Follow Freddie:
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Freddie’s recommendation: A Not Too Technical Overview of This Bitcoin Thing

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Takeaways:

• Speech and thought are the same freedom wearing different clothes. A society that stops you saying a thing eventually stops you thinking it, because thinking is mostly a conversation you have out loud with other people.

• The safest thing anyone can do with personal data is refuse to collect it in the first place. Every large centralized database eventually leaks, and it is usually sold to exactly the people it was supposed to protect you from. So a policy designed to keep children safe ends up building the single most dangerous object in the country.

• When a stated goal cannot be achieved by the method chosen, the stated goal is probably not the real one. There is no way to check every child at the door without checking every adult too, which means age gating the internet is really identity gating the internet. The children are the argument, and the argument is unanswerable by design.

• Control of money comes first. Someone who cannot buy a train ticket cannot travel to a protest, which makes the payment rail the cheapest and quietest lever an authoritarian has.

• When people erupt, attacking the place where the anger is visible does nothing about the anger. Blaming a social platform for street violence is treating the thermometer instead of the fever, and it reveals a governing class more frightened of being seen clearly than of being wrong.

• Credit is a machine for pulling tomorrow’s value into today, and it works beautifully in small doses. Scaled to a nation and detached from anything real, it becomes a way of consuming a future that has not been earned yet. Money got easy to make, value never did, and the gap between those two facts is most of what feels broken.

• Currencies are much more fragile than the people using them believe. The oldest surviving one, the British Pound, is only a few hundred years old, Zimbabwe has burned through five in one lifetime, and Argentina five in fifty years.

• The protocol does not need permission, and the human being holding it lives somewhere with rules. A single regulatory phrase can lock a citizen out of an exchange, close a business bank account, or cap what an ordinary person may buy in a year. That is why policy work matters.

• A ban on Bitcoin is a ban on arithmetic. A child in a bedroom flipping a coin 256 times and writing down the result has generated a key and can receive money from anywhere on earth, which means outlawing it requires outlawing entropy, mathematics and private thought. Some things simply cannot be legislated out of existence.

• Almost everyone doing damage is convinced they are the good person in the story, which is why a central bank can sell a surveillance currency using the word freedom and mean it sincerely. That is more unsettling than villainy and also more workable, because sincere people can be argued with. The numbers are on the side of ordinary people, and remembering that is itself a form of resistance.

Connect with me:
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Sponsors:

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

Watch my episode with Mikkel for more:

Ledn

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

Trezor

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

Abundant Mines

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

Special offers:

→ Want to preserve your privacy online? Get a GrapheneOS privacy phone or laptop, up to $150 off “Above Phone” products + extra $50 off with code EFRAT: https://abovephone.com/efrat/

→ Get 15% off “Born To Be Free” all-natural, tallow-based skincare products on a bitcoin standard, using code EFRAT: https://oshi.link/1nvZYq

→ Join me at any of these conferences or events:

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

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

Art as a Vehicle for Collectivist Ideas

Somewhere along the way, art became a delivery system for collectivist ideas, and any artist who wanted to eat learned to carry the message. MADEX is proving the delivery system runs in both directions. Change the money behind the art and you change what the art is allowed to say. He’s making the case that capital itself, real capital, is the root of excellence rather than its enemy.

The Entrepreneur Is the Signal

You can measure the health of a society by the way it treats its entrepreneurs, he told me, because an entrepreneur is the closest thing we have to an honest signal from the market. In a world that relies on committees of experts, government subsidies or mandates – this can sounds like a strange idea. But in an open free market, the entreperneur’s endevours will receive an honest “live or die” signal rapidly, which will serve as a impactuful force to shape the market and society’s direction and behaviour.

The Truck Nobody Asked For

MADEX then shared an anacdote I wasn’t aware of: Pickup trucks in the US and Canada are now much larger that in the past. But nobody asked for larger vehicles… what happened? Regulators tied engine efficiency to vehicle size, and manufacturers worked out that inflating the truck with aluminum was cheaper than redesigning an engine from scratch. The rule produced the exact opposite of its intent, and everyone pays for it forever. That’s what happens when people with no connection to reality get to define what efficiency means. It’s a small example, but it’s everywhere once you start looking for it.

Quality Cannot Be Faked

Real leather and real cotton resists dilution. The price of beef tells you more about what’s happening to your money than any government number, and the feeling of something well made sitting in your hand has quietly become a form of evidence. MADEX is building a line of lighters right now designed to last generations, a small rebellion against everything disposable.

The Patron With No Opinion

Bitcoin is the first patron of the arts with number go up technology. Every patron before it arrived with an opinion about what should be made. Bitcoin has none. Hold it long enough and it becomes the blank check that artists have been dreaming about for five hundred years, moving the constraint on creation from money to vision. When 0.01 Bitcoin can finance a company for twenty years, we’re going to see an explosion of innovation nobody alive has witnessed. True capitalism has been dead for well over a century. We’ve just been living off its architectural remnants.

AI Is Not The Enemy

On AI, he wasn’t dismissive, just precise. AI cannot receive a vision in a dream, MADEX said. It recombines what already exists, useful and worth using. The creators black pilling on AI right now are being encouraged to quit their jobs by the people who benefit from them quitting.

Why He Won’t Use the ₿

MADEX refuses to put the Bitcoin symbol on his work. The symbol is a shortcut, cheap, fast, anyone can order it from China, he says. What actually costs something is converting dense economic and philosophical ideas into symbols that carry them, and people feel that difference even when they can’t articulate it. Wealth is in the details. The last two percent of effort is the entire distance between good and great.

Children: The Most Intimate Front

We closed on children, and he was ademant about that. The campaign against having children is the most intimate front of this whole war. It’s expensive, it’s bad for the planet, the world is ending anyway, and the targets are always the people who think for themselves. Children hand you a stake in the future (I loved that), and a stake in the future makes you fight for it. That’s why you’re being told to skip it.

Thought on Debt

About debt, MADEX is more nuanced: Fiat debt cripples fiat man and liberates Bitcoin man. Same instrument, opposite outcome, and the only variable is what you’re holding underneath it. One man is locked into a car payment for eternity. The other takes on debt with a smile, because time is quietly working for him.

This is one of the most creative conversations I’ve had on the show, with a super based, talented artist. If you make anything, or you’re raising kids, or you’re just trying to figure out what to hold onto while everything around you gets diluted, this one is for you.

Connect with me:
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Ledn

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

Trezor

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

Abundant Mines

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

Special offers:

→ Get 15% off “Born To Be Free” all-natural, tallow-based skincare products on a bitcoin standard, using code EFRAT: https://oshi.link/1nvZYq

→ Join me at any of these conferences or events:

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

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

Luke de Wolf, industrial cybersecurity expert and author of “Defending Bitcoin”, applies critical infrastructure security frameworks to Bitcoin itself. We dig into the network’s real risks and vulnerabilities: arbitrary data, Bitcoin Core’s governance structure, and the Core vs. Knots split. Luke’s argument: Bitcoin has weathered this so far, but complacency is the one risk it can’t afford.

Follow Luke: Twitter | Nostr | Book and Website

Watch Luke’s first appearance on the You’re The Voice Podcast here

Takeaways:

• Bitcoin is critical infrastructure with nobody assigned to defend it. Every power grid, pipeline and payment network on earth has a security team, an incident response plan and someone whose job is to answer the phone at 3am. Bitcoin secures close to two trillion dollars and has none of that. Its entire defense budget is whatever individual holders, node runners and miners decide to spend on their own.

