Follow Mercedes: LinkedIn | Montessori’s Instagram | Montessori’s website

Takeaways:

• Most people are never taught how to be economically independent, and that gap doesn’t disappear with age or income. Adults sign decades-long mortgages without understanding what they’re agreeing to, the same way they were never taught to question anything else handed to them by an institution that benefits from their compliance.

• Building something new is often easier than trying to fix something broken from the inside. Trying to retrofit freedom into a system that was never designed for it is like trying to put wings on a freight train. At some point you have to start from scratch.

• Montessori and Bitcoin are answering the same question from two different directions. Both are built on the idea that you don’t need external validation, a central authority, or someone else’s permission to know your own value.

• Personalization at scale isn’t a contradiction if you’re willing to give up the idea that everyone has to move at the same pace. A school where no two students share a timetable sounds revolutionary but it is reality for Mercedes.

• Children are treated as a side conversation in almost every major economic and technological shift, even though they’re the ones who will live with the consequences the longest. Every adult in the room has children around them whether or not they have their own, and that makes the responsibility to model good decisions collective, not optional.

• Sometimes the version of a system that gets taken away from you turns out to be worse than the one you build in its place. Losing Spanish accreditation simply removed the dependency on an authority that was never fully aligned with the mission anyway.

• Kids are absorbing the architecture of the future faster than the adults around them can keep up with..

• Maria Montessori built an entire educational philosophy out of a public health insight: you can’t legislate or punish your way into good outcomes, you have to educate people before the crisis, not manage them after it. The same logic applies to financial literacy and to Bitcoin adoption.

• If you want an idea to actually take root in a culture, you don’t convince the adults first, you teach the children and let them bring it home. A child who understands self-custody becomes the reason their parents finally pay attention.

Connect with me:
Twitter | YouTube | Instagram | Nostr | My podcast | All other links

Sponsors:

Expat Money

→ Download the free report on second citizenships & setting up a plan B in another country with Expat Money: https://expatmoney.com/efrat

Watch my episode with Mikkel for more:

Ledn

→ Access liquidity without selling your Bitcoin, get 0.25% off your first loan: https://ledn.io/Efrat

Trezor

→ Get your TREZOR wallet & accessories, with a 5% discount, using my code at checkout (get my discount code from the episode - yep, you’ll have to watch it)

Abundant Mines

→ Have you tried mining bitcoin? Stack sats directly to your wallet while saving on taxes with Abundant Mines. A month of free hosting for my followers:

Special offers:

→ Join me at any of these conferences or events:

→ Get 10% off on Augmented NAC to detox the Spike protein, using the code: YCXKQDK2, and this link. (Please note, this is not medical advice and you should consult your MD). Watch the episode with Tina below.

→ Watch “New Totalitarian Order” conference with Prof. Mattias Desmet & Efrat - use code EFRAT for 10% off

Follow Jeff: Twitter | Nostr

Takeaways:

• The world is a reflection of our consciousness, and what we are really doing when we build on an honest monetary foundation is building better versions of ourselves. Technology is the mirror; we are the substance.

• Every level of consciousness produces a different version of reality. If you enter Bitcoin angry at the world, Bitcoin will reflect that anger back at you, attract others at the same frequency, and feel like belonging, making it very hard to move to the next level. Understanding this is the beginning of actually using Bitcoin as a tool for growth rather than a cage for your current identity.

• People do not resist Bitcoin because they have evaluated it and rejected it. They resist it because accepting it would require destroying an identity that is wrapped up in a system that steals from others. Jeff had to go through his own identity destruction before he could fully see and that experience is exactly why he can have compassion for those who haven’t yet.

• We have never lived in a free market, so we have no mental model for one. This is why so many Bitcoiners will sell back to fiat, not because they are stupid or dishonest, but because they are trying to navigate an emergent reality using a map that was drawn for a different world. Holding is harder than it looks precisely because we are the model.

• AI is a tool in a free market. The fear around AI largely comes from living in a centralized system where tools are weaponized against us. In a Bitcoin-anchored free market, AI drives productivity, prices fall, and the gains are distributed. The danger is who controls the infrastructure AI runs on.

• Every human in the room has a genius that exceeds Jeff Booth’s in some dimension. Most people do not believe this about themselves because the fiat system depends on that disbelief. A system built on a lie requires you to underestimate yourself. Bitcoin, built on truth, eventually produces the opposite condition.

• Ego death is not a metaphor. Jeff walked away from boards, companies, and revenue and then had to watch a $40M fundraise collapse to $11M during FTX. The brutal stripping away of the old identity made possible everything he can see and build now. You cannot carry the old world into the new one.

• Once you feel abundant, you will have abundance. Jeff went to zero in 2017 and discovered that he still had everything: health, relationships, learning, direction. Rebuilding the financial part was almost incidental once he stopped chasing it. Abundance is a state of consciousness before it is a state of account.

• Bitcoin will raise the global level of consciousness because operating on an honest foundation forces people to see themselves and each other clearly. When you cannot blame inflation, you have to look at your own choices. That reckoning, happening at scale, is what Bitcoin is actually doing to humanity.

Connect with me:
Twitter | YouTube | Instagram | Nostr | My podcast | All other links

Sponsors:

Expat Money

→ Download the free report on second citizenships & setting up a plan B in another country with Expat Money: https://expatmoney.com/efrat

Watch my episode with Mikkel for more:

Ledn

→ Access liquidity without selling your Bitcoin, get 0.25% off your first loan: https://ledn.io/Efrat

Trezor

→ Get your TREZOR wallet & accessories, with a 5% discount, using my code at checkout (get my discount code from the episode - yep, you’ll have to watch it)

Abundant Mines

→ Have you tried mining bitcoin? Stack sats directly to your wallet while saving on taxes with Abundant Mines. A month of free hosting for my followers:

Special offers:

→ Join me at any of these conferences or events:

→ Get 10% off on Augmented NAC to detox the Spike protein, using the code: YCXKQDK2, and this link. (Please note, this is not medical advice and you should consult your MD). Watch the episode with Tina below.

→ Watch “New Totalitarian Order” conference with Prof. Mattias Desmet & Efrat - use code EFRAT for 10% off

Follow Charlene:
Twitter | LinkedIn | The Bitcoin Leap Book on Amazon | Satoshi Sister Circle on X

Takeaways:

• Every layer of the financial system like the commercial banks, Wall Street, the Federal Reserve itself shares the same single point of failure. It all runs on trust in humans and that’s the weakest link. Bitcoin doesn’t fix humans. It just removes them from the equation.

• The 2008 financial crisis didn’t break the system but it revealed it. The system was working exactly as designed. Greed and negligence were structural features. Charlene spent years trying to fix it from within before she understood that. Bitcoin was the first thing she encountered that didn’t require that understanding to be fixed.

• Charlene went from banker to consultant to Fed regulator, each time believing the next layer of the system could fix the one before. It never did. Hearing her trace that arc made me think: how many brilliant, mission-driven people are still inside those institutions right now, believing the same thing? And how long before they find Bitcoin too?

• What Charlene describes in Africa is something I find so moving: communities choosing Bitcoin not because a government told them to, but because they looked at their broken financial systems and chose something better. That’s sovereign decision-making and that’s exactly what Bitcoin was built for.

• Charlene’s framing: Africa doesn’t need Bitcoin, Bitcoin needs Africa. She flips the entire narrative of who is helping whom. The grassroots builders, the bottom-up adoption, the proof-of-concept ecosystems emerging across Nigeria, Kenya, Ethiopia, that’s the most honest expression of what Bitcoin actually is.

• A permissionless, trustless system has no bias. It doesn’t know your skin color, your passport, your net worth, or your religion. It just runs. After everything she witnessed inside the Fed - the patterns of inequity, the structural exclusion - that quality of Bitcoin wasn’t abstract to her. It was the answer she’d been looking for her entire career without knowing it existed.

• Charlene is unambiguous on CBDCs: they are surveillance infrastructure with a monetary interface, full stop. The digital yuan has already shown us the destination: spending tracked, dissidents frozen, lives controlled by who holds the off switch. When European regulators travel to China to study “best practices” for the digital euro, they are actually importing a control architecture.

• Something Charlene said clarified a tension I’ve wrestled with: the moment you bring Bitcoin inside the regulated financial system, you accept that system’s rules: KYC, AML, the travel rule, full surveillance of sender and receiver. That’s the antithesis of Bitcoin’s original promise. But she frames it as optionality, not surrender. The permissionless version still exists. You just have to choose it.

• Boards are rejecting the language being used to pitch bitcoin. Sovereignty and permissionlessness mean nothing in a boardroom. Stress tests, audit readiness, governance structures, investment policy amendments, that’s what opens the door. Charlene’s insight is that the case for Bitcoin has to be made in whoever’s language holds the keys.

• Before Charlene came to Bitcoin, she was trying to connect low-income women with financial advisors because she believed better information would change outcomes. What she found instead was that those women had already found Bitcoin on their own without a background in finance, without anyone pointing them there. That tells you something deeper than any financial literacy campaign ever could. Bitcoin is compelling not because we teach it well. It’s compelling because it’s actually better.

