RABBIT HOLE RECAP #391: LEDGER LEAKS AGAIN

What's up freaks? This rip of RHR was brought to you by our good friends at CoinKite. They produce the Cold Card Q, my favorite hardware wallet. It's got two secure enclaves, it's got a full screen, full keyboard here. As you can see, if you're watching, if you can't watch, just imagine something that looks like a BlackBerry. It allows you to create private public key pairs offline in an airgat fashion. Never have to connect the Cold Card Q to an internet device you can sign transactions and pspts remotely in the most secure fashion if you're a bitcoin power user and you're looking for the best security go pick up a cold card queue and go to coin kite.com find the cold card queue there i think you go to cold card.com as well use the code rh for five percent off step up your security get a cold card queue this route was also brought to by our good friends at stackwork if you're looking for a great way to make kyc free sets stackwork has bounties go to stackwork.ai find their bounties page and contribute to the bounties you can make bitcoin kyc free for completing the bounties if you're a developer looking to scoop up some easy sets go check out the bounties contribute to them and stack some sets stackwork.ai Matt and I have been talking about privacy and the importance of using a VPN for seven years now, literally seven years, I believe at least once every episode or two. It's like, hey, make sure you're running a VPN. I think it's especially important today when you have governments in the UK, other parts of Europe, all across the world, really trying to introduce digital ID and curbing speech with hate speech laws. Make sure you're protecting your privacy and shielding yourself from government surveillance as you're perusing the web. Our VPN of choice here at RHR is Obscura. It's built by a Bitcoiner. Four Bitcoiners, Carl Dong, did some very critical work for Bitcoin back in the day, but he decided to shift his focus to bringing privacy to everybody with Obscura. It is a VPN that cannot log. Literally, by the way, it's designed. A lot of VPNs will hand waves, say, we're not logging, we're not logging, you can't trust them. You want the VPN that cannot log. That is Obscura. Go to obscura.net, use the code RHR for 25% off when you sign up. Any of their deals, make sure you're using it, particularly if you're in one of these countries where the governments are becoming extremely censorious and targeting citizens that exhibit wrong think. You should be running a VPN. That VPN should be obscura. Obscura.net, code RHR, 25% off. This rip was brought to you by our official electrolyte sponsor here at RHR, Salt of the Earth. You've been hearing Matt and I talk about it quite a bit. I drink multiple packets up in a day You gotta stay hydrated That's why my face looks so good That's why I'm getting buff I'm able to get to the gym more Because I'm hydrated Matt, he's looking incredible I'm sure you've all noticed it You wanna know why? Salt of the earth, baby Go to drinksauté.com Use the code RHR You're gonna get 15% off I'm dead serious It hasn't made my life way better My wife, she's right behind me right now laughing But she's laughing because she knows it's true She drinks like seven a day I drink a few a day maybe seven a day too. Matt, I don't even want to tell you how much he's drinking. It's good. It keeps you hydrated. It keeps you alert. Keeps you ready to go. Drink saute.com. That's D-R-I-N-K-S-O-T-E.com. Use the code RHR for 15% off any order. You've had a dynamic where money's become freer than free. If you talk about a Fed just gone nuts, all the central banks going nuts. So it's all acting like safe haven. I believe that in a world where central bankers are tripping over themselves to devalue their currency, Bitcoin wins. In the world of fiat currencies, Bitcoin is the victor. I mean, that's part of the bull case for Bitcoin. If you're not paying attention, you probably should be. Can the devs do something? below 90k again did you see all the rumors are circulating that all the Zcash devs quit I don't think they're rumors I think there was a walkout the board of directors of the electric company trying to push through things that the Zebs we're calling them Zebs now Zcash devs did not like they all left in protest is that what they call them do they actually call them Zebs No, I just made that up. Yeah, Zcash is down, but it looks like 15% today on that news. Well, guess what? They're going to create their own electric company. They're going to come back and they're going to be better than ever. And the Winklevoss twins are going to say, hey, we're backing these guys. Zcash is stronger than that. That's what I saw. That's why I said it was like a rumor, right? because they're not actually quitting Zcash. They're just launching a roadmap. They don't want to build the roadmap that the board of directors at Electric Company is putting on board. It's such a fucking shitcoin. Anyway, for your stable stack side, Zcash is a shitcoin. But yeah, on the topic of, I mean, I think a lot of us were pretty bullish this week and it'd be nice if the Bitcoin devs could fix the Bitcoin price. Thank you. Well, maybe with the Zcash walkout, we just need to convince them, like, hey, look at the Bitcoin price. There's a ton of market cap here, a lot of upside potential. Maybe you should come fix the Bitcoin price. We got to convince the Zebs to become Bebs, right? Yes. Yet. And here, what a week. I was thinking yesterday, I was like, all right, what are we going to talk about? And then I thought for 10 seconds, I was like, oh, there's a lot going on this week. We've got a tight rip, coffee rip. Thank you guys for joining us. As you may be able to tell, that is on the road. I've got a TFTC to record at 10.30 a.m. Eastern. And the schedule is conflicted, so we have a coffee rip. Shout out to you, Carlos. I know these are your favorite rips. I hope you're in the live chat right now. but we'll jump right in the Clark's dashboard. Carlos missing a coffee rep. You hate to say it. Ryan's in the dashboard. To be clear, I didn't, I forgot to