Dear Friends,

2025 has been BitcoinWalk's most transformative year yet. We now have regular walks spanning 4 continents and dozens of countries, with new communities launching almost weekly.

Each Saturday as I walk with friends here in Madeira, I'm reminded that BitcoinWalk's greatest strength is community building. Together, we're creating a parallel world beyond the Fiat Matrix—one with fair monetary rules where no one can confiscate the fruits of your labor, and where your time and energy can be confidently saved for the future. These conversations inspired me to double down on BitcoinWalk's mission.

We've just launched our significantly improved website! After considerable development, we've eliminated our reliance on Google Maps. You can now copy coordinates directly into any map app you prefer, like OpenStreetMap. As believers in FreedomTech over BigTech, this matters. We've also enhanced the experience for finding and starting walks, with exciting nostr features on the horizon.

Our roadmap includes publishing BitcoinWalk events natively on nostr, making events discoverable across platforms like Orange Club and Satlantis. I'm also collaborating with HodlBod to implement Flotilla as our nostr-based group chat solution.

Here's where I need your help: Development costs for these improvements have been significant. While we've kept expenses lean by working with efficient partners, your contributions would directly enable us to continue building and scaling these community tools.

If BitcoinWalk has added value to your life, please consider supporting our mission:

- Zap this post (publicly)

- Send sats to bitcoinwalk@getalby.com (privately)

Every contribution—large or small—helps us expand this movement and bring more people into our parallel Bitcoin economy.

To every BitcoinWalk host: thank you for your dedication this year. You're the heartbeat of this community.

Have a wonderful Christmas, and let's make 2026 even bigger! 🎄

Endo

try hugging your chase bank account. you feel nothing. cold glass.

hug your node. feel the warmth of 10 minutes of cpu cycles verifying a block.

this is what satoshi wanted.

It's at a point now where it's almost impossible for me to use the "regular" internet. I can't access half the sites. The reason? I care about my digital hygiene and thus use a VPN. Sometimes switching to a different VPN or switching the country of the VPN works; other times it does not. Oh well, I guess I'm not going to watch that video, or read that article, or look at that picture. Whatever.

In addition to that, if I'm not blocked completely, I have to prove that I'm human every step of the way. Captchas, re-captchas, Cloudflare checkboxes, the whole shebang. I am human. I promise. And I am very annoyed. Outright angry, even. I doubt that any robot will ever be as annoyed as I am right now about the current state of the internet.

What annoys me most, actually, is that all these measures don't really work. There's bots everywhere. Robots get access to the stuff anyway, using farms of humans, just like in the good old days of WoW gold farming. The centralized "safety" nets of Cloudflare et al brought down large swaths of the internet multiple times in the last couple of weeks alone, and as things centralize more and more these outages will happen more and more.

I'm very close to breaking up with the legacy internet. I'm human, I can cryptographically prove that I'm human, and I have sats to spend. But the legacy internet doesn't care about that. It cares about farming me and my data, while annoying me to no end. I've been nostr only for a while now, but that was only on the "social media" side. 2026 might be the year where I go nostr-only for everything, or to phrase it slightly differently: permissionless for everything.

No more "are you human?"

No more "I'm sorry, Dave. I'm afraid I can't do that."

No more cookie banners, paywalls, and AI slop.

No more being treated like a child.

Even if it means that I'll have to self-host everything.

Even if it means that I'll have to build & maintain stuff myself.

Even if it means that it's a lot of work and pain.

Nothing worth having ever comes easy.

But the easy stuff is not worth having in the first place.

Here's to the year to come, and the new corner of the internet, build on cryptography and webs-of-trust. Real value. Real connections. Real humans.

Here's to nostr.

we need to come up with a term for vibe coding that doesn't have negative connotations