• When I asked Charlene what gives her hope, she said: the builders. They understand the actual problems of the world, and they are using Bitcoin to solve them.

Connect with me:
Twitter | YouTube | Instagram | Nostr | My podcast | All other links

Sponsors:

Ledn

→ Access liquidity without selling your Bitcoin with Ledn — learn more at https://ledn.io/Efrat

Trezor

→ Get your TREZOR wallet & accessories, with a 5% discount, using my code at checkout (get my discount code from the episode - yep, you’ll have to watch it)

Abundant Mines

→ Have you tried mining bitcoin? Stack sats directly to your wallet while saving on taxes with Abundant Mines. A month of free hosting for my followers:

Special offers:

→ Join me at any of these conferences or events:

→ Get 10% off on Augmented NAC to detox the Spike protein, using the code: YCXKQDK2, and this link. (Please note, this is not medical advice and you should consult your MD). Watch the episode with Tina below.

→ Be good to your eyes & health, and get the Daylight tablet - a healthier, more human-friendly computer, zero flicker & zero blue light. Use code EFRAT for $25 off: https://bit.ly/Efrat_daylight

→ Watch “New Totalitarian Order” conference with Prof. Mattias Desmet & Efrat - use code EFRAT for 10% off

→ Get a second citizenship and a plan B to relocate to another country with Expat Money, leave your details for a follow up: https://expatmoney.com/efrat

Follow Win:
Twitter | LinkedIn | Nostr
Human Rights Foundation’s website

Takeaways:

• Governments don’t need tanks to destroy a population’s wealth. A single radio announcement canceling the most common banknotes is enough. The 1987 Burma demonetization erased 80% of the population’s economic power overnight, and most of the world has never heard of it because it happened in a country with no English-language media infrastructure. Financial violence is the quietest and most effective form of oppression.

• Poverty is often an engineered outcome. Win’s entire generation was born into scarcity because a dictatorship deliberately destroyed the savings of their parents. When we talk about poverty in the developing world, we rarely ask who pulled the lever.

• When Win’s bank account was frozen as punishment for supporting democracy, his Bitcoin holdings couldn’t be touched. The ability to hold sovereign money is a lifeline. For people living under authoritarian systems, self-custody is a survival infrastructure.

• The same playbook gets used across every authoritarian regime, over and over, because it works. Freeze the accounts, demonetize the savings, starve the movement. From Burma to Iran to Turkey to Lebanon to Russia, the pattern is identical. What changes is the country name. What Bitcoin offers is the first tool that breaks the pattern.

• CBDCs are not a modernization of money. They are the completion of the authoritarian control stack. When Win says it’s going to get worse once governments have digital money with programmable controls, he is describing something already happening in practice, not a hypothetical future. The infrastructure for total financial surveillance is being built right now in places most people consider free.

• Buying Bitcoin in a free country creates a network effect that protects people in unfree ones. When someone in America or Europe DCA’s into Bitcoin, they are not just making an investment decision, they are contributing to a global system that becomes harder to attack or shut down. The strength of Bitcoin’s network is the shield for everyone who depends on it.

• The most powerful form of resistance is often the one that doesn’t look like resistance at all. Win crossed a jungle border, deleted 500,000 social media followers, and started over from nothing, as a deliberate strategy to protect his family and preserve his ability to keep working. Sometimes disappearing is the most radical act.

• People in comfortable countries underestimate how different money feels when you have no reliable options. In Burma, people buy second-hand cars as a store of value because the local currency devalues faster than the car does. There is no 30-year mortgage. There is no stock market. There is no 401k. For billions of people, the entire financial toolkit we take for granted simply does not exist, and Bitcoin is the first globally accessible alternative.

Connect with me:
Twitter | YouTube | Instagram | Nostr | My podcast | All other links

Sponsors:

Ledn

→ Access liquidity without selling your Bitcoin with Ledn — learn more at https://ledn.io/Efrat

Trezor

→ Get your TREZOR wallet & accessories, with a 5% discount, using my code at checkout (get my discount code from the episode - yep, you’ll have to watch it)

Abundant Mines

→ Have you tried mining bitcoin? Stack sats directly to your wallet while saving on taxes with Abundant Mines. A month of free hosting for my followers:

Special offers:

→ Get 10% off on Augmented NAC to detox the Spike protein, using the code: YCXKQDK2, and this link. (Please note, this is not medical advice and you should consult your MD). Watch the episode with Tina below.

→ Be good to your eyes & health, and get the Daylight tablet - a healthier, more human-friendly computer, zero flicker & zero blue light. Use code EFRAT for $25 off: https://bit.ly/Efrat_daylight

→ Watch “New Totalitarian Order” conference with Prof. Mattias Desmet & Efrat - use code EFRAT for 10% off

→ Get a second citizenship and a plan B to relocate to another country with Expat Money, leave your details for a follow up: https://expatmoney.com/efrat

Follow Terence:
Twitter | Instagram
The Bitcoin Hero’s Journey Keynote Speech | Proof of Money Book

Takeaways:

• Refusing Bitcoin the first time you hear it is common. Every person who has ever heard about Bitcoin dismissed it initially because that’s the natural human response to risk. Only a liar claims they jumped in immediately. The refusal is part of the journey, not a sign that someone is closed-minded.

• The price of admission to Bitcoin is humility. You cannot cross the threshold from the fiat world into the Bitcoin world without first admitting, out loud, to yourself, that you don’t know what money is. That is a genuinely frightening thing for an educated person to sit with, and it’s why so many people stall at the threshold.

• Bitcoin forces you to learn a new language before you can think in it. Words like permissionless and trustless do not exist in the vocabulary, and Microsoft Word literally underlines them in red. If a civilization’s word processor cannot spell a concept, that tells you something important about how new the concept actually is.

• There is a difference between holding Bitcoin and being a Bitcoiner. Anyone can buy a car and park it in the garage, but that’s not driving. If you bought Bitcoin and changed nothing else in your life, you are missing the entire gift. The hero’s journey is not about reaching a destination; it’s about the transformation along the way.

• Bitcoin does not change who you are. It removes the Fiat Kryptonite that was distorting who you were always meant to be. The surgeon in Argentina who drives an Uber to survive, the math professor who became a side realtor because property boomed, these are not edge cases. The entire economy is full of talented people forced sideways by a money system that leaks their energy.

• Real money makes you demand real everything else. When your savings vehicle is pure, non-leaking, non-debasing energy, you start looking at every other area of your life through the same lens. Toxic relationships, unnecessary side hustles, fake food grown on seed oils - once you have a standard for what real looks like, you start finding all the counterfeits.

• Humanity has never had real money before. Seashells, gold, paper, every form of money that has ever existed was the best substitute we could dig up or find at the time. Bitcoin is the first thing that actually meets the criteria everyone already agrees money should meet. We did not invent a new kind of money; we finally found the real thing.

• The fiat system is not ignorant of what it’s doing. Business schools teach finance and never once define money. That is not an oversight; it is design. If people understood that the denominator of their measuring stick is being stretched constantly, they would behave very differently, and that behavioral change would be bad for those who benefit from the stretching.

• Saving in Bitcoin is a global act, not just a personal one. By holding Bitcoin off the market, you are not frivolously consuming today. That preserved purchasing power raises the market rate for everyone, including the unbanked and surveilled populations who need sound money the most. Your savings decision has geopolitical consequences.

• Bitcoin is equal opportunity but not equal outcome. It does not promise everyone the same result; it promises everyone the same access. Whether you get a lot or a little from it depends on the value you put into the world. In that way, it is more honest than any yield-chasing system that pretends to create returns without underlying work.

Connect with me:
Twitter | YouTube | Instagram | Nostr | My podcast | All other links

Sponsors:

Ledn

→ Access liquidity without selling your Bitcoin with Ledn — learn more at https://ledn.io/Efrat

Trezor

→ Get your TREZOR wallet & accessories, with a 5% discount, using my code at checkout (get my discount code from the episode - yep, you’ll have to watch it)

Abundant Mines

→ Have you tried mining bitcoin? Stack sats directly to your wallet while saving on taxes with Abundant Mines. A month of free hosting for my followers:

Special offers:

→ Join me at Europe’s biggest and most influential Bitcoin event! Enjoy 10% off your BTC Prague using the code EFRAT.

→ Get 10% off on Augmented NAC to detox the Spike protein, using the code: YCXKQDK2, and this link. (Please note, this is not medical advice and you should consult your MD). Watch the episode with Tina below.