give the freaks a heads up. So that's on me traveling. I've lost my voice, by the way, freaks. So apologies on that front. But anyway, dashboard, continue. Current price of Bitcoin is $89,740. One cuck box is going to get you $1,114. sats were to 1.79 trillion dollar market cap we were at block height 931 413 which means we had a difficulty adjustment between last week and this week it was a negative it happened earlier today uh we're at 21 blocks ago so earlier this morning negative 1.2 percent difficulty adjustment blocks are coming in at 10 minutes and 11 seconds on average. We have 1,995 blocks still. The next adjustment estimated to be as of right now on January 22nd, 2026 and not reliable estimate here, considering we're only 21 blocks into this difficulty epoch, but it's looking like a negative 35% downward difficulty adjustment. Blocks been coming in at 16 minutes and 44 seconds on average since we, adjusted earlier today. There are 7,665 transactions in Clark's mempool, which is high, which would make sense if blocks have been coming in 16 minutes and 30 seconds on average. If we go over to mempool.space, we'll see they have 85,754 transactions. And their mempool getting expensive, high priority, four sats per vbyte, medium priority, two sats per vbyte. If you're willing to wait, one sats per vbyte will suffice. That is the state of the network. Did you see our colleague at 1031, John Arnold, sent us a teeny-weeny zap? A teeny-weeny zap? What did you zap us? What did you zap us? I don't have a... John, can you zap with size, please? 210. The Razor Fund. Wow, I'm the... John. I think he's telling me to shave. I think you should send me more money if you want me to shave, John. I think he wants you to shave your chest. I think this is the most buttons you've had unbuttoned. He's getting some chest hair visibility. I actually buttoned them up before we went live. And I see silent.link zapped us 42,000 sets. Thank you, sir. I love silent.link. It's a fantastic service. You see him for Bitcoin. It is. Bitcoin medium of exchange. Like I said, I'm recording an episode of TFTC about an hour and 15 minutes from now with Nick Slaney from MoneyDevKit. You don't have it on the list, but maybe you have one of them on the list. I think Bitcoin is a medium of exchange. Obviously not as popular as many would lead you to believe, but if you look at this week, or like the last month particularly BitChat which we have on the list we'll talk about that more in depth but they've added the ability to send eCash via the CashU protocol within BitChat there was a demo floating around of Cali doing that earlier this week we had Rumble release there oh it's right creator wallets creator wallets non-custodial they also have buy sell Or just buy on it, right? They have MoonPay buy, I think. I wouldn't be shocked if they have MoonPay buy. No, they definitely have MoonPay buy because everyone's favorite Grumpus was complaining about the spread on Twitter about it. Favorite Grumpus? Who's that? Well, Pleditor. Oh. He called it a scam because there's a spread. just don't buy don't buy the rumble if you don't want to everything's got to be perfect if it's not perfect you're a scammer shout out to Mav21 21,000 set zap in the live stream I think the rumble news is pretty fucking big it's pretty massive did you see did you see that they so rumble while it is is on-chain Bitcoin, Tether, and Tether Gold. And they're going to add Lightning soon, hopefully. They used Tether's wallet dev kit to build the whole thing, and they want it to be self-custody. So it's difficult to set up easy-to-use, self-custody Lightning wallets, so they're working on it. But did you see that they came out with the SATS competitor for Tether Gold, Skudos? No. What is it? I think it's one one thousandth of a tether gold is called a scudo now which is I guess a callback to a Roman coin called the same name so you heard it here first Freak stay on the stack scudos it's not as not as catchy scudo a new on-chain unit where one scudo equals one one thousandth of x-a-u-t scudo I think in the announcement they call it the people's unit I kind of like that the people's unit it's got a little innuendo to it yeah yeah so I think it's big I'm recording with Nick Slaney from Money Dev Kit at 10.30 I'm sure many of you have seen him vibe coding on Repplet. I think they have an official money dev kit sort of integration with Repplet. And so if you're vibe coding, you can basically incorporate what they're doing to receive Bitcoin in a non-custodial fashion rather trivially as well for your vibe coded apps if you're out there. Yeah, MDK is cool. I like when Nick and his co-founder are building over there. So good week for the Medium Exchange. Even though the price is down. Maybe that's why the price is down. People are spending Bitcoin to people who don't want to hold it. The reason the price is down is because everyone's buying eSims on silent.link. Topping up the data. That would mean that silent.link is dumping immediately. I find that hard to believe. I doubt it. Yeah, it's just... I mean, he runs BTCPay servers, so I assume he doesn't. Yeah. All right, to the list. Maduro Raid, number one. Do you think they waited until after RHR to scoop them up? I think they knew that we would have been all over it had they done it on Thursday night. Middle of the night. Was it Friday into Saturday or Saturday into Sunday? It was right after RHR. Traditional markets were closed, right? Like only Bitcoin was open. So yeah, maybe it was Friday night, 2 a.m. Friday night or something. Yeah. On Saturday morning. a lot of speculation what's your take there's a couple different angles here I mean all the angles obviously we talked about it a couple weeks ago like the boats, the narco boats probably just a facade I like the UAV take obviously Venezuela has a ton of natural resources, oil, gas, gold, rare earth minerals. Silver. Silver. Guyana is there. Scudos. A lot of scudos. And then I don't know, there's like the QAnon. I don't know if it's QAnon even, but there's theories that election fraud was being run via Venezuela. I don't know. Do you