Read_890 - Executed For a Twitter Post... [FFR77]

[00:00:00] The country's top court upheld his death sentence from 2018, when Al Jasser was convicted of terrorism and treason. [00:00:09] At the time, the regime accused al Jasser of criticizing the Saudi royal family and posting about state corruption via an anonymous Twitter account. Officials held his trial entirely in secret. [00:00:22] Civil society groups say the charges were trumped up and tied to his activism. Al Jasser had previously written about the Arab Spring, women's rights and government corruption. He was executed Saturday, June 14, 2025, for what he posted on Twitter. [00:00:40] The best in Bitcoin made Audible I am Guy Swan and this is Bitcoin Aud Foreign what is up, guys? Welcome back to Bitcoin Audible. I am Guy Swan, the guy who has read more about bitcoin than anybody else. You know, we are digging into a bunch of news items today. I had actually intended to collect. I have a bunch of things saved from some recent freedom financial freedom reports from the hrf. But then I finally caught up and I read number 77, which is the one we're going to read today, and there were so many things that I wanted to comment on. I was like, crap. I am not. There's no way I can pack this all into one episode. So I was like, all right, I'll just make this a re. I intended on this being a guy's take. Then I was like, no, I'll just, we'll read through the Freedom report really quick and then I'll just do like a one hour take on everything. And you know, one of the things about this publication is just perspective, man. [00:01:51] Like, holy crap. [00:01:54] The degree to which it's also, it's part the whole like, you know, check your financial privilege and check your, you know, Western privilege that we get to complain about the things that we get to complain about. But then there's also, there's also an element of, like, how quickly these things can steamroll against us. [00:02:17] Like that you do not give an inch because when you partially compromise on core principles, all you do is dilute the message that allows you to defend the principles going forward. It's easier to give up the next two inches after you've given up one. And the number of people who have now spent years in prison in the UK for things that they posted on Twitter, including the guy who was making funny videos of his dog going Heil Hitler. When nobody with three warm brain cells would take it seriously. It was supposed to be funny. [00:02:55] We are headed in the wrong direction. [00:02:58] So much is headed in the wrong direction at the exact same time that things are headed in the right direction, as I've tried to describe. And the picture that I see when I, when I, when I'm trying to understand what's happening to the world, I see these, this massive divergence where the establishment and the old traditional systems are having to get worse and worse just to maintain their, their degree of power and their, their center, the narrative that they run on. And then there is also this kind of decentralized noster bitcoin like this whole other world that's happening and they are at odds with each other. And actually the conversation we had with ck, I love the way he put it, is that if the old system isn't fighting you, you're not actually making, you're not actually in a paradigm shift. That was a really great conversation, by the way, if you haven't watched it. But we're going to hit the Freedom Report from HRF today, which the show is also brought to you by hrf. These I huge respect for these guys and what they do. And we are also supported by Synonym makers of the BitKit mobile wallet as well as the Pub key stack, which I think is actually a the reason I am interested in this project because I think it's such a critical piece of how we might solve these problems. And then lastly, Chroma, you can find them at getchroma Co. The link is right down in the show notes. And this is all about recovery and light health and hormone health, which for the people who are sitting in front of a freaking screen all day like me, it has made a world of difference for me and I highly recommend it. And you got a 10% discount with code, Bitcoin, audible. All the links and details are run in the show notes. And with that, let's go ahead and get into today's read. And it's titled the HRF's Financial Freedom Report. Number 77 June 19, 2025 Good Morning Readers. We begin this week in El Salvador, where President Nayib Bukele's ruling party officially passed a sweeping foreign agents law. The legislation targets NDOs, journalists and change makers who receive any international funding, imposing a 30% tax and burdensome financial reporting requirements. The law risks hampering independent media, civil society and organizations providing checks on state power. [00:05:15] Meanwhile, in Havana, Cuba, university students launched a rare academic strike after the government's telecom monopoly sharply raised mobile data rates. The hike effectively prices out a generation of young Cubans from the Internet, turning a basic tool for communication and education into into a luxury. Their protest has become a flashpoint for broader frustrations with Cuba's collapsing currency and deepening digital repression in Open source. News SeedSigner the DIY Bitcoin hardware for self custody added support for right to left languages like Arabic and Persian, expanding Bitcoin access for billions. This upgrade came from real Collaboration at the 17th annual Oslo Freedom Forum, where ideas between activists and builders became tools for freedom. [00:06:00] We also highlight P2P band, a new tool that helps people worldwide find and connect with others to trade Bitcoin peer to peer over nostr. We end with an interview between Bitcoin developer and educator Lisa Nygut, Nifty Nye and one of the first Twitter developers, Ravel, who discusses building on nostr, decentralized social media and the future of agentic programming. We also feature a new joint publication between HRF and the Signal, which which explores the global battle over money and assets between dictators and dissidents. [00:06:33] Now let's see what's happening. [00:06:36] Global News El Salvador approves foreign agents law on May 20, El Salvador's ruling Nueva Ideas Party passed a foreign agents law that directly targets the financial lifeblood of civil society. [00:06:52] The legislation mandates that any group or individual receiving international support register with the Interior Ministry, disclose sensitive financial data and pay 30% of their foreign income or donations as tax violations carry steep fines up to $150,000. [00:07:11] Press freedom advocates like the Committee to Protect Journalists in Latin America warn that the law is designed to intimidate journalists, suppress nonprofits and dry up crucial funding that sustains El Salvador's shrinking civil society. [00:07:25] Independent media outlets like El Faro, which rely on foreign donors, say the legislation could force them to shut down. Foreign agent laws such as this are broadly implemented across authoritarian regimes from Russia to Nicaragua and serve as a warning of what could come in El Salvador, Cuba University students protest Internet rate hike University students in Cuba launched an academic strike in response to a steep mobile data rate increase imposed by etecsa, the Cuban state run telecom monopoly. The new scheme offers subsidized 6 gigabytes for 360 pesos, but any extra usage now costs over 3,000 pesos, roughly $16 in a country where the average monthly wage is $20. For many that prices out basic connectivity. Students from several faculties at the University of Havana declared the measures unjust and unsustainable, saying the hike cuts off access to learning, communication and the outside world. Meanwhile, the University of Havana has reaffirmed unconditional support for the Communist Party of Cuba. With high inflation, collapsing services and a growing youth exodus, this protest has become a flashpoint of Generational discontent with Cuba's digital and economic repression Iran Currency plunges amid financial restrictions as military tensions rise across the Middle East, Iran's regime is restricting citizens financial activity at home. The Iranian Toman 10,000 Riyals plunged 18% against