→ Be good to your eyes & health, and get the Daylight tablet - a healthier, more human-friendly computer, zero flicker & zero blue light. Use code EFRAT for $25 off: https://bit.ly/Efrat_daylight

→ Watch “New Totalitarian Order” conference with Prof. Mattias Desmet & Efrat - use code EFRAT for 10% off

→ Get a second citizenship and a plan B to relocate to another country with Expat Money, leave your details for a follow up: https://expatmoney.com/efrat

I was interviewed recently in Ireland by on “Counterpoint”, about:

• EU’s new Digital ID + Wallet pilot in Ireland

• EU regulations as part of the larger Agenda 2030 and 2050

• The Fiat monetary system

• Are digital technologies all bad, or can we find rescue in freedom tech: Bitcoin, Nostr, open source, privacy tools

Thousands already watched, please watch & drop a comment to tell me what you thought!

Thanks for watching.
♥️ Efrat

Connect with me:
Twitter | YouTube | Instagram | Nostr | Podcast | All other links

Latest releases:

Sponsors:

Ledn

→ Access liquidity without selling your Bitcoin with Ledn — learn more at https://ledn.io/Efrat

Trezor

→ Get your TREZOR bitcoin wallet & accessories, with a 5% discount, using my code at checkout (get my code from my podcast episode - yep, you’ll have to watch it)

Abundant Mines

→ Have you tried mining bitcoin? Stack sats directly to your wallet while saving on taxes with Abundant Mines. A month of free hosting for my followers:

Special offers:

→ Join me at Europe’s biggest and most influential Bitcoin event! Enjoy 10% off your BTC Prague using the code EFRAT.

→ Get 10% off on Augmented NAC to detox the Spike protein, using the code: YCXKQDK2, and this link. (Please note, this is not medical advice and you should consult your MD). Watch the episode with Tina below.

→ Be good to your eyes & health, and get the Daylight tablet - a healthier, more human-friendly computer, zero flicker & zero blue light. Use code EFRAT for $25 off: https://bit.ly/Efrat_daylight

→ Watch “New Totalitarian Order” conference with Prof. Mattias Desmet & Efrat - use code EFRAT for 10% off

→ Get a second citizenship and a plan B to relocate to another country with Expat Money, leave your details for a follow up: https://expatmoney.com/efrat

.

→ Please like, comment, share & follow — to help me beat the suppressing algo’s. Thank you!

Follow Mauricio on Twitter | Visit Ledn

Takeaways:

• Hyperinflation and inflation are not on the same spectrum. Inflation is a rational economic response to an increase in money supply; hyperinflation is an emotional, societal breakdown of trust in every institution at once. When Maduro stole the 2013 elections on national television and started shooting protesters, the price of bread became irrelevant. People were not recalibrating their financial models. They were fleeing.

• In a hyperinflationary environment, your second job becomes more important than your first. Mauricio described payday in Venezuela as the moment workers would beg to leave early so they could convert their wages before the currency lost another chunk of its value by close of business. Saving, in the traditional sense, became the fastest path to poverty.

• The wealthy have always known something that financial advice hides: governments borrow the currency they print, and they are structurally incentivized to devalue it. When the government is short fiat, holding fiat long is working against the biggest player in the game. The people who got ahead in Venezuela were not the ones who saved bolivars. People who knew how to use hyperinflation properly got a massive tail within the fiat world.

• Bitcoin-backed debt and fiat consumer debt are not the same instrument wearing the same name. When your collateral is Bitcoin you already own, you are not wagering future labor against a lender. You are unlocking liquidity from an asset you have already earned. The debt slavery that people rightly fear comes from unsecured credit. It does not come from a loan backed by something you already possess.

• Automated liquidation, which feels cold and mechanical, is actually one of the more honest features of Bitcoin-backed lending. There is no human judgment, no favoritism, no deals made quietly for preferred clients. The rules are known from day one, and the system executes them identically for everyone.

• The Asset-backed securities (ABS) market is not just a funding mechanism. It is the pathway through which Bitcoin lending can scale to match the actual demand for Bitcoin-backed credit. A $1 trillion lending market needs capital sources that run at that depth. The $1.85 trillion US consumer ABS market is one of the few places that can supply it, and Ledn’s S&P investment-grade rating is the key that unlocks the door.

• A mortgage, a yen carry trade, a Bitcoin-backed loan, and a wealthy Venezuelan borrowing bolivars at 24% during 5,000% hyperinflation are all the same trade at different scales. You borrow the currency that someone else can print and hold the asset that nobody can print. The people across history who have built wealth in fiat systems have almost universally done this, while the conventional advice given to everyone else points in the opposite direction.

• Venezuela has been frozen in time since the late 1990s. The cars are from the last economic boom. The skylines have not changed. The colors of the houses are the same. What that physical stasis represents is something more profound than economic stagnation: when people stop believing in their own future, they also stop building, investing, and imagining one.

• What changed in Venezuela on January 3rd was not just political. For the first time in 25 years, the actors who once moved openly against US interests are now publicly distancing themselves from acts of aggression and releasing figures they had imprisoned for decades. The geopolitical ground shifted, and with it, the economic calculus. American Airlines doubled its flights to Caracas. Barquisimeto got its first international flight in decades. Investors are calling Mauricio asking for introductions. These are all signals.

• The debate over whether debt is inherently immoral, as Jimmy Song argued in the debate with Mauricio, misses what he considers the essential question: is it a voluntary transaction between consenting adults? If someone understands that the government will continue debasing fiat and wants to borrow that fiat to hold something the government cannot print, the moral case against that transaction is hard to make.

Connect with me:
Twitter | YouTube | Instagram | Nostr | My podcast | All other links

Sponsors:

Ledn

→ Access liquidity without selling your Bitcoin with Ledn — learn more at https://ledn.io/Efrat

Trezor

→ Get your TREZOR wallet & accessories, with a 5% discount, using my code at checkout (get my discount code from the episode - yep, you’ll have to watch it)

Abundant Mines

→ Have you tried mining bitcoin? Stack sats directly to your wallet while saving on taxes with Abundant Mines. A month of free hosting for my followers:

Special offers:

→ Join me at Europe’s biggest and most influential Bitcoin event! Enjoy 10% off your BTC Prague using the code EFRAT.

→ Get 10% off on Augmented NAC to detox the Spike protein, using the code: YCXKQDK2, and this link. (Please note, this is not medical advice and you should consult your MD). Watch the episode with Tina below.

→ Be good to your eyes & health, and get the Daylight tablet - a healthier, more human-friendly computer, zero flicker & zero blue light. Use code EFRAT for $25 off: https://bit.ly/Efrat_daylight

→ Watch “New Totalitarian Order” conference with Prof. Mattias Desmet & Efrat - use code EFRAT for 10% off

→ Get a second citizenship and a plan B to relocate to another country with Expat Money, leave your details for a follow up: https://expatmoney.com/efrat

Just finished another conference - with a good grassroots Spanish bitcoin community.

I wanted to share a panel I participated in Madrid a few weeks ago, enjoy and please drop a comment & like, yes it helps:

"Bitcoin Is the Answer: Neutral, Censorship-Resistant Money vs. the Failures of Crypto, Gold, and Central Bank Digital Currencies"

Moderator: Kristyna Mazankova – Master in Bitcoin Program Director at Universidad de las Hesperides.
Panelists:
• Efrat Fenigson – Host at ‘You’re the Voice’
• Knut Svanholm – Host at ‘Bitcoin infinity show’
• Remu Karhulah ti – CEO of BTC HEL.”

Next up on my tour - Prague, US, Lugano…
Stay cool, calm & collected, and don’t forget to stack sats.
♥️ Efrat

Connect with me:
Twitter | YouTube | Instagram | Nostr | Podcast | All other links

Latest releases:

Sponsors:

Ledn

→ Access liquidity without selling your Bitcoin with Ledn — learn more at https://ledn.io/Efrat

Trezor

→ Get your TREZOR bitcoin wallet & accessories, with a 5% discount, using my code at checkout (get my code from my podcast episode - yep, you’ll have to watch it)

Abundant Mines

→ Have you tried mining bitcoin? Stack sats directly to your wallet while saving on taxes with Abundant Mines. A month of free hosting for my followers:

Special offers:

→ Join me at Europe’s biggest and most influential Bitcoin event! Enjoy 10% off your BTC Prague using the code EFRAT.

→ Get 10% off on Augmented NAC to detox the Spike protein, using the code: YCXKQDK2, and this link. (Please note, this is not medical advice and you should consult your MD). Watch the episode with Tina below.

→ Be good to your eyes & health, and get the Daylight tablet - a healthier, more human-friendly computer, zero flicker & zero blue light. Use code EFRAT for $25 off: https://bit.ly/Efrat_daylight

→ Watch “New Totalitarian Order” conference with Prof. Mattias Desmet & Efrat - use code EFRAT for 10% off

→ Get a second citizenship and a plan B to relocate to another country with Expat Money, leave your details for a follow up: https://expatmoney.com/efrat

.

→ Please like, comment, share & follow — to help me beat the suppressing algo’s. Thank you!

Follow Paul on Nostr/Primal | Twitter | Instagram | Hummingbird: The Bitcoin Jungle Story

Takeaways:

• The life you truly want starts as a question, not a plan. Paul asked what he would do if he had all the bitcoin in the world and arrived at surfing, building something meaningful, and starting a family. He held that image, things started aligning, and years later that is exactly what his life looks like. Most people never get specific enough to let reality organize itself around the answer.