want to bet on it? No, I don't want to bet on it. But I don't know. The whole, I mean, in and out within four hours, and then you had this sort of perp walk. I mean, it's pretty impressive. Very impressive. Well, that's where we're getting to. Then you had the perp walk where Maduro was wearing like 15 different outfits in the span of 24 hours. And he did not seem perturbed at all. He actually seemed pretty happy. I don't know you got to play it that way though regardless like in Al you think it was like an organized negotiated trade right yeah I feel that the vibe I getting I don know with any degree of certainty well I don know how we can prove that or not Maybe it be more clear in the future But we can definitely prove whether or not your theory of him being involved in election fraud and turning state's witness or whatever, and I'd be happy to bet that I don't think that's the case. But we'll see. Marty had to pay me 100,000 sats this week because he lost the Bip Bonds bet. I'm ready to re-up with a new bet. You went into waste-lice. Yeah, I don't know. A couple things. First of all, Polymarket was wild in the lead-up to it. There was some insider that Polymarket Working had designed created a fresh account, but like 400k on Maduro getting captured which I'll just keep repeating is like just the wildest time we live in with all these prediction markets and the implications of them then there was the other polymarket piece that like a bunch of people lost money on betting on an invasion because this was technically not an invasion and I just remind everybody always read the fine print if you are going to gamble on these things and the fine print in that case was actually very clear. It was like the U.S. has to hold territory in Venezuela for it to be counted as an invasion, which is clearly not the case. They did like this organized handoff, right? It's like Maria Mercado or whatever, the Venezuelan opposition leader that won the Nobel Prize. They like Trump like completely rugged her and then just put in... Delcy, who was the second in charge. Yeah, Maduro's incredibly corrupt ballplayer over there. Yeah, did you read the background on why they made that decision? Apparently they were vetting Machado to see whether or not she could actually come in and maintain power. She's not even in the country. Yeah. Yeah, I mean, it was pretty weak on her part. Did you see she dedicated her Nobel Prize to Trump? Yeah. Yeah, I mean, we'll see how it plays out, right? There's a long, long history of American military interventions in South America and other places throughout the world that have gone horribly. but it does seem like Hegseth and the Trump administration are trying to be very deliberate and reserved in how they handle this situation and pragmatic which might not be the best outcome for Venezuelan opposition or freedom fighters but could be a very strategic outcome for American interests. And one thing that was learned in Iraq was we, we, fuck, George Bush and his administration completely disbanded the entire Ba'ath Party, the entire bureaucracy, fired the entire army. The whole army then became ISIS and shit because you had a bunch of young, trained guys that were unemployed. And it was part of, it was a significant part of the reason why everything was like an absolute disaster there. So you can kind of see the reasoning that if they have a corrupt, established leader that's already in place with all the mechanisms that she has to control the country and operate the country, that it could be very, you know, much more pragmatic than trying to do a complete regime change and nation building type of situation, right? Yes. And it aligns very well with the national security strategy that was written, I believe, in the beginning of December, late November. I mean, every president, I believe when they come in, they have to write a national security strategy. Historically, they've just been part of the process. What's the word I'm looking for? It's like going through the motions. You write one, and it's like, okay, here's the thing. We won't reference it. But this one was a stark sort of delineation from national security strategies and prior administrations. And he basically said, hey, we want to bring back the Monroe Doctrine. We don't want to be in the Middle East. No, it's the Donroe Doctrine. Get it right. The Donroe Doctrine is here. Many people were wondering if that was just posturing and if they would follow up. and I think this Maduro extraction is a validation of like, yeah, no, we're dead serious about this national security strategy. We want to own the Western Hemisphere. And they're already talking about Cuba, Colombia, Nicaragua, follow-ups. And that's what I worry. Let's not get above our skis here. They are definitely going to get above their skis. I think they're feeling very cocky right now. I mean, Venezuela too is very resource-rich. And the Chavez government has been very influential in then funding a lot of these other dictatorships, right? So him being removed already immediately has impacts on Cuba and Nicaragua. China, Russia and Iran too. Obviously, yeah. So it should be interesting. A while times – I mean I just want to be absolutely clear. If this wasn't a negotiated deal with a staged abduction, and if it's even close to what happened on the surface just from an execution point of view, it is absolutely wild what they pulled off in terms of an outcome. There was no U.S. military losses. I think the reports are that they killed like 32 Cuban elite security guards, like their special forces in the compound. And then they abducted him and his wife and then brought him back to New York for trial. And supposedly his wife is heavily involved in the secret police and stuff too. so like she's not like an innocent wife figure which is part of the reason why at least they say that they took her as well but that's I mean that's a pretty there's like a there's a bunch of situations where that plays out with you know helicopters going down long invasion what about just the dichotomy of hitting you know like just cruise missiling the compound versus like actually trying to go in and abduct. Pretty wild. Very wild. What do you think of the Bitcoin theories in this one? Oh yeah, then there's the rumor that there's 600,000 Bitcoin. They probably have a stash of Bitcoin. 