Welcome to the future

Initial reflections on the Coldcard catastrophe, the bitcoin-only approach, and financial freedom: 1) Many people, me included, trusted and recommended Coldcard more than we should have. Especially after it became only source-viewable, and especially given the attitude of the Coldcard creator towards other similar projects. These were obviously red flags in retrospect. This was a huge lapse on my part and I pledge to learn from it 2) Coldcard operated for many years with shocking, betraying negligence that was hidden from the public by a) security theater driven by marketing (i.e. cypherpunks should use this sophisticated tool) and b) an “in circle” reputation and that people like me perpetuated. Another mistake that will stick with me, and guide my future actions 3) We will not be lectured by scammers and ETF promoters and former FTX cheerleaders. There are other Bitcoin-only products like Bitkey, Bitbox, Passport, and Seedsigner. Just because one Bitcoin hardware wallet company failed, doesn't mean the Bitcoin-only approach is bad. Far from it. It just means we need to learn and improve. It DOES NOT MEAN we need to "diversify" into random shitcoins, endorse or tolerate premines, give all our Bitcoin to corporations, or other such nonsense 4) FOSS should be the gold standard in general. And multi-vendor multi-sig or collaborative custody should be a goal for large amounts 5) Exchange hacks have been ~1,000x worse than even this disaster. The answer to challenges in self-custody is *not* to trust someone else with your money. It’s to learn and improve or upgrade your self-custody 6) Fiat currency must be defeated. Entire nations have lost 50% of their money overnight, 75% or even 99% in a matter of months or years. Accounts are regularly frozen and stolen every day. The global monetary system is immensely unjust and predatory and must be resisted. The mission must go on 7) AI makes bugs more exploitable, but it also can be used to secure codebases to an extraordinary degree. This is already happening (see Spiral's Loupe) and really shows the power of open weights. The lesson here is not that frontier AI should be gatekept by the elite, but that it should be open to all, so that we all have more eyes on everything 8) Financial freedom is not easy. And maybe never will be. The price of freedom is eternal vigilance. Self-custody is the pinnacle. Maybe not everyone reaches it, but we should strive to make it an option for anyone 9) I am sorry that HRF handed out Coldcards at two of our events over the past decade, and sorry that I mentioned Coldcards occasionally over the years as a good option. I am NOT sorry that HRF has a laser focus on self-custody and privacy. This approach is *the only option* for people under authoritarian societies. Maybe you want to choose to rely on the good graces of an American financial institution, but this option doesn't exist for billions of people worldwide 10) I am also proud that HRF over the past decade has handed out *many more units* of other devices such as Bitkeys and Seedsigners and Passports, and that we work to teach topics like privacy and multi-sig in our work. I am also proud that we have given out 100+ grants, invested more than $5M, and paid out more than a dozen bounties towards multi-sig, better self-custody, and privacy 11) I can’t say enough about how awesome Casa is and collaborative custody in general. I have heard good things about AnchorWatch and Unchained as well. I highly recommended the collaborative approach for non-profits. Liana is fully open source and superb for managing multi-sig. Casa and Liana have helped HRF sleep easy through the FTX crash, Silicon Valley banking system collapse, Coldcard catastrophe, and other crises 12) It is incredibly inspiring to see the Bitcoin community rally around helping people at a time of need. Many people have barely slept over the past four days as they have helped race to secure funds. It is truly awesome to see this 13) We are in a new age of "back to the basics" in thinking hard about self-custody. Bitcoin doesn't work as freedom money unless people can control it themselves. There is much work to do, but perhaps in 10 years we will look back at this crisis and see that the industry instead of giving up, evolved significantly as a result. Now is the time to make that dream a reality. Thankfully I am seeing a variety of Bitcoin companies and entrepreneurs ranging from Block to Bull iterate rapidly in that direction 🙏

“Parents are increasingly willing to embrace tracking and analytics for their children, and to outscore parenting decisions to technology”

My interview on the BBC World Service that aired twice in the past day about AI and freedom Grateful to get a chance to promote the vision of private, sovereign, and local AI powering a new age of individual human empowerment to so many millions of people 🙏