• Bitcoin circular economies begin with trust and a farmers market. Bitcoin Jungle grew because the right people already trusted each other after Covid, and they happened to start accepting bitcoin together. The infrastructure followed the culture, and the community followed the infrastructure.

• Nostr is Cypherpunk theory finally made usable. The idea of a cryptographic web of trust outside corporate control has been the missing half of Bitcoin’s vision since the 1990s. Nostr is how the internet was supposed to work before gatekeepers hijacked it.

• Every free speech platform that runs on a company’s servers is structurally incapable of being free. The government knocks once and the accounts disappear. I lost years of work on Telegram in a single day. Until the infrastructure is uncensorable, the speech is not free, regardless of what the CEO says.

• Owning your digital identity is going to become as important as owning your money. Just as Bitcoin separates money from state, Nostr separates identity and communication from corporate intermediaries. The private key you hold for Nostr is the same fundamental breakthrough as the private key you hold for Bitcoin.

• New parenthood is a systemic reset. When Paul watched his wife go through labor, the depth of appreciation and connection he felt was something he had never accessed before. A child restructures your understanding of what actually matters.

• What the surveillance tech era demands is better technology built on sovereign principles. Throwing your phone into the ocean changes nothing about the system that created it. The answer is Primal, hardware wallets, and tools like the Daylight Computer: technology that serves the human rather than harvesting them.

• Nostr gives every individual complete control over their own digital neighborhood while taking that power away from corporate moderators. A platform can mute accounts for its own users, but reaching into the protocol to silence anyone everywhere is something no one can do. That asymmetry - individual curation without centralized censorship - is what free speech infrastructure actually looks like.

• We are in the 1990s of digital health. We figured out that seed oils, ultra-processed food, and sedentary living were destroying our bodies. We have not yet fully reckoned with what blue light, addictive algorithms, and screen dependency are doing to our minds and nervous systems.

• Censorship flows from institutional pressure, and centralized platforms will always yield to it. Pavel Durov and Jack Dorsey before him both became instruments of the same system when governments came knocking. The person at the top is ultimately irrelevant; the architecture determines the outcome.

• A new doco called “Hummingbird” comes out soon, telling Bitcoin Jungle’s story in a film, bringing together the spiritual, ecological, and financial dimensions of living on a Bitcoin standard.

Connect with me:
Twitter | YouTube | Instagram | Nostr | My podcast | All other links

Sponsors:

Ledn

→ Access liquidity without selling your Bitcoin with Ledn — learn more at https://ledn.io/Efrat

Trezor

→ Get your TREZOR wallet & accessories, with a 5% discount, using my code at checkout (get my discount code from the episode - yep, you’ll have to watch it)

Abundant Mines

→ Have you tried mining bitcoin? Stack sats directly to your wallet while saving on taxes with Abundant Mines. A month of free hosting for my followers:

Special offers:

→ Join me at Europe’s biggest and most influential Bitcoin event! Enjoy 10% off your BTC Prague using the code EFRAT.

→ Get 10% off on Augmented NAC to detox the Spike protein, using the code: YCXKQDK2, and this link. (Please note, this is not medical advice and you should consult your MD). Watch the episode with Tina below.

→ Be good to your eyes & health, and get the Daylight tablet - a healthier, more human-friendly computer, zero flicker & zero blue light. Use code EFRAT for $25 off: https://bit.ly/Efrat_daylight

→ Watch “New Totalitarian Order” conference with Prof. Mattias Desmet & Efrat - use code EFRAT for 10% off

→ Get a second citizenship and a plan B to relocate to another country with Expat Money, leave your details for a follow up: https://expatmoney.com/efrat

→ Please like, comment, share & follow — to help me beat the suppressing algo’s. Thank you!

Follow Janice on Twitter | AIntivirus’s website

Takeaways:

• Many question marks remain around John’s mysterious death: When someone found breathing and with a heartbeat receives CPR with the ligature still around their neck, we have to ask what was supposed to happen, and who decided. The official account cannot hold together under the weight of what the security footage actually shows. A cell door cracked open while every other door was closed. A body brought into the hallway, treated, then returned to the cell. These details do not fit the story that was told.

• Systems designed to protect us can be weaponized against us the moment we become inconvenient. John’s journey through the Bahamas, Cuba, the Dominican Republic, and Spain was the story of a man with the awareness to stay a step ahead of a system that had decided he needed to be contained.

• Intuition is data. Janice was the one who stressed; John was the one who knew. He had full situational awareness at all times, even inside a prison cell, dictating tweets through eight-minute phone calls. The people who dismissed him as paranoid were wrong about the threat being imaginary. What they called paranoia was, in fact, perception of real danger.

• The way a government treats a man’s death tells you everything about how much it values his life. The prison leaked John’s death to the media before notifying his attorneys. Then they held his body for three years while fighting an appeal.

• Five years of silence is its own kind of answer. When I asked Janice what she feels when people say that John’s still alive, she asked to drop it. It’s too painful. She said she would have heard from John by now if he was alive and had gotten out.

• Love that truly sees you changes you permanently. John found Janice in circumstances that had convinced her she was worth less than she was. She still struggles to understand what he saw in her. That struggle is evidence of how deep the wound had gone, and how complete the transformation. Real love rewrites what you believe you are capable of deserving.

• Grief pointed at a mission becomes force. Janice did not walk away from the fight when John died. She picked up the specific thread he had been working on before his arrest and she is pulling it forward through the Aintivirus Project.

• Bitcoin is transparent by design, and that transparency is both its strength and its vulnerability. The base layer needs visibility for immutability and final settlement. But everyday financial life requires privacy, and privacy requires tools beyond the blockchain. If we do not actively support the builders of those tools, we will face the same visibility that hunted John, and we will have chosen it.

• We are living through a moment of unusual darkness that is being packaged as progress. Scientists disappearing, developers prosecuted for writing code, people being unlived in plain sight. The reason it continues is that those watching have convinced themselves they are not next. That belief has always served power more than it has served people.

Connect with me:
Twitter | YouTube | Instagram | Nostr | My podcast | All other links

Sponsors:

Ledn

→ Access liquidity without selling your Bitcoin with Ledn — learn more at https://ledn.io/Efrat

Trezor

→ Get your TREZOR wallet & accessories, with a 5% discount, using my code at checkout (get my discount code from the episode - yep, you’ll have to watch it)

Abundant Mines

→ Have you tried mining bitcoin? Stack sats directly to your wallet while saving on taxes with Abundant Mines. A month of free hosting for my followers:

Special offers:

→ Join me at Europe’s biggest and most influential Bitcoin event! Enjoy 10% off your BTC Prague using the code EFRAT.

→ Get 10% off on Augmented NAC to detox the Spike protein, using the code: YCXKQDK2, and this link. (Please note, this is not medical advice and you should consult your MD). Watch the episode with Tina below.

→ Be good to your eyes & health, and get the Daylight tablet - a healthier, more human-friendly computer, zero flicker & zero blue light. Use code EFRAT for $25 off: https://bit.ly/Efrat_daylight

→ Watch “New Totalitarian Order” conference with Prof. Mattias Desmet & Efrat - use code EFRAT for 10% off

→ Get a second citizenship and a plan B to relocate to another country with Expat Money, leave your details for a follow up: https://expatmoney.com/efrat

I’m in the midst of my European spring roadshow, and it’s going well but quite challenging! I’m moving between cities every week, preparing presentation, recording and releasing podcasts on the go, meeting people, while ensuring my sleep, sun, food and spiritual habits are kept relatively in tact.

Let me share experiences from 4 places:

1) Block with Mir / Lugano Switzerland

Mir interviewed me when we were in Lugano last year, here’s the fun result
We discussed ”PROFESSIONAL PROOF OF WORK …titles and credentials matter less than your ability to demonstrate value through action, integrity, communication, and authenticity. In Bitcoin, your real résumé is your proof of work.”

2) MAD Bitcoin, Madrid, Spain

Last week in Madrid was really great, here’s my little summary video:

And here’s my rant about why bitcoin is really important. Not as another digital investment asset, but as a freedom enabler. And no, government surveillance is not ok. Click to read the whole rant…

3) With Eddie Hobbs, Dublin, Ireland

I was interviewed by on his show Counterpoint, at the Dublin studio. We talked about Ireland’s Digital ID / CBDC / Internet control, EU’s plans, a bit of Trump, Israel, bitcoin and more. Stay tuned till next week!

