Episodes

  • Your Money, Your Data, Your Mind | Jesse Posner

    Your Money, Your Data, Your Mind | Jesse Posner
    Feb 19 2026
    “If somebody gets control over your personal AI — all your health data, all your financial data, all your emails, everything you've thought about — they own you.” Jesse Posner built FROST threshold signatures and shipped BitKey at Block. Now he's building Vora because he realized individual self-custody is still a LARP — and the stakes are about to get much higher. Episode Summary Most people think a hardware wallet means they've solved self-custody. Jesse Posner spent years at Coinbase and Block learning exactly why that's wrong. Without a full node, your wallet leaks your balance and IP address to third-party servers. Without physical security integration, your keys are one wrench attack away from worthless. Without verifiable hardware, your entire setup might be compromised from the factory floor. Vora is building the integrated answer: a sovereign device combining a full Bitcoin node, air-gapped hardware wallet, tamper detection, and emergency response — all designed so that attacking a Bitcoiner becomes more expensive than it's worth. But Posner isn't stopping at money. He argues the next frontier of self-custody is your mind. As personal AI agents accumulate our most intimate data — health records, financial decisions, private thoughts — whoever controls that AI controls the person. Vora's “guardian AI” architecture uses hardware-backed isolation to guarantee that no prompt injection can reach your most trusted model, while still letting you harness frontier cloud models for non-sensitive tasks. The same cypherpunk principles that protect Bitcoin keys now protect the most valuable asset of all: your autonomy. About the Guest Jesse Posner is CEO and co-founder of Vora, a startup building Bitcoin-grade self-custody for both digital assets and AI. A trained lawyer turned cryptographic engineer, Posner spent over four years at Coinbase on key management, then helped build BitKey at Block. He created the first BIP-340 compatible implementation of FROST (Flexible Round-Optimized Schnorr Threshold Signatures), supported by a Brink grant. His work sits at the intersection of cryptography, constitutional law, and physical security — bringing an unusually broad lens to the question of individual sovereignty in the digital age. X/Twitter: jesseposnerNostr: jesseposner on PrimalLinkedIn: Jesse PosnerGitHub: jesseposnerCompany: Vora Key Quotes “We wanted to make self-sovereignty real — where you can control your Bitcoin, maintain your privacy, protect yourself from physical attacks, and resist government seizure.” — Jesse Posne“If somebody gets control over your personal AI, they own you. You could literally lose control of your identity.” — Jesse Posner“The nation-state system is like a dead man walking — the ground has already shifted and we're just seeing the slow collapse.” — Jesse Posner Key Takeaways A hardware wallet without a full node is a privacy leak: Every time your wallet checks your balance through a third-party server, it reveals your UTXOs and IP address — giving attackers a map to your Bitcoin and your front door.Self-custody must include physical security, not just key management: Vora integrates tamper detection, time-delayed spending, and emergency dispatch into the custody system itself, making the economics of attacking a Bitcoiner unprofitable.FROST threshold signatures eliminate the privacy and cost penalties of multi-sig: Traditional multi-sig reveals your entire key setup on-chain. FROST produces a single signature indistinguishable from a solo signer, with the ability to refresh, revoke, and add key shares without moving Bitcoin.Your personal AI is the next self-custody frontier: As AI agents accumulate intimate personal data and gain the ability to act on your behalf, controlling that AI becomes as critical as controlling your keys — and the same cypherpunk architecture applies. Timestamps [00:00] Introduction and Jesse's background at Coinbase and Block[03:16] How institutional vs. individual self-custody differs[06:30] Executive Order 6102 and constitutional resistance to government seizure[09:05] Physical security: integrating alarms, tamper detection, and emergency response[14:31] The $5 wrench attack problem and why it gets worse as Bitcoin appreciates[17:53] Why a full node matters for privacy — your wallet is leaking data[22:48] Supply chain attacks and the case for verifiable hardware[27:23] Trusted execution environments: powerful but not impervious[32:40] How FROST threshold signatures work and why they matter[39:29] Proactive security: refreshing key shares without moving Bitcoin[44:37] Self-custody of AI: why controlling your mind is the next frontier[48:58] Prompt injection attacks and the “lethal trifecta”[52:47] Guardian AI architecture: hardware-isolated models that can't be corrupted[54:57] Fiduciary AI: confidentiality and undivided loyalty in a single concept[1:06:02] Vora's product roadmap: AI product this ...
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    1 hr and 22 mins
  • S03E04 John Robb — Total Surveillance Is One Switch Away