Incredibly based for Jensen’s first ever X post to be in defense of open weights

Very interesting…

Ash’s original name in Japanese is Satoshi What? How did I only learn this now? 😅

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Revolting I wonder how many people who drink these “energy drinks” know they have 35 grams of sugar

I know this is a regular thing for some people but — First time finishing the Sunday NYT crossword. Have always found it impossible “Honor Among Thieves” and “Power Behind the Throne” my favs here

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Updated

“The Bitcoin president”

Happy to become a producer of this film It’s a decent chunk of freedom money, yes, but for a great cause and concept: A people-powered, Bitcoin-powered, unstoppable investigation into the global war on whistleblowers We should spy on governments, not the other way around

Three months ago I wrote my first reflections on AI I had been using OpenClaw for a few weeks, and it blew my mind I could now simply talk to a computer, and it could orchestrate and execute complex, creative tasks of all kinds This open-source AI harness gave me, personally, new powers of computer programming, design, and beyond that I never had before It was a real “I know Kung Fu” moment, straight out of The Matrix The most awesome part was that the harness itself -- the software I was using to operate the AI “brain” or model -- was open source and fully customizable The evolution of AI had been forked away from corporate dominance to create a path of sovereignty for the user, allowing them to choose their own intelligence It felt like we were on the brink of something big And yet still, three months later, it feels like these times were so very long ago In February and March, we ran a fun OpenClaw experiment at HRF with just a few people, to see what kind of impact personal agents could have on productivity and on reducing busy work and bureaucracy By May, we had actually started to give some of the world’s leading dissidents easy-to-use, extremely powerful, freedom-oriented AI tools to help them turn their dreams into reality We do this at “Agent Camps”: 3-day, in-person experiences with teachers who are experts in education, design AI software, AI hardware, and software engineering We have also created beautiful, engaging AI experiences and content at massive live events ranging from Bitcoin 2026 in Vegas to the Oslo Freedom Forum, sparking curiosity in thousands of people We began with the open-source ethos, and now have been able to add privacy, and even full sovereignty, to our toolset The product HRF has helped bring into existence -- Finite -- now offers a “private” mode where the inference provider can’t read the user data, similar to a Signal server. This product is what our Agent Camp graduates now use, and is what we hope to scale to more and more activists as we move through the year We are even testing a “local” mode powered by our very own cluster, that we control, that gives us the ability to control the full AI stack What I’m still struggling to digest is how fast the AI hardware and software environment is evolving towards making “sovereign AI” a practical reality There’s a lot of doom in the headlines around the big AI corporations and their relationships with governments -- for good reason -- but when you zoom out and consider the big picture, the undeniable reality is that open weight models are getting more powerful, easier to use, and smaller so that they fit on cheaper and more widespread devices One year ago, open weight AI models were mostly a joke. They couldn’t really execute anything that complex Today, it’s getting hard to tell the difference between a personal agent powered by the best open weight models versus the best frontier ones And while the frontier model companies are struggling through massive scaling and legal and political issues, open weight models and open-source harness software sets are blazing ahead Consider that just *3* months ago, local AI was mostly a joke Today it actually works: HRF and Finite currently have an uncensored model running on ~ $4,500 of equipment that can serve a dozen people, and it’s extremely useful for research. No third parties involved. The cost to do this will only decrease over time until it is something that simply can be run on any phone or computer or tablet Already there are ways where you can run an open weight model on an iPhone, completely locally, and get a decent research assistant, no internet required The latest development is the fusion model: where harnesses can “fuse” together several model brains to nearly replicate, for certain tasks, the performance of something like Fable -- the most powerful frontier model on earth Technology and business and culture are, surprisingly, pushing us faster and faster towards workable freedom AI that is either privacy-protecting or completely sovereign, for the average person The evolution of AI continues to trace the evolution of the computer, which went from something you had to once rent from a university or a library to something in the 1980s that came into your home in the form of the “personal” computer We are in the middle of a similar shift where you might now “rent” compute from a giant corporation, to a world where, quite possibly, much of, or even most of, your compute will one day be done on devices you own and control This shift could be expedited dramatically by companies like Apple, Google, and maybe even WhatsApp or Signal getting into the local AI game, and enabling users to fire up local AI assistants or use inference through a TEE We are already seeing companies like Apple make very positive signs in that direction So what’s the bad news? There is plenty. The top-end frontier models are coming under increasing pressure from governments, and will likely end up fully KYC’d and gatekept, only accessible to a tiny few trusted people and institutions This is the nightmare scenario: a small few with superpowers, and a permanent underclass with none But if the average person can, in the next 12-18 months, use open-source software with no KYC to privately access or locally download frontier-like intelligence… then, the expansion of freedom in the 21st century seems more realistic So far at HRF, we have worked with Finite to focus on helping activists learn the magic of personal agents. Make no mistake, dictators and tyrants are pushing full speed ahead on AI. We can’t afford to sit on the sidelines. We give dissidents their own agent, even if running on a frontier brain, just to try it out on harmless or fun projects, to see what is possible and start building their “agent” muscle and mental framework This step alone is hugely liberating. When you watch someone use an agent for the first time, it’s like being in the same room as someone when they first used email or the internet, but even more jaw-dropping. Some people even get so emotional that they cry, happily. Something else we have helped organize are the “AI Hack for Freedom” events, where activist team captains collaborate with developers to make freedom tools. The first one was in January of this year, and what made it special is that the devs could actually, with coding agents, make shippable products in just 2 days. But at the May “AI Hack for Freedom,” just a few months later, the activists now helped make the software, driving the process themselves! Developers still help of course, but the shift is remarkable On June 2 at the Oslo Freedom Forum we debuted the "AI Lounge", a cafe-style, Apple Store-vibe experience where attendees could come in and start playing with cutting-edge personal agents powered by our customized version of Hermes. They could choose a frontier experience or a “private” mode powered by a TEE model, or they could even play with a fully local uncensored model It was a home run. Human rights defenders who had never thought of themselves as digital creators were completely engaged, generating incredible things So what next? Two big steps We aim to put our harness server into the TEE, so that no one can see what activists are doing, even as they use top-of-the-line models And we aim to finalize a mobile app where you can talk to your agent in a slick way, fully encrypted, with no third parties or KYC At that point, we will have what we need to really take it to the next level and start to truly scale the freedom AI experience Later this year, I expect the discussion to move beyond personal agents to organizational agents. Following in the footsteps of Block, more and more organizations will set up an “organizational brain,” where their key internal meetings, achievements, outcomes, and goals will all be uploaded live into an AI-powered database, so that complex projects can be created by individuals in minutes instead of requiring teams of people, taking months I’ve built my own “local brain” with all of my writings, posts, interviews, etc -- and I’ve seen how powerful this is. I can’t wait to help freedom fighters build brains for themselves and their organizations, to continue to superscale their work I plan to continue these updates -- so in September, I will come back with more Stay tuned!