600,000 seems aggressive and large. That would take a lot of discipline for them to stack and hold it when they're a poorly run corrupt government is not the best vehicle for stacking large amounts. But there probably is a decent amount of Bitcoin there. I wonder, we obviously have no idea who controls it. A bunch of that Bitcoin was seized by Maduro when he stole it from citizens, right? From specifically Bitcoin miners. But then other Bitcoin is believed to have been done with oil deals, which makes sense. because Bitcoin is ideal money in a non-trusted, when you don't trust your counterparties. And then presumably, we've known for a while that the Maduro administration was mining Bitcoin themselves. There's a couple of interesting aspects here on the Bitcoin side. First of all, to the quantum piece, I think it's kind of, once again, here's another example. It's like, oh, a quantum attacker steals a million Bitcoin and we're going to freeze the protocol over it. But the US government flies Blackhawks into a sovereign nation and abducts their president and then forces them to hand over the private keys. And we're like, oh, that's just normal. That's fine. We're not going to freeze those Bitcoins. I think there's a logical fallacy there. If anyone that supports freezing quantum, quote-unquote, quantum vulnerable coins preemptively, I think needs to reckon with the fact that if that's what you support, why don't you support freezing when there's a military attack to steal Bitcoin? And then I think the second piece that's interesting is there's a bunch of naive fairytale Bitcoiners that are like, oh, Bitcoin fixes this, it stops wars, blah, blah, blah. This is a perfect example of the types of military engagements that you will continue to see under a Bitcoin standard because obviously Bitcoin does not stop wars. What it does do is it removes the money printer from the equation so you can't fund super long, inefficient forever wars through that silent tax, through the inflation tax. And it doesn't have the same ring to it to say Bitcoin stops wars. bangs when you say that out loud, saying Bitcoin forces war to be more efficient and more pragmatic and more tactical does not hit the same. But that's the case, right? And so you look at a situation like this, it's like the US government, US military spent a smaller amount of money in a very tactical engagement to potentially seize Bitcoin resources and strategic location in terms of Venezuela's location at the mouth of the Caribbean and the Panama Canal. And that's a perfect example of a cost-benefit analysis that in a post-Bitcoin world could make financial sense for a country to do it. Bitcoin not bombs I think the yeah the hope of like yeah the hope of like I mean the whole Bitcoin ending war I think it's this I don't want to call it maybe it's not a pipe dream but it's certainly a stretch like I like to be optimistic if it can happen like if you take the money printer out people are forced to engage in legitimate commerce and once you have that at scale the incentive to go to war decreases, which I can see too. It's not going to end war. No, it forces warfare to be more efficient. It's the human condition. War just doesn't like... Changing the money doesn't stop war. We've been on a gold standard in the past. There were still wars. We've been on hard money standard. There's still wars. There's plenty of governments that have shit currencies that don't really have access to a printer in practice that do wars. So it just logically does not flow. Sorry to burst your bubble. I know people like hearing it, but Bitcoin does not fix this. Going back to the Venezuelan government Bitcoin stash, whether or not they have 600,000, I'd be shocked if they have 600,000 Bitcoin. Maybe over time they've accumulated that much, but I would find it hard to believe that they did not burn through a large amount of that, especially when you consider how long they've been accumulating or interacting with Bitcoin going back to 2017, 2018 when the price was much lower. But I think I'm pretty confident. I think I've written about it. I think we've talked about it. There have been confirmed reports of the Venezuelan government using Bitcoin in oil trades. And the way they would use Bitcoin is they would do a trade with Russia, Iran, China for oil. They would demand to get paid in Tether. And then they would immediately sweep that Tether into Bitcoin because they understand the centralized third-party risk that exists with Tether as an entity issuing that stablecoin that can freeze your stablecoin. So they were using Bitcoin as this neutral, sovereign reserve asset to make sure that their funds weren't frozen. And then the other theory of how they accumulated some Bitcoin is gold swaps. They have a ton of gold, like we mentioned earlier. They have a ton of gold underground and above ground in Venezuela. And apparently, I believe with China or somebody, they did a gold swap where they gave them a large amount of gold in return for Bitcoin. I think they have a couple billion dollars worth of gold stuck in a UK vault too, right? Yeah. Did you see that? Yeah. So it would make sense that because they got frozen and they got sanctioned, they refused to deliver the gold from the UK vault. And I think after that, they're like, all right, let's diversify out of gold and into Bitcoin. It can't be frozen. But point being is whether you like it or not, this acutely validates Bitcoin's value prop in the first state. You have a rogue nation state recognizing that they're vulnerable to the whims of central authorities in other monetary domains, particularly the fiat and even the gold system. So they turn to Bitcoin because they can trust it much more than they can in those systems. And so maybe a hard pill to swallow, but this is why Bitcoin exists. 