    S03E04 John Robb — Total Surveillance Is One Switch Away
    Feb 13 2026
    “All it takes is the political will or the political mistake to turn it on. And it's there.” John Robb maps the path from post-national identity collapse to automated totalitarian surveillance—and explains why most of the tools people are counting on won't stop it. Episode Summary The systems holding society together are breaking down faster than most people realize. John Robb returns to Trust Revolution to connect two accelerating forces: the collapse of shared national identity that made trust and governance possible and the rise of autonomous AI that makes population-scale surveillance trivially cheap. When common identity dissolves, everyone treats the state as a system to loot—and those benefiting from the looting need tools to maintain control. That tool is what Robb calls “the long night”: AI assigned to every individual, building profiles, manipulating behavior, punishing dissent, all automated by a small group with network access. Musk buying Twitter delayed but didn't prevent it. Asked whether Bitcoin, encryption, or decentralized networks can counter state-level AI surveillance, Robb is blunt: probably not. What individuals can do is leverage AI aggressively for personal economic advantage, build persistent AI agents they actually control, and resist the emotional manipulation that makes authoritarian lockdown feel necessary. Robb gives the window at roughly ten years before the economic singularity separates those who paired with AI from those who didn't. About the Guest John Robb is the editor of the Global Guerrillas Report on Substack and Patreon, where he publishes predictive frameworks at the intersection of war, technology, and politics. A former USAF special operations pilot who flew Tier 1 missions with Delta and SEAL Team 6, Robb later earned his MPPM from Yale, became Forrester Research's first internet analyst, and co-founded Gomez Advisors (sold to Compuware for $295 million). He is the author of Brave New War, a military strategy classic on open-source warfare. His work focuses on how networked systems create both unprecedented fragility and opportunity for individuals navigating institutional collapse. X/Twitter: https://twitter.com/johnrobbSubstack: https://johnrobb.substack.comPatreon: https://www.patreon.com/johnrobbLinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/john-robb-97518/ Key Quotes “We don't trust each other anymore. Everything anyone else says, you treat it like an attack.” — John Robb“If you find yourself being enraged—absolutely anything, even if you think it's justified—walk away. You are being played.” — John Robb“Every investment [of data] you make is going to be siphoned off to the cloud and used by them to compete against you.” — John Robb Key Takeaways The surveillance state doesn't require a conspiracy — just a switch: Corporations already built every component of totalitarian AI surveillance through normal product development. Automated, individualized manipulation at population scale is now a matter of political will, not technical capability.Bitcoin and encryption probably won't stop the long night: Robb is direct — decentralized tools can't match the degree of control a fully deployed AI surveillance system would exert. The political and social dynamics driving demand for that control are stronger than the technical countermeasures available.AI leverage is the individual's economic lifeline: The gap between those who pair with persistent AI agents and those who don't will widen into an unbridgeable economic divide within a decade. The priority is building AI tools you control locally — centralized services siphon your intelligence and use it to compete against you.Empathy triggers are weaponized at network speed: Viral content manufactures tribal identity in days — what took nation-states years of propaganda. Recognizing when you're being conscripted into an emotional swarm is a core survival skill for anyone navigating algorithmic media. Timestamps [00:28] Why post-nationalism and AI autonomy are the two forces reshaping everything[03:19] What autonomous AI actually means — and why current systems fall apart after eight hours[07:58] The long night: what a modern totalitarian surveillance state looks like[14:58] Why Musk buying Twitter only delayed the surveillance threat[17:08] How the end of the Cold War began the structural replacement of the middle class[20:44] Surveillance as a service — what job it does for the cosmopolitan elite[28:31] Why Bitcoin and encryption probably can't counter state-level AI surveillance[29:17] Data ownership as the missed opportunity — sharecroppers on your own land[38:25] Building persistent AI agents as personal economic leverage[45:21] Top 10% now drive half of consumer spending — what that means for technology development[54:13] Empathy swarms: how viral content manufactures tribal identity in days[1:01:10] Staying connected, staying skeptical, and screening your family's ...
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    1 hr and 11 mins
  • S03E03 Aaron van Wirdum – Bitcoin's Origin Story and the Unfinished Fight