4) Porto, Lisbon, Portugal

In between I also visited Porto in Portugal - where I attended a great local meetup with some amazing bitcoiners - lots of educational content was shared:

I also attended the “Free Energy Summit” in Lisbon, organized by my friend Andre Loja from Free Madeira:

And some photos:

Wish me luck in Ireland, Barcelona, Prague etc… drop a comment.
♥️ Efrat

Connect with me:
Twitter | YouTube | Instagram | Nostr | Podcast | All other links

Latest releases:

Sponsors:

Ledn

→ Access liquidity without selling your Bitcoin with Ledn — learn more at https://ledn.io/Efrat

Trezor

→ Get your TREZOR bitcoin wallet & accessories, with a 5% discount, using my code at checkout (get my discount code from the episode - yep, you’ll have to watch it)

Abundant Mines

→ Have you tried mining bitcoin? Stack sats directly to your wallet while saving on taxes with Abundant Mines. A month of free hosting for my followers:

Special offers:

→ Join me at Europe’s biggest and most influential Bitcoin event! Enjoy 10% off your BTC Prague using the code EFRAT.

→ Get 10% off on Augmented NAC to detox the Spike protein, using the code: YCXKQDK2, and this link. (Please note, this is not medical advice and you should consult your MD). Watch the episode with Tina below.

→ Be good to your eyes & health, and get the Daylight tablet - a healthier, more human-friendly computer, zero flicker & zero blue light. Use code EFRAT for $25 off: https://bit.ly/Efrat_daylight

→ Watch “New Totalitarian Order” conference with Prof. Mattias Desmet & Efrat - use code EFRAT for 10% off

→ Get a second citizenship and a plan B to relocate to another country with Expat Money, leave your details for a follow up: https://expatmoney.com/efrat

.

Follow Lyn on Twitter | MACS (Mothers Against Cruel Sentencing)’s website

Takeaways:

• Winning one battle doesn’t end the war. Ross Ulbricht’s pardon was a historic victory, but it exposed a structural reality: the war on crypto was declared over without releasing its prisoners. Bitcoin colleagues are still behind bars, which means every victory that doesn’t address the people left inside is incomplete.

• The social-legal layer of Bitcoin is as critical to its security as its technical architecture. Miners, nodes, and code maintainers protect the protocol technically, but the narratives society holds about Bitcoin and financial privacy are also a layer of the protocol, one that requires the same vigilance and active defense.

• A double life sentence for a first-time nonviolent offender is a product of sentencing practices that have grown increasingly extreme since the drug war began in the 1980s. Ross’s case shocked people because the sentence was too extreme to ignore, and that shock was necessary to build the coalition that eventually freed him.

• The drug war is structurally incentivized to never end. Prisons represent the largest line item in the DOJ’s budget, institutions profit from the incarcerated population, and funding flows in from multiple directions. The people inside that system may individually want reform, but the machinery has too much money running through it to stop easily.

• A sentence meant to reform an individual means nothing when that individual is never given the chance to grow past who they were at 26. Life sentences strip away the possibility of redemption or change, and society ends up paying to cage people who would never offend again. The families pay a cost that doesn’t show up in any budget.

• Prison conditions are so brutal that prisoners prefer the idea of physical torture to serving decades inside. Ross conducted an informal survey asking fellow inmates whether they would choose real physical torture over long-term incarceration. Every single one chose the torture. That is how bad it is in there.

• Incarceration punishes far beyond the individual being sentenced. When a parent goes to prison, the children’s lives unravel, the family fractures, and statistics show those children are more likely to end up incarcerated themselves. The sentence handed to one person quietly sentences an entire family to a different kind of suffering that never appears in any court record.

• Outrage at injustice can be a gift. Sometimes the worst possible outcome creates enough shock to move people into action who would otherwise stay silent. Ross’s sentence was so extreme that it became impossible to ignore, and that extremity ultimately helped build the coalition that freed him. There can be meaning, even purpose, in the worst things.

• The inconsistency within the U.S. justice system is its own form of injustice. States decriminalizing and legalizing cannabis while federal prisoners serve life sentences for the same substance is a mirror held up to a system where justice depends entirely on jurisdiction, timing, and who you happen to be.

• Mothers don’t leave. Ross observed in prison that across all family members, it was nearly always mothers who never abandoned their incarcerated children. Lyn didn’t frame that as a strategy when naming MACS. She framed it as witnessing the deepest form of loyalty that exists, and building around it.

• One ordinary person acting on faith can move mountains that institutions refuse to touch. Lyn describes herself as a nobody who kept going, who barged in on a president during dinner, who woke up years before the pardon hearing the words ‘he will be free.’ Ross’s pardon proves that the odds against any individual making that kind of difference are very real, and that the miracle can still happen.

• Winning the pardon created an obligation, not a finish line. The skills, platform, and network Lyn built to free Ross don’t disappear when he walks out the gate. She turned all of it toward the people who are still inside, because she now understands exactly what it costs to stay and what it costs to finally leave.

Connect with me:
Twitter | YouTube | Instagram | Nostr | My podcast | All other links

Sponsors:

Ledn

→ Access liquidity without selling your Bitcoin with Ledn — learn more at https://ledn.io/Efrat

Trezor

→ Get your TREZOR wallet & accessories, with a 5% discount, using my code at checkout (get my discount code from the episode - yep, you’ll have to watch it)

Abundant Mines

→ Have you tried mining bitcoin? Stack sats directly to your wallet while saving on taxes with Abundant Mines. A month of free hosting for my followers:

Special offers:

→ Join me at Europe’s biggest and most influential Bitcoin event! Enjoy 10% off your BTC Prague using the code EFRAT.

→ Get 10% off on Augmented NAC to detox the Spike protein, using the code: YCXKQDK2, and this link. (Please note, this is not medical advice and you should consult your MD). Watch the episode with Tina below.

→ Be good to your eyes & health, and get the Daylight tablet - a healthier, more human-friendly computer, zero flicker & zero blue light. Use code EFRAT for $25 off: https://bit.ly/Efrat_daylight

→ Watch “New Totalitarian Order” conference with Prof. Mattias Desmet & Efrat - use code EFRAT for 10% off

→ Get a second citizenship and a plan B to relocate to another country with Expat Money, leave your details for a follow up: https://expatmoney.com/efrat

There is a particular kind of cowardice dressed up in respectable clothes. It wears the face of politeness. Of staying in your lane. Of not wanting to cause trouble, not wanting to lose friends, not wanting to be the one who makes things awkward at the dinner table.

And it’s destroying us.

I’ve watched people witness fraud and say nothing. I’ve watched professionals nod along to policies they knew were wrong. I’ve watched entire communities look away while their neighbors were being crushed, by corrupt systems, by captured institutions, by outright lies dressed up as public health, public safety, public good. The machinery of control doesn’t just rely on enforcers. It relies on bystanders. It needs your silence. It counts on it.

Simon & Garfunkel wrote about this in 1964. “Silence like a cancer grows” - four words that have aged into prophecy. They were writing about a society so seduced by comfort and spectacle that it had forgotten how to speak. How to really speak. Not perform, not signal, not post, but stand up, tell the truth, and accept the consequences.

That was sixty years ago. Look around.

We are living through a period of coordinated, institutionalized deception on a scale most people still can’t bring themselves to name out loud. The financial system is built on debt that can never be repaid. The health system spent years prioritizing compliance over care and turning sickness into a business model. Governments surveil their own populations and call it safety. Platforms silence doctors, journalists, and ordinary people and call it moderation and safety. And most people, educated, decent, well-meaning people, said nothing. Some because they are scared. Some because they genuinely don’t know. And some because knowing is uncomfortable, and comfort is addictive.

Silence is never neutral. Every time a person who knows the truth chooses not to say it, they hand a little more power to the people who are lying. Every time someone watches something wrong happen and looks away, they make it easier for it to happen again. The absence of resistance is a form of consent, whether we intend it that way or not.

What we need right now, urgently, are people willing to be inconvenient. Willing to be unpopular. Willing to lose something. Whistleblowers. Truth-tellers. The colleague who won’t sign off on the report they know is falsified. The doctor who won’t prescribe what they know is harmful. The journalist who won’t kill the story. The ordinary person who refuses to pretend they didn’t see what they saw, who won’t turn a blind eye to violence, war crimes, and the extortion of fellow human beings.

This is a call for courage, the specific, unglamorous kind that shows up in small moments: the email you send anyway, the question you ask in the meeting, the post you publish knowing half your audience will push back.

Freedom and dignity are preserved by people. By individuals who decide that their integrity is worth more than their comfort, and that the future they want to live in is worth building, even when building it is hard.

Silence is a choice. And every day it continues, it compounds.

In the song (below) Paul Simon warns the crowd and tries to reach them, but his words fall like silent raindrops into empty wells. That image has stayed with me. Because that’s what it feels like to speak when most people are afraid to join, or aren’t ready to hear. And yet the speaking still matters. It plants something.

“Fools” said I, “You do not know
Silence like a cancer grows
Hear my words that I might teach you
Take my arms that I might reach you”
But my words like silent raindrops fell
And echoed in the wells of silence

Every generation gets a moment where silence becomes a verdict. This is ours.

Listen to this remake by Disturbed.

“The Sound of Silence”

Paul Simon, Simon & Garfunkel, 1964.