• Availability turns out to be the security property that matters most. In industrial systems the priority is keeping the thing running, because a plant that stops has already failed at its purpose. Bitcoin works the same way.

• The most dangerous governance failures look completely reasonable from the inside. Nobody has to be corrupt for a system to capture itself. A fellowship leads to a contributor role, a contributor role leads to a maintainer role, a maintainer nominates her own successor, and every individual step is defensible. Then one day you look up and the people holding commit rights all came through the same two founders.

• Rough consensus becomes rule by insiders the moment you also get to define who counts as an insider. Technical people with years of GitHub history and legitimate objections were dismissed in the OP_RETURN debate on the grounds that they were not regular contributors to Core.

• Telling users to go run different software is an admission, and people took it literally. Knots went from roughly 5% of the network to around 20%. ProductionReady now exists specifically to fund a third implementation. When people are told their preferences do not count, some of them go and build somewhere those preferences do count.

• Defaults shape behavior far more powerfully than rules ever could. For years nothing prevented anyone from stuffing data into Bitcoin. There was only a network default saying 80 bytes gets relayed and anything beyond that is your own problem. That default held for a decade on nothing but shared understanding. Removing it took away the friction that had quietly made restraint the easy choice.

• Every attack surface in this conversation had a personal action attached to it. This is the part I keep returning to. Mining centralization has a home miner answer. Node centralization has a run your own answer. Governance capture has a choose your client answer. The list of things a single person can do right now turned out to be longer than the list of things they have to accept.

• Complacency is the one threat with no available defense. Every other risk we discussed has a mitigation, a workaround, a control you can apply today. The single failure mode with no answer is a population deciding its individual contribution is too small to bother making.

Connect with me:
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Sponsors:

Expat Money

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

Watch my episode with Mikkel for more:

Ledn

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

Trezor

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

Abundant Mines

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

Special offers:

→ Get 15% off “Born To Be Free” all-natural, tallow-based skincare products on a bitcoin standard, using code EFRAT: https://oshi.link/1nvZYq

→ Join me at any of these conferences or events:

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

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

Transcript:

PART 1: THE TREZOR INCIDENT

Yesterday Trezor confirmed a data breach at one of its shipping partners, exposing customer order details, and in this video I’ll walk through what happened, what it means, and the self-custody best practices worth tightening.

But first we need to talk about what’s happening to self-custody, because I feel there’s a multi-front attack on bitcoin and specifically on self custody, and the last couple of weeks make that hard to ignore.

That matters because self-custody isn’t a fringe practice, more than 45% of bitcoin is held in self-custody today, according to River. And I think that’s exactly why there’s a real push to reduce that number and get users custodying their bitcoin with third-party custodians instead, because the more that shifts, the more it chips away at bitcoin’s strength as a permissionless asset. And yet, look at what’s piled up in just the last couple of weeks.

It started with Coldcard, a firmware flaw that quietly weakened seed randomness, draining over 1,800 Bitcoin from thousands of addresses. Then BTCPayServer, exploited to empty Lightning nodes. Then Boltz, hit by relentless AI-assisted attacks until its founding team stepped down and handed the company off, and days later Lightning wallet ZEUS pulled its own infrastructure offline after a separate cyberattack. And now, this week, Trezor disclosing a shipping partner breach that exposed customer data.

All of this landed right around Bitcoin’s contentious BIP-110 activation window. I’m not saying that’s cause and effect, but five incidents in the same stretch of weeks is not something to wave off as coincidence. It reads like a multi-front attack on the credibility of self-custody itself, and headlines are pushing the same message: self-custody is dead, you can’t trust yourself to custody your own money, you need someone else to hold it for you.

But I reject that framing. It may not be for everyone, and some people genuinely need help, but it’s still a valid approach. There are many ways to hold, secure, and transact with Bitcoin, and each person, business, or institution should use whatever fits them best.

I also think we’d be lying to ourselves if we didn’t admit these incidents are teaching us something real. We’ve gotten comfortable, and that’s exactly where security fails. So instead of getting defensive, let’s actually learn from this and tighten what needs tightening.

Here’s what Trezor disclosed.

Trezor put out an official statement on August 13th about a breach at ShipMonk, one of the shipping providers they use to fulfill orders. An unauthorized party gained access to systems holding customer data. The exposed KYC information includes names, phone numbers, emails, and shipping addresses, of roughly 14,000 people who ordered from the US, UK, Sweden, Colombia, Brazil, Italy, or Portugal between May 10th and August 8th 2026. If you placed an order during that time, check your email to see if you received a message from help@trezor.io about it.

The reason the number isn’t higher is Trezor’s own data retention policy. They retain order data for only 90 days after delivery, and require the same from their shipping partners, so anything older simply wasn’t there.

Trezor also says this is the first time in their thirteen-year history that a breach has exposed customer phone numbers and shipping addresses.

Important to mention, as I’ve seen some people and companies spreading misinformation about it: devices and wallets were NOT affected by this. This is an order data breach, which poses an operational security risk, not a funds risk. Nobody’s Bitcoin was touched, no private key was exposed, and Trezor’s own systems were not compromised. This was strictly a data breach.

PART 2: SELF-CUSTODY BEST PRACTICES

So let’s get into the actual takeaways here, a few self-custody best practices worth tightening up right now.

If you were affected, know this: it doesn’t put your funds at risk directly, but it does put you at risk of phishing, and since shipping addresses were exposed, it also raises the risk of a $5 wrench attack, meaning physical targeting based on someone knowing where you live and that you own a hardware wallet. Whoever accessed this data now has exactly what they need to send convincing phishing emails, fake calls, fraudulent letters impersonating Trezor, your bank, or an exchange.

1. Never enter your seed phrase anywhere but your device. Not a website, not an app, not a support chat. This is the single most repeated piece of advice from every hardware wallet company after every incident, because it’s still the number one way people actually lose funds.

2. Verify any Trezor communication through official channels only. No legitimate company will ever ask you for your recovery words, your seed phrase, not by email, not by phone, not on a website. Btw the same goes for communication from me or anyone else, there are so many impersonators who are trying to scam people pretending to be someone they’re not. I would never DM you to ask for your personal information.

3. Consider a multisig setup for meaningful amounts. Spreading trust across multiple devices or locations means a compromised seed can’t take everything. When it comes to multisig, remember it doesn’t necessarily require a custodian, it doesn’t require KYC, giving up your privacy, or a company signing on your behalf. One of Bitcoin’s first principles is removing trusted third parties, not scaring you into adding them back in under a different name.

4. Limit what companies know about you when you order. Use an email address that isn’t tied to your real identity when you place the order. Pay with bitcoin if you can, and if you can’t, use a disposable debit card instead of your regular one. Ship to a PO Box or delivery center, instead of your home address to limit how much of your physical location is on file, though keep in mind ID is usually still required to collect from one.

Trezor is also rolling out an anonymous delivery option, using locker pickup, neutral packaging, and generic sender details, with automatic deletion of shipping data after delivery, aiming for the EU by September and the US by the end of the year.

WHY THIS MATTERS

Lastly, I want to apologize for not stressing these best practices earlier, I’m aware it could have protected people from this data breach, and as someone who recommends Trezor products, I apologize if you got affected. I also want to emphasize something about every company or product I talk about on my show. Nothing is risk free. I bring you the people and the products I find compelling, but that is never a substitute for your own research. Always look into the security practices of anything you use to store or move your money, and always decide for yourself what level of risk you’re comfortable carrying.

Stay sharp, vigilant, and safe out there.