100%. And then the last piece I would say is if Bitcoin is seized by the US government, they should give it back to the Venezuelan people. There's almost zero shot they will. They will probably just put it in the Strategic Bitcoin Reserve alongside the other stolen Bitcoin they have there. But I do not like the... I do not have respect for the cheering of the stolen Bitcoin going into the US Strategic Bitcoin Reserve. Even though that's what's probably going to happen if it does exist. Yes, I agree with you. But I want to put the case forward. Donald Trump, I know you listened to the show. Donrow Doctrine. I respect it I agree with it I think we should be focusing on our locality the Western Hemisphere And you have an opportunity here Let be clear There no indication that we know where the Bitcoin is or that we have the potential to get control of it at this point. So this is all speculation theory. But if we do have the ability, and like you said, Matt, I agree, I think it should go back to the Venezuelan people. And if you truly do want a strong, robust Western Hemisphere where people, particularly nation states, they're operating in negotiations and in commerce with good intentions, both counterparties have good intentions, it would be a great strong signal to say, hey, we're letting the Venezuelan people keep their Bitcoin. It is theirs. Their government acquired it off the sweat of their brow. You obviously are in a position where we want you to be stronger and you need to build up. And here's a good foundation, a nice Bitcoin strategic reserve for your country. It's a good foundation to begin building that. I think that would be a great step forward and a great sign of, hey, we legitimately want to make the Western Hemisphere stronger. As if the Trump administration did that. Will they do that? Will they ever even get control of the Bitcoin? Who knows? I think I agree with Matt. Yeah. I mean, if you're trying to get control of the Bitcoin, right, how would you do it? Instead of hitting the leader with a cruise missile, you would abduct him and interrogate him, right? That's the only way you're going to get access to it. But just to be clear here, once again, this is also a fairy tale. But obviously, if President Trump is listening, I actually think it shouldn't be given back to the Venezuelan government as their own strategic reserve. I like the idea. It's very unique in Bitcoin that you could do that, is literally have the US government airdrop an equal portion of sats to every single citizen of Venezuela. and I did the math it's a great fucking meme number there's 28 million Venezuelans about and if there's actually 600,000 Bitcoin that's 2.1 million sats per person and you can just airdrop it directly to the people well now you got my juices flowing you do that and you're there's been a large diaspora out of Venezuela as the Maduro regime Chavez and Maduro took over and destroyed the country. Many Venezuelans left the country, millions coming to the United States alone. And if you're trying to solve an immigration, these people are truly refugees. But I think if Maduro is out and there seems like the potential to rebuild Venezuela exists and you want to incentivize the Venezuelans who participated in diaspora and came to the United States and said, hey, we're going to airdrop this Bitcoin, but you've got to go back to Venezuela. could be like a nice little carrot there too yeah and I'm we've interacted with tons of Venezuelan Bitcoiners that's actually like another thing we should note on this story too is like Venezuelans I think on a per capita basis were some of the strongest Bitcoin adopters in the early days because they were going through hyperinflation notoriously they spun up a bunch of mining operations Matt mentioned they got seized by the Maduro regime. And so there's a ton of Venezuelans that I've personally interacted with that Matt has over the years that are extremely happy with what's going on right now. So I'm happy. And again, I think it's still early days, fog of war, less than a week out from the Maduro extraction. It's yet to be determined whether or not it will be a smooth transition or it'll be in the overall benefit of the Venezuelans that we're subjected to. the wins of the Maduro regime. I want to be optimistic and hold out hope that the Bonroe Doctrine is true and they do want a strong Western atmosphere. It was cool to see all the celebrations and the tears of joy that were coming across the internet last week because people were really suffering. 100%. Alright. do we have, I guess it's early. It's a morning rep. Let me just check my email. I'm not seeing, not seeing a financial freedom report out yet. So we don't have a Human Rights Foundation financial freedom report though. We'll just make one up. We talked about it last week. It seems like the interest in BitChat and Uganda specifically has increased. Over the last week, Cali's been showing some charts of download numbers coming out of Uganda. That's insane. I think he said 1% of the country has downloaded BitShot. On Android alone, it's over a million downloads. Yeah. We mentioned it last week, but they have a big election coming up a week from today, Thursday, January 15th. much speculation that the incumbent administration is going to shut off the internet to prevent people from communicating because they're likely going to execute some election fraud. And so to curb or to front run the internet shutdown and the shutdown of communication networks within the country, people have been fleeing to download. not fleeing, but have been rushing to download BitChat. What are you showing us, your coffee cup? Is there a monkey back there? I don't know, I just had to get up real quick. Oh. This is my way of turning off the camera. So in a way to sort of front-run this and get ahead of it, many people in the country have been urged to download BitChat, which, for those who are unaware, it's an app that you download, and it communicates using Bluetooth. So if you're within proximity of other users, you can communicate with. If you hit a critical mass of people, that sort of range with which you can communicate with people expands pretty massively. So a week out from