the dollar overnight, briefly crossing 98,000 and exposing just how brittle the country's currency is after years of isolation. Instead of offering relief, Iranian officials responded by choking off financial alternatives for Iranians with restricting purchases and transactions with digital currencies, freezing online gold platforms and blocking websites reporting real exchange rates. Internet watchdog Netblocks also detected an Internet outage in Iran, further compounding the inability of ordinary Iranians to access or move their funds and access outside information. [00:09:39] While regular people are barred from buying any digital currency, state connected firms are quietly allowed to move billions. At a moment when people are scrambling to protect their livelihoods, the state is sealing financial exits while reserving financial privilege, stability and freedom for itself. Watch this presentation from Iranian activist and Bitcoin educator Zaya Sadir at the 17th annual Oslo Freedom Forum for a glimpse into the financial repression Iranians face. I'll add the link to the video in the show, notes Kenya Bitcoin Adoption in Africa's largest informal Settlement in the heart of Kibyra, Africa's largest informal settlement, a quiet revolution is underway. [00:10:22] Nearly 200 residents and merchants in the Soweto Rest neighborhood now use Bitcoin to save, trade and survive without bank accounts or paperwork. The initiative, led by the nonprofit Afrobit, offers a lifeline to those locked out of the formal financial system. [00:10:40] People in Kibera do not have an opportunity to secure their lives with normal savings, says co founder Ronnie Mdawida. With Bitcoin, they don't need permission or identification, just a phone and an Internet connection. [00:10:53] Afro Bit backs this with a local wallet, education programs, a Bitcoin powered marketplace, and even a waste management program where workers earn satoshis, the smallest unit of Bitcoin. It's fast, cheap and lets me save, says one vegetable vendor. This circular economy is a model for how Bitcoin can provide financial inclusion, opportunity and freedom in financially underserved regions or struggling economies. [00:11:20] Saudi Arabia executes journalists over social media activity Saudi Arabian officials executed journalist Turki Al Jasser last week after seven years in prison. [00:11:35] The country's top court upheld his death sentence from 2018, when Al Jasser was convicted of terrorism and treason. At the time, the regime accused Al Jasser of criticizing the Saudi royal family and posting about state corruption via an anonymous Twitter account. Officials held his trial entirely in secret civil society groups say the charges were trumped up and tied to his activism. [00:12:01] Al Jasser had previously written about the Arab Spring, women's rights and government corruption as well. His case fits into a well worn pattern where the Saudi regime has increased politically motivated executions330 in 2024 and tightened control over online speech Turkey Google algorithm buries independent media In Turkey, a quiet form of censorship is unfolding not through arrests or bans, but through code. After a recent algorithm update by Google, independent News outlets like T24 and Mediascope report losing up to 80% of their web traffic. These aren't fringe blogs they're among the few remaining platforms publishing journalism critical of the Erdoan regime. The traffic collapse comes as Ankara tightens control over digital platforms, including licensing requirements for YouTube creators rolled out in 2024. While Google insists the changes are global and technical, the outcome in Turkey is political. [00:13:07] When corporate algorithms erase dissent, the line between state and platform blurs and threatens access to independent information vital for human rights and democracy. In this context, platforms like Nostr censorship resistant, open source and decentralized are becoming increasingly necessary. [00:13:28] Bitcoin News seedsigner introduces Right to left Language Support the seedsigner, an open source and fully customizable Bitcoin hardware wallet for self custody, officially added support for right to left languages like Arabic, Persian, Hebrew and Urdu. This is a major accessibility breakthrough. It directly expands Bitcoin self custody tools to over a billion people who speak RTL languages, many of whom are activists and non profits under authoritarian regimes facing capital controls, surveillance or sanctions. This addition was achieved in part by in person collaboration at the 17th annual Oslo Freedom Forum in May, where Seedsigner developers collaborated with Iranian activist Zaya Sadir, who produces Bitcoin educational content in Persian and Arabic. It's incredible to see this kind of tangible impact emerge from the forum where global connections turn into real tools for freedom. Get tickets for next year's event here. The link will be available in the show notes P2P Band Global Peer to Peer Bitcoin Aggregator P2P Band is a new tool that helps people around the world find and connect with others to trade Bitcoin directly. It works as an aggregator, pulling together peer to peer bitcoin offers posted on the NOSTR Protocol, a decentralized social media protocol that resists transaction and communication censorship, all without relying on centralized platforms. Users can log in with their NOSTR public and private keys, sign trade orders and filter offers based on who they trust, making exchanges more personal and secure. As governments and corporations increasingly monitor and restrict financial activity. Tools like P2P band offer a way to preserve open access to digital cash. [00:15:20] Cov Wallet releases on app store with CoinCTRL Cove wallet, an open source mobile bitcoin wallet, shared that they are officially approved for listing on Apple's App Store. The app's latest Release also introduces CoinCTRL. This feature lets Cove Wallet users view and manage their individual UTXOs unspent transaction outputs. Users can search UTXOs by label, amount, address or transaction ID and sort them by date or amount and granting greater control and privacy when spending their Bitcoin. Users can also manually select which UTXOs to use in a transaction and customize the amount, helping optimize privacy and fees. This release is especially valuable for human rights defenders seeking curated financial privacy and self custodial finances. [00:16:11] Damas notedeck releases 0.4.0 with support for Zaps the team behind Domus, a client for the decentralized NOSTR protocol, released a new beta version of notedeck, a multi platform browser for nostr. This beta release adds support for Zaps, a bitcoin based tipping feature that lets users send small donations to publishers instantly and permissionlessly. It also introduces an AI assistant called Dave, which helps users search and summarize posts across the broader NOSTR network. [00:16:43] More generally, Nostr is a censorship resistant social protocol used by activists, journalists and developers to share information without relying on traditional platforms that are vulnerable to censorship and deplatforming. For these groups and more, tools like notedeck help organize and navigate the fast growing NOSTR network, making it easier to find information, support peers and stay connected in hostile or censored environments. [00:17:10] Maelstrom Awards PayJoin grant to Ben Allen and Silent Payments grant to MacGyver 13 Bitcoin Investment Firm and grant maker Maelstrom awarded grants to Bitcoin developers Ben Allen to improve PayJoin and MacGyver 13 to work on silent payments. PayJoin is a privacy enhancing transaction method that enables two users to each contribute an input to a bitcoin transaction, breaking the common chain analysis heuristic that assumes a sender owns all inputs. This makes it harder for dictators to trace payments or link the identities of activists and nonprofits. Maelstrom's grant to MacGyver 13 will help improve silent Payments, a static address protocol for Bitcoin that allows transaction senders to generate unique addresses from a receiver's static public key. [00:18:03] This helps activists and nonprofits to receive Bitcoin donations more discreetly. [00:18:08] SPIRAL seeking Senior engineer To advance