Connect with me:
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Latest content:

Sponsors:

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

Watch my episode with Mikkel for more:

Ledn

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

Trezor

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

Abundant Mines

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

Special offers:

→ Get 15% off “Born To Be Free” all-natural, tallow-based skincare products on a bitcoin standard, using code EFRAT: https://oshi.link/1nvZYq

→ Join me at any of these conferences or events:

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

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

Follow MADEX: Twitter | Nostr | Art

Takeaways:

• Art was never neutral. Somewhere along the way it became a delivery system for collectivist ideas, and any artist who wanted to eat learned to carry the message. What MADEX is proving is that the delivery system runs in both directions. Change the money behind the art and you change what the art is allowed to say.

• You can measure the health of a society by the way it treats its entrepreneurs. An entrepreneur is the closest thing we have to an honest signal from the market.

• The pickup truck story broke something open for me. Nobody asked for larger vehicles. Regulators tied engine efficiency to vehicle size, and manufacturers worked out that inflating the truck with aluminum was cheaper than redesigning an engine. The rule produced the exact opposite of its intent and everyone pays for it forever. This is what happens when people with no connection to reality get to define what efficiency means.

• Quality cannot be faked, which is exactly why it disappears first. A steak resists dilution. So does real leather and real cotton. The price of beef tells you more about what is happening to your money than any government number, and the feeling of something well made sitting in your hand has quietly become a form of evidence.

• Bitcoin is the first patron of the arts with number go up technology. Every patron before it arrived with an opinion about what should be made. Bitcoin has none. Hold it long enough and it becomes the blank check that artists have been dreaming about for five hundred years, which moves the constraint on creation from money to vision.

• When 0.01 Bitcoin can finance a company for twenty years, we are going to see an explosion of innovation that nobody alive has witnessed. True capitalism has been dead for well over a century and we have been living off its architectural remnants ever since.

• AI cannot receive a vision in a dream. It recombines what already exists, which is useful and worth using, and it will never sit alone at three in the morning while something arrives from somewhere unaccountable. The creators black pilling on AI right now are being encouraged to quit by the exact people who benefit from them quitting.

• The Bitcoin ₿ is a shortcut that anyone can order from China. What actually costs something is converting dense economic and philosophical ideas into symbols that carry them, and people feel that difference even when they cannot articulate it. Wealth is in the details, and the last two percent of effort is the entire distance between good and great.

• The campaign against having children is the most intimate front of this war. It is expensive, it is bad for the planet, the world is ending anyway, and the targets are always the people who think for themselves. Children hand you a stake in the future, and a stake in the future makes you fight for it. That is precisely why you are being told to skip it.

• Fiat debt cripples fiat man and liberates Bitcoin man. Same instrument, opposite outcome, and the only variable is what you are holding underneath it. One man is locked into a car payment for eternity and the other takes on debt with a smile because time is quietly working for him.

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

Sponsors:

Expat Money

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

Watch my episode with Mikkel for more:

Ledn

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

Trezor

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

Abundant Mines

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

Special offers:

→ Get 15% off “Born To Be Free” all-natural, tallow-based skincare products on a bitcoin standard, using code EFRAT: https://oshi.link/1nvZYq

→ Join me at any of these conferences or events:

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

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

Ben Perrin is a Canadian Bitcoin educator and the creator of BTC Sessions, the world’s longest running Bitcoin only educational channel, with tens of millions of views since 2016. Together, we discuss what bitcoin is shaping up to be, Ben’s three YouTube deletions, the Canadian trucker protest, state censorship, self custody mistakes that could cost families their inheritance, and the new Sovereign Sessions channel launching this month. We close with a rapid audience Q&A on BIP 110, wallets, silent payments, and more.

Follow Ben: Twitter | Nostr | BTC Sessions on Youtube | Sovereign Sessions on Youtube

Takeaways:

• A decade of any discipline, dance or Bitcoin education, teaches the same lesson about mastery: the goal keeps moving faster than you can catch up to it. Ben expected to run out of Bitcoin topics to cover. Ten years and thousands of videos later, the list keeps growing faster than the time he has to cover it.

• Platforms that reward you for growth can revoke everything on a whim, and the only real protection is never depending on a single one of them. Ben’s YouTube channel vanished three times, once mid livestream in front of nearly 400,000 subscribers, with no real explanation ever given.

• When a government freezes a small amount of Bitcoin during a protest and the press reports it as total confiscation, the version that spreads is the one that serves the narrative already in place, regardless of what actually happened. Most Canadians still believe the trucker protest funds were frozen; 70 percent of the donated Bitcoin was handed out in packages on the ground and never touched.

• Real world adversarial tests, even painful ones, become blueprints. The financial crackdown on the Canadian trucker protest exposed weaknesses in fundraising under state pressure that Bitcoiners can now design around, using tools like silent payments, before the next crisis arrives.

• Overengineering an inheritance plan into a scavenger hunt can guarantee generational wealth is lost, simply because whoever needs to access it isn’t equipped to solve the puzzle a paranoid version of yourself designed.

• Diversification within Bitcoin custody, not away from Bitcoin, is where the real risk management happens. Weighing the likelihood of a house fire against the likelihood of a state raid, and building a different setup for each, is more honest than pretending one solution fits every threat.

• State media funded largely by government dollars will rarely cover stories that embarrass that government, which means the truth about tools like Bitcoin spreads person to person, podcast to podcast, hand to hand, never top down.

• Voting out a leader over surface level dissatisfaction, without examining what the replacement actually represents, often installs someone who continues the same policy under a friendlier face. An electorate that celebrates removing one architect of a crisis while cheering for his former advisor has learned nothing about the crisis itself.

• Being called an influencer only stings when you’ve absorbed someone else’s cynicism about what you do. It stops being an insult the moment you watch it change a stranger’s life, send them into a career they love, or hand a family the tools to protect their future.

• Refusing to build financial products that sit on top of Bitcoin as collateral comes from rejecting the same counterparty risk Bitcoin was built to escape, just recreated one layer removed and dressed up as innovation.

• Passionate voices at the extremes of any debate aren’t a problem to silence. They’re what drags the center of the conversation somewhere new, while most people still land somewhere in the middle, which is exactly how consensus is supposed to work.

• Hope, in Ben’s telling, gets built one local market at a time, by finding freedom minded people and transacting directly with them instead of waiting for permission from institutions. Enough scrappy individuals doing that quietly today is what lets a whole generation ride off into their own version of a peaceful citadel.

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

Sponsors:

Expat Money

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

Watch my episode with Mikkel for more:

Ledn

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

Trezor

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

Abundant Mines

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

Special offers:

→ Get 15% off “Born To Be Free” all-natural, tallow-based skincare products on a bitcoin standard, using code EFRAT: https://oshi.link/1nvZYq

→ Join me at any of these conferences or events:

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

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

Follow Tomáš: Twitter | LinkedIn

Takeaways:

• A single root failure destroys everything built on top of it. If entropy is broken at the very beginning of key generation, no amount of good design downstream can save you, because every key that follows inherits the same flaw.

• Open source is necessary but never sufficient. Code being visible does not mean anyone is actually looking at it. Security requires incentivized eyes doing the work, not just accessible code sitting in a repository.

• Licensing quietly shapes an entire industry’s incentive structure. When a company forks free and open code but locks its own derivative down, it loses the very community review that made the original trustworthy.

• A vulnerability can sit untouched for five years, and the silence itself is never proof of safety. Absence of disclosure just means absence of attention, not absence of risk.

• The instinct to add more security friction often trades away the usability that keeps people safe in the first place. Security that nobody can use correctly becomes its own kind of vulnerability.

• Physical security gets disproportionate attention because it is dramatic and visible, while remote and software-level risks quietly do far more damage. We fixate on the exotic threat and underinvest in the mundane one.

• Transparency has a cost that companies rarely get credit for. Publishing a finding that ultimately posed no real risk to funds still reads as a headline, and honesty can be mistaken for weakness.

• Every wave of institutional entry into Bitcoin, through ETFs and custodians, reintroduces the exact intermediary that Bitcoin was built to remove. Convenience quietly recreates the system people thought they were escaping.

• A crisis inside a trusted brand tends to produce both short-term flight to convenience and long-term improvement in rigor, and a community can hold both reactions true at the same time.

• Bug bounty programs are a quiet admission that no company, however competent, can find all of its own flaws. Declining to pay for vulnerability reports is a decision about priorities, not a sign of confidence.

• Multisig across different vendors protects against a category of failure that multisig within one vendor cannot touch. Redundancy only works when the redundant parts can actually fail independently of each other.

• Technologies inherit reputations from years-old failures long after the underlying weaknesses have been fixed. A protocol’s old bad name can persist even after the real problem has quietly been solved.

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

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Ledn

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

Trezor

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

Abundant Mines

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

Special offers:

→ Get 15% off “Born To Be Free” all-natural, tallow-based skincare products on a bitcoin standard, using code EFRAT: https://oshi.link/1nvZYq

→ Join me at any of these conferences or events:

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

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

Follow Paul: Nostr | Paul’s Newsletters | “A Lodging of Wayfaring Men” free audiobook

Paul’s newsletter:

The Findings Substack

From 2011 through 2025, my subscribers financed a long exploration to the frontiers of history, philosophy and science. That voyage is now complete and I’ll be writing about our discoveries here at Substack.

Takeaways:

• A surveillance state rarely needs a single villain behind it. It emerges from an accumulation of institutions, each one just doing what seemed convenient or profitable at the time, until the aggregate becomes something none of them could have built alone.

• Fear works as a deliberate brain hack, and someone usually benefits from deploying it. Once you can recognize that mechanism in the moment it’s happening to you, you stop being an easy target for it.

• Watching a government stop mocking a movement and start showing up to court says more about that movement’s momentum than any poll or headline ever could.

• Sitting inside a courtroom teaches how easily the appearance of due process can mask decisions that were made long before anyone took the stand. A judge quietly editing a trial transcript over a weekend is the kind of detail that never makes it into the official record.

• A currency that requires printing more of itself to survive is eventually forced into a binary choice between hyperinflation and default, and governments will almost always choose to keep printing rather than face the political consequences of default.

• The hardest part of adopting a genuinely new idea about money isn’t intelligence. It’s psychological willingness to sit with something unfamiliar long enough to actually understand it, and most people simply don’t have the time or safety to do that.

• Encryption was once classified as a weapon under US export law, restricted the same way a missile would be. The privacy tools we take for granted today exist because a small group of people were willing to risk prison to get the code out into the world.

• Covid showed how quickly people who called themselves free speech advocates could disappear the moment defending speech actually cost them something. Watching an entire class of vocal supporters vanish overnight was more revealing than anything they had said before that.

• A chaotic, decentralized AI landscape full of competing, imperfect players can be safer for humanity than a smooth, centralized one. Entropy, messy as it looks from the outside, is often what keeps power from consolidating in the first place.

• Charity and care for the poor existed long before the modern welfare state, built by ordinary people who could not simply print unlimited money and instead built systems of mutual support that had to work within real constraints.

• Honest money makes war, bribery, and unchecked government spending structurally harder, because there is finally a real price attached to every one of those choices.

• What gives Paul the most hope for humanity’s future is watching people quietly rediscover that certain traditional values around commitment, family, and purpose were healthier all along than the alternatives they had been sold.

• Every single person changes the world just by making choices every day. The world as it exists right now is nothing more than the aggregate of billions of individual decisions, which means no one participating in it is actually powerless.

Connect with me:
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Sponsors:

Expat Money

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

Watch my episode with Mikkel for more:

Ledn

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

Trezor

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

Abundant Mines

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

Special offers:

→ Get 15% off “Born To Be Free” all-natural, tallow-based skincare products on a bitcoin standard, using code EFRAT: https://oshi.link/1nvZYq

→ Join me at any of these conferences or events:

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

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

If you’re considering switching to Trezor

Trezor has a sale on till Aug. 6, of up to 20% off (which started before this shit show) and I got an extra 10% off, using this link.
The discount code is in this short video, yes, you’ll have to watch it:

What happened

Coinkite, the maker of Coldcard, disclosed a critical flaw in how some of its devices generate wallet seeds. In simple terms: the device was supposed to pull true randomness from a dedicated hardware chip when creating your seed phrase, but due to a coding error, it was often pulling from a much weaker, predictable source instead.

Weak randomness means a smaller pool of possible seed phrases, small enough that an attacker can potentially guess or reconstruct one and steal the funds behind it. Your PIN, your air-gapped setup, your secure element, none of that helps once the seed itself was never truly random to begin with. Sadly, researchers have already tied roughly 594 BTC (about $38 million) swept from around 500 wallets to this exact issue.

More technical explanations here:

Who is affected

• Mk3 devices, seeds generated on firmware 4.0.1 through 5.0.3, are the most exposed. Coinkite estimates the effective randomness dropped to roughly 40 bits, far below what’s needed for real security.

• Mk4, Mk5, and Q devices were also affected, though less severely (effective entropy around 72 bits), because some hardware-based randomness still got mixed in as a backup.

• TAPSIGNER, OPENDIME, and SATSCARD are not affected, they run different code entirely.

• If your seed used 50 or more independent, private dice rolls, or a strong BIP-39 passphrase, your risk is significantly lower, but migrating is still the safe move.

  Coinkite’s full technical writeup is here if you want the details: Technical Deep Dive into the Entropy Issue

Coinkite’s response

Coinkite founder NVK posted a long, unusually direct apology and accountability statement. Worth reading in full:

What to do if you have a Coldcard

I’m not going to walk through the migration steps myself, this moves fast and the official guidance is the safest source to follow in real time. Go straight to Coinkite’s own instructions: blog.coinkite.com and firmware upgrade instructions. You can also follow @COLDCARDwallet and @Coinkite for real-time updates. If you’d rather be walked through it, see the video tutorial and the live support session below.

Video walkthrough

• If you’d rather watch someone do this step by step, Nathan from BTC Sessions put together a quick 15-minute tutorial: confirm your seed phrase backup, upgrade firmware, wipe seed, generate a new seed from the new firmware, then migrate to the new wallet using the temp seed.

• There’s also a 2+ hours support session on their Youtube channel: COLDCARD Hack Support w/ Bitcoin Mentor Team

• also released a comprehensive guide:

Watchman's Torch by Escape the Technocracy

Coldcard: The Devastation Begins

Episode 229 of The Watchman Privacy Podcast – Coldcard: The Devastation Begins…

Listen now

17 days ago · 3 likes · Gabriel Custodiet

Don’t throw out your old device

One more thing: don’t throw out your old device once you’ve migrated. If you ever pursue a police report or your stolen coins are recovered, your original Coldcard may be needed to prove you owned the seed, tied to the hardware ID on the processor. Because the seeds are trivially brute forceable, having the seed alone is not enough to prove you’re the rightful owner.

If you’re on a Trezor

Trezor itself confirmed its own devices are safe, and not affected by this specific issue, since it’s a Coldcard codebase problem, not a shared industry flaw:

However, if you generated your seed on an affected Coldcard and later moved that same seed onto a Trezor, you are still affected, moving a weak seed to a different device doesn’t fix the weakness:

Also:

Investigation update

Security researcher Clay Garrett shared new findings on how the attacker operated during the sweeps:

Act now

I’m so sorry for everyone who’s been hurt by this. Self custody means you’re not trusting a bank or an exchange and that you’re responsible. It doesn’t mean you’re not trusting anyone. You’re still trusting that the device’s engineering actually did what it claimed to do. Open-source firmware helped this get found fast, but it still took a live exploit for anyone to catch it.

If you have a Coldcard, don’t wait. Act now and migrate today. And if you know someone who has one and might not be following this closely, send them this article please.

P.s. Additional resources

released a good interview on the topic too:

TFTC also put together a comprehensive guide:

And released a video guide too:

Checkonchain Bitcoin Newsletter

⚠️ PSA: Addressing The Coldcard Exploit

Read more

20 days ago · 43 likes · 20 comments · James Check (Checkmatey)

Connect with me:
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Latest releases:

Sponsors:

Expat Money

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

Ledn

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

Trezor

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

Abundant Mines

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

Special offers:

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

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

.

I’ve been living a nomad life for a while now. Bali, El Salvador, Australia, Vietnam, Spain, Ireland and many more places.

I experience different currencies, I learn about tax systems, rules.

Now - it’s not easy knowing where to settle down. There’s no one perfect place, I personally believe your personal checklist is unique to you, and your shortlist will be set depending on what’s important to you.

But heres one thing I’ve learned which I want to share with you: the concept of freedom, on the physical geographical aspect - It’s a structure you build deliberately.

Because governments can freeze your bank account. Restrict your movement. Close their borders overnight. We saw it during Covid. Now during the recent Middle East wars I felt it again.

Also life in the “west” - is not becoming easier, let’s admit it.

That’s why I believe in having a Plan B. A second residency. A second passport. Somewhere else to go if and when things go sideways.

I’m glad to share I partnered with Expat Money, founded by Mikkel Thorup, who has lived in nine countries, visited over 100, and spent two decades helping people build exactly this kind of structure.

He put together a free report on Plan B residencies and instant citizenships. Places like Panama, with an interesting territorial tax system - for example if your income is earned outside the country, you owe nothing to the government.

Or Vanuatu, where you can get citizenship by investment in as little as three months, and pay in Bitcoin.

Or Bulgaria, where an investor visa requires no residency to keep it active, and can fast-track you to citizenship in as little as 18 months.

The report outlines various paths to a second passport. Dozens of country programs, and It’s free.

Let me know in the comments if there are specific countries you want to learn more about, or specific tools like offshore banking, passports or tax residencies.

Efrat ♥️

My keynote from Prague:

Connect with me:
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Sponsors:

Expat Money

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

Watch my episode with Mikkel for more:

Ledn

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

Trezor

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

Abundant Mines

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

Special offers:

→ Get 15% off “Born To Be Free” all-natural, tallow-based skincare products on a bitcoin standard, using code EFRAT: https://oshi.link/1nvZYq

→ Join me at any of these conferences or events:

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

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

Presenting it on Prague’s massive stage last month was a very moving moment for me. I felt like I’m combining my lived experience of building resilience, my “old” expertise of creating value-driven brands and identities, with my newfound wisdom on spirituality, digital and physical freedoms. These are all ingredients in my life’s recipe, and how I build and maintain resistance and sovereignty, step by step, day by day. I hope this inspires you and moves you to action.

“Banned or censored by Stripe, Telegram, Substack, and LinkedIn, all in one year. Efrat Fenigson took the BTC Prague stage and laid out what’s next: digital ID in 27 countries, message scanning, VPN bans. Bitcoin solved the money layer. This talk is about the rest.
What does Efrat’s sovereignty framework look like? Identity, Infrastructure, voice and value, on the physical, digital and spiritual levels.”

Please help me beat the evil algorithms, with a share on X, a comment on Youtube/Spotify, or a zap on Fountain. Also consider my sponsors & affiliates offers, that helps support my work, indirectly.
Thank you!
Efrat ♥️

More from BTC Prague 2026:

Connect with me:
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Sponsors:

Expat Money

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

Ledn

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

Trezor

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

Abundant Mines

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

Special offers:

→ Get 15% off “Born To Be Free” all-natural, tallow-based skincare products on a bitcoin standard, using code EFRAT: https://oshi.link/1nvZYq

→ Join me at any of these conferences or events:

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

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

Follow Dave: Twitter | Dave’s website

Takeaways:

• A government that stops fearing its own people has stopped governing and started extracting. When the incentive to maintain public trust disappears, what remains is simple predation dressed up in bureaucratic language.

• Real power today isn’t concentrated by armies anymore, it’s distributed by asymmetric tools. Once a rice farmer with a rifle can outlast a superpower’s military, and a Bitcoiner can move his savings past any border with a seed phrase, the old math of who gets to rule quietly stops working.

• A concrete pad worth $12,000 becoming a $600 million government lease is what happens when a system has never once been forced to answer for its behavior. Corruption doesn’t need to hide when there are no consequences waiting on the other side.

• Pain, not persuasion, is what finally breaks the spell of national identity (for some). People stay loyal to systems that fail them right up until the failure lands in their own kitchen, at which point ideology gives way to survival instinct.

• Wealth follows freedom, and freedom follows the people willing to build somewhere it still exists. Alberta didn’t attract Bitcoin custodians and miners by accident, it attracted them because a place still had room for the property rights capital requires.

• Regulation applied honestly ends up revealing which institutions never actually wanted to follow their own rules. The companies that hand over customer data without a court order were protecting their own convenience, not their customers.

• Younger generations don’t need to be persuaded by ideology when the math of their own lives already tells the truth. A twenty-two-year-old who can’t get a first job doesn’t need a lecture on economics, he needs someone to explain why the door is locked.

• Bitcoin functions as the exit that makes every other negotiation possible. Knowing you can always opt out changes the posture you bring to fighting for change from within, because desperation stops being the only option left on the table.

• The most radical act available to an ordinary person right now might be opting out quietly rather than fighting loudly. Moving your money, your business, or your family somewhere freer (for those to choose to move and not stay and fight) starves a failing system of the resource base it depends on, in a way no protest ever could.

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

Sponsors:

Expat Money

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

Watch my episode with Mikkel for more:

Ledn

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

Trezor

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

Abundant Mines

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

Special offers:

→ Get 15% off “Born To Be Free” all-natural, tallow-based skincare products on a bitcoin standard, using code EFRAT: https://oshi.link/1nvZYq

→ Join me at any of these conferences or events:

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

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

When people experience hardship but choose to build out of their breakdowns, rather than hate or fight, it resonates. When they do it simply, humbly, connected to nature, it amplifies that resonance. I’ve been planning my visit to Costa Rica for a while. After watching the film, I can’t wait for that experience.

The film is directed by DirectorHodl & produced by Paul Keating, exploring the origins of an organic farmer’s market in Uvita, Costa Rica, in the Bitcoin Jungle community, weaving together themes of trust, spirituality, and an ancient myth known as the prophecy of the eagle and the condor. By diving into the profound impact of colonialism in Central America, the film examines how institutions like the IMF and World Bank have shaped the region over time, illuminating how Bitcoin has arisen within the community as a natural response to a systemic problem. If you wish, support the film and his independent creators here.

Watch my episode with Paul Keating, the producer and overall awesome guy:

→ Please like, comment & share. Thank you!

→ Hummingbird website

Connect with me:
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Sponsors:

Expat Money

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

Ledn

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

Trezor

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

Abundant Mines

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

Special offers:

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

→ Get 15% off “Born To Be Free” all-natural, tallow-based skincare products on a bitcoin standard, using code EFRAT: https://oshi.link/1nvZYq

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

“They’re trying to control the rails to Bitcoin as much as they can, if they have control over that, they’ll ‘allow you to play with your Bitcoins’.”

I was hosted last night on Simply Bitcoin’s live show, discussing agenda 2030, the digital panopticon & my sovereignty framework, (ignore Saylor’s click bait), start at 49:50:

More about my “sovereignty framework” next week when my BTC Prague keynote is finally out.

In the meantime, check out my new reel about the Plan B FREE report:

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

Sponsors:

Expat Money

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

Watch my episode with Mikkel for more:

Ledn

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

Trezor

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

Abundant Mines

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

Special offers:

→ Get 15% off “Born To Be Free” all-natural, tallow-based skincare products on a bitcoin standard, using code EFRAT: https://oshi.link/1nvZYq

→ Join me at any of these conferences or events:

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

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

Follow Eddie: Twitter | Substack | Youtube | Eddie’s website

Takeaways:

• Catastrophic upheaval can be the very thing that reveals how power actually works. Once you see the machinery behind an event like Covid, you can’t go back to seeing the world the way you did before.

• Small nations get chosen as testing grounds for a reason. English-speaking, highly educated, geographically convenient, and diplomatically quiet, Ireland fits the criteria.

• A captured system rarely announces itself. It moves through funding: state media grants doubling overnight, VAT quietly removed, a broadcaster bailed out like a bank. Follow the money and you find the leash.

• Labels can be weaponized to end a conversation before it starts. When almost no one who gets called “far right” actually holds far right views, the term has stopped describing anything and started functioning purely as a silencer.

• People rarely organize around an abstract injustice, but they will organize around what’s hitting their own wallet. A protest that starts over diesel prices can end up pulling the scab off an entire system of unfairness that had been building for years.

• Genuine dissent takes more than data and logic. There’s a compulsion that kicks in once you’ve found the truth of something: you can’t just sit on it, you have to share it, even when it costs you.

• Critical thinking is a muscle, and echo chambers let it atrophy. When people stop encountering anyone else’s actual reasoning, they lose the ability to reason for themselves and start simply repeating what they’re fed.

• Rational argument alone rarely moves someone off a position they’re emotionally attached to. Questions do more work than statements, because they let a person arrive at an uncomfortable conclusion themselves instead of being told.

• Many people spend decades assuming national governments are the top of the pyramid, until the moment they realize governments themselves answer to something further up the chain.

• Every generation believes its own crisis is unprecedented, but the pattern of fear, control, and slow erosion of rights has repeated across history. What changes each time is only the technology being used to do it.

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

Sponsors:

Expat Money

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

Watch my episode with Mikkel for more:

Ledn

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

Trezor

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

Abundant Mines

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

Special offers:

→ Get 15% off “Born To Be Free” all-natural, tallow-based skincare products on a bitcoin standard, using code EFRAT: https://oshi.link/1nvZYq

→ Join me at any of these conferences or events:

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

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

Something is happening across the Western world that doesn’t have a single headline, a single law, or a single villain. It’s a creep. Quiet, incremental, always justified by the most sympathetic rationale available: protect the children, stop the terrorists, fight misinformation, prevent financial crime. By the time any single measure becomes visible enough to generate public outrage, ten others have already passed into law. I must humbly admit: even though I have been monitoring this space for years, and have been aware of the UN’s Agenda 2030 and its sub-goals, I did not envision the implementation phase to accelerate and be so present and real already in 2026. I thought we had a few more years for that.

But reality is slapping us all in the face these days, it’s the nature of this disillusionment phase we’re all living through. And it’s how digital control works: a slow accumulation of permissions that governments grant themselves while the public is distracted.

2026: The Year The Internet Closed In On Us

The open internet, the one that allowed anonymous speech, private communication, and pseudonymous identity, is being systematically dismantled. In its place, a new architecture is emerging: one where every user is identified, every transaction is logged, every communication is scannable, and every platform is legally responsible for what its users say.

The European Union has led the charge. The Digital Services Act requires large platforms to proactively police content, implement algorithmic transparency measures, and take down material flagged by government-approved “trusted flaggers,” entities designated by member states with the power to escalate content removal requests. The practical result is a privatised censorship infrastructure, where liability pressure does the work that state censorship would have been challenged in court.

Then there is Chat Control, perhaps the most ambitious surveillance proposal in EU history. Under the guise of combating child sexual abuse material, the European Commission proposed legislation that would require messaging platforms to scan all private communications, including end-to-end encrypted messages, for flagged content. The proposal has faced fierce resistance from cryptographers, privacy advocates, and some EU member states, but it has not been abandoned. It keeps returning in revised form because the goal has not changed. Breaking encryption, under any rationale, gives governments access to private communication at scale.

The EU’s approach to age verification follows the same pattern. Under the Digital Services Act and related frameworks, platforms must verify the ages of users accessing “harmful” content. The mechanism for doing this, in practice, requires users to submit government-issued identification or biometric data to third-party verification services. Age verification systems are honeypots for identity data, and the regulatory pressure to implement them is accelerating.

The UK & Australia’s Versions of Controlled Internet

Britain’s Online Safety Act, passed in 2023, imposed sweeping obligations on platforms to remove “legal but harmful” content, with the definition of harmful left deliberately broad and subject to future expansion. Ofcom, the regulator, was empowered to demand that platforms implement “accredited technology” to scan for illegal content, including within private messages. Like Chat Control in the EU, this creates backdoor pressure to break or circumvent encryption.

The Online Safety Act’s scope creates strong incentives for platforms to geoblock or limit functionality for users who appear to be circumventing content restrictions, putting effective pressure on VPN use without a formal ban.

Australia moved first on social media age restrictions, with its Online Safety Act empowering the eSafety Commissioner to issue removal notices for a wide range of content. The under-16 social media ban it introduced is now being cited as a model by other governments. As I discussed on Spectator TV Australia, when that ban started locking adult political writers out of platforms, it wasn’t a bug. It was a preview.

Identity Is the Infrastructure of Control

The EU’s digital identity framework, eIDAS 2.0, mandates that member states make available a European Digital Identity Wallet to every citizen who wants one. The wallet holds verified identity credentials, educational qualifications, medical records, payment information, and travel documents, all in a single state-issued digital container. EU countries are required to offer EUDI Wallets to their citizens by end of 2026, with businesses required to accept them by 2027. The Commission frames this as convenience. What it actually creates is a single point of identity that governments, employers, and service providers can require before granting access to services.

Ireland was selected as one of the earliest implementers, launching a pilot for its Government Digital Wallet in April 2026: a state-run app to store your ID, birth certificate, driving license, and more. The government’s pitch sounds reassuring: “You are in control of your data.” “Nothing is tracked or recorded.” They said the same things about every surveillance system before it became mandatory. Ireland is legally required under EU regulation to have the wallet operational for public services by end of 2026, extended to private services by end of 2027. “Voluntary” has an expiration date. They wrote it into law.

Ireland’s Communications Minister has already proposed requiring the wallet for social media access, meaning Irish people would need a state-issued digital ID just to log into Facebook, Instagram, or X (and any other big tech media platform). The Irish Council for Civil Liberties put it plainly: this would mean users can no longer browse the internet with any degree of anonymity. Every page visit, every platform login will be traceable back to a specific government ID.