the election, many people are downloading BitChat to be able to communicate as it's going on and to highlight election fraud if it happens. And I think this is an incredible example of freedom tech. And it will be very interesting to see the impact this has next week during the Ugandan elections. and did you see that the Ugandan government was like we've developed the technology to block BitChat and people in the comments are like you don't have the capability of blocking Bluetooth like you're just making shit on the way and supposedly Callie's working on on the Android side using direct Wi-Fi connections which extends the range significantly. You can't do that on the iPhone side, but because BitChats cross-compatible, it still indirectly benefits iPhone users because if it goes iPhone to Android then to Android to iPhone, you get significantly more range. Hell yeah. I don't know if they're going to write about it this week. I was going to say, I don't know if they're going to write about it this week, but go sign up for the Financial Freedom Report. They'll definitely be right about that, is my guess. I'm at an HRF event right now, and one of the main topics is BitChat and the success of BitChat. And also the impact of Vibe Coding in its creation and development in the first place. So it's just wild to see. It's cool to see. It empowers people. And just to be clear again, there's two aspects of BitChat. You have the mesh that's direct peer-to-peer, and then you have the global chat rooms that are using Nostr. And there's also the DM functionality, that if you're not near someone, you can then switch to Nostr-based DMs. Obviously, we've seen authoritarian governments in the past cut internet during election times. that's why there's being this push to BitChat in the first place. So if they do do that only the mesh part of BitChat will work. Obviously the Nostra aspects won't. And then the last piece I would just say is do you see the opposition leader? He has two million followers. And it's just like every morning he's just all caps like download BitChat which is just a crazy thing. so we'll keep you guys abreast of that I guess by the time we record next week if it's on Thursday Uganda's a few hours or probably six or seven hours ahead of us I would imagine so there should be some news next week when we're recording you can look out for that alright software updates, coin swap version 0.2 2.0 has been released. Come on a tap or use dig to swap protocol. This protocol allows faster swap rounds, unified funding, contract transactions, cheaper fees for swap recovery, and better anonymity set for increased privacy. So this is a really cool project, and we're funding it out of OpenSAPs. And they specifically asked me to sound the horn to all the ride-or-die freaks out there to test it and provide feedback and help contribute to the project. So go check it out if it interests you. It's obviously privacy-focused. Bitcoin swaps. Go check it out. Mention Boost. It's probably one of the bigger successes at OpenSats this year. Pretty cool to see. Just quietly grinding it out. Up, up, up, up, up. All right. Top boost from Rabbit Hole Recap, 390, the 2026 cattle bike. None to read on fountain. none above 21,000 sets. Do we have any on Primal? Nope. High zap was 2100 sets. Reminder freaks, if you're new here, we read every zap or boost that's over 21,000 sets. Anything in the line? The top four. We read the top four over 21,000 sets. All right, we've got a couple in the Primal live chat. 21,000 sets from Bill. Long Island Bitcoin meetup tomorrow, January 9th. A tap room in Ronkonkama at 6.30pm. All freaks welcome. Interesting. Friday night Bitcoin meetup. What do you think about that? Not my vibe, but I support it. Yes. The Commoner, 21,012 sats, palindrome, zap, let's fucking go. Let's go. Let's go. Freedom tech, winning out. I see Weirdo Robot in the comments asking for a link to CoinSwap, the CoinSwap repo. I do have a link. It will be in the show notes. but I will also put it in the Nostralide chat. I'm going to beat you to it. No, you didn't. You failed. Dang it. All right, next up, join market. Is there an update on the DDoS attack that we talked about last week? So this is the guy who announced the DDoS and the mitigation of rotating log files. This is just cool to see. Like, JoinMarket has been around for a while. I mean, this kind of came out of nowhere. It caught me off guard. It's a full... Yeah, go on. So as I said, JoinMarketNG, It's a full rewrite of all joint market components in modern Python, focusing on performance, maintainability, and extensibility. While maintaining compatibility with the existing joint market network, wire rewrite has served the community well for years. And we're deeply grateful for all that the contributors have done. However, the project has no longer actively developed 181 open issues and 41 open pull requests and had architectural limitations such as relying on Bitcoin cores, Berkeley DB wallets, which were deprecated in version 26.0. So it seems like Jewry Market has been neglected in mower here. And I imagine others are picking up the reins and modernizing it and making sure that's updated and maintained. So cool to see. I absolutely love to see it. Actually, that just reminded me, I unintentionally forgot to put it on the list, but there was a bug in Core V30 that had people... Drop legacy wallets. Well, specifically, it was if you migrated... It was really bad. If you migrated a legacy wallet... So that's what reminded me, like a Berkeley DB legacy wallet. I think it would wipe all wallets that were attached to the core client. I think obviously that's not great. And core maintainers also agree with that, which is why they announced it and then removed the core 30 release from the site, from their site. But to be clear, a very small subset of users could be affected by this. I think in general, most people just don't use core as a wallet to begin with. This does not affect anyone who's using Sparrow to connect to their node, for instance. It actually people that are running wallets within Core The second piece is obviously you