stratum v2 spiral the Bitcoin focused grant and education initiative backed by Block is offering a unique grant opportunity aimed at tackling one of Bitcoin's biggest challenges, mining pool centralization. [00:18:27] They are seeking a senior engineer to make significant contributions to Stratum V2, a new mining protocol designed to further decentralize bitcoin mining and solidify the network's censorship resistance. The role will focus on building Open source servers, APIs and proxies for real world mining deployments. You can learn more about the opportunity here. Spiral also recently published a must read article on the limits of Coinjoin, a bitcoin privacy technique, exploring how post coinjoin behavior can undermine privacy and what steps activists and nonprofits can take to to improve real world financial privacy. Read it here. [00:19:06] And that wraps up the major news items. They do have the recommended content this one they've got a the Signal and HRF joint publication. They're doing a bunch of pieces on more in depth and specific articles expanding on exactly how governments are increasing financial repression, CBDCs and surveillance driven policy. Well, they've got a link to check it out, which I will also have that the Signal in the in the show notes. In fact, I just read one of the pieces talking about like how Hollywood is becoming a ghost town. It's actually really interesting. It's a little off topic with the main idea, but I think so much of like the cultural change and the kind of identity crisis that we're going through in the world, it's actually really interesting to see. [00:19:54] I don't think these are unrelated. I think a lot of the consequences in economic shifts and centers kind of migrating around the world and splitting up from kind of their geographic center. I think this is kind of a consequence of how connected we are becoming and how networks are beginning to judge or control more about the organization of humanity than geographic location. And not to say geographic location isn't still like a huge indicator or a huge factor, but just how much more our digital networks are becoming centers for a lot of people's income, their work and productivity and their safety and social circles and that those social circles are beginning to extend more and more into the real world. You know, it used to be an odd thing just, just 10 or 15 years ago it was odd to have a friend that you met on the Internet and then to have met them in real life. I mean, it was for me and I was, I. I was a native Internet born. You know, like I was like 8 years old or 9 years old when they got, when I got the Internet and I was completely engrossed, right like this was this, this completely changed my world. And I met friends and stuff online and played video games with people and now the number of people, you know, in the bitcoin space that I've then met at conferences and like I have tons of people where the overall I actually hang out with more people that I quote unquote know and interact with them more online than I do in real life. And even my real life friends, I spend way more time with them online. Like phone calls, text keat, you know, sharing things, talking about stuff like just our communication is in digital world. And it used to feel like there was this massive separation between those two worlds and it's starting to blend together. And that comes with a lot of great benefits. But it also comes with a massive amount of trade off with the way Web 2.0 works and especially with the way our money works. And this is why I lean on the hrf. And this is. I'm going to save the signal. Um, because I'm curious. I, I actually did not know this publication. Um, but just this one article caught my interest. But I'm going to put it in my lineup for a bit and try to, try to stay up on it and see, see what kind of stuff they publish then. The other recommended content is bim Parents. So BTC Sessions tutorial on how to set up a bit axe. If you don't have a bit axe, you should get a bit axe. I don't have a bit axe, I feel. [00:22:42] So I got my brother a bit axe and I have an S9 and I have my two what's miners, but those are for heating my house and it's hot, is just so hot. So I have no need. I'm not running, I'm not mining anything right now, which is sad. I wish. I feel like I should be mining, but I do want to get. When I have my studio fully set up, you're going to see a bit axe behind me or on my desk or something. You'll see it. I don't have one yet, but it will be there. But Sessions has a tutorial on setting it up and you know, as soon as, or as much as people say it's like, oh, it doesn't make any difference and you know, it will never be a meaningful part of the network. It probably will never even get to 1% of the network. [00:23:22] You know, I don't care. I think, I think it's important to just participate. You know, I was shocked when I first started Mining with my what's Miners? And finally got it set up with the heat. It was super inconvenient from the context of like heating your house. I was having to control it with Python, like scripts that we put together that I run through Terminal. So it was like really frustrating and annoying. And my wife couldn't just go like and set, set the heat and then, you know, have it cut on and cut off like automatically. And I had, I had these great plans to actually build this script into an automated thing and put it on a little screen. I even have all the devices. I have the Raspberry PI, I had the little stuff screen. And I did a simple setup on figuring out how to boot straight into this simple UI that skips Linux. So I could literally like unplug the device and plug it back in. It would just boot right into it with this little screen. Like I could literally run it like a thermostat. But the combination of this forever construction project downstairs and never, never having the time just, you know, drowning myself, this was also right when I was around. When I was doing this was when I was also doing this show, Shitcoin Insider, AI Unchained and the PEAR Report and doing audio books and trying to do. I was starting up the PEAR project, the PEAR drive project at that time. So basically it was just one of the 30 or so projects that just never even got honestly picked up and off the ground. So it will be really nice to have this basement done and have a workshop where I can actually pick it up again and screw around and probably get it working. I suspect it won't be this winter. It would be nice if it was this winter, but it'll probably be next winter. We'll see. I'll keep you updated. But all that was to say that I had way, way like despite the fact that it was inconvenient and that it wasn't, you know, perfect for the job. Like it was like real hacked together setup. It was also really fun and I was kind of shocked how easy it was to actually get it mining. Now because of the 220 plug and stuff, I wouldn't recommend doing the what's minor M 30s. I would recommend something that you could just plug in to to a normal outlet. Like kind of like the S9. Except the S9 is not going to get you in. It's not really going to be worth much if. Unless you're doing it literally just because you need a heater, like a room heater that you can even put on like low Power or something. It's not going to get. You're not going to get much as far as sats out of it. But if you're looking for a kind of legit device and you just want to, you know, swap out a breaker to 20amps or 40, 30 or 40amps, like you're trying to get like a real serious one and you want to be able to plug in a machine to it that will heat a real space and also get you a significant amount of hash power or a meaningful amount, at least. I would say do it. I'm. I think every bitcoiner should mine, even if it's just a little bit. Even if it's just a bit axe. I think you will be. [00:26:23] I think you will be surprised by just how. How great it feels to feel like you're a part of the whole bitcoin stack. Like that you're doing everything that bitcoin does. [00:26:36] You know, in the mining video that I did very recently, which I'll have a link in the show notes, if you haven't seen it, I think it's good. I think it's a good explanation. I've had some good feedback from it, but I try to explain