CBDC Is The Weapon of Control

The Digital Euro sits alongside this architecture. The ECB’s rollout target is 2026-2027, the same window as the wallet rollout. While the retail digital euro gets most of the public attention, the ECB is simultaneously running two wholesale infrastructure projects that have received almost no coverage: Project Pontes, which establishes an interface between central bank money and tokenised digital assets, and Project Appia, which is designing the broader ecosystem and governance framework around those tokenised assets.

We’re essentially seeing a state-controlled digital ID wallet, plus a state-controlled digital currency with programmable rails, arriving together. I think people fail to understand that once their identity and their money live in the same government infrastructure, every transaction can be permissioned, tracked, and cut off. As I recently wrote, analysing Deutsche Bundesbank President Joachim Nagel’s pitch for the Digital Euro: central bankers are rebranding control as “critical payment infrastructure,” framing geopolitical tensions and declining cash use as the drivers for why we must embrace it.

None of this should be a surprise. Back in December 2025, I laid out the three CBDC trends I expected to define 2026: accelerating rollout, the merging of digital currency with digital identity, and the Digital Euro setting the global template. Every one of them is now playing out, faster than even I expected.

Your Face Is Now Your Passport

Airports are becoming the clearest working model of what global biometric infrastructure looks like once it’s actually built. The EU’s Entry/Exit System went fully operational across all 29 Schengen countries on April 10, 2026, replacing passport stamps with fingerprints and facial scans for every non-EU traveller, data stored for three years and used to automatically track how many of your permitted days you have left. Refuse to hand over your biometrics, and you are refused entry, full stop. But this is not an EU-only project: it mirrors the US Biometric Exit program, the UK’s Electronic Travel Authorisation, and a broader international push, coordinated through the International Civil Aviation Organization’s biometric passport standard, to make facial recognition the default credential for crossing any border, anywhere. What’s being sold as convenience, and what is supposed to speed up the line for people already enrolled (in reality it’s often causing huge delays across major airports), is quietly becoming the connective tissue of a single, interoperable global identity layer: enroll once, and your face becomes legible to every airport, every immigration system, and potentially every database it is ever linked to afterward.

New Crypto Regulation Enabling Surveillance

The EU’s MiCA (Markets in Crypto Assets) regulation, brought crypto assets under a comprehensive regulatory framework. Among its provisions are strict licensing requirements for crypto service providers, mandatory KYC for all transactions above certain thresholds, and, through DAC8, the automatic reporting of crypto asset holdings to tax authorities across member states. DAC8 requires crypto exchanges and wallet providers to collect and report detailed user information, including name, address, tax identification number, and the value of assets held and transacted, automatically shared between EU tax authorities.

That aggregation of financial data has not gone unchallenged. Bull Bitcoin, one of the world’s oldest Bitcoin-only exchange, has filed a legal challenge before France’s Conseil d’État, the country’s supreme administrative court, seeking to annul the decree implementing DAC8 domestically. CEO Francis Pouliot argues the directive creates a centralised honeypot of sensitive financial data, and the case arrives against a documented and worsening physical threat: French authorities have recorded 77 verified cases of kidnapping, extortion, or attempted extortion linked to crypto holders since the start of 2026 alone, already surpassing all of 2025, with France now accounting for an estimated 70% of such “wrench attacks” worldwide. “DAC8 has transformed the concept of Know Your Customer into Kill Your Customer,” Pouliot said. The case is being financed independently, and a favourable ruling could set a precedent for challenges across the EU.

The Travel Rule, now extended to crypto assets under MiCA, requires that the identity of both sender and receiver be attached to every transaction above a threshold. The pseudonymity that made Bitcoin usable as a parallel financial system is being regulated away. Banned would generate resistance. Made compliant means traceable, which means controllable.

KYC requirements have expanded in parallel across traditional finance. Under the EU’s Anti-Money Laundering Directives, banks must collect and verify detailed beneficial ownership information, monitor transaction patterns, and report suspicious activity to financial intelligence units. The threshold for what constitutes suspicious activity has been consistently lowered. Paying rent in cash, moving money between family members, operating a business with international clients: all of these can now trigger reporting obligations.

Your Car Is Watching You Too

The surveillance layer is not confined to phones, wallets, and bank accounts. It now extends to the vehicle in your driveway. A field known in the intelligence industry as CARINT, car intelligence, has emerged around the fact that modern cars are rolling computers, dependent on constant cellular and internet connectivity to function. Israeli firms are reported to be leading this space: one company has developed an “offensive” capability that can remotely tap into a car’s hands-free microphone and dashboard cameras, while others sell tools that track a vehicle’s location and movements in real time by exploiting its built-in SIM card, and even fingerprint individual vehicles using the unique identifier broadcast by their tire-pressure sensors. In the United States, agencies including the FBI and NSA request vehicle data from manufacturers much as they request data from phone and email providers, and firms like Palantir fuse license plate and registry data with other intelligence sources. The more digital a car becomes, the more it becomes another node in the same surveillance architecture as your phone, your wallet, and your identity.

The surveillance creep has now reached the dashboard by design, not just by hacking. As of July 7, 2026, every new passenger car and van registered in the EU must include an infrared, driver-facing camera as part of the bloc’s Advanced Driver Distraction Warning system, monitoring eye movement, blinking, and gaze direction whenever the vehicle exceeds 20 km/h. The European Commission frames it purely as a road-safety measure, and the system is described as closed-loop, with facial data processed on-device rather than transmitted. But researchers note that claim has no independent audit, and the same auto industry has a well-documented history of sharing or selling driver data to third parties. A camera trained on your face, built into your car by law, joins the SIM card, the tire sensor, and the microphone as one more sensor feeding a system you never consented to and cannot opt out of.

The Other Side: Freedom Tech Is Fighting Back

None of this is going unanswered. As covered by Susie Violet Ward on Forbes, a growing freedom tech movement is building the tools that let people communicate, transact, and organise even when governments, platforms, or banks try to cut them off. Activists in countries where governments impose internet and electricity blackouts turn to Bluetooth mesh-networking apps like Bitchat, which let nearby phones relay messages without internet or mobile service at all. On the financial side, developers are building bitcoin-based privacy tools like Cashu or Fedi for private digital money, and peer-to-peer donation protocols like Agora, which Venezuelan opposition leader Leopoldo López built after watching his own country weaponise the banking system against dissidents, calling it “unstoppable funding.”

This resistance extends to the phones too. Hakeem Anwar, a software engineer and founder of Above Phone, argues that Big Tech phones are not just data-collection devices but control points, since Google and Apple hold the signing keys to every app on their stores and can remove any application without your consent. His answer is phones powered by GrapheneOS and equipped with alternative privacy-conscious applications, services and sim cards. As Anwar put it when I spoke with him: privacy is a stack, the protocol, the app, and the hardware all have to be trustworthy, or the weakest link defeats everything else.

For me the two most exciting freedom technologies are Nostr, a decentralised protocol where your identity lives in a private key you control rather than the state, and Bitcoin, which lets value move peer to peer without middlemen granting permission. It feels like the time is right to educate the public about privacy and digital technologies; Freedom fighters such as John Burnett had put together a free course for digital privacy, and Bitcoin Policy UK Co-founder Freddie New consolidated a free privacy toolkit.

The Pattern

Each of these measures has a sympathetic justification: child protection, financial crime, national security, extremism, misinformation. These are real problems, and no serious person disputes that. The question is whether the proposed solutions are proportionate, whether they are reversible, and whether the infrastructure being built to address them can be repurposed once the justification is no longer convenient.

History answers that question clearly: emergency powers are rarely temporary. Surveillance infrastructure built for one purpose is routinely expanded to others. Identity systems created for efficiency become mechanisms of exclusion. Financial monitoring tools designed for crime become tools for managing dissent.