    S03E03 Aaron van Wirdum – Bitcoin's Origin Story and the Unfinished Fight
    Feb 6 2026
    “The cypherpunks who tried to build digital cash before Bitcoin might one day be remembered like America's founding fathers.” Aaron van Wirdum spent five years writing The Genesis Book—and warns the fight for money outside of government control isn't over. EPISODE SUMMARY Bitcoin didn't appear from nowhere. For decades before Satoshi, a scrappy band of cryptographers, privacy activists, and heterodox economists tried to build digital cash that could operate outside government control. They all failed—until one anonymous inventor synthesized their ideas into a system that actually worked. Aaron van Wirdum, author of The Genesis Book and former editor-in-chief of Bitcoin Magazine, traces this lineage from David Chaum's DigiCash in the early 90s through Nick Szabo's Bit Gold to Satoshi's breakthrough: using proof of work for consensus rather than as currency itself. But the origin story doesn't end with invention. Van Wirdum covered the 2015-2017 block size wars in real time—when miners, exchanges, and venture-backed startups controlling 80% of economic activity tried to change Bitcoin's rules and lost to anonymous node runners in basements. Today, the threat has shifted. Mining is concentrated, privacy developers face prison, and incremental regulation slowly suffocates self-custody. The question isn't whether Bitcoin can survive a 51% attack. It's whether it can survive becoming as monitored and controlled as email. ABOUT THE GUEST Aaron van Wirdum is the author of The Genesis Book: The Story of the People and Projects That Inspired Bitcoin and former editor-in-chief of Bitcoin Magazine's print edition. He discovered Bitcoin in 2013 and spent over a decade documenting its technical evolution and governance battles, including real-time coverage of the block size wars. Based in the Netherlands, van Wirdum studied journalism and the historical influence of technology on social structures at Utrecht University. He left X/Twitter and is now active on Nostr. Nostr: https://primal.net/AaronvanWBook: https://thegenesisbook.com KEY QUOTES “The market decides what is Bitcoin. That is ultimately what it comes down to.” — Aaron van Wirdum “The big concern is sort of the emailification of Bitcoin—where the protocol is still out there, but no one's actually interacting with it directly because everything is happening through [custodial solutions and regulated entities.]” — Aaron van Wirdum “Bitcoin is the best form of money ever invented, if it all keeps working as intended.” — Aaron van Wirdum KEY TAKEAWAYS Bitcoin is an evolutionary step, not a lucky accident: Satoshi synthesized decades of failed attempts—Hashcash's proof of work, DigiCash's privacy, Bit Gold's decentralized registry—into a system where the pieces finally fit together. The difficulty adjustment algorithm and using proof of work for consensus (rather than as currency) were the crucial breakthroughs.The block size wars proved Bitcoin's immune system works: When 50 companies representing 80% of economic activity tried to change the rules in 2017, fork futures markets revealed the market valued the conservative version. The users—not the miners or corporations—ultimately decide what Bitcoin is.Individual miners refusing transactions is annoying, not existential: F2Pool censoring OFAC-sanctioned transactions means slightly longer confirmation times. The real threat is miners refusing to build on blocks that include those transactions—that's when censorship becomes enforced.Regulatory suffocation is the most plausible failure mode: Not a protocol attack, but incremental KYC/AML rules that make self-custody harder, privacy tools illegal, and Bitcoin's actual use as digital cash impossible while ETFs and “institutional allocators” hold a version that's no different from any other financial asset. TIMESTAMPS [00:01] Introduction and the cypherpunk vision of building money outside government control[03:44] Tim May's radical vision: the internet as a new frontier for institutions[11:26] David Chaum and DigiCash: how the first working digital cash almost became a banking standard[17:15] Nick Szabo's Bit Gold: inching toward Bitcoin and why it couldn't quite work[21:07] Bitcoin's known weakness: the 51% attack and mining centralization today[25:27] The block size wars: how close Bitcoin came to capture or destruction in 2017[33:58] Transaction censorship: when it matters and when it doesn't[38:25] The OP_RETURN debate: harm reduction versus fighting spam[47:54] Why Aaron's still here after 13 years: “What is more important than money?”[54:46] The dimming torch: privacy as Bitcoin's underemphasized origin story[56:15] The most plausible failure mode: incremental regulation and the emailification of Bitcoin[60:54] Practical advice: get a wallet, get some Bitcoin, just try it RESOURCES & LINKS Mentioned in Episode: Bitcoin Magazine - Aaron van Wirdum's articles - His coverage of Bitcoin over the past decadeNew York ...
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    1 hr and 5 mins
  • S03E02 Jason Hughey – Companies Don't Keep Promises. People Do.