that. [00:26:48] All right, analogize the hash rate, the global hash power of bitcoin as a wall. It's a hash wall. It's literally a wall of energy and raw compute that is built to defend against changing bitcoin's history. [00:27:09] And when you kind of have this concept, when you see what this thing is, it just feels awesome to be a part of it. Even if you're a tiny, insignificant part of it. You're adding, you know, maybe this wall is a million blocks high and a billion blocks wide and you're putting one brick on this thing. But to be able to look at this incredible thing that has been created and say, I have my brick in there. [00:27:41] Bitcoin is a movement, right? It depends on us protecting it. And it's not pure economics. It's not pure. Just the rational actor does the rational thing. There is also an element of meaning that we do the meaningful thing and we do the right thing to protect this. That we have incentives, not just profit incentives, but incentives to protect this thing that protects us. [00:28:06] You know, it's not profit incentive that makes me go to the range and practice with my gun. It's not profit incentive that has me get to know my neighbors and try to build some sort of common ground with the people in my local area. And it's not profit incentive that Gets me to turn on my miners and run them all winter long, even when I'm probably spending a net more to heat my home. Even getting the SATs at this point because they're old devices. [00:28:34] I do do it out of self interest. I do do it out of protecting myself and my family, but I don't do it because I'm homo economicus. I do it because I want to be independent and I want my family to be safe. And you know, maybe, maybe that desire and that mission of wanting to protect bitcoin and not caring, you know, exactly how much profit we make or just running little bit axes for the sake of running bitaxes or heating our hot tub with a bitcoin miner for the. Just for the sake of doing it with a bitcoin miner. Maybe that is always just a tiny, tiny portion of the network. Maybe the most it ever is is 1% of the network. But you know what? That's nothing to scoff at.1% of the network doing it just because it's the right thing to do because you just want to be a part of it. I don't understand the people who dismiss that as irrelevant and all these stupid people running their bitaxes, it's like, bitch, do you mind? Like I respect someone if they make hashes by writing it out on a piece of paper. The person who says it doesn't matter because Mara exists and they have some huge Data center with 10,000 machines in it. The person who says that the bitax doesn't matter is using the same defeatist logic as somebody who says there's no point in hosting your own data or hell, writing your own code because everybody's just going to use the one in the app Store, it's literally a because somebody is really big, it's you're useless because you're small. Bullshit. Everything big started small. Everything. And I think it's a fool who says that just because you're not turning a profit or just because you're not making a huge difference right now, that that makes the idea stupid. When to the contrary. I would argue that a small band of convicted people who will do something when it is nothing but a loss, but because it means something to them who will take a risk to accomplish something that matters or to do something that seems to make no difference at all, but for the right reasons. I would argue that that connection, that purpose and that conviction is exactly the only thing that actually can change the world. And if you actually adopted the logic that because it wasn't a meaningful amount of hash power because it wasn't a meaningful project or nobody would adopt it. You go back to the 1990s and you'd tell the tiny group of cypherpunks who didn't matter and couldn't accomplish anything and who nobody even listened to and in an era where nobody cared about privacy that they were never going to win and they should just give up and thank God they didn't listen to people like this. That kind of crap makes me want to turn like have my Linux CPU mining bitcoin just, just so that they're annoyed and they have to tweet about it. That's not profitable. Suck it. I made more hashes than you anyway. There's a BTC Sessions tutorial on how to set up a tiny miner on your desk. Again, this is all you can find all these links on The Freedom Report number 77, which the link will be in the show notes. I'll link to the version and then also the NOSTR version so you can explore on your preferred platform. Now I want to hit a little bit about each of these items here because there's a lot, there's actually a lot to unpack in this one. So first, the El Salvador Foreign Agents Law. [00:32:00] Bukele is such an interesting anomaly because he's super heavy hand like, like it's hard to deny the results that he has incredibly aggressively imprisoned the gangs. And I can't imagine that there is not a significant amount or at least a very meaningful amount of false positives, so to speak, people who were jailed without due process, judges and politicians who were extralegally prosecuted, hands that were forced like he's, he seems to absolutely be a very strong handed leader. And the process has without a doubt seen authoritarian actions and movement or I guess behavior and mirrored actions and decisions. This Foreign Agents Law is a pretty good example of that. And I highly encourage you listen to and or read the Village and the Strongman. This is Gladstein's piece on a lot of what you know, Bukele has done and what's going on over there. But there is, there is also an element here is how do you fix a government that is so corrupt that all of the bodies of the government do not actually do the job they're supposed to do. Like if your judges are so corrupt that they're bought by the gangs, that your politicians are just embedded in violent corrupt organizations, how do you use the court system or laws? Like the whole idea of a legal system that puts up all of this resistance that you know has elected officials and votes and, you know, jurisdictional representatives and judges and courts. The whole idea of the checks and balances is to prevent it from becoming so saturated with corruption that the society cannot even function. It's supposed to slow it down. So if it is completely corrupt, you, you cannot, you obviously cannot depend on like the, the structure itself doesn't just give human rights because of the structure. The idea is to just prevent the government from getting so out of control that you can't. That the process attempts to protect human rights. But if the whole structure, it's still run by people, if they are all or majority of them are corrupt, it doesn't matter that the process is democratic specifically, or republic or authoritarian. You're not gonna get freedom, you're not gonna defend human rights, no matter what the process looks like. And I'll be perfectly honest, and this isn't to. [00:34:52] I'm not trying to excuse Bukele. I'm. I'm trying to put the results in context because the problem is that the standards set by one leader will be so horribly abused by the next one in line. I understand the creep and the problem of authoritarian systems, but from what I have the admittedly kind of rudimentary digging that I have done on how horribly corrupt, and it's not hard to defend this statement that it was. If it's the homicide capital of the world, if El Salvador was one of the most dangerous places to live on planet Earth, then it's not hard to make the simple assumption that their system, their court system, their property rights system, their political system is going to be horrifically corrupted. It's just going to be filled to the brim with corruption, with lies, and with just falsehood all across the board. And that the process people going through the motions are going to be attacking and getting in the way of rights and protection, protecting the corrupt far more often than it will be protecting the rights of the individual people. That's exactly how it becomes the most dangerous society in the world. But from a practical standpoint, I have no idea how you undo something like that. And I also don't know how you use authoritarian power in a situation like