Hello darkness, my old friend
I’ve come to talk with you again
Because a vision softly creeping
Left its seeds while I was sleeping
And the vision that was planted in my brain
Still remains
Within the sound of silence

In restless dreams I walked alone
Narrow streets of cobblestone
‘Neath the halo of a street lamp
I turned my collar to the cold and damp
When my eyes were stabbed by the flash of a neon light
That split the night
And touched the sound of silence

And in the naked light I saw
Ten thousand people, maybe more
People talking without speaking
People hearing without listening
People writing songs that voices never share
No one dared
Disturb the sound of silence

“Fools” said I, “You do not know
Silence like a cancer grows
Hear my words that I might teach you
Take my arms that I might reach you”
But my words like silent raindrops fell
And echoed in the wells of silence

And the people bowed and prayed
To the neon god they made
And the sign flashed out its warning
In the words that it was forming

And the sign said, “The words of the prophets
Are written on the subway walls
And tenement halls
And whispered in the sounds of silence”

Source: LyricFind

Share this on X and Nostr:

Feel free to share your thoughts in the comment section.
♥️ Efrat

Connect with me:
Twitter | YouTube | Instagram | Nostr | Podcast | All other links

Latest releases:

Sponsors:

Ledn

→ Access liquidity without selling your Bitcoin with Ledn — learn more at https://ledn.io/Efrat

Trezor

→ Get your TREZOR bitcoin wallet & accessories, with a 5% discount, using my code at checkout (get my discount code from the episode - yep, you’ll have to watch it)

Abundant Mines

→ Have you tried mining bitcoin? Stack sats directly to your wallet while saving on taxes with Abundant Mines. A month of free hosting for my followers:

Special offers:

→ Join me at Europe’s biggest and most influential Bitcoin event! Enjoy 10% off your BTC Prague using the code EFRAT.

→ Get 10% off on Augmented NAC to detox the Spike protein, using the code: YCXKQDK2, and this link. (Please note, this is not medical advice and you should consult your MD). Watch the episode with Tina below.

→ Be good to your eyes & health, and get the Daylight tablet - a healthier, more human-friendly computer, zero flicker & zero blue light. Use code EFRAT for $25 off: https://bit.ly/Efrat_daylight

→ Watch “New Totalitarian Order” conference with Prof. Mattias Desmet & Efrat - use code EFRAT for 10% off

→ Get a second citizenship and a plan B to relocate to another country with Expat Money, leave your details for a follow up: https://expatmoney.com/efrat

.

Follow Hakeem on Twitter & Substack | Take Back Our Tech’s website | Digital ID Report

Take Back Our Tech

Let's use technology that doesn't use us. We are an educational movement & community. Together we'll learn about friendly technology and how to use it effectively across many areas. Desktop, web, mobile, hardware, communications, and much more!

Takeaways:

• “Voluntary” is a word governments use to normalize something they plan to make mandatory. India’s Aadhaar was “voluntary” too until you couldn’t rent an apartment or open a bank account without it. They never need to pass a law forcing you. They just wait until enough people are in the system, and then exclusion does the work for them.

• The global digital ID rollout is one interoperable infrastructure built on shared standards. W3C Verifiable Credentials and ISO 18013-5 mean the profile your government builds on you does not stay in your country. It follows you across borders. The biometric check at the airport is the system working exactly as designed.

• Losing your Social Security number is recoverable. Losing your biometric identity is something else entirely. You can change a password. You cannot change your face. Once your legal identity is linked to your biometrics, you have not just signed up for a convenience app, you have made yourself permanently legible to any system connected to that infrastructure - forever.

• The most dangerous moment in any surveillance rollout is when the technology runs ahead of the law. The privacy protections for digital ID have not been written yet and the system is already being built. By the time legislation exists to protect you, your data will have been flowing for years.

• The question “where do I go to escape this?” is the wrong question. The rollout is everywhere, no country has opted out. The better question is: what layer of this system can I refuse to participate in, and how do I build local relationships that do not require it? Community is the one infrastructure that surveillance systems cannot fully replicate.

• Big Tech phones are not just data collection devices, they are control points. Google and Apple hold the signing keys to every app on their stores. That means any application you depend on for freedom like encrypted messaging, Bitcoin wallets, decentralized tools, can be removed from your device at any time, without your consent. The device is the chokepoint, and most people have handed it over without realizing it.

• End-to-end encryption is only as strong as the device running it. Communicating through Signal on a phone that logs your keystrokes gives you the theater of privacy, not the substance of it. Privacy is a stack. The protocol, the app, and the hardware all have to be trustworthy, or the weakest link defeats everything else.

• The fact that a privacy tool receives government funding should make you more curious, not more comfortable. It does not mean the tool is compromised, but it is a reason to keep looking, keep asking, and never treat any single solution as the final answer. In the freedom stack, trust is earned incrementally and tested over time.

• When age verification moves to the operating system level, it is not about protecting children, it’s about building the mechanism to tie your digital identity to every piece of software you run. Self-report is just the opening move. The end state is “sign in with your digital ID,” and the big OS makers will be happy to comply.

• Bitcoin taught me something I now apply to everything: when a platform kicks you out, it’s an invitation to find the better protocol underneath. Every time censorship found me - Stripe, Telegram, Substack - I found an alternative that did not need my compliance. The friction of exclusion is exactly what forces you toward real sovereignty.

• Nostr is what self-sovereign identity was always supposed to be before governments co-opted the phrase. When you own your private key on Nostr, your followers, your social graph, and your content travel with you wherever you go. No platform can delete you from the protocol. That architecture is the antidote, not the alternative.

• There is a small window, probably until 2027, before age verification and biometric requirements become baked into the hardware and operating systems most people use. The people who migrate their devices, communication, and identity to open protocols now will have real optionality. The people who wait will face a much harder transition from inside a system that already knows exactly who they are.

Connect with me:
Twitter | YouTube | Instagram | Nostr | My podcast | All other links

Sponsors:

Ledn

→ Access liquidity without selling your Bitcoin with Ledn — learn more at https://ledn.io/Efrat

Trezor

→ Get your TREZOR wallet & accessories, with a 5% discount, using my code at checkout (get my discount code from the episode - yep, you’ll have to watch it)

Abundant Mines

→ Have you tried mining bitcoin? Stack sats directly to your wallet while saving on taxes with Abundant Mines. A month of free hosting for my followers:

Special offers:

→ Join me at Europe’s biggest and most influential Bitcoin event! Enjoy 10% off your BTC Prague using the code EFRAT.

→ Get 10% off on Augmented NAC to detox the Spike protein, using the code: YCXKQDK2, and this link. (Please note, this is not medical advice and you should consult your MD). Watch the episode with Tina below.

→ Be good to your eyes & health, and get the Daylight tablet - a healthier, more human-friendly computer, zero flicker & zero blue light. Use code EFRAT for $25 off: https://bit.ly/Efrat_daylight

→ Watch “New Totalitarian Order” conference with Prof. Mattias Desmet & Efrat - use code EFRAT for 10% off

→ Get a second citizenship and a plan B to relocate to another country with Expat Money, leave your details for a follow up: https://expatmoney.com/efrat

Lauren Rodriguez is the wife of Keonne Rodriguez, co-developer of Samourai Wallet, who was arrested and imprisoned by the DOJ for writing non-custodial, open-source Bitcoin privacy software. Since Keonne’s arrest, Lauren has become the relentless voice of the case, speaking publicly, coordinating the community push for a presidential pardon, and keeping the story alive through media, petitions, and outreach. In this episode, recorded live at Bitcoin Conference 2026, we unpack what Samourai Wallet built, why the DOJ’s prosecution hid exculpatory evidence and sets a chilling precedent for every developer & affects all protocol participants.

→ Please like, comment, share & follow — to help me beat the suppressing algo’s. Thank you!

Follow Lauren: Twitter

Sign the petition & donate: https://billandkeonne.org/

Watch our panel from Vegas 2026 here

Watch our panel from Bitcoin Vegas 2026, and Keonne’s episode:

Takeaways:

• When prosecutors hide exculpatory evidence, they expose their own motive. If the government truly believed in its case against Keonne, it would have had no reason to conceal evidence. The concealment is the confession that this prosecution was never about truth or justice.

• Writing code for a non-custodial tool is categorically different from operating a financial institution. The DOJ applied regulations designed for banks and Western Unions to a software developer who never held a single satoshi. That category error either reflects a fundamental misunderstanding of the technology, or a deliberate strategy to set a sweeping precedent that rewrites who is responsible for how their tools are used.

• Regulatory guidance that explicitly says you are compliant can still become the basis for a criminal prosecution. Keonne followed FinCEN’s 2013 and 2019 guidelines, in black and white, and was charged anyway. Compliance is not the same as safety when the government decides to reinterpret its own rules retroactively.

• Financial privacy in Bitcoin is treated as suspicious while identical privacy in the legacy banking system is considered standard. The same level of transactional privacy that your bank account has by default becomes forbidden when applied to Bitcoin. That double standard was built deliberately, and the Samourai case is its sharpest expression yet.