    S03E02 Jason Hughey – Companies Don't Keep Promises. People Do.
    Jan 30 2026
    Enron had “integrity” as a core value. FTX had none at all. Both collapsed. Jason Hughey argues the problem isn't whether companies state their values—it's whether those values function as actual decision-making frameworks or just motivational posters on the wall. Episode Summary Most organizations betray trust not through malice but through design. Jason Hughey breaks down the two paradigms shaping every workplace: top-down control systems that optimize for short-term extraction, and emergent systems that treat employees as contributors rather than resources. The dysfunction you've felt—being punished for good ideas, watching customer service decline to hit quarterly targets, seeing values that exist only on walls—isn't random. It's built in. Hughey works with a framework called Principle Based Management, developed by Charles Koch at Koch Industries and first codified in 1990. The core distinction: rules tell people what to do, principles empower them to decide. When you suppress the signals coming from people closest to the work, you get the same coordination failures that collapsed the Soviet economy—just at company scale. The alternative requires hiring for virtue over talent, building genuine challenge cultures, and committing to low time preference even when it's not exciting. If better money requires better principles, better organizations might too. About the Guest Jason Hughey leads business development at Satoshi Pacioli, a Bitcoin-focused accounting firm founded in 2022, where he's also driving the firm's adoption of Principle Based Management—a framework rooted in Austrian economics that treats organizations like markets rather than command structures. With over ten years in customer experience and team building, including time in the fitness industry, Hughey brings a practitioner's lens to management theory. He co-authored Called to Freedom (2016), exploring the intersection of Christianity and libertarianism. LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jasonhughey/Satoshi Pacioli: https://satoshipacioli.comSubstack: https://satoshipacioliaccounting.substack.com Key Quotes "Values or a company's culture becomes the motivational poster on the wall that you walk by and acknowledge and see the word integrity there, and then you forget about it." — Jason Hughey"When you are consistently using your power to shut down those signals that are emerging from people who are on the front lines doing the work, you're going to run into the problem of now we're not getting the knowledge to where it needs to go." — Jason Hughey“The value is the ideal that you live by. The virtue is the day-to-day commitment to doing it.” — Jason Hughey Key Takeaways Stated values mean nothing without lived virtue: Enron had “integrity” on the wall. The distinction between values (ideals you claim) and virtue (daily commitment to act on them) separates companies that build trust from those that betray it.Suppressing internal signals creates Soviet-style coordination failures: When employees are punished for bringing ideas or challenges forward, knowledge stops flowing to where it's needed—the same problem that collapsed centrally planned economies, just at organizational scale.Hire for virtue first, talent second: Talent can be coached; character rarely changes. If you have to choose between someone highly skilled who plays politics and someone less skilled with integrity, take the latter.Principles empower, rules constrain: Rules-based management treats employees as resources to accomplish tasks. Principle-based management gives people a framework and lets them decide—unlocking creativity, ownership, and better customer outcomes. Timestamps [00:48] Why most organizations betray trust—two competing management paradigms[04:41] FTX, Enron, Theranos: the pattern behind corporate values failures[09:16] The fifth dimension of PBM: self-actualization and meaning at work[11:34] Design choices that guarantee dysfunction—challenge culture and cult of personality[16:18] How high time preference management destroys customer service and employee trust[20:35] Information flow in broken organizations—when signals get siloed or shut down[23:49] The socialist calculation problem applied to business management[26:01] Principles vs. rules: empowering employees to decide[29:08] What local knowledge actually requires—integrity, challenge culture, knowledge systems[30:49] Virtue vs. values: the ideal you claim vs. the commitment to live it[36:06] Building scaffolding so you don't fall when times get tough[39:08] Where to start when your team shows cracks—two diagnostic questions[43:24] Hiring for virtue when everyone can perform values in an interview[49:41] What's been harder than expected implementing PBM at Satoshi Pacioli[52:21] What changes if more organizations operated this way—restoring trust[55:41] The infinite game: low time preference as competitive advantage[59:13] Legitimate organizational ...
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    1 hr and 4 mins
  • S03E01 Oscar Merry — What Joe Rogan Lost for $100M