that and not have it turn right back into that. Like, how do you. You can't make a good authoritarian government. You can't shut down journalists with a foreign agents law and then have a free press. But then I do have to ask, what if there are actual foreign agents? What if the IMF is like, look at the amount of pressure being put on El Salvador and what's a $30 million investment into attacking Bukele in the media to the IMF if it gets him to agree to a loan or to change a policy that's favorable to the IMF and World bank or NATO or whatever it is. Now again, I don't think a foreign, I don't think being authoritarian is, is a fix for that. The foreign, the foreign agents law is stupid. I think it's, it's not going to work on a long term scale, even if it does work in the short term because Bukele is some angel and he has no ill intent or he doesn't just like to attack journalists who insult him, which, yeah, sure, he's not human. But my question is if there are actually foreign agents trying to undermine you, and specifically they are very, very, they're way more powerful and way far wealthier nations that are trying to undermine, you know, the sovereignty of your country, which we see all across Africa, South America and the developing world, what do you do, like, what do you do against that? [00:37:41] And I understand that like, you know, doing like a foreign agent's law like this and just shutting down, you know, critical journalists is, is going to backfire because it's just going to be used against like, it's just going to give a new opening when it's not like the wealthy nations are now, now they have no avenue to do this now, they're out of wealth and oh, our hands are tied. You shut down our little journalist institution that we were funding with an ngo. [00:38:09] No, to the contrary, they're like, oh, well, in a couple of years we'll be able to use this against the people who are arguing for freedom and rights and the ability to, to speak freely and criticize the government. Because we just, we, well, boom, we have a precedent of a government that just shuts journalists up when they criticize us. Eventually they're going to be in the driver's seat and that's going to be a really, really useful tool. [00:38:31] What I mean, at what I'm, what I'm trying to get at when I ask this question is it seems like a damned if you do, damned if you don't situation when you're a country who, when you're a small country that's basically subjugated by the west or just wealthier nations like a developing country, like, don't. When other wealthier, more influential global powers, whether it be China, Russia, the us, France, like anybody in NATO, whatever, when you don't have every piece of technology available. [00:39:07] And this is, this is why I'm asking a question I kind of know the answer to is that I don't think there's a way to do this with government. [00:39:14] And that, you know, this is exactly why the HRF is so critical about or so focused on peaceful movements and technology and Bitcoin and the Internet and all of these things. Because I think this is the only. It's not. [00:39:27] Even though they're democracy focused, I don't see, quote unquote as defending democracy as like the great thing. I think the outcomes and the culture of freedom are downstream from the technology that defends those things. [00:39:43] And so what I mean by that is if the technology defends people's right to or ability, their capacity to criticize their government, to get their message out, and for millions to see it, the disrespect, the ability to reveal corruption, to reveal a leader sticking their foot in their mouth, or to control or alter the perception of those in power from being powerful to being petty, that is what actually defends the ability to speak freely because it gives confidence and conviction to those who would speak up. And, and it kind of sits the powerful in their place by putting them on an even keel that they can't manipulate the perception of them. They can't force their reputation to be something great when everyone sees them as liars or fools. You know, a reputation built on silencing journalists or dissidents, or controlling your opposition or hurting people who quote, unquote, stand up against you is not an honest reputation. It's reputation through manipulation. It's, it's fiat reputation, right? It's reputation by silencing everything that comes out negative about you so that only positive things are said about you. It is fiat reputation. It is the essence of fraudulent integrity or fraudulent influence. But what sucks about it is it's just like until, like there's just no, there's no way out for a lot of small countries, it seems like, I mean, I guess, you know, defending building Internet infrastructure, building alternative pathways, building, you know, adopting Bitcoin, like that's, that's the only thing you can do that would actually have a meaningful and lasting effect, is you try to give sovereignty to your people. But in the case of Bukele, it seems like even with all the good he's doing, he's kind of setting the stage for all of the, the bad that would follow. You know, if I had to come like a US parallel to the whole foreign agents bull crap is kind of like the TikTok ban, right? Or the forced sell of tick tock TikTok is Chinese agents. Because a whole bunch of people are criticizing the US like, even if, like, from the context of, like, me and, like, my opinions and stuff and like, my. I'm. I criticize the crap out of my government, I don't make it a good solid 10 minutes in an episode without saying something bad about government. [00:42:16] I don't need any help from the Chinese, you know, Communist Party. But even if TikTok was somehow this crazy, this ridiculous psyop to undermine the US government, it only makes them look right. [00:42:29] When the US government is so petty and retarded as to ban TikTok or to force them to sell it to a US company. [00:42:39] And especially everybody, all the young generation on TikTok who thinks they're fools, it only confirms everything they ever thought and all of the supposed Chinese propaganda that was being put into their brains. You just proved them right. And that reeks eerily of a foreign agent's law. Oh, bad company has foreign investors and foreign controllers and, oh, it's very. It doesn't talk good about our regime. [00:43:10] And, you know, I could. [00:43:12] It makes a difference too, though. Just that it's the US and China. Like, I could give a crap. Like, oh, no, the US government got criticized. Oh, poor China. China. Is China being undermined by journalists? It's at least a little different when you're talking about a developing country or a country that's been suffering and is tiny and poor and is desperately trying to dig its way out and has a country like the US or China standing over its shoulder going, you're not going to do that. I don't know. It all sucks sometimes. It's a hard. [00:43:44] I don't envy the situation of a lot of those countries and any attempt to get themselves out from underwater and what has to be done or what seems like the only path, because there is no path. You know, it's. You know, this is kind of the. The thing we talked about with Fiat, right? Is when you're in a fiat system, there's not really a spectrum of power. [00:44:12] You know, like, it's not really that there's the big dog and then there's the next two or three people, the next two or three countries that are, you know, similar in power, and then the four or five after that. But if you got like 20 small countries together, they have a meaningful amount of capital and power to actually influence things. [00:44:34] That's not really how it is. If you had an independent money, if you had bitcoin as the global standard and all of those countries could actually quote, unquote, ally together. You could ally all of South America and all of Africa to basically say, listen, we're not going to do what you want us to do anymore, France or NATO or whatever, that would actually be incredibly meaningful. [00:44:58] But when you're on a global dollar standard and the entire financial system is basically a permissioned system run by the top dog, by the one fiat power that can actually enforce debts the world over, there isn't really a second