• The psychological toll of wrongful imprisonment is distinct from ordinary incarceration. When you know you do not belong there, and when a pardon feels perpetually imminent, you cannot simply buckle down and do the time. The limbo between hope and reality is its own cruelty layered on top of an unjust conviction, and Keonne is living that every day.

• Rights that go undefended quietly become privileges. Covid demonstrated how rapidly freedoms can be surrendered by a compliant majority. Bitcoin financial privacy is on the same trajectory, accepted as normal one decade, criminalized the next. The people who care have to stand up, or else they get overrun.

• Keeping someone’s story alive while they are in prison is a must. As Ross Ulbricht once told Lauren, even after a five-year sentence people slowly forget you because you are not present. The media campaign Lauren is running is the mechanism that keeps political pressure from evaporating while Keonne sits in a cell.

• The DOJ’s novel legal theory in the Samourai case extends risk far beyond the two developers charged. Miners, lightning node operators, and relay operators are all potentially vulnerable under the same precedent. A case that looks like it is about one wallet is actually about the entire Bitcoin infrastructure and the developers who maintain it.

• Code is speech. That principle was established at the Supreme Court level in the 1990s. Using code-writing as the basis for a criminal prosecution implicates the First Amendment, the Fourth Amendment, and due process rights simultaneously. The Samourai case is not just a Bitcoin story. It is a civil liberties story that reaches anyone who writes software in America.

• Small individual actions aggregate into real political force. Posting about the case, donating, signing a petition, writing a letter to Keonne in prison, mentioning it to one non-Bitcoin friend: none of these feel like enough on their own. But the entire campaign keeping this case alive is made of exactly those small actions, stacked.

• Keonne’s letters from prison, called Notes from the Inside, are doing something the legal case cannot: maintaining his humanity in the public mind. A name on an indictment fades. A voice that writes vivid, funny accounts of life behind bars stays present. The letters are both an act of connection and a quiet act of resistance.

Connect with me:
Twitter | YouTube | Instagram | Nostr | My podcast | All other links

Sponsors:

Ledn

→ Access liquidity without selling your Bitcoin with Ledn — learn more at https://ledn.io/Efrat

Trezor

→ Get your TREZOR wallet & accessories, with a 5% discount, using my code at checkout (get my discount code from the episode - yep, you’ll have to watch it)

Abundant Mines

→ Have you tried mining bitcoin? Stack sats directly to your wallet while saving on taxes with Abundant Mines. A month of free hosting for my followers:

Special offers:

→ Join me at Europe’s biggest and most influential Bitcoin event! Enjoy 10% off your BTC Prague using the code EFRAT.

→ Get 10% off on Augmented NAC to detox the Spike protein, using the code: YCXKQDK2, and this link. (Please note, this is not medical advice and you should consult your MD). Watch the episode with Tina below.

→ Be good to your eyes & health, and get the Daylight tablet - a healthier, more human-friendly computer, zero flicker & zero blue light. Use code EFRAT for $25 off: https://bit.ly/Efrat_daylight

→ Watch “New Totalitarian Order” conference with Prof. Mattias Desmet & Efrat - use code EFRAT for 10% off

→ Get a second citizenship and a plan B to relocate to another country with Expat Money, leave your details for a follow up: https://expatmoney.com/efrat

* Note to clarify what Matyas meant about MiCA regulation: While MiCA does not directly regulate merchants, its travel rule requirements effectively forced third-party Bitcoin payment processors — e.g. Confirmo & Qerko — to treat fiat conversion as a financial service, requiring them to KYC every customer. Since they aren’t complying, these processors stopped supporting merchant Bitcoin payments, and since most merchants relied on them rather than managing self-custody, they stop accepting Bitcoin altogether.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​

→ Please like, comment, share & subscribe — to help me beat the suppressing algo’s. Thank you!

Follow Matyas: Twitter | BTC Prague’s website

Takeaways:

• When a monetary system fails its people for long enough, working around it becomes culture. Czechs spent decades finding currency loopholes under communism, quietly exchanging forbidden foreign notes on the street because that was the only rational thing to do. That inherited distrust of centralized money is the exact mindset that makes a country Bitcoin-ready before the rest of Europe has even asked the question.

• When a European central bank governor buys Bitcoin, even experimentally, even a million dollars worth, a spell is broken. The ECB’s furious response to the Czech National Bank’s move was the reaction of an institution that knows its monopoly on monetary orthodoxy is cracking. The cracks always start at the edges.

• Czech citizens did not need an abstract argument against adopting the euro. They watched Slovakia take it, and they watched bread prices double overnight while salaries barely moved. The orange-pill sometimes arrives not through a podcast or a book, but through watching your neighbor get wrecked by the same trap you almost walked into.

• A small group of Czech Bitcoiners once sat in a room and sketched out legislation most thought was Mission Impossible. Three years later it passed unanimously, with zero votes against. The crypto-anarchists who wrote off that effort as a waste of time were wrong. Every layer of defense matters.

• The digital euro CBDC is not merely surveillance money. The architecture being built allows authorities to restrict which goods you can purchase, not just track that you purchased them. The danger is not only that they will see everything. The danger is that what they can see, they can eventually block. Monetary independence is a sovereignty buffer that eurozone countries have already lost. The Czech Republic retained its own currency, and that single fact allowed its central bank to experiment with Bitcoin on its balance sheet while the ECB was still having a panic attack over the idea. Countries that gave up their currencies signed away the ability to move differently when it matters most.

• Privacy was never a default feature of Bitcoin. It has to be added as a second layer and actively defended. The transparent base layer exists for a reason: it is what makes trustless settlement across a global network possible. But transparency at the foundation does not mean privacy is unattainable. It means privacy requires intention. If you want curtains, you have to hang them yourself.

• Arresting developers for writing privacy software is a precedent that threatens the tools of freedom themselves. The prosecution of Samourai Wallet and Tornado Cash developers signals that governments are willing to treat the act of giving people options as a crime. If the community does not fight these cases loudly and publicly, those precedents calcify into the foundation of the next system.

• Real-world trust networks are becoming one of the most undervalued forms of sovereignty infrastructure. As deepfakes, algorithmic manipulation, and AI-generated noise make online information increasingly impossible to verify, knowing people in the physical world who you can actually call and cross-check with is a form of resilience. Bitcoin conferences are places where trust bridges get built.

• The Bitcoiner ethos naturally expands beyond money once the financial foundation is in place. The same logic that leads someone to self-custody their Bitcoin, to think in decades, and to distrust centralized intermediaries, extends naturally to health, education, communication, food production, and community.

• Staying and building is a choice with consequences as real as leaving. The temptation to move somewhere more favorable is understandable. Matyas nearly left the Czech Republic entirely. But the legislative wins gave him enough hope to stay and build, and the people who stay are the ones who shape what the next version of a place looks like. Flight is a valid strategy. But so is standing your ground.

Connect with me:
Twitter | YouTube | Instagram | Nostr | My podcast | All other links

Sponsors:

Ledn

→ Access liquidity without selling your Bitcoin with Ledn — learn more at https://ledn.io/Efrat

Trezor

→ Get your TREZOR wallet & accessories, with a 5% discount, using my code at checkout (get my discount code from the episode - yep, you’ll have to watch it)

Abundant Mines

→ Have you tried mining bitcoin? Stack sats directly to your wallet while saving on taxes with Abundant Mines. A month of free hosting for my followers:

Special offers:

→ Join me at Europe’s biggest and most influential Bitcoin event! Enjoy 10% off your BTC Prague using the code EFRAT.

→ Get 10% off on Augmented NAC to detox the Spike protein, using the code: YCXKQDK2, and this link. (Please note, this is not medical advice and you should consult your MD). Watch the episode with Tina below.

→ Be good to your eyes & health, and get the Daylight tablet - a healthier, more human-friendly computer, zero flicker & zero blue light. Use code EFRAT for $25 off: https://bit.ly/Efrat_daylight

→ Watch “New Totalitarian Order” conference with Prof. Mattias Desmet & Efrat - use code EFRAT for 10% off

→ Get a second citizenship and a plan B to relocate to another country with Expat Money, leave your details for a follow up: https://expatmoney.com/efrat

→ Please like, comment, share & subscribe — to help me beat the suppressing algo’s. Thank you!

Follow Hodl on Nostr

Takeaways:

• Privacy was a historical accident. Every ruler throughout history would have weaponized mass surveillance if the technology allowed. What we are living through now is the closing of a brief structural window. The default condition of power is always to know, and now it finally can.

• Opting out of surveillance does not make you safe. It makes you a target. In a world where everyone is mapped, the dark spot draws more attention than the data point. True privacy is only meaningful at scale, which is why Bitcoin and related tools must become widespread to be effective, rather than staying reserved for the vigilant few.

• The surveillance state does not need to be openly tyrannical to function. It only needs to stay opaque enough that most people do not care. By the time the system becomes visibly monstrous, when it is being used to sort people in ways nobody can ignore, the infrastructure to resist it will already be in place and well-practiced.