need to have a really really old wallet that you then migrating And then also without a backup If you have a backup you wouldn be affected Obviously, you can just restore from backup. So it definitely shouldn't be dismissed as something that is trivial. But also, I think on the other side of the extreme, making it seem like it's the end of the world type of situation is wrong as well. Yes. And it looks like Not implemented this as well, too. So be aware if you're running Not. But didn't Luke say they weren't infected? Was that wrong? I saw somebody pointing out that the same code was implemented in Not. I don't know. Could be wrong. could be wrong I saw Luke on Noster said he hadn't merged that pull request yet and it wasn't part of Nod's okay but yeah it's a good reminder first of all to back up your wallets make sure all your wallets are always backed up ideally offline on steal oh I see Jerry Jerry said Luke was mistaken and they were affected too take it as you will but second of all I think it's another example that like there's better ways there's better ways to use Bitcoin than to use the built-in wallet functionality of core or not not best practice in my opinion at this point beware legacy addresses are addresses with a one in front and so if you're using Bitcoin Core as a wallet and you're planning on upgrading and you have Bitcoin and addresses. Yeah, but I think this is IP address day? No, no, no. I think you could have a legacy format wallet. It's like how it's stored in the database. I think you could use it with new addresses, but it's an old created wallet. It's just like moving to the new HD wallets. But I don't know. Maybe I'm wrong there. Never used that functionality in Core. Be aware. Next up on the list, big update from Primal. Primal Signers here. Absolutely massive. We're very excited about it. You can now sign into Primal Web without an extension. It's time to fade all the extensions. I absolutely hate needing an extension to use Nostra web apps. And so now to sign into Primal Web, all you have to do is scan a QR code. It uses the open... You scan a QR code with your phone, with the Primal mobile app. Your keys stay on your phone locally and everything gets signed from your phone in the background. And it uses the open NSEC bunker standard, which is, it's funny because this is what silent.link was asking for last week and we were testing it while he was asking for it. I knew it was in the pipeline. But that means that if you're using NAC or another NSEC bunker compatible signer, you can also sign into Primal Web with that as well. You obviously don't need to use the Primal app. And it also means with the Primal app, you can sign into any other Nostra app that supports NSEC bunker. if it's on your phone and you can't scan a QR code because you're in your phone browser you can also just copy and paste the NSEC bunker code without exposing your NSEC so it opens up just easy interoperability with pretty much every Nostra web app for Primal users the Primal team it's really impressive that they pulled this off Specifically on Android, it was relatively easy to do. On iPhone, on iOS, they kill background processes. It's really hard to have a background process constantly running. But we got it approved through the App Store, which is no easy feat. And the way we did it is it plays ambient noises. We curated a bunch of ambient sounds that play because it's a media player. So it's like if you have Spotify or Tidal in the background, you can mute the noises if you don't want to listen to, you know, jungle sounds or something while you're signed into Nostra apps. But the UX flow is just incredibly smooth. So I implore people to try it out, test it out, give us feedback. You know, there's a lot of unfounded hate out there for Primal. I saw some haters saying this is another example of us trying to lock in users or creating a walled garden which is just retarded because it's actually the exact opposite feature it's like you can sign in you can use Primal without ever providing an NSEC to the Primal app and you can now use a stream message for some reason uh oh are we still recording though? I don't know. I hit resume. I don't know if I kept recording. Let me see. Oh, I just got like a three-second guy here. I went back. You want to do it again? It's on again. Are we live? I think we're live. We're live. We're live. Are we live? Pretty cool. Did we lose? What did we lose? Do we have the recording? We're back. We're back. We're back. Recording should exist. I just don't know if it was recording while the stream dropped. YouTube's back. Twitter's back. I don't know what we missed. Did the freaks hear that we have huge updates coming for Primal? This is just the first of many. I'm pretty excited about it. And to the freaks that aren't aware, 1031 is the largest investor in Primal, and we're heavily involved in development. Looks like we're up on Twitter and YouTube. I think Noster is down, but people are flooding to the alternatives. But I was going through a diatribe. Why do we use this? Because you don't have to give up personal information. You create a private-public key pair. You can be pseudo-anonymous. You can detach your identity. any personal identifying information from your social web of trust account. And that is very important, especially in these days when companies like Ledger are continuously collecting data, having it stolen from them and leaked on the internet. There was a third Ledger leak that was announced this week. I mean, to be clear, I think, just before we move on to that, But yes, it's huge that you can use Nostra without permission, that you can use it without providing intimate personal information to big tech, social companies. But I think the verifiable data, the fact that all data is signed is going to be absolutely massive, particularly on video, on photos, but also on text posts. and to the example of we'll use Venezuela as an example again like while Venezuela was going down everyone was they wanted to monitor the situation and they were checking Polymarket and they were checking X and stuff and it's really hard to see which data is real and what is real and what is fake there's a lot of shit going on out there and the truth of the matter is if you're using something like X the only way you know if something is real or not is you're just trusting Elon and if you're using Facebook you're trusting Zuck You're using TikTok, you're trusting the CCP and Larry Ellison. It looks like he's going to get the US one. But I think that's going to become more and more of a clear win for Noster as an interoperable, verifiable data set. And we'll make it particularly well suited for, quote unquote, monitoring the situation. But yeah, onto the Ledger League. God, they are so irresponsible over there. I think this is the third time personal information has been leaked out of Ledger. And there's already been many cases where people are getting robbed and having home invasions. Their families are being put at risk because Ledger is not prioritizing customer safety. And I think they should be shunned from the industry in a big way. So look, we'll read your customer's got this email. Dear customer, Global E recently identified unusual activity on a portion of our network. Immediately after we became aware of the unusual activity in our cloud systems, we took action to contain and ultimately secure our systems. We retained independent forensic experts to conduct an investigation into the incident and were able to determine that some personal data including name and contact information were improperly accessed. so trusted third parties ledger should be shunned no focus feel bad for the bitcoin team inside a ledger because they are pretty elite um and then the other the other thing i would highlight here is it's another example by the way that um in the rise of the rise of llms the rise of these AI models makes it really easy to sift through these data leaks and combine the data leaks with each other and cross tabulate data. So you can take this ledger leak, for instance, and you can be like, okay, which email addresses are in here and what other leaks, not even just ledger leaks, have shown home addresses or other information and you can get in a nice table that shows all the information. It's pretty scary. In terms of personal data being leaked and compromised on the internet and then used against people, we're very much in a brave new world. It's easier than ever to weaponize this on an individual level against people. Yeah, and that is why at Rabbit Hole Recap, We choose to partner with CoinKite because they build the best hardware wallets. And then on top of that, they collect as little PII as possible, personal identifying information. And then they also wipe any data that they do collect when they make sales, when they sell products after 90 days. And so they're actively deleting user information. Can't verify, sort of trust me, bro. but I think it's impossible to verify that information is deleted. But it is. It's deleted every 90 days, as it should be. They take it very seriously. And just in general, best practice is to not use a home address for shipping where you're going to ship things to. Consider a P.O. Box or some other kind of office address or something, non-home address type of situation. But that information is deleted. And the other big thing that Coldcard does is they don't do any marketing emails and stuff. A lot of these ledger attacks, these ledger leaks have been because they have marketing lists to send you promo emails and try and sell you on whatever new products that they're releasing constantly. And CoinKite just doesn't do that. They don't have any third-party dependencies. They don't send out any marketing emails. And they should absolutely be applauded for that. So, yeah, I love CultGuard. I think they do a really good job. I use it. I use it for my companies. I use it for our projects. My family relies on it. Our businesses rely on it. And you can use code RHR for a discount. Well, not only that. we've got a new bundle we've got a special bundle on CoinKite too when you get the RHR bundle you'll get two queues a magic internet money sats card to hand out at a wedding if you haven't done that already and then a steel plate backup as well I think you'll get 10% off if you use the RHR code for that bundle particularly to be clear it's not up yet but it's supposed to be up by end of day so yeah you'll get a bigger discount if you use the RHR bundle if you do the RHR bundle, which I personally like. Even if you don't do multi-sig, I like the idea of having two cold cards because you set up the first one, then you back it up to steel, and then you restore from the steel to the second one. And then so you'll know that you actually recorded your seed correctly and that you practice the restore process. And then at that point, you have the two cold cards that are mirroring each other. They're the same wallet. and they're obviously pin protected with the secure element so you can kind of think of them like your seed with the lockbox around it like it's a safe with your with your seed and then you have the third backup which is a physical steel you know water resistant fire resistant analog offline plate and I think so then you can put the two gold cards in different places and you put the steel somewhere where you make sure that no one can get access to this deal because obviously they can spend their money if they get access to it. It's a really good setup. And then to Marty's point, SATs cards are just a great way to gift Bitcoin. So I think it's a cool bundle. It is a cool bundle. That's all we have on the list. I know you're busy. And on a bit of a somber note, you were aware of this last week, man. That's why we pushed it up. but my aunt is very close with us. She was rushed to the ICU last week. Now she's on hospice, and it looks like today may be her last day on this earth, and I just wanted to use that to send a message. Cherish time. Cherish your time on the planet. Cherish time with your family. Shout out to Aunt Nancy. This one's for you. I'm sorry, brother. That sucks. and yeah time is scarce make the most of it love you all freaks stay on the stack peace of love