place. [00:45:18] There's not a spectrum of power. It's just a changing of hands of who is the top dog that runs the whole show. And everybody is subjugated by them. And people only have power by how much they agree and or get favor from the one running the show, from the one, from the currency that everybody else is forced to use. Because if you're using the dollar, if the country has to use the dollar, if the, the which their small currency can just be obliterated just by calling debts due. Like the amount of financial manipulation that can just eviscerate a small country and any degree of financial sovereignty that they had is just wild. You know, being a small, a tiny fish in a big pond like that is just a recipe for you're going to do what somebody else says and that's just kind of how it goes. But because of that, all of your people, all of the people in this country or the institutions are going to rush to the dollar. And the only way that anybody would gain power in those countries is, is by allowing the, you know, that that elite group, the powerful people who control most of the opinion and the perception of people within that country and within the, the structures of that country by allowing them to use the dollar so that they can escape the problems and the cost of the local currency. Well, that means that your success, both your success and any attempt of any capacity of your country or the people from getting out from under the thumb of this whole thing and not having to go down with the ship basically is directly tied to all of them supporting the capital power of the fiat alpha. Think about it. The very ability to play on the international stage means I pay for the bombs and the banking infrastructure and the financial rails that are used to control me and force my currency into collapse. [00:47:26] Like Iran is a great example. Iranians who are trying to save themselves from this ridiculous situation that they found themselves in under an authoritarian regime and simultaneously Western governments that have been trying to bomb them, the US and everybody's been trying to bomb them for 40 years. Their escape is to get access to the dollar, which means they're either paying for their authoritarian regime or the bombs. [00:47:52] That's just crazy. Iran's situation is so crazy because my brother actually is, should be in a few days, what's the fourth? So it'll be, it'll be in just a week or two. [00:48:05] He's actually getting married to a girl who's Iranian, who's been living in Canada for like seven or eight years or something like that, still doesn't have citizenship in Canada. And all of this immigration stuff, all of the sanctions and everything has just made this an unbelievable nightmare. Them getting married doesn't really, doesn't really speed up the process at all. She's like her trying to become an American citizen. I mean, literally we talk about it all the time. It's just an utter mess every time I get an update. And so she still has, her family is still in Iran. They've. Everybody's there and my brother talks to, I think it's her nephew quite a bit online. [00:48:43] And he, they just went dark for. They didn't even have contact with him for like a number of like days, I think, I think even like a couple of weeks that there was just no contact. [00:48:56] And then finally he actually logged back on one day and sent a message. And apparently he had to go through like dozens, like just test dozens and dozens of Tor nodes to finally find one that had a, had a tiny little leak in and out of the country in order to get a connection through and actually communicate with people. And so crazy too, because I don't even know, there's still not even a great fix for that. Like nostr is great and pubkey are great in their own context. Like Nostr allows you to connect to relays, right? And then you sign messages and then they'll propagate through a bunch of relays. But if you get, you know, if you get cut off from, you know, US IP addresses or you just get your IP addresses get locked to Iranian IP addresses, you still have to find some way to leak that information through. And then the Pub key and what they're trying to do, which is way more censorship resistant, is that your address would actually be in any links or, you know, the source of your information or content would actually be published on the DHT. So it's on the BitTorrent network that people actually figure out how, how to get access to you. So your Pub key link would, you could change its location and you could move it and you could put your content up somewhere else or some other network or whatever and they could still just go, they just still use your pub key to find and connect to you and they wouldn't even know that anything changed. So that's actually a really powerful way to get censorship resistance. But it still requires that they can connect across the border and get a connection into the country. So it's like if all external like non Iranian IPs or relays on Nostr get blocked and then all external non like local Iranian IP addresses get blocked, then it doesn't, it still doesn't quite fix the problem that you can look at it, look it up on the peer to peer network on the DHT and find where the address is or that you can connect to one of 15 different relays because they might just all be blocked where your Internet might be down. There's still not a full solution. Granted, if any sort of connection was pulled back up, Nostr and pubkey would be exactly and or Keat like those sorts of things. Peer to peer and, or decentralized and federated style systems would be exactly the things that would actually leak some information through. Finally and there'd be the first things that you would want to or be able to connect to because Twitter is not, you know, you have to triple quadruple login. It's like you're not, there's no Tor service. You know, it just, it's the dead end. You're not going to use a centralized service. So the only hope is to use something like those two or three different options. But it still just sucks how big, how significant this problem is because a lot of it still just requires physical infrastructure to get in and out of the country. There's still so much of the problem that isn't just an app, it isn't just a software problem. You know, like I could be like, oh, Iranians should use Pear Drive. It's like, well they're not going to be able to connect to my IP address to download something. Like it's a great step in the right direction, but it doesn't, doesn't fix the problem. There's an element of they need to be able to connect to a satellite for Internet and if Elon Musk gets trapped out or free, you know, Iran, who knows, authoritarian regime, they just blow the, the specific satellites out of the sky that give them Internet access. I doubt they have much concern for whether, I mean to the contrary, they just don't want their people to have Internet because they don't want information to get through. They want to be able to control what everybody thinks, control what everybody can see and what information they have access to and what they're allowed to say and share with other people. They want to control the population so that they are stuck using their currency, fueling them and their bombs and their regimes and. And stuck defending them and unable to entertain or get out of the bubble that makes them realize how ridiculous their situation is or how how corrupt and dishonest the regime that is controlling them really is. You know, if you can just keep pulling a blindfold over people's eyes, it's easy to stop people from standing up because they don't even know what they need to stand up for. [00:53:20] You know, on that note, Zaya Sadir and actually my brother talks about this a lot too. [00:53:26] I want to Anybody who's making Bitcoin content out there needs to really be looking into. And I say this kind of as like, because this is something that I'm telling myself to do. I'm kind of trying to make myself feel guilty for not really pulling the trigger and putting the system together that would make this work. But working on AI translation, my brother talks to his nephew, or I guess his wife's or fiance's nephew and actually her father as well, pretty regularly using an LLM that will just