• Bitcoin culture faces a genuine strategic paradox without a clean answer. Engaging with the state compromises your principles, but hiding from it may get you crushed. Both approaches are necessary. The internal fighting about which one is ‘right’ wastes energy that should go toward the actual problem.

• Bitcoin is structurally resistant to capture in a way that no political decision can permanently override. Even if lawmakers or institutions try to subsume it, the technical properties of the network make sustained capture nearly impossible. The real insurance policy is not goodwill from governments. It is the code and the people quietly building on top of it.

• Calm in turbulent times does not come from knowing the path. It comes from knowing the destination. American Hodl has known for years that Bitcoin was going to win. He just does not know the exact route. Staying curious about the how rather than anxious about the what is a sustainable way to move through a world visibly on fire.

• The Samourai Wallet prosecution revealed something fundamental about where financial privacy law is heading. In America, if something is not explicitly illegal, it is legal, or should be. Criminalizing developers for writing privacy tools sets a precedent that treats the act of building sovereign infrastructure as evidence of criminal intent.

• Generation Z is simultaneously more aware and more confused than any prior generation. They arrived at the internet when it was already a vortex rather than a blank canvas for exploration. They carry more raw information and fewer tools for evaluating it. The work of parenting in this era is not to supply answers. It is to model the process of questioning, including teaching children to question the parent.

• Speaking truth out loud, not just thinking it privately, is one of the most consequential acts available to a person. The lies we tell ourselves accumulate into deadwood that makes forward movement impossible. Burning it down is painful because it was built over years. The path that opens on the other side leads somewhere real.

Connect with me:
Twitter | YouTube | Instagram | Nostr | My podcast | All other links

Sponsors:

Ledn

→ Access liquidity without selling your Bitcoin with Ledn — learn more at https://ledn.io/Efrat

Trezor

→ Get your TREZOR wallet & accessories, with a 5% discount, using my code at checkout (get my discount code from the episode - yep, you’ll have to watch it)

Abundant Mines

→ Have you tried mining bitcoin? Stack sats directly to your wallet while saving on taxes with Abundant Mines. A month of free hosting for my followers:

Special offers:

→ Join me at Europe’s biggest and most influential Bitcoin event! Enjoy 10% off your BTC Prague using the code EFRAT.

→ Get 10% off on Augmented NAC to detox the Spike protein, using the code: YCXKQDK2, and this link. (Please note, this is not medical advice and you should consult your MD). Watch the episode with Tina below.

→ Be good to your eyes & health, and get the Daylight tablet - a healthier, more human-friendly computer, zero flicker & zero blue light. Use code EFRAT for $25 off: https://bit.ly/Efrat_daylight

→ Watch “New Totalitarian Order” conference with Prof. Mattias Desmet & Efrat - use code EFRAT for 10% off

→ Get a second citizenship and a plan B to relocate to another country with Expat Money, leave your details for a follow up: https://expatmoney.com/efrat

Susie’s post echos with me, give it a quick read:

I recommend watching these talks:

Connect with me:
Twitter | YouTube | Instagram | Nostr | My podcast | All other links

Sponsors:

Ledn

→ Access liquidity without selling your Bitcoin with Ledn — learn more at https://ledn.io/Efrat

Trezor

→ Get your TREZOR wallet & accessories, with a 5% discount, using my code at checkout (get my discount code from the episode - yep, you’ll have to watch it)

Abundant Mines

→ Have you tried mining bitcoin? Stack sats directly to your wallet while saving on taxes with Abundant Mines. A month of free hosting for my followers:

Special offers:

→ Join me at Europe’s biggest and most influential Bitcoin event! Enjoy 10% off your BTC Prague using the code EFRAT.

→ Get 10% off on Augmented NAC to detox the Spike protein, using the code: YCXKQDK2, and this link. (Please note, this is not medical advice and you should consult your MD). Watch the episode with Tina below.

→ Be good to your eyes & health, and get the Daylight tablet - a healthier, more human-friendly computer, zero flicker & zero blue light. Use code EFRAT for $25 off: https://bit.ly/Efrat_daylight

→ Watch “New Totalitarian Order” conference with Prof. Mattias Desmet & Efrat - use code EFRAT for 10% off

→ Get a second citizenship and a plan B to relocate to another country with Expat Money, leave your details for a follow up: https://expatmoney.com/efrat

I’m still recovering from a super busy week in Vegas, at the world’s largest Bitcoin conference.

The panel I moderated is now released, please watch it, like, comment and please please SHARE it. It is SO important to keep the pressure on, and get Keonne & Bill pardoned, and support the legacy of the legendary John McAfee. Lyn, Ross Ulbricht mother, inspires everyone to never give up. Watch and share:

Share this on X please:

Watch my interview with Keonne Rodriguez before he went to prison:

Check out the 8 interviews I recorded for the podcast, stay tuned they’ll be released soon! Click this Twitter thread to see all 8 guests:

What do you think about the panel?
Please comment, like and share. In this case it matters so much.
I’m so grateful to be given this opportunity to raise awareness to these cases and topics.
♥️ Efrat

Connect with me:
Twitter | YouTube | Instagram | Nostr | Podcast | All other links

Latest releases:

Sponsors:

Camp Nakamoto

→ Join me at Camp Nakamoto, a family-friendly Bitcoin retreat on a private island in New Hampshire, June 18–21. Code EFRAT for 15% off: https://www.campnakamoto.com/

Ledn

→ Access liquidity without selling your Bitcoin with Ledn — learn more at https://ledn.io/Efrat

Trezor

→ Get your TREZOR bitcoin wallet & accessories, with a 5% discount, using my code at checkout (get my discount code from the episode - yep, you’ll have to watch it)

Abundant Mines

→ Have you tried mining bitcoin? Stack sats directly to your wallet while saving on taxes with Abundant Mines. A month of free hosting for my followers:

Special offers:

→ Join me at Europe’s biggest and most influential Bitcoin event! Enjoy 10% off your BTC Prague using the code EFRAT.

→ Get 10% off on Augmented NAC to detox the Spike protein, using the code: YCXKQDK2, and this link. (Please note, this is not medical advice and you should consult your MD). Watch the episode with Tina below.

→ Be good to your eyes & health, and get the Daylight tablet - a healthier, more human-friendly computer, zero flicker & zero blue light. Use code EFRAT for $25 off: https://bit.ly/Efrat_daylight

→ Watch “New Totalitarian Order” conference with Prof. Mattias Desmet & Efrat - use code EFRAT for 10% off

→ Get a second citizenship and a plan B to relocate to another country with Expat Money, leave your details for a follow up: https://expatmoney.com/efrat

.

Two pieces of content for your early morning coffee ☕:

1. “Freedom Go Up” - a name I gave the twitter space I spoke in this morning, prior to Bitcoin 2026 in Vegas: I spoke about Pardoning Samourai, and the US potential of being a beacon of light and preserving freedom and privacy - as the American forefathers intended. Also touched on CBDCs, agenda 2030, digital ID, the controlled demolition of the old world order and ushering in a new one.
   Listen to the recording here:

2. “They Control Your Money” - A live conversation I had on the “Daily Stack”, about passive investments via bitcoin mining, AI, global agendas, free speech, CBDCs vs Bitcoin, and more.
   Follow The Daily Stack, now on Nostr too.

Clips:

3. Join me in Vegas for these sessions!

—

Let me know your thoughts?
Have a great day and go touch grass,
♥️ Efrat

Connect with me:
Twitter | YouTube | Instagram | Nostr | Podcast | All other links

Latest releases:

Sponsors:

Camp Nakamoto

→ Join me at Camp Nakamoto, a family-friendly Bitcoin retreat on a private island in New Hampshire, June 18–21. Code EFRAT for 15% off: https://www.campnakamoto.com/

Ledn

→ Access liquidity without selling your Bitcoin with Ledn — learn more at https://ledn.io/Efrat

Trezor

→ Get your TREZOR bitcoin wallet & accessories, with a 5% discount, using my code at checkout (get my discount code from the episode - yep, you’ll have to watch it)

Abundant Mines

→ Have you tried mining bitcoin? Stack sats directly to your wallet while saving on taxes with Abundant Mines. A month of free hosting for my followers:

Special offers:

→ Join me at Europe’s biggest and most influential Bitcoin event! Enjoy 10% off your BTC Prague using the code EFRAT.

→ Get 10% off on Augmented NAC to detox the Spike protein, using the code: YCXKQDK2, and this link. (Please note, this is not medical advice and you should consult your MD). Watch the episode with Tina below.

→ Be good to your eyes & health, and get the Daylight tablet - a healthier, more human-friendly computer, zero flicker & zero blue light. Use code EFRAT for $25 off: https://bit.ly/Efrat_daylight

→ Watch “New Totalitarian Order” conference with Prof. Mattias Desmet & Efrat - use code EFRAT for 10% off

→ Get a second citizenship and a plan B to relocate to another country with Expat Money, leave your details for a follow up: https://expatmoney.com/efrat

.