    S03E01 Oscar Merry — What Joe Rogan Lost for $100M
    Jan 22 2026
    “If you choose to go exclusive on Spotify, you're essentially saying to 70% of your existing and potential audience, ‘Sorry, you can't listen anymore.’” Oscar Merry watched Joe Rogan lose influence despite a $100 million payday—and built Fountain to prove there's a better way. Episode Summary Oscar Merry's Alexa skills hit #1 in productivity and earned $30,000 in six months. He moved on when the technology couldn't match the vision—and the gatekeepers made clear it wasn't going to. Now as CEO of Fountain, he's building infrastructure for creators who want to own their audience rather than rent access to them. The conversation maps the entire value chain—from how legacy media takes up to 90% of creator revenue with quarterly payouts to how open protocols enable instant payments with single-digit fees. Merry unpacks the Joe Rogan case study as proof that even $100 million can't compensate for lost reach and explains why Nostr's cross-app comments represent the most significant shift in content discovery since RSS. For creators sensing that platform dependence is a liability, this episode lays out what's actually working in open podcasting today—and what's still hard. About the Guest Oscar Merry is CEO and co-founder of Fountain, a podcast app built on open protocols including Bitcoin Lightning and Nostr. Before podcasting, he was an Amazon Alexa Champion who built skills used by millions, ran the London Alexa Meetup, and taught voice technology courses. He pivoted to audio after recognizing that voice assistants couldn't escape Big Tech gatekeeping. Based in the UK, he leads a small team building what he calls “a different way of doing content discovery on the internet." X/Twitter: https://twitter.com/MerryOscarNostr: primal.net/merryoscarLinkedIn: https://linkedin.com/in/oscarmerryFountain: https://fountain.fm Key Quotes “If you choose to go exclusive on Spotify, you're essentially saying to 70% of your existing and potential audience, sorry, you can't listen anymore.” — Oscar Merry “In the current system, as an artist, as a content creator, you are losing out massively on both time and money.” — Oscar Merry “Imagine if that YouTube comment could go into the Twitter feed or the Instagram feed or the LinkedIn feed. That conceptual difference that Nostr can deliver is the thing that lights up the eyes of podcasters.” — Oscar Merry Key Takeaways Open podcasting is a check against centralization: Even Spotify's $100 million couldn't prevent Joe Rogan from losing influence during his exclusive period. The fragmented nature of podcasting—where Apple and Spotify together hold only ~30% market share—means exclusivity costs more than it pays.Legacy media takes up to 90% with quarterly delays: Between platforms, payment processors, labels, and collection agencies, creators can end up with 10 cents on the dollar months after the value was created. Open micropayments reverse this with instant settlement and single-digit fees.Value-based discovery beats attention algorithms: When a casual like and a life-changing experience are weighted equally, algorithms optimize for slop. Attaching payments to discovery signals lets quality surface over engagement bait.Nostr inverts the flow for creators: Instead of audiences traveling to walled-off comment sections, engagement and money flow toward the creator across any app that speaks the protocol. Timestamps [01:08] Oscar's origin story: #1 Alexa skill to questioning Big Tech control[09:56] Why podcasting's fragmented ecosystem resists centralization[11:32] The Joe Rogan case study: $200M couldn't buy back lost influence[17:14] Why value for value can work when only 1-5% participate[26:10] What Fountain learned from listen-to-earn rewards[31:14] Money flow comparison: legacy media vs open payments[38:44] Attention algorithms vs value-based content discovery[47:43] Nostr's magic: comments that appear across every app[51:22] What censorship resistance actually means in practice[53:33] Building a business on unproven protocols[1:00:25] First moves for creators exploring open podcasting[1:03:18] The Fountain pitch: why switch from Spotify or Apple Resources & Links Mentioned in Episode: Primal - Nostr client with built-in Lightning walletPodcast Index - Open index for podcast RSS feedsAlby Hub - Self-hosted Lightning wallet for value-for-value payments Podcast: Subscribe: https://podcast.trustrevolution.coMusic: More Ghost Than Man
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    1 hr and 8 mins
  • S02E16 Pippellia – Reputation Without a Kill Switch

    S02E16 Pippellia – Reputation Without a Kill Switch
    Dec 18 2025
    “Web of Trust is any network of relationship where trust is distributed and emergent—it's not imposed by someone else.” Pip builds the infrastructure that makes decentralized reputation actually work. While platforms like Twitter sell verification for $8, he's applying Google's PageRank algorithm to Nostr—and giving it away for free. EPISODE SUMMARY Right now, if you want to know whether an account is real or a bot, you're trusting Twitter or Meta to tell you. That model is failing—platforms can't stop spam, won't stop scams that pay for ads, and increasingly demand full KYC just to participate. Pip is building the alternative: Vertex, a Web of Trust service that computes reputation scores across Nostr's social graph. Instead of a company database deciding who you are, your reputation emerges from the people who actually know you. The technology uses PageRank-style algorithms to surface trustworthy accounts and filter out impersonators—without any central authority making those calls. For builders, this means spam protection and personalized recommendations without reinventing the wheel. For individuals, it means your identity and audience become portable—no platform can erase you because no platform owns you. Pip made Vertex free because Nostr needs adoption more than he needs revenue, a bet that infrastructure must reach critical mass before it can sustain itself. ABOUT THE GUEST Pip (Pippellia) is the co-founder of Vertex, a Web of Trust service for Nostr developers. He builds the infrastructure layer that helps decentralized apps solve their hardest problem: figuring out who to trust when there's no central authority. Vertex uses PageRank-style algorithms to compute reputation scores, enabling spam filtering, personalized recommendations, and impersonation protection. He received an OpenSats grant in 2025 and made Vertex free to drive adoption, prioritizing network growth over immediate revenue. X/Twitter: https://twitter.com/pippelliaNostr: https://primal.net/p/nprofile1qqs0dqlgwq6l0t20gnstnr8mm9fhu9j9t2fv6wxwl3xtx8dh24l4auswr6u0jGitHub: https://github.com/pippellia-btc KEY QUOTES “Web of Trust is any network of relationship where trust is distributed and emergent. It emerges organically from interaction and connections—it's not imposed by someone else.” — Pip “Reputation is not a value, but it depends on the point of view. For me, your reputation is quite high because I follow you directly.” — Pip “Whatever you build, even if it's small, your audience on Nostr is gonna be yours forever—unless obviously you screw it up and people decide to leave you.” — Pip KEY TAKEAWAYS Centralized verification is broken by design: Platforms profit from bots inflating user counts and scammers paying for ads. Meta reportedly requires special permission to remove spammers whose ad budgets exceed certain thresholds—spam prevention conflicts with revenue.Your reputation should travel with you: On Nostr, if one app bans you, your identity and followers remain intact across every other client. Getting banned everywhere would require the entire network to decide you're toxic—a far higher bar than one company's content team.Web of Trust solves the cold start problem for builders: Instead of building authentication systems, spam filters, and recommendation engines from scratch, developers can plug into existing reputation infrastructure and inherit the social graph's accumulated trust signals.Personalized trust beats global authority: Different people can have different views on who's trustworthy. Vertex lets you borrow someone else's perspective—your technically-savvy friend's judgment on which app developers to trust, for example—without surrendering control to a platform. TIMESTAMPS [00:44] What Vertex is and the problem it solves [03:23] Why centralized trust verification is failing—the Twitter/X model [05:11] Pip's definition of Web of Trust: distributed and emergent trust [06:49] Why PGP's web of trust failed after 30 years [10:32] How Twitter's paid verification made identity meaningless [14:19] Meta's perverse incentives—when scammers pay more than spam costs [18:42] The primitives needed for healthy online discourse [21:26] Why reputation depends on point of view, not absolute values [27:13] How Nostr makes your audience portable and permanent [29:36] Can Web of Trust be weaponized? The exclusion question [34:52] Vertex's business model: freemium credits based on reputation [39:49] Why app store review models are going obsolete [41:57] Zapstore: using Web of Trust to verify app developers [49:00] What traditional developers get wrong about decentralized identity [55:21] What's next: explicit content detection and filtering [1:00:46] Personalized recommendations and onboarding without surveillance RESOURCES & LINKS Mentioned in Episode: Vertex - Web of Trust as a Service for Nostrnpub.world - Nostr profile search engine powered by Vertex for accurate discovery and ...
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    1 hr and 9 mins
  • S02E15 Christian Keroles – What Dissidents Know About Bitcoin

    S02E15 Christian Keroles – What Dissidents Know About Bitcoin
    Dec 12 2025

    “It's not enough for me to be taken care of if everyone else on the planet is living in a digital gulag.” CK explains why HRF treats Bitcoin as essential infrastructure for human rights—and why dictators keep failing to build alternatives that work.

    Episode Summary

    One billion people live in democracies with stable currency and property rights. Seven billion don't. Christian Keroles, Director of Financial Freedom at the Human Rights Foundation, argues that Bitcoin flips this equation—giving everyone access to the best property rights and most stable money regardless of where they're born. In this conversation, CK breaks down why authoritarian regimes are the most enthusiastic about CBDCs yet consistently fail to achieve adoption. Why activists from Russia to Myanmar to Venezuela are choosing Bitcoin as their financial infrastructure, and what HRF has learned funding nearly 300 open-source Bitcoin projects. The pattern is clear: governments build intranets while Bitcoin builds the internet of money. And just like email in the 90s, the protocol works—we're just waiting for everyone to get an address.

    About the Guest

    Christian Keroles (CK) is Director of Financial Freedom at the Human Rights Foundation, where he leads the CBDC Tracker, Bitcoin Development Fund, and activist education programs. Before HRF, he spent years as Managing Director and COO at Bitcoin Magazine and the Bitcoin Conference, building the infrastructure that shaped Bitcoin's public narrative. His team has distributed millions in grants to open-source developers and trained over 300 activists from 50+ countries on Bitcoin self-custody. CK discovered Bitcoin in 2017 through Laura Shin's Unchained podcast and hasn't stopped building since.

    Social Links:

    • X/Twitter: https://twitter.com/ck_SNARKs
    • LinkedIn: https://linkedin.com/in/ckeroles
    • Nostr: https://primal.net/ck

    Key Quotes

    • “If you are opposing the guys in charge, you're not going to have access for very long.” — Christian Keroles
    • “Bitcoin is freedom enabling technology. Bitcoin is bad for dictators, and Bitcoin aligns with Western liberal values.” — Christian Keroles
    • “Rather than exporting troops, rather than exporting inflation, the way that we do that is we export freedom technology.” — Christian Keroles

    Key Takeaways

    • CBDCs are the intranet of money: Dictatorships are most excited about CBDCs because they enable capital controls, population surveillance, and data collection on unbanked citizens—but they consistently fail at consumer adoption because governments are terrible at shipping tech products.
    • Debanked means playing whack-a-mole: Activists under authoritarian regimes describe constant account closures, using aliases, and moving between platforms. Bitcoin gives them permissionless access to digital payments for the first time—reconnecting them to the global economy.
    • Bitcoin adoption follows the email playbook: The protocol works perfectly for sending value anywhere. The bottleneck is that nobody has a Bitcoin address yet. As more people come online, network effects compound—and HRF is funding the tools to accelerate that adoption.
    • eCash, Nostr, and open-source AI are the frontier: HRF sees these technologies as complementary layers that make Bitcoin more adoptable. eCash enables jurisdictional arbitrage for product builders; Nostr creates censorship-resistant social infrastructure; open-source AI focuses on practical threats from surveillance systems rather than theoretical superintelligence.

    Mentioned in Episode:

    • HRF CBDC Tracker - Monitoring government digital currency programs worldwide
    • Zeus Wallet - Lightning and eCash wallet CK uses personally
    • Bitcoin Design Foundation - User research for Bitcoin builders
    • Check Your Financial Privilege - Alex Gladstein's book on Bitcoin and human rights

    Podcast:

    • Subscribe: https://podcast.trustrevolution.co
    • Music: More Ghost Than Man
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    55 mins
  • S02E14 Why Ads Keep Winning

    S02E14 Why Ads Keep Winning
    Dec 5 2025

    Big Tech captures $670 a year from the average American through attention and data. Voluntary payment has never broken past 5% adoption in 50 years of trying. So why does it still matter? Because it's not about replacing ads. It's about having somewhere to go when the platforms decide you shouldn't exist.

    Episode Summary

    Voluntary payment sounds like the answer to surveillance capitalism. Pay creators directly, cut out the middlemen, become the customer instead of the product. The philosophy is compelling. The data is brutal. NPR, Wikipedia, Patreon, Nostr — participation rates cluster between 1-5% and haven't budged in decades. Technology isn't the problem. Human behavior is. When given a choice, most people choose free with ads over paying directly. But this episode reframes the entire question. Voluntary payment doesn't need to replace extraction economics. It needs to exist as an exit. When Patreon banned Sargon of Akkad in 2018, thousands of creators watched their income evaporate. When they fled to SubscribeStar, Stripe and PayPal cut that platform off too. OnlyFans nearly killed its own business model because banks demanded it. Operation Choke Point proved the government can strangle legal businesses through financial pressure alone. The 5% who voluntarily pay aren't your main revenue stream. They're your lifeboat — an uncancellable base that doesn't depend on any platform's good graces.

    Key Quotes

    "Your ad revenue pays the bills. Your voluntary supporters are your insurance policy."

    "Stop thinking about voluntary payment as charity. Think about it as investing in creators you can't afford to lose."

    "Voluntary payment can't dominate. Defaults always beat choice. Human nature doesn't really change. But it can exist at a scale that makes it viable."

    Key Takeaways

    • The 1-5% ceiling is structural, not technological: Patreon's conversion rate hasn't grown in a decade despite easier payments and lower friction. Better UX won't solve a values gap between early adopters and typical users.
    • Defaults beat decisions: Apple's tracking transparency saw a 55-point swing from a single design change. People don't choose surveillance — they just don't reject it. Same with payment. The path forward may be changing defaults, not convincing more people to pay.
    • Voluntary payment is deplatforming insurance: When Patreon, PayPal, or your bank decides you're too risky, most creators have no backup. Those who built direct relationships with even 5% of their audience have an escape route.
    • The hybrid model works: Chapo Trap House ($140K/month Patreon plus sponsors), Tim Dillon ($200K/month Patreon plus ads) — successful creators aren't choosing between models, they're using both.

    Timestamps

    • [00:43] The promise of value for value — paying creators instead of being monetized
    • [02:15] The $670 Big Tech extracts annually from the average American
    • [04:30] Evidence voluntary payment can work: Patreon success stories and Apple's tracking data
    • [07:45] The counterevidence: YouTube Premium at 9%, Netflix ads at 55% of signups
    • [10:20] Nostr's payment participation — 0.5% despite frictionless Bitcoin integration
    • [14:30] Historical data: NPR, Wikipedia, pay-what-you-want restaurants all hit the same ceiling
    • [17:00] Why defaults determine behavior more than decisions
    • [18:45] The exit option reframe — why voluntary payment still matters
    • [20:30] The Patreon/Sargon cascade and SubscribeStar deplatforming
    • [23:00] Operation Choke Point and financial censorship
    • [25:30] How successful creators actually operate: the hybrid model
    • [28:00] What this means for creators, listeners, and builders

    Mentioned in Episode

    • Fountain - Podcasting 2.0 app with Bitcoin Lightning payments
    • Nostr - Censorship-resistant social protocol with built-in payments
    • Patreon - Creator subscription platform
    • OpenSats - Open source Bitcoin and freedom tech funding

    Podcast

    • Subscribe: https://podcast.trustrevolution.co
    • Music: More Ghost Than Man
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    24 mins