Welcome to the second issue of my new newsletter! Please consider subscribing if you haven't done so already, and don't forget to follow me on X or Farcaster. Hit me up in my DMs if you want to speak with me.

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And I want to apologize to the email subscribers for the formatting errors with URL embeds last week. Apparently Paragraph doesn't do a very good job with URL embeds, although tweets look fine. This is when I learned why you should send a test newsletter to yourself before sending it out to everyone. Alright let's get into it, we will start with privacy, then crypto, the playlist, and finally I will save the political stuff for last so you can easily skip it if you want.

Random privacy tip of the week: If you use Monero, the safest way to do so is by running your own node. To run your own node is easy, you just need enough harddrive space to hold the blockchain (You will want to allocate a minimum of 300 GB for this, I think the current size of the chain is around 240 GB). Then just download Monero GUI from getmonero.org (always verify you are downloading the legitimate software, don't trust me, verify it by checking the PGP signature of the software), and it will start up a node for you automatically when you open it.

Once your running your own node on your computer, you can connect to it through Cake Wallet or any mobile wallet on your phone. This way if you have to do any XMR transactions on the god, you know and trust the node processing them since you own it.

If you can't run your own node, don't just connect to any random node because there are some malicious nodes out there who want to log your IP address. Either connect to a node belonging to someone you know and trust, or you can also use Seth For Privacy's node which has been around for a while and can be relatively trusted. I think he's a good actor in the space, so connecting to his node is a good stopgap until you have the ability to run your own.

The legendary ZachXBT finds a privacy flaw in Zashi wallet related to NEAR intents. Read this to learn how to get around it if you are swapping to or from other chains in Zashi. I was thinking how much it would suck to get doxxed by this bug if you were someone who just bought ZEC for the first time to try and gain some privacy only to have your wallets linked to each other. I'd imagine there are good number of people who might of been affected by this since everyone and their mom has been buying ZEC lately. I like how ZachXBT handled this though, he messaged Zashi and told them he was going to post this before he did so they would be prepared for it, and he presented it in a way that was informative and fair. Zashi said they are going to fix it by implementing ephemeral transparent addresses for NEAR Intents, and that doing so is now their number one priority.

ZachXBT asked if we want to see more posts like this about privacy topics, and fuck yeah we do. ZachXBT is a goat. Don't forget that he also uses Monero regularly, and the world's number blockchain analyst using Monero for his payments is all the endorsement you should need.

The renewed interest in privacy has also affected the Ethereum ecosystem as well and the Ethereum Foundation recently announced the formation of a 47 member "Privacy Cluster", coordinated by Igor Barinov.

From the cryptonews article,

"The Ethereum Foundation announced Wednesday the formation of a 47-member Privacy Cluster coordinated by Blockscout founder, Igor Barinov.

The initiative expands on efforts dating back to 2018 through the Privacy and Scaling Explorations team, which has built over 50 open-source research projects and released key primitives, including Semaphore for anonymous signaling, MACI for private voting, and zkEmail.

The cluster unites top researchers, engineers, and cryptographers to tackle five key areas.

These areas include private reads and writes for seamless payments and interactions without surveillance, private proving for portable verification, private identities through selective disclosure, privacy experience improvements, and institutional adoption through a dedicated task force.

The foundation is also developing Kohaku, a privacy-preserving wallet and open-source SDK designed to make strong cryptography accessible for mainstream users.

The move follows a September rebrand of the Privacy and Scaling Explorations team to Privacy Stewards for Ethereum, which shifted focus from cryptography exploration to problem-first solutions addressing surveillance vulnerabilities.

That transformation introduced a roadmap warning that without robust privacy protections, Ethereum risks becoming “the backbone of global surveillance rather than global freedom.”

The team emphasized that institutions and users would migrate elsewhere if private transactions, identity, and data remain compromised by public blockchain transparency. "

The article also references Vitalik Buterin's blog post, "Why I Support Privacy", and a privacy roadmap for Ethereum that he published back in April.

Let's talk about DNA for a second. I always tell people never to voluntarily give up their DNA to ANYONE unless you are forced to to avoid arrest. Definitely don't send it in to some tech start up to find out how much Native American blood you have. Even more so than your fingerprints, your DNA is not only unique but can't ever be changed. You are stuck with your DNA forever. There are some ways to alter your fingerprints, there is no way to change your DNA. That's why the governments of the world want it so bad, they would love to have a DNA sample of every single person.

This article from reason reveals the disturbing extent of the United State's DNA collection campaign at the border, from citizens and non-citizens. Oftentimes, they will trick people into giving up a sample when they aren't required to. This massive amount of DNA collection occurring at the border doesn't even include the DNA sample collection that occurs in the criminal justice system in many states and in the Federal system from anyone arrested of a felony, regardless of whether that felony actually was a crime with a victim or not. This means all the State has to do to get your DNA is make a bogus felony arrest, and they can take it from you. It doesn't matter if you actually are guilty or not guilty, this is pre-trial. Innocent until proven guilty is thrown out the window and the state can violate your personal sovereignty in order to catalog you like cattle.

The CODIS database that stores all this DNA is growing a rapidly increasing pace. If this pace continues, when you combine it with all the other state run DNA databases around the world, it won't be long before the majority of humanity has been cataloged and put into these databases. All sorts of very evil things can be done with that kind of information.

I would do whatever you can to avoid getting your DNA collected, it may save your life one day.

It won't be long now before the State tries using AI as an excuse to require mandatory digital IDs for all citizens to even access the internet. Not only should we be advocating against digital IDs, but we should be advocating against all mandatory government ID. I can understand the need to verify one's identity in certain situations, however I believe that service can be handled by private organizations and businesses rather than under the centralized control of the state.

I'm going to take you back in time a little bit to explain why digital IDs are so dangerous. In Afghanistan before the Taliban regained power, the United States pushed digital ID with biometrics there. When the United States split town, the Taliban was able to use the database to hunt down anyone who had helped the United States. When you gather biometric and other personal identification data into a centrally controlled database, you create a massive security risk for everyone in that database. You have no idea who will be in charge of the Government or what kind of Government we will have in ten or twenty years. If the wrong kind of people get into power, they can use a database like that to easily track down, imprison, and even execute anyone who opposes them politically.

The Bitcoin filter debate continues, and now the Knots team has proposed a soft fork.

The FUD that Luke and the Knots supporters were pushing when Ordinals were more popular was that "spam" was clogging up the Mempool and making it more expensive for regular Bitcoin transactions. Now that the Mempool is way less crowded, that narrative wasn't working anymore so they switched to "If we don't filter out transactions with arbitrary data then someone will put CSAM on the blockchain to make it illegal to have a copy of the blockchain". There are a lot of flaws in the Knots supporters thinking and I don't think they know what is best for Bitcoin. In my opinion, allowing arbitrary data on Bitcoin is a good thing. Storage is cheap, the modest increase in state size will not affect decentralization. If someone is too poor to buy a bigger hard drive to run their Bitcoin node on, then running a Bitcoin node probably isn't on their priority to do list anyways.

You can read about the new soft fork proposal here. Although this article is someone inaccurate because the soft fork, now known as BIP-444, was originally proposed by PortlandHODL, not Luke Dashir Jr, although he is all for it.

There was a good article from Nic Carter about the Quantum threat to Bitcoin, which is in his opinion the most serious threat to Bitcoin at the moment. What worries me is that the pace of Bitcoin development is so slow thanks to the ossification crowd (those who are scared of changing a single line of code in Bitcoin because they don't want any risk to their bags), that they will not address the Quantum threat in time. Nobody knows when this threat will arrive, they can only make educated guesses, and when it does there will be no time for arguing about it on the internet. The solution has to be in place BEFORE it arrives or there will be potentially catastrophic consequences to the network. I'm not trying to FUD, but I think people have been talking about the Quantum threat for so long that it kinda feels like it's never going to happen to some folks. Unfortunately, it probably is going to happen, and now that AI can accelerate things, it may happen sooner than we previously thought it would.

Speaking of which, Monero is working on it's quantum security.

Meanwhile on Z-Cash, if I am correct, shielded transaction's privacy is quantum secure, but the network is not yet. They have a Quantum Security upgrade called NU7 on the roadmap though. Here is a blog post about ZEC and quantum threats from Sean Bowe.

There is a new POS system on Android for Monero. Onboarding businesses to private cryptocurrency is essential for building the second realm. To do this we need POS systems with excellent UI. I haven't tried this yet, but hopefully it works well.