We launched our AI program at HRF in early 2025 Our first move was asking @Justin Moon to join us He denied knowing anything about AI but thankfully agreed to join us and has been the perfect leader for this initiative We started to film a bit here and there as we began launching a few initiatives and experiences around helping dissidents embrace AI as a tool for freedom. Towards the end of 2025 and especially in January of this year, the tools grew shockingly good to the point that non-technical people could start creating very powerful things very quickly We didn't know WHAT exactly would happen next, but planned to film as much of our work as possible from January to June and then release a mini-doc about the experience Here it is... and it has exceeded our wildest expectations This short video traces the evolution of a simple idea (that AI should be a tool of freedom) into what is now a powerful product (an interface where the world's top dissidents can use versatile and staggeringly-effective personal agents to superscale their work, and critically, they can do this without the inference provider being able to spy on them) Very thankful for everyone involved especially Justin... and Skyler and Paul and Austin and Brandon (the Finite team, they create the activist learning experience "Agent Camp" as well as the Finite AI product itself)... and Rod Roudi at the AI Freedom Lab (Rod produces the AI Hack for Freedom event series)... and Scott at Cultivator Labs (his team captured and directed this film)... and many others including Jack and Miles and team at Block who are truly showing us what is possible with organizations and AI. And of course all the amazing human rights defenders and allies like the Reynolds Foundation who have journeyed with us on the adventure. It has been fun and honestly exhilarating at times but I feel very confident predicting that the big fun still lies ahead 🤖 🚀