Paul Keating is building freedom tech with Primal, a Nostr client that puts digital sovereignty back in users' hands. Based in Costa Rica, Paul lives entirely on a Bitcoin standard as part of Bitcoin Jungle, one of the most vibrant circular Bitcoin economies in the world. A surfer, new father, and tireless advocate for freedom-first technology, Paul joined me at Bitcoin 2026 in Las Vegas for a conversation that has been a long time coming. We covered what a truly sovereign life looks like day to day, how Bitcoin and Nostr function as nature's response to broken money and broken social media, the open protocol future Primal is building toward, and the upcoming Bitcoin Jungle documentary - Hummingbird.
→ Please like, comment, share & follow — to help me beat the suppressing algo’s. Thank you!
Follow Paul on Nostr/Primal | Twitter | Instagram | Hummingbird: The Bitcoin Jungle Story
— Support my work —
I was recently banned from Stripe, so I cannot have paid memberships on Substack… but there’s always another way!
Takeaways:
The life you truly want starts as a question, not a plan. Paul asked what he would do if he had all the bitcoin in the world and arrived at surfing, building something meaningful, and starting a family. He held that image, things started aligning, and years later that is exactly what his life looks like. Most people never get specific enough to let reality organize itself around the answer.
Bitcoin circular economies begin with trust and a farmers market. Bitcoin Jungle grew because the right people already trusted each other after Covid, and they happened to start accepting bitcoin together. The infrastructure followed the culture, and the community followed the infrastructure.
Nostr is Cypherpunk theory finally made usable. The idea of a cryptographic web of trust outside corporate control has been the missing half of Bitcoin’s vision since the 1990s. Nostr is how the internet was supposed to work before gatekeepers hijacked it.
Every free speech platform that runs on a company’s servers is structurally incapable of being free. The government knocks once and the accounts disappear. I lost years of work on Telegram in a single day. Until the infrastructure is uncensorable, the speech is not free, regardless of what the CEO says.
Owning your digital identity is going to become as important as owning your money. Just as Bitcoin separates money from state, Nostr separates identity and communication from corporate intermediaries. The private key you hold for Nostr is the same fundamental breakthrough as the private key you hold for Bitcoin.
New parenthood is a systemic reset. When Paul watched his wife go through labor, the depth of appreciation and connection he felt was something he had never accessed before. A child restructures your understanding of what actually matters.
What the surveillance tech era demands is better technology built on sovereign principles. Throwing your phone into the ocean changes nothing about the system that created it. The answer is Primal, hardware wallets, and tools like the Daylight Computer: technology that serves the human rather than harvesting them.
Nostr gives every individual complete control over their own digital neighborhood while taking that power away from corporate moderators. A platform can mute accounts for its own users, but reaching into the protocol to silence anyone everywhere is something no one can do. That asymmetry - individual curation without centralized censorship - is what free speech infrastructure actually looks like.
We are in the 1990s of digital health. We figured out that seed oils, ultra-processed food, and sedentary living were destroying our bodies. We have not yet fully reckoned with what blue light, addictive algorithms, and screen dependency are doing to our minds and nervous systems.
Censorship flows from institutional pressure, and centralized platforms will always yield to it. Pavel Durov and Jack Dorsey before him both became instruments of the same system when governments came knocking. The person at the top is ultimately irrelevant; the architecture determines the outcome.
A new doco called “Hummingbird” comes out soon, telling Bitcoin Jungle’s story in a film, bringing together the spiritual, ecological, and financial dimensions of living on a Bitcoin standard.
Connect with me:
Twitter | YouTube | Instagram | Nostr | My podcast | All other links
Sponsors:
Ledn
→ Access liquidity without selling your Bitcoin with Ledn — learn more at https://ledn.io/Efrat
Trezor
→ Get your TREZOR wallet & accessories, with a 5% discount, using my code at checkout (get my discount code from the episode - yep, you’ll have to watch it)
Abundant Mines
→ Have you tried mining bitcoin? Stack sats directly to your wallet while saving on taxes with Abundant Mines. A month of free hosting for my followers:
Special offers:
→ Join me at Europe’s biggest and most influential Bitcoin event! Enjoy 10% off your BTC Prague using the code EFRAT.
→ Get 10% off on Augmented NAC to detox the Spike protein, using the code: YCXKQDK2, and this link. (Please note, this is not medical advice and you should consult your MD). Watch the episode with Tina below.
→ Be good to your eyes & health, and get the Daylight tablet - a healthier, more human-friendly computer, zero flicker & zero blue light. Use code EFRAT for $25 off: https://bit.ly/Efrat_daylight
→ Watch “New Totalitarian Order” conference with Prof. Mattias Desmet & Efrat - use code EFRAT for 10% off
→ Get a second citizenship and a plan B to relocate to another country with Expat Money, leave your details for a follow up: https://expatmoney.com/efrat
— Support my work —
I was recently banned from Stripe, so I cannot have paid memberships on Substack… but there’s always another way!
