissions on Tuesday.
He went on to say, "Wright has lied and lied and lied."
Alright, so this news is important for many reasons, not just to prove that a person was wrong.
There are plenty of people wrong on the internet all the time.
It's kind of like that ex-KCD comic where it's like, "Honey, come to bed," and it's like,
"No, someone's wrong on the internet." That's not what this is about.
Craig and others that were participating with Craig or kind of in spirit with Craig,
they were targeting Bitcoin developers, Bitcoin companies, and others with litigation,
claiming that they were violating his IP.
Well, now it has been proven in court that he is not the creator of Bitcoin,
and he has no legal standing moving forward.
So this not only brings a huge sense of peace and relief to the lives of many developers
who were just trying to contribute to an open-source project,
but it also removes a large risk factor that potentially held back investment dollars
from coming into Bitcoin startups.
So, really massive, huge thank you to Jack.
Thank you to all the other backers of COPPA, the people that were involved in this,
put in all this hard work and countless hours.
Thank you to all the Bitcoin developers, past and present, for the great work that you do.
Next step, we have Top Builder 2024.
So we first talked about Top Builder when it launched,
and the competition came to a close this week on March 14th,
and they announced their winner at the Austin BitDevs in Austin, Texas.
Now the winner this year is Yopaki.com.
It is a Bitcoin wallet and marketplace that has additional finance tools.
From the website, it says, "With Yopaki, you can easily buy, sell, and manage Bitcoin
alongside a diverse portfolio of financial instruments, such as ETFs, stocks, commodities, and CETES,
all within a single, seamless platform."
So congratulations to them. That is awesome.
They won $15,000 and just a lot of exposure.
But shout out to Pleb Lab for hosting this.
Shout out to Car. He's awesome. You rock for putting this on and all the great work that you're doing.
And then Wolf from New York City for sponsoring this.
Y'all put on a great event and great competition.
I'm really excited to see Yopaki grow from here,
and also really excited for all the other great projects that came out of Top Builder.
We've talked about some of them on here. One of them is Cascader that has a lot of potential as well.
Sorry for the other ones that I didn't mention. There's a ton of great stuff.
Next item up is a really long article that has lots of chapters to it,
but it is called PIX, P-I-X, PIX in Brazil, a field study for the Bitcoin community.
So this comes way of user Paulo Sacramento.
Paulo decided to do a deep dive study into PIX, which is a financial app being used in Brazil,
and wanted to see what can we learn from it in the Bitcoin community.
So I'm going to read just like the quick intro paragraph here.
It says, "In November 2020, the Brazilian central bank introduced PIX, a digital payment system.
As of this writing, 32 months have passed since its launch, and more than 140 million Brazilians have embraced it
and have used it at least once. In this remarkably short time,
PIX has become the second most popular instant payment system in the world."
And so what Paulo goes on to do over the course of 10 chapters, including introduction and a final thought chapter,
so that would be 12 total, I guess.
He goes in and talks about kind of like, why did they introduce this? What's the big picture here?
Talks about some of the politics involved, looks at it from an entrepreneurial lens.
Then he tries to go into some of the data privacy and the leaks and the vulnerabilities,
scams that were going on, so many things.
I would recommend checking it out. I have not read through the whole thing myself,
so I'm recommending something that I haven't read the entire thing of, so I apologize.
Normally, I like to go through all the content before I share it.
This one just looks like it is chock full with awesome stuff.
I recommend giving it a read, and then you can let me know that it's garbage and that I shouldn't have recommended it.
Just kidding. I'm sure it's great.
Okay. Last news item is the Bitcoin takeover that happened at South by Southwest in Austin as well.
On Friday, to cap off a week of a lot of really great Bitcoin content that was here locally,
there was a full day of presentations from Freedom Tech founders and builders.
Then it was capped off by a live recording of Rabbit Hole Recap with Odell and Marty Bent,
with guests Parker Lewis and Will Cole.
Just to give you an idea of some of the people that spoke at the event,
you had Marty Bent, founder of TFTC Media.
You had Nifty Nae, Lisa, from Base58, also a contributor to Lightning and Bitcoin.
Then Spiral, Steve Lee spoke from Spiral, talked a lot about getting grants to work in the Bitcoin space.
I thought it was really notable that he talked about how Block, which used to be called Square,
started by Jack Dorsey and many others, that Spiral was set up to effectively help Bitcoin.
That's its mission. That's what Jack told them.
Here's your funding, give out grants to people, and just move forward the progress of Bitcoin.
What a really cool mission to have.
Then we heard from Grant Gilliam from 1031 Venture, Venture Platform.
They also do grants as well, but they talked a lot about how they aren't a typical VC
and what you picture in your mind of VCs.
They do a lot of Freedom Tech investing and building of companies in this space.
Then we heard from Joe Kelly, co-founder and CEO of Unchained.
After that, Joe McGill from Zaprite spoke about Zaprite.
They're doing a lot of cool stuff as well. So was Unchained.
Then after lunch, we heard from Justin Moon, who's co-founder and head of engineering of Fetty,
one of the Layer 2 Fetty Mint type businesses.
Then we heard from Tony, who is co-founder and CEO of Mutiny Lightning Wallet,
that is also integrating with Fetty.
To round out the day, the last third of it was Bitcoin mining.
We heard from Giga Energy, Matt Lostro.
Then from Coromant, we heard from Jamie McAvity.
Then to end it off, we had that live rabbit hole recap with Marty Bent, Matt O'Dell, and others.
So a really great event, lots of wonderful people.
I know that videos have been posted on places like Twitter and Noster, possibly on YouTube.
So look around if you want to watch some of those.
If I find the treasure trove that has all the videos in one spot, I will share it out on my socials.
You can find me on Noster at marks@nosterplebs.com or on Twitter.
My name is Markskram.
All right, let's go into boosts and zaps.
We had a couple of boosts from the last episode.
First was the wild hustle, boosted 2,500 sats, and said "Kendrick vibes" at the end,
referring to that sweet song that we had from Bri360.
And then Joel W., 333 sats.
Now on to zaps from Noster.
These are people who zapped the note where I published the episode.
And there were no zaps.
That's right, no zaps for Gretchen Wiener.
Okay, so let's move on to project updates.
A big one, actually there are a couple big ones, but first one is Bisk 2.
That is awesome.
Bisk is a decentralized exchange for trading Bitcoin in and out of fiat.
So I'm just going to read directly from the announcement.
"We're thrilled to announce the long-awaited launch of Bisk 2.
The latest version of our decentralized exchange platform is now live and available for download.
Bisk 2 brings a host of new features, improvements, and enhancements
to make your trading experience even better."
From the website, talking about Bisk 2, it goes on to say,
"Similar to Bisk v1, Bisk 2 will be a decentralized Bitcoin exchange
that allows anyone to buy and sell Bitcoin in exchange for national currencies or other cryptocurrencies.
Bisk 2 is a desktop application that works across platforms."
There's a lot of really cool stuff about it.
It's peer-to-peer. It's open source.
It's very privacy-focused, no verified accounts or KYC.
And you can also run it over the Tor network.
So if you've not heard of Bisk before, go check it out.
Next up, your own LLM.
So we have FreeGPT.
Well, they've launched version 2 on StartOS.
If you're running StartOS, if you have a Start9 server, or you're running on your own hardware, go update.
This replaces the FreeGPT service that was there.
It's not running there anymore. You have to get version 2.
But this gives you your own local GPT LLM service.
You have full privacy. You can run your own prompts and queries and things on your own box
so that big tech companies aren't looking at what you're doing
and also aren't affecting the results that you are receiving.
Next, we have an update from Ghost.
Ghost 5.80.3.
Ghost is that famous blog and CMS software platform.
It's open source.
They put out an update that has a lot of fixes in it.
They reduced requests and 403 responses for comments auth check.
They fixed /p redirects not being indexed by search engines.
Fixed adding recommendations when oembed fails.
And then they fixed a ton of issues with HTTP 500 responses.
So if you're using Ghost, go update, or you probably already have updated.
But check it out.
Last one is BlowWater.
BlowWater is a Noster app, and it is focused completely on direct messages.
So it's like a Noster messaging application.
BlowWater just released its newest update, they said in their launch.
And it says, "The biggest update since its creation. Still raw, still rough edges, still growing."
I tried it out, and I had a little bit of exchange back and forth with the developer.
And it doesn't immediately recognize the relays that you were connected to.
So you have to add more relays so that you can see your profile and things like that.
So I've played with it a little bit, but I'm going to play with it more.
Because I like the idea of having a really good Noster DM application.
That's it for the news and updates this week.
This is Freedom Tech Wrap.
If you find this weekly source useful, please share it with your people.
You can also support us through Value for Value in your podcast app or on Noster.
If you have any feedback, send it our way on Noster to marks@nosterplebs.com.
To close it out, we have the Song of the Week, where your stats directly support that artist.
So stick around and boost.
For the rest of you, thanks for listening to Freedom Tech Wrap.
And remember to live independent.
Later!
[Freedom Tech Wrap theme song]
This week's artist has that rustic, bluegrass, farming, cowboy feel to it.
I picked their song that talks about the fifth horse of the apocalypse.
Because in many ways, I feel like it describes the human spirit, especially those crazy ones embracing freedom tech.
Plus, it's just really fun to listen to.
So, here are the No Good Redwood Ramblers with "The Fifth Horse of the Apocalypse."
[The Fifth Horse of the Apocalypse theme song]
A black horse with red eyes always comes as a surprise when he's watching you.
So count your lucky stars and hide your PBR 'cause he's watching you.
You can't put a bridle on him, he'll put a bridle on you.
Then you know you're through. Better watch your back.
[The Fifth Horse of the Apocalypse theme song]
When you see his nostrils flare, you'd better beware 'cause he's watching you.
And when he opens up his stride, you know you're gonna die 'cause he's watching you.
You can't put a horseshoe on him, he'll put a nail in you.
It won't be in your shoe, it'll be straight in your heart.
[The Fifth Horse of the Apocalypse theme song]
[end]