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Weekly Round Up
Well the United States bombed Iran and the markets shrugged it off. Personally I am not ok with the United States government robbing it's citizens through both taxation and inflation and then using some of the proceeds to kill people overseas. Fuck that shit. If you also don't support killing people, opt out and stop using the dollar as much as possible. We have alternatives, let's use them and through using them we will make them stronger than the dollar. If enough people opt out of the fiat monetary system, the state loses it's power that mainly comes from being in charge of the money printer. We have our own money printers, CPUs and ASICS. Mine crypto, use crypto, earn crypto. Might want to stack some more sats before all these Bitcoin treasury companies buy it all right? Although if we ever have a bad enough bear market and all these treasury companies become forced sellers at the same time, us plebs might be able to get some more BTC at a steep discount.
Anyways on to some cool shit, some fucked up, and some random shit from the previous week or so in completely random order.
This guide by StellarSand seems like a good guide to privacy settings in your browsers and many other apps. Be forewarned I haven't done a deep dive into this yet, some of the choices might be controversial such as whether you should turn on safe browsing mode in Brave Browser or not. Safe browsing mode protects you from malicious websites but it also sends information, albeit anonymized information, to Google to check URLS. That's the thing with privacy settings, you have to consider your own threat model and sometimes the most private option isn't the most secure option. But guides like this are a good starting point and you can tweak it to your liking, there was another good one that I used awhile back but I have no idea where I stored the link to it, if I ever find it I'll share it.
Guide to privacy settings for most major software and services. - privacy-settings/Privacy Settings at main · StellarSand/privacy-settings
On a side note, Github actually flagged one of my accounts because I wasn't doing any coding even though I was helping out projects by pointing out documentation errors. I appealed and they said Github is only for software development you don't belong here. Isn't documentation an important part of software development? I feel like there is a place on Github for people who don't necessarily code and only help with documentation. I guess I should of just used Cursor to vibe code some bullshit and then they would of let me keep my account open.
My appeal message:
"I'm not sure why I got flagged, probably because I take steps to protect my privacy such as using a VPN, but I am a legitimate user of the platform and I would like access to it. I want to use Github mainly because although I am not good at coding, sometimes when I am reading project documentation I notice grammar, spelling, or clarity issues and want to help correct them. Its a small thing but I would still like the ability to contribute to open source projects in this way. I am a FOSS advocate and I don't intend on using the platform in any malicious ways, I am just a normal user. Please unflag me thank you!"
Github's lame response:
"Hello,
GitHub is meant to be used as a collaborating and hosting tool for software developers. We're unable to see activity on your account that indicates that it's being used for the intended purpose. For this reason we will not be removing the restrictions from this account at this time."
NanoGPT
I've heard about this for a little while but I finally tried it out after listening to the recent Monero Talk episode with the founder. It is a tool that allows you to pay per prompt to use many different AI models. Why is this cool? Because you can pay with Monero, and many other cryptocurrencies. You don't even have to make an account at all to use it, you can just pay as you go with Monero and privately access the most powerful models that are available to consumers. Anyways I tried it, it works, you can just send throw a couple bucks at it and use it all day long. So add another thing to the long list of stuff you can buy directly with Monero, AI compute. And if you suck and don't have any Monero, you can also pay in a transparent cryptocurrency just don't ask the AI anything you don't want to link to your wallet until the end of time.
NanoGPT offers access to every AI model on a pay-as-you-go basis with no subscription needed. Generate videos (Kling, Veo and more), create images (Flux Pro, Kontext, GPT Image, Hidream), and access ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Deepseek, and other top AI models.
New speech by Ross Ulbricht, if you haven't seen the one at Bitcoin 2025 go watch it too, here is Ross speaking at Freedom Fest
This was cool, Ross finally got to go to Porcfest after many years of being locked in a cage and he gave a speech at the main pavillion to his many supporters that were there. Some of the people in attendance have been fighting very hard to get Ross home for a long time, even when it seemed almost hopeless after he lost his appeals. The only copy of the Porcfest speech I have seen so far is on the latest episode of Monerotopia, although the audio kind of sucks.
Speaking of Ross, I just wanted to give a shout out to his mom's new non profit which I support the mission of whole heartedly (and which accepts XMR/BTC donations), called Mothers Against Cruel Sentencing. There is a lot of cruel sentencing in the United States and around the world including for nonviolent victimless crimes. It's disgusting and it needs to stop, please support them. I mean fuck you can still go to prison for cannabis in many places in 2025, as well as any one of a long list of "unapproved" substances because the state thinks it owns your body to the point where your not even allowed to decide what substances you consume.
The battle continues for Alexey Pertsev, check out The Rage if you haven't already, they do excellent reporting on financial surveillance.
Apparently the privacy coin Zano is having some issues? I know little about Zano other than the fact Aaron Day has been advocating for the FUSD private stablecoin that lives on Zano. We need a private stablecoin badly, there have been several failed attempts in the past. I'm going to wait and see how it goes before I even consider using it. I think FUSD is at like a million dollar market cap or something ridiculously tiny like that. Everyone has got to start somewhere though. If you are using Zano though, make sure you are using a VPN at least, apparently only 2% of you are which is insane to me for users of a privacy coin.
@xenumonero also discusses the Zano deanonymization attack on his latest episode of antimoonboy news
Xenu has been busy...he just released his manifesto DarkNet Market Maximalism and also presented Rucknium and Boog900's research on defeating spy nodes on the Monero network at MoneroKon.
As well as Rucknium's research on optimal ring signatures...
There were a lot of other interesting presentations at Monerokon 2025, check them out on the Monero Community Workgroup's youtube channel in the coming weeks as more are released. These people are doing God's work by working on private digital cash, without which our world will become very dystopian.
The not so genius Genius Act passed the Senate.
Regulating stablecoins under the Genius Act is not a win for crypto. It is a win for draconian KYC/AML financial surveillance and will protect Circle/USDC and other big corporate issued stablecoins at the expense of innovation in the stablecoin space. USDC will be the backdoor CBDC. Maybe it is time to create more stablecoins backed by assets other than the dollar. It saddens me that there are people cheering for this like we just won some kind of victory for crypto. https://reclaimthenet.org/senate-advances-genius-act-stablecoin-regulation-crypto-privacy
In honor of the new war I did some quick calculations on US foreign aid to Israel:
The United States has stolen an estimated 310 billion inflation adjusted dollars from taxpayers to give to the Israeli government in foreign aid. To put that in perspective, you could of given every...single...one of the estimated 771,480 homeless Americans $401,825. That could buy an entire house in many areas or rent a $1200 a month apartment for 27.9 years.
I rant about how No Kings should just be No Rulers
The new P.A.Z.NIA Radio Show Cloak and Dagger released it's 3rd episode, all 3 are worth listening to if you are interested in a little casual subversion. Listen live every Saturday.
On this third episode of Cloak & Dagger, Thane Riddle comes to you again with hard-hitting news and practical information in the realms of privacy and security. Specifically, Thane covers the topic of work/employment privacy in the modern day: what do to, what not to do, and various strategies therein;...
![Cloak & Dagger with Thane Riddle: Episode 2, Work Privacy + Distributed Computing [P.A.Z.NIA Radio Network] | The Vonu Podcast](/_next/image?url=https%3A%2F%2Fstorage.googleapis.com%2Fpapyrus_images%2Fb7187bbf42608384eb1c0892bbaf1050.png&w=384&q=75)
The whirlpool is back baby! This is thanks to some very based anon Ashigaru (fork of Samourai Wallet) devs forking the protocol and relaunching it. Previously Ashigaru only had the other privacy features of Samourai Wallet without the whirlpool. The whirlpool is a coinjoin implementation that uses a centralized coordinator to play matchmaker with users who want to coinjoin their BTC which, if done correctly, can obfuscate the origin of the user's coins.The last whirlpool shut down when the Samourai Wallet devs were arrested. The Ungovernable Misfits tested the new one out and give a run down on their podcast.
The return of the whirlpool made me wonder, if one had some KYCed bitcoin, would it be overkill to coinjoin them and then swap into monero before spending said coins rather than swapping the KYCed coins directly for monero? I think that is probably a reasonable course of action. Better safe than sorry, although the best course of action is not to KYC in the first place.
I found this censorship resistance calculator on @aeonBTC 's website which is pretty cool, if you want to know how many guerrilla miners are needed to keep the Bitcoin network censorship resistant. Guerrilla miners are home miners, black market miners, any miners operating outside of regulatory oversight. They are absolutely essential and you should consider contributing to the cause by spinning up some miners. You can heat your house with them too if you want to play the lottery with your heat in the winter. Solo miners do win blocks, it happens on a semi-regular basis.
Calculate how many guerrilla miners are needed to keep Bitcoin censorship resistant.
The state's goons have been out in full force, rounding up innocent people who crossed an imaginary line in search of a better life and stuffing them in detention centers that are already full. 65% of those they have detained have no criminal record whatsoever and 93% have no violent convictions. I thought the point was to get rid of the criminals? Instead Trump set a fucking 3000 deportations a day quota and ICE agents are just deporting anyone and everyone to meet the quota. What kind of losers go work for ICE anyways? So many ways to make money in this world and you choose being a jackboot for a corrupt overreaching federal government? Same goes for all federal law enforcement agents, you all lack something I like to call morals.
The recent immigration-related arrest shows that ICE is more concerned with targeting all immigrants than with ensuring public safety.
Breaking news! Bitcoin will be able to be used as collateral for mortgages! I wonder if anyone is still calling Bitcoin a scam these days?
US Federal Housing Finance Agency issues order to count Bitcoin & crypto as an asset for a mortgage.
Ok folks that's all for this week, if the 3 people that open my newsletter emails could let me know if they enjoy this or not I would appreciate it, if so I will keep doing weekly dumps of random shit, cool shit, and fucked up shit! Although I might call it something else because the title is kind of shitty.
Follow me @bitcoinrenegade on Twitter and @thoughtcrimeboss on Farcaster
thoughtcrimeboss
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