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:
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

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:
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

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:
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

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 licence, 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.

Watch my keynote from Prague 2026:

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

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:

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

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

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

.

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

→ Get 15% off “Born To Be Free” products, using code EFRAT: oshi.link/1nvZYq

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

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

Sponsors:

Ledn

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

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:

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:

Latest releases:

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

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

Sponsors:

Expat Money

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

Watch my episode with Mikkel for more:

Ledn

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

Trezor

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

Abundant Mines

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

Special offers:

→ Join me at any of these conferences or events:

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

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

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:
Twitter | YouTube | Instagram | Nostr | My podcast | All other links

Sponsors:

Expat Money

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

Watch my episode with Mikkel for more:

Ledn

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

Trezor

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

Abundant Mines

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

Special offers:

→ Join me at any of these conferences or events:

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

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

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:
Twitter | YouTube | Instagram | Nostr | My podcast | All other links

Sponsors:

Expat Money

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

Watch my episode with Mikkel for more:

Ledn

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

Trezor

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

Abundant Mines

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

Special offers:

→ Join me at any of these conferences or events:

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

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

Latest releases:

In this panel from last month in Prague, we cover one of today’s most urgent topics, or at least so I think - preparation against the digital prison. On the panel: Tony (The Bitcoin Way), Viliam (Vexl), Lea (Cake Wallet), and me, moderated by the awesome Susie Violet Ward. We explain why you need to prepare to protect your money, your privacy, and your freedom before the cage closes. We mention the boiling-frog trap of convenience, why “I have nothing to hide” is a dangerous myth, Worldcoin and the trade of your data for a few bucks, building your parallel network before the crisis hits, and how to reclaim sovereignty over your identity, money, and voice.

Watch this clip:

Leave me a comment - do you also think it’s an urgent topic? and why?
Efrat ♥️

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

Sponsors:

Expat Money

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

Watch my episode with Mikkel for more:

Ledn

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

Trezor

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

Abundant Mines

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

Special offers:

→ Join me at any of these conferences or events:

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

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

I’ve been living out of a suitcase for the past couple of years. Bali, Australia, El Salvador, Vietnam and I just returned from a European roadshow. This lifestyle is a deliberate choice. I want to find the next place I could live in, and I tour the world to scout for it, while speaking at conferences and recording my podcast on the go.

For me, having options is key, it’s the winning strategy. I position myself so that no single government holds all the cards on my life.

We live in a world where governments can freeze your bank account, restrict your movement, inflate your savings into dust, and decide, overnight, what you’re allowed to do with your own money. I’ve seen it happen. I’ve reported on it. And I decided I don’t want it to happen to me too.

My own Plan B is being formed over the past few years: second citizenships/residencies, offshore accounts. The ability to pick up and go if and when things get too crazy.

The good news? You don’t need to be ultra-wealthy to do this. You need information, a bit of courage, and the right people to guide you.

That’s why I want to point you to this free report about this topic.

Want a Plan B? Here’s Where to Start

Most people sense that something is shifting: governments overreaching, currencies inflating, freedoms narrowing. Fewer people know what to actually do about it.

Expat Money, founded by Mikkel Thorup, is one of the most practical resources available for anyone serious about building a life with more options and less dependence on any single government. Mikkel has lived in nine countries, visited over 110, and owns real estate in ten. His consultancy helps clients legally reduce their tax burden, obtain second residencies and citizenships, and invest internationally, including in real estate.

The core concept is “flag planting”, diversifying your passport, residency, banking, and lifestyle across multiple jurisdictions. The goal is not to run from anything, but to position yourself so no single government can hold your life hostage.

What you get from downloading Expat Money’s free special report:

• Five ways to get a second passport, including one that’s almost never talked about

• The best second citizenship programs available, and how to acquire one instantly

• What different visas do, and how to choose the right one for your family

• What to expect to pay, and how to stay within budget

• Which countries actually get you closer to your freedom goals

• How a Plan-B residency can act as political insurance for your family

If you’ve been sitting on the idea of a Plan B: a second passport, a residency abroad, a structure that protects your savings, this is the practical entry point. Freedom is something you build, one jurisdiction at a time.

And watch my episode with Mikkel, a fascinating conversation:

Keep exploring & preparing for rainy days…
Efrat ♥️

Follow me:

Twitter | YouTube | Instagram | My podcast | All other links

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

Takeaways:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Sponsors:

Expat Money

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

Watch my episode with Mikkel for more:

Ledn

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

Trezor

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

Abundant Mines

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

Special offers:

→ Join me at any of these conferences or events:

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

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

Follow Jeff: Twitter | Nostr

Takeaways:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Sponsors:

Expat Money

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

Watch my episode with Mikkel for more:

Ledn

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

Trezor

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

Abundant Mines

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

Special offers:

→ Join me at any of these conferences or events:

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

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

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

Takeaways:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Sponsors:

Ledn

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

Trezor

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

Abundant Mines

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

Special offers:

→ Join me at any of these conferences or events:

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

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

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

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

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

Takeaways:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Sponsors:

Ledn

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

Trezor

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

Abundant Mines

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

Special offers:

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

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

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

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

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

Takeaways:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Trezor

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Abundant Mines

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

Special offers:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

• The Fiat monetary system

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

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

Thanks for watching.
♥️ Efrat

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

Latest releases:

Sponsors:

Ledn

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

Trezor

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

Abundant Mines

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

Special offers:

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

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

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

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

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

.

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

Follow Mauricio on Twitter | Visit Ledn

Takeaways:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Sponsors:

Ledn

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

Trezor

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

Abundant Mines

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

Special offers:

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

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

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

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

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