translate to Persian. And he said it's good. Like, it's really good translation. It's better than a strict translate app like Google. [00:54:12] Google Translate used to be, or still kind of is. Like he said, LLMs just work way better because it's based on context. It's vectors. Right? It's not trying to find the explicit word in Persian that means this because that's not always the way it is. It's about the grammar and the context of this structure of language of different. [00:54:33] A combination of words mean this concept. [00:54:38] And so the translation, translation is actually way, way better than it traditionally has been now that these tools are available. And I think people, especially if you're in AI and you're working in it. I know I haven't done a bunch of shows on AI lately since we just kind of paused AI Unchained, but I'm still fascinated by this and I wish I could figure out how to kind of keep an AI oriented audience with the show just so I could be talking to people who are in a little bit. But I think that function of translating into the languages of people who are in the worst conditions in the world, the hardest markets under the strictest controls and lack of Internet freedom and access, translating into those languages and dialects Goes way, way further than most people think. So if anybody's working on tools to really make that automated or simple or far more effective and far more accurate. Keep going, Keep going. Reach out to people. Reach out to me, because I think this is something that we as bitcoiners, especially in the U.S. like, there is a bubble. There's not. There's the bridge between. And we actually talked about this with Roger Huang a little bit when we had him on the show. But the. There is still this giant disconnect. There's this giant barrier between the Chinese bitcoin market and culture and the US Bitcoin market and culture. There's still this enormous divide that we haven't figured out how to pull down yet. But I think most of the pieces of the tools are all there. They exist. They just need to be put together. [00:56:22] And that last 4 to 5% of significant error correction needs to be sorted out in some automated or systematic way that makes it either just affordable or easy to implement. And I think the possible effect of that could be much, much bigger than people realize. [00:56:45] So, anyway, that's just my call to get somebody else to do work for me that I've been wanting or meaning to do that I don't have freaking time to do. So just throwing that out there. [00:56:56] And then there's Saudi Arabia and, you know, Turkey, I think, actually goes align. Goes in line with this situation. So they have executed a journalist over what he posted on Twitter. He's put in prison, been in prison for seven years, tortured just for having an anonymous Twitter account, which they ended up figuring out who he was. Which is interesting because I dug a little bit into this, and it was actually a Saudi Arabian. [00:57:26] It was multiple Saudi Arabian employees at Twitter who worked for the government that went in and just stole the user data to figure out who it was. So it wasn't even like. Or necessarily. I mean, you know, the. They could have just complied, but it wasn't even necessarily that Twitter just complied with the Saudi Arabian government. It's just that Twitter can't control the fact that they had, you know, was it 20,000 or 30,000 employees or something? And obviously, at some point in the mix, you've just got people who are not. You have enemies in your midst. This is why KYC even run by angels, run by the people who will never compromise kyc. Everything is a nightmare. It is a surveillance and authoritarian control nightmare because all they have to know is who you are. And this guy got prosecuted for terrorism and treason because he posted about corruption and Human rights abuses within the Saudi royal family. He posted about women's rights, the Arab Spring, the Palestinian issue, and just general political repression. And he even has a tweet that was, it's quote, the Arab can be killed by the government under the pretext of national security. [00:58:45] And that is exactly what happened to him. [00:58:47] And that's. That slope is slippery, you know, like it ain't a huge jump from hate speech. This person is the most evil person ever and he deserves to be in jail for 30 years to he committed treason or he committed social terrorism and let's blow his brains out. You don't even have to execute people. [00:59:12] You can still just ruin their lives forever. Especially when you have a culture that excuses it and you've made it politically acceptable to label something as special. Terrible speech. Because there is one end game to that. [00:59:28] There's not. There's no other. There is one end game to saying people can't say things because it's special, bad, or that if you say this thing about person A, it's okay if you say it about person B because of some arbitrary characteristic or location or ethnicity or nationality. Now it's terrorism. Look at what the Republicans are doing now. They're now saying that if you criticize the IDF, that you're, if you criticize Israel, it's a form of domestic terrorism and hate speech. And there's special laws about literally criticizing people that explicitly say if it's this exact type of person or this type, this specific ethnicity or this specific country that they are from. And this has nothing to do with whether or not you agree with them. There's a serious problem if you can't recognize that you're not allowed to criticize a government without being accused of criticizing an entire people or a religion. [01:00:27] They are not the same thing. If someone criticizes the US government or Trump, they're not criticizing Americans. I'm not insulted by that. The one that pops into my head most recently was the one with the, the guy who was, it was a musician. I can't remember if he's a rapper. I didn't recognize him. But a whole bunch of people were saying, oh, he just did this, these horrible anti Semitic remarks and all of this stuff. And he called for the deaths of all Jews and stuff. And so I went and looked, I wanted to. I was like, this was this freaking nuts. And with all respect, with all due respect, there's plenty of people on the left who do say horrible stuff and they do go way overboard. So I was curious what this person said, and they were chanting, death to the IDF or kill the idf. The IDF is not Jewish people. Now, you can't obviously call this inciting violence like this is. This is an explicit call for violence. [01:01:23] But it's not anti Semitic and it's not hate speech from their perspective. It's actually a very targeted call to specifically punish the aggressors from how they see the situation. It would be like me saying death to the CIA if the CIA had installed a dictator in my country and led to immense violence and bombing of all of my neighborhoods and people. And then the establishment is outraged, calling the statement Death to the CIA as being anti white and racist hate speech. Nah, that's not what it is. [01:02:04] That's hiding behind that. Because you don't want to have the conversation about whether or not the Israeli Defense Forces are doing something wrong. That's the issue. And if they are, that response isn't unreasonable. But you're not allowed to have that conversation. [01:02:22] I'll tell you. In my experience, whenever an issue is being aggressively dodged, as hard as it possibly can be dodged, like the real issue, and the conversation is constantly being shifted back to some shallow virtue signaling where the person who disagrees just necessarily is somehow evil, racist, bigoted lunatic who wants death to everyone who agrees with me. And no conversation is allowed to even happen on this issue. In my experience, those are usually the ones who are being dishonest. Because if you're being honest and you actually have the better argument, you would actually just want to have the real conversation. Like, I don't dodge a conversation about crypto or about fiat or Bitcoin. If somebody contradicts or says Bitcoin's for criminals, I don't say they're pedophiles. To the contrary, I kind of get excited. Now I get to explain how they're wrong. And I'm pretty good at it. I'm not afraid of the conversation because I'm pretty highly convicted that I'm right. I don't have to dodge the conversation because I have a good point to make. [01:03:30] But all this just shows how much of a problem centralized social media is central. Like the situation that HRF laid on in Turkey as well, that Google just made an innocent algorithm change and we did this globally. And it just so happened that all of the critical, all the platforms and journalistic institutions that were critical to Erdogan's regime dropped almost immediately. [01:04:02] Traffic by 80%. Yeah, that's a coincidence. [01:04:06] Solving these problems with the pair stack, with the pub key stack, with nostr this solving these are is not optional and this is specifically while I'm not why I am not very militant about any particular option like I think Pub Key, Nostr and the pair stack all have their benefits and they all have drawbacks that could lead to them not being the one that truly solves the problem and even using them each in their respective best case I think is, you know, lends itself to over complexity. You know, the pair stack is great because it's peer to peer and it's an entirely new protocol stack that can basically accomplish everything in a purely peer to peer way. Keat with all its failings and with its, its constant update because it's just beta, perpetual beta. Keat has worked fantastically from the context of. This is an entirely peer to peer chat app that I have been using as a main driver for a really long time. But it has created its own DHT. It's not using the BitTorrent DHT which has millions and millions of nodes. So there is a drawback there. PubKey on the other hand is using the mainline DHT and it's just trying to solve. Well actually it's trying to solve a lot but the main idea really is to publish the sort of DNS onto the BitTorrent network, onto the just the hash table of connections on the network so that where to point to you, how to update your location and your hosting. All of that stuff can't be taken down and as long as somebody has your public key they can find you and you can just keep updating where your stuff is. And so it would be like if the piratebay.org every time that website got taken down is it all they had to do is just boot it up on some other server somewhere and rather than having to have a mirror on some totally different URL, you could still just go to the piratebay.org and it still just takes you right there. It solves the core problem of the centralization and the constant government takedowns and restrictions around domain names and accident links. You know like Google is a great example is in this instance of them just cutting down the access the links of people getting to the, the traffic getting to the website to begin with. If we separate those things out and make the quote unquote link, the access to them decentralized and peer to peer or in a network that is distributed to the point that it can't be, there's no single place to actually take it down or remove it, it changes the nature of how the traffic flows to those locations. And how the, how the information flows through the network to that person. We could make it so the bulk of that information isn't filtered through a single entity. And then nostr's great benefit or biggest upside I think is really in the authentication is the fact that you sign every single message so that we know it's you. But that comes with a bunch of drawbacks of how do you handle keys. You can't just pass keys around to all these clients. And there's no explicit key derivation or key delegation system. [01:07:26] So you really kind of have like this messy system that's a little bit complicated for Normie users and that needs to be solved. Whereas pub key deals more with logins and just direction. Like where do you say your information is? And then you download it. And your pub key is who you are and you just sign in. You have, you have an authentication token that you sign one time and then you're logged in and you're just using the service or you're proving that this is your home server, but you're not signing every single thing that adds to it. So you don't really have that key problem. But then NOSTR always already has this like huge network effect. And so many bitcoiners are already up there. So you can add them to a contact list and you can pay them or zap them and then pair works exceptionally well for just direct and quick connections and transferring files and blobs using hypercores. But it's a bit overly complicated, it's hard to build with. So how do you simplify that? Or of course, you could use PEAR for files and data sharing. You could use BitTorrent and Pub Key for DNS so that your connection and how people find you can't be shut down. And you could use NOSTR to help backstop how you host and get that information out to people. And you could sign with those keys or derive it from pub key keys and you know, get that same level of authentication and then get access to all of. To interoperate, interoperating with all the people on nostr. But the. But now you've got this complicated mesh of three different things when it's just easier and it's gonna break less if you just use one thing. I don't know. I don't know what it's going to be. And it might not even be any of these three. These are just the three that I'm super focused on right now because I think they're the most promising from the tools that I have used with them. But we have to solve this problem. This isn't a nice to have. This is a if we want the future that we want and this problem cannot continue as it is, and that means we do work, we test it, we try these things out, we try to break it, we try to improve them. And we're okay with saying no to one when another one is solving our problem or does a better job or is more resilient in some way that is more directly important to the implementation of what we are trying to accomplish. [01:09:49] And it's not just fun and games, it's not just sharing movies, it's can someone in Iran publish images of the bomb that just dropped in their town? [01:09:58] Can people in Palestine get their message out when dozens of people are just killed while they're in line waiting for food? And simultaneously when stories aren't true, can you have an open conversation and actually challenge what was said, seen or what was said? These are not small problems and it's not as if there's, there's not trade offs to all of it. But I think at the end of the day there's, there's a simple logical reality that more freedom and more speech and more accent, more sovereign ability to determine your own level of trust in your own social circles will result in a better outcome for more people across the board every single time. And importantly, it means more responsibility for those people. And I think the more sovereignty and responsibility you give to the individual, the better the person is that's developed from a world where they own who they are. There is one good path forward and it's all the trade offs that get us more freedom. That's my two sats. [01:11:04] So anyway, we'll wrap it up. [01:11:07] Thank you guys for listening. Shout out to the HRF for their freedom report. I had intended on just aggregating from a bunch of different ones, but there was enough to cover in this one. I was like, I'm just going to read this guy. Shout out to Synonym and pubkey for the incredible things that they're building. The link in the show notes if you want to go check it out, or if you're a builder and you're looking to build unstoppable solutions to these problems. I think this is an incredible suite of tools at your disposal. And for anybody who is diving deep down the the light health rabbit hole and trying to get good energy, don't end up developing with blue light blasting into your eyes all night till 3 o' clock in the morning. If you're a builder, we need you healthy and regulated and your hormones. Right? Check out Chroma at Getchroma Co. And you got a 10% discount right in the description. Trust me, you'll thank me for it. With that. Thank you guys for. Thanks for listening. This is Bitcoin audible. I'm Guy Swan, and that's my two SATs. [01:12:20] A secret to life, though, is to fall seven times and to get up eight times. [01:12:26] Paulo Coelho.