Deep dive into how the new Cupcake feature on Cake Wallet works. It lets you turn any old phone into an offline signing app for extra security. Kinda of reminds me of the seedsigners for bitcoin.

Farcaster is back on top, they acquired the AI powered token launching platform Clanker, and started buying $CLANKER with 2/3rds of the fees generated by Clanker. This led to a huge pump in $CLANKER and various coins that had been launched on Clanker. There were a bunch of new Farcaster Pro sign ups too. Did you know you can read this newsletter directly within the Farcaster client using the Paragraph miniapp? Just go to my profile, and click read in the pinned post. If you don't have a Farcaster Account, signups are now free, if you sign up please use my referral code and you will get 20% cheaper swaps if you do any trading on the platform .

My favorite channel on Farcaster /Politics now has their own show! If you use Farcaster, be sure to come check the channel out. They also have a miniapp called Policast where you can place bets on prediction markets based on current events, using the official token of the Politics channel BUSTER.

Apparently the US Government needs better data security...interestingly the hackers that are targeting ICE apparently aren't doing so for "hacktivism" or political reasons.

Podcast: Hackers Dox ICE

Hackers targeting ICE and other agencies; Wikipedia's AI problem now has some data; and OpenAI's inevitable pivot to sex bot.

https://www.404media.co

Xenu went on Vlad's podcast to debate Monero versus Zcash. Warning they had audio issues throughout this episode but it was still good. I think both of them did a good job honestly, I can find merits to arguments on both sides although I lean towards Monero. Vlad annoys some people but his podcast is pretty good, he has scored some big interviews before and they go deep. If you ever need something to listen to, the archives contain many hours of crypto discussions.

I don't believe the fact that you consume a plant such as cannabis should preclude you from the right to bare arms. It's just as absurd as saying if you have a beer after work on occasion that you should lose your 2nd amendment rights. Now if you get wasted on booze, cannabis, or any other drug, and then use a firearm to hurt someone who isn't attacking you, then you should be punished. But simply getting wasted in of itself shouldn't mean you have less rights than anyone else. The Supreme Court is going to be deciding a case based on this very issue, does banning gun ownership for drug users violate the 2nd amendment?

https://reason.com/2025/10/20/scotus-will-consider-the-constitutionality-of-the-federal-ban-on-gun-possession-by-illegal-drug-users/

Here's a good example of the ridiculous extent of immunity laws for US federal agents that let them get away with all sorts of tomfoolery, such as just making up a fake sex trafficking ring in order to keep a woman in jail unjustly.

https://reason.com/2025/10/26/police-abuse-protected-by-federal-immunity/

Did you know that there are currently FIFTY different emergencies declared by the Federal Government of the United States? The amount of power these so called emergencies give the executive branch is mind blowing.

"The emergency is now the default. Most of the knobs and levers a modern president uses to bully companies, police speech, or move bodies around aren't new laws—they're standby powers that switch on with a magic word: emergency. Congress littered the U.S. Code with these shortcuts; the Brennan Center for Justice has cataloged 137 statutory powers that spring to life the moment a president declares one. (Many never fully turn off.) As of mid-2025, there were roughly 50 simultaneous national emergencies still in force; they are renewed annually, spanning everything from sanctions to tariffs. That architecture lets the White House reach for trade controls, financial blockades, and tech blacklists without returning to Congress. If you like your powers separated, this is the opposite."

https://reason.com/2025/10/25/how-to-ruin-a-shutdown/

In better news, the Javier Milei's libertarian experiment in Argentina lives to fight another day as his party did very well in the midterms. Not long ago it wasn't looking so good for him, now it's looking a lot better. People were saying oh look Argentina got a bailout that means Libertarianism doesn't work. Well for one, Milei had the presidency but his party had a minority in the legislature, which hamstrung his ability to make changes. Also, he inherited quite a fucking mess to be honest, and maybe we should actually give him a little time to work his way out of it before writing him off. Reform of a system as broken as Argentina's was is going to take time and likely involve some pain before the gain. Not financial advice but probably a great time to take a look at investing in Argentina's stocks.

I don't know much about German politics but I did find it weird that 7 of their opposition party politicians died in the run up to the election....

Please let me know in the comments what kind of content you liked and didn't like, any feedback is appreciated! Spread the word that there is a new newsletter in town.....

That's all folks, see you next issue, in the mean time stay free.