What is being built right now, across the EU, the UK, the United States, and their allies, is a comprehensive architecture of identification, communication surveillance, financial monitoring, and content control. Each piece connects to the others. The digital wallet links to the digital euro, which links to KYC, which links to DAC8, which links to the Travel Rule. The age verification system links to the identity wallet. The biometric border layer links to the same digital identity infrastructure. Chat Control links to the encryption backdoor. The Online Safety Act links to content moderation liability, which links to trusted flaggers, which links to government-approved information.

The cage is assembled one regulation at a time, by unelected technocrats and bureaucrats who understand that populations accept constraints they cannot see arriving all at once. If you haven’t started preparing for this highly technocratic reality by learning about and embracing freedom tech, the time is now.

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These are the stories that give me hope. What about you?
Efrat ♥️

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I think this is one of my better podcast performances lately. I joined Archie’s podcast this second time (first time here), to discuss the growing centralization and surveillance trends, and to share my sovereignty framework.

“Is sovereignty still possible in an increasingly digital world?
Efrat Fenigson explores growing tensions between individual freedom and centralised control with digital IDs, surveillance systems, and CBDCs.

Governments and institutions are expanding their influence across money, communication, and personal data. Sovereignty can no longer be viewed as just a financial issue. It must be built across every layer of life. Physical, digital, and spiritual.

⚠️ The battle for freedom may not be fought through politics alone, but through the public resisting the system itself.”

Chapters:
00:00 - Intro
01:57 - What Has Efrat Been Observing?
13:13 - Origins of The World Agenda
18:35 - What Is The Overton Window?
24:58 - The State’s Social Attack Vectors
30:56 - Centralised Digital Wallets Are Coming
34:26 - How Do We Stop Centralisation?
39:20 - Finding Your Purpose In Life

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Expat Money

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Ledn

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

Trezor

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

Abundant Mines

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

Special offers:

→ Join me at any of these conferences or events:

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

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

Ivor Cummins is a biochemical engineer, author, and independent commentator based in Dublin, Ireland, known for his channel and platform The Fat Emperor. After a career in engineering and complex problem-solving, Ivor turned his analytical lens on the corporate distortion of nutritional science, exposing decades of deliberate misinformation around dietary fat and cholesterol.. When lockdowns began in 2020, Ivor rapidly identified the pandemic response as an orchestrated, multi-layered control mechanism and became one of the most prominent voices challenging the official narrative using establishment data against itself. He has since been shadow banned, given YouTube strikes, kicked out of Linkedin, featured in a half-page New York Times piece, and canceled by friends of 40 years. None of which slowed him down. Now completing a Master of Applied Psychology, Ivor is helping people navigate the psychological warfare being waged in modern society. In this conversation, Ivor and I explore the architecture of global control. From climate fear and digital ID rollouts to the power of Bitcoin as a sovereignty tool, we conclude that understanding the system is the first step to escaping it.

Follow Ivor: Twitter | Ivor’s website | Ivor’s recommendation of Applied Psychology | Ivor’s Free Book recommendation

Takeaways:

• Every major modern psyop, dietary fat, cholesterol, Covid, climate, follows the same operational blueprint: capture the funding, capture the scientists (they have mortgages and careers), generate the fear, and then let the captured media and captured institutions enforce the narrative on the public. Once you see the template, you see it everywhere. The details change, but the architecture does not.

• The most powerful weapon against a captured system is its own data. Ivor’s entire methodology on food science, on Covid, and on climate was to never make claims the establishment could easily dismiss, but to use their own published numbers to prove their own lies. When the IPCC’s own subcommittee quietly walked back RCP 8.5, they confirmed what the data critics had been saying for years. The establishment’s data will eventually betray the establishment.

• Covid was not an isolated health crisis but rather the test run for universal digital ID. That conclusion, which seemed extreme in 2020, is now the stated policy position of the EU. The timeline between “two weeks to flatten the curve” and Von der Leyen announcing digital ID integration is not a coincidence. When an agenda is accelerated this visibly, the acceleration itself is the evidence.

• The Irish government didn’t need to use an iron fist during Covid because mass formation did the enforcement for them. Governments that rely on population compliance rather than direct coercion are in some ways more dangerous, because they leave no visible villain. When your neighbor becomes your censor, the control is nearly invisible and almost impossible to resist collectively.

• Coordinated suppression follows a predictable escalation: first social, then professional, then financial, then legal. Ivor’s experience with shadow banning, newspaper attacks, professional complaints to engineering bodies, charity regulators being weaponized, and finally a sheriff at the door, maps a pattern that is applied to dissidents globally. Knowing the pattern in advance is itself a form of protection. You can’t be ambushed by what you already expect.

• Platforms that centralise your identity are platforms that can erase you. The promise of Nostr is not censorship resistance combined with identity sovereignty. When your social graph, your content history, and your identity live in cryptographic keys you control rather than on a server someone else owns, the entire logic of deplatforming collapses. This is the same principle that makes Bitcoin what it is, applied to speech.

• Digital ID is the infrastructure of total financial and social control. The moment your driving licence, health records, and digital euro wallet are integrated into a single state-issued identity, your ability to transact, travel, and exist in public life is contingent on state permission. Ireland being chosen as the EU’s first rollout country is not random; early adopters normalize what later becomes mandatory.

• Measuring Bitcoin in fiat is like measuring freedom in the currency of your oppressor. Once you hold most of your wealth in Bitcoin, your unit of account changes and suddenly everything else becomes cheaper over time, because it’s denominated in a deflationary asset. The mental shift from fiat-lens to bitcoin-lens changes how you perceive value, inflation, and what you are actually protecting your family from.

• The antidote to mass formation is not more information but rather a community of people who share a principled understanding of reality and can hold each other steady. Ivor’s online resilience programs are about creating nodes of psychological immunity in a population being deliberately destabilized. If you want to build a movement that can survive sustained psychological attacks, you have to build the inner infrastructure first.

Connect with me:
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Sponsors:

Expat Money

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

Watch my episode with Mikkel for more:

Ledn

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

Trezor

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

Abundant Mines

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

Special offers:

→ Join me at any of these conferences or events:

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

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

Listening to central bankers like Joachim Nagel talk about “strategic autonomy” and “financial sovereignty” feels like a scripted response to a “New World Disorder” that has been brewing for years. They point to “geopolitical tensions” and the “declining use of cash” as the primary drivers for why we must embrace a digital euro, but I can’t help but wonder if they are just rebranding control as “critical payment infrastructure”. It is part of a much larger, unsettling picture where the old world order, what some experts are calling a “doom loop” of inequality and destabilization, is being replaced not by something better, but by a more digitized version of the same destructive feedback loops.

For me, this is not just about a more convenient way to pay; it is about who really holds the keys to our financial lives. While the “elite” discuss “hard power” and how to sustainably finance massive increases in defence spending, the rest of us are being nudged toward AI agents using CBDC/stablecoins digital wallets that could track every transaction (with bitcoin it’s a different picture btw). If central banks are accumulating gold at record paces as a hedge against “systemic risk,” we should be asking why they’ve made the system so risky in the first place. I’m not buying the “autonomy” narrative. To me, it feels like a manufactured transition into a new world disorder managed by the same old hands.

What do you think?
Efrat ♥️

Connect with me:
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Sponsors:

Expat Money

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

Watch my episode with Mikkel for more:

Ledn

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

Trezor

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

Abundant Mines

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

Special offers:

→ Join me at any of these conferences or events:

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

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

Latest releases: