Smart phones, dumb people.

Self-custody isn't paranoia. It's the default state of true ownership throughout human history. Trusting a third party with your wealth is the anomaly, not the norm. It's a new year, great time to start taking responsibility if you haven't yet.

Abusing the money printer isn’t a bug, it’s human nature: once people taste power, they always want just a little more. If you can decide who gets the new money first and what it funds, you quietly shape society from the top down.

Weaponized counterfeiting shows how hostile states can quietly stoke inflation, wipe out savings, quell revolutions, and gut public trust in money itself—often without firing a shot. During the American Revolution, British officials under Lord George Germain backed forgeries of Continental currency, accelerating its collapse and undermining confidence in the rebel government’s finances. In the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic era, British-backed counterfeiters helped flood France with forged assignats and related paper, deepening inflation and discrediting revolutionary economic management. In World War I, German authorities experimented with fake British pounds to strain London’s financial system, probing whether inflation and shaken confidence could weaken Britain from the inside. In World War II, SS-Sturmbannführer Bernhard Krüger’s “Operation Bernhard” at Sachsenhausen used enslaved specialists to mass-produce forged Bank of England notes, funding spies like Elyesa Bazna (“Cicero”) and aiming at financial chaos in Britain. During the Vietnam War, counterfeiting was a psychological and economic weapon, with the U.S. and South Vietnamese printing fake North Vietnamese currency (tín phiếu) to destabilize the communist economy, while the VC responded with their own notes and design changes, leading to low-quality, easily counterfeited bills that damaged trust and caused inflation. After Iraq’s 1990 invasion of Kuwait, Saddam Hussein’s regime looted and forged Kuwaiti dinars, forcing Kuwait to replace its notes to prevent lasting damage to its monetary system and citizens’ savings. Why would the bitcoin revolution be any different? They can’t fake bitcoin so they alt-coin, shit-coin, stable-coin, paper-coin.

We’re slaves to time alone.

Stage setup a before the show.

Open source hub at Bitcoin MENA: 2 intense days of listening to users of very different technical levels. Some are stuck in shitcoinery, others are using bitcoin to protect themselves. Some are curious, other believe they know everything. Hands on the devices, scanning QR codes, testing NFCs, signing testnet transactions, downloading lighting wallets, talking about ecash, and onboarding on to nostr. The types of people that approached our both looking to learn more about bitcoin left me happy and surprised. People are ready, the UX is not, but it’s getting there.

Inputs and outputs