🇹🇭 We are already at the end of January - one month into what will surely be an interesting year. You may think that a lot has already happened on the geopolitical front (it certainly has) but as a reader here you will know that there is much more in the pipeline and it is closer than many would like to imagine. Opt out of the nonsense and distractions - be sure that you are where you want to be, with whom you want to be and doing what is important for you. If you need a refresher, go back to what we discussed 4-years ago in Madeira:

13 - Choices and Decisions - who makes yours?

I have been really busy this week with work - albeit back in Madeira - so I had little time to read or do much other than work. In the coming weeks I should have more time - I am taking a few weeks off work and have quite a

Letter from ...around the worldRoger Price

V and I have been taking advantage of a few cooler days to go walking around the old city here in Bangkok. Among other places we visited Wats Rajapradit and Rajabhopit this week. These are two rather beautiful temples, easily reachable beside the flower market and near the Royal Palace.

I also got out on a few meetups - including Friday evening's Bob Space meetup. Every month they do an evening with local entrepreneurs coming in and bitcoin is used for all transactions. Below in this week's Sovereign Computing update I share with you the apps that you likely want to have available so that you too can participate in events like this. I also got invited to speak at the event and was happy to talk on the Sovereign Computing tools that we have been discussing recently - here and here - slides here.

Other meetups this week included the regular Satoshi Square and Bangkok Digital Nomads meetup and on Saturday we had Reading in the Park with around 1,000 people turning up to read their favourite books and share their recommendations in the afternoon sunshine.

FYI - some dates for your diary: we have an Annular Solar eclipse on 17 February (marking the start of Chinese Year of the Fire Horse) and Total Lunar eclipse on 2-3 March in addition to Total Solar eclipse on 12 August and Lunar eclipse on 27-28 August. Don't forget: Vernal equinox on 20 March and Summer Solstice on June 21st.

Insight of the week

You will be well aware that I have long told you to pay attention to The Matrix. This undoubtedly was a sign, and maybe trigger, for what has been happening around the world since the turn of the century.

This week I came across what has got to be one of the best summaries and explanations of all of the signs contained within. Click below to read and watch the full explainer.

Question everything

The Matrix (1999) is summarized here not just as a landmark action and effects film but as a sustained Gnostic allegory. The Wowski siblings packaged ancient Gnostic cosmology and soteriology inside a cyberpunk blockbuster: the plot and characters map almost point-for-point onto Gnostic categories and processes. What most viewers noticed

Letter from ...around the worldRoger Price

No one can be told what the Matrix is - you have to see it for yourself

More in this issue

• Photo memories - Wats Rajapradit and Rajabhopit - walkabout with V
• Project Updates - Bitcoin daily wallets - Sovereign computing part 3
• Plenty of useful links - don't say nobody told you!
• Closing out - The big picture and year 713 BC in particular

🛠️ Project Updates

We have reached part 3 of the Sovereign Computing series. In this one I will cover Bitcoin wallets for beginners - these will allow you quickly to get started to receive and send bitcoin as payment. Use them for a few weeks and you will also learn much about how bitcoin works and how it is just better money. They are all interoperable and any bitcoin that you put into one can easily be transferred to the others.

The wallets below are all optimised for small and daily transactions. As such you can consider them like a wallet or purse. Keep in them only what you need for a few days expenses and you can easily top up any time (a bit like going to the ATM).

Blink

Blink is positioned as a speed-first, user-friendly wallet for quick Lightning payments. This is the main wallet used in El Salvador so it is very well tested and it works well. It focuses on fast send/receive flows, in-app balance visibility, and minimal friction for micropayments and purchases. For daily use Blink aims to remove setup complexity - good for people who want to pay with Lightning without dealing with channel management. Blink has many other useful features including integrated contacts - well worth checking out.

Wallet of Satoshi

Wallet of Satoshi is probably the most widely used beginner-friendly custodial Lightning wallet. Its strengths are instant payments, very simple onboarding and broad merchant compatibility for Lightning invoices. It’s excellent for newcomers who want to make everyday purchases quickly, but because it’s custodial you don’t control private keys (this simplifies recovery but introduces custodial trust and potential privacy tradeoffs). Works very well for smaller payments.

Macadamia (iOS)

Macadamia on iOS targets users who want a clean, mobile-first Lightning and Cashu (eCash) experience on Apple devices. It emphasises a polished interface, fast invoice scanning, and smooth on-ramps for topping up Lightning balance. Macadamia is convenient for everyday payments on iPhone and integrates iOS niceties; check the app’s backup and recovery options to match your desired custody model.

Minibits

Minibits is a lightweight wallet designed around micro-transactions and low-friction spending. It streamlines small payments like tips, subscriptions and vending scenarios, offering a simple interface with Lightning payments or eCash to keep latency low. If your daily Bitcoin use is heavily micropayment-focused, Minibits tries to reduce per-payment friction, though that can mean relying on custodial or pooled liquidity arrangements.

Cashu

Cashu was the first to implement Chaumian eCash (minted tokens) to enable privacy-preserving, unlinkable transfers. Instead of Lightning channels, Cashu issues digital tokens from a mint that you redeem or send to peers, giving strong unlinking between payer and recipient when used correctly. For daily use, Cashu is appealing when privacy and offline-like token transfers matter, but it typically depends on trusting a mint operator and has different redeem/top-up mechanics than Lightning wallets. Note that Macadamia and Minibits also support Chaumian eCash - give them a try together.

Phoenix

Phoenix is a non-custodial wallet that aims to make self-custody simple by handling channel management automatically. It merges on-chain and Lightning flows so you can receive on-chain funds and have them available for Lightning payments without manual channel fiddling. Phoenix is a solid choice for users who want full key control with the convenience of automatic channel and liquidity management; it balances privacy and backup requirements with a relatively simple user experience. Being a self custody wallet it is OK to hold larger amounts.

Aqua Wallet

Aqua Wallet focuses on a polished mobile experience that often blends Lightning convenience with smart account features for everyday spending. It highlights easy invoice handling, readable transaction history, and fast payment flows for merchants and peers. Aqua is suitable if you value a modern app experience for daily purchases; as with any app, review custody and backup options to see how they align with your risk tolerance. This is also a self custody wallet (using Liquid Bitcoin) - there are many reasons why this can be interesting - once you start using it you will discover them.

Remember - all of the above are optimised for daily transactions - sending and receiving. To store larger amounts of bitcoin you must use tools that are designed to give you full self-custody (non-custodial) and security. This becomes important once you have more than a few hundred dollars (or equivalent) - happy to suggest these if/when you need.

🔗 Links for your edification

The following are links from my NetNewswire feeds - learn, enjoy and share.

Flag theory and Hong Kong

Andrew explains how entrepreneurs and investors are quietly moving their businesses and capital to Asia, especially Hong Kong. HK remains one of the world’s most powerful neutral jurisdictions, offering an interesting geopolitical counterweight, tax efficiency and optionality. You will see why global capital from Russia, Asia, Africa, and increasingly the West is positioning there.

We have talked before about Flag Theory. Hong Kong (home for us) is certainly an interesting location - indeed it was the one highlighted in The Sovereign Individual and also in Snow Crash!

Big Long already?

Marty has brought back Scott to discuss what Scott had warned about back last August - check back as needed to refresh your mind. The "Big Long" is playing out in the silver market because the underlying asset is no longer available to be borrowed or loaned out.  All of this occurs simultaneously with a Six Sigma Event in Japan: The blowout of the Japanese yield curve which is likely a precursor to a global deleveraging event that will expose "structural insolvencies" worldwide.

Big Long plays out

In this discussion from January 2026, Marty of TFTC and Scott analyze a historic short squeeze in the silver market which has recently catapulted from the high 20 USD range to over 118 USD - a factor of 6 multiplier. The conversation delves into the structural failures of the global

Letter from ...around the worldRoger Price

Trouble ahead, for sure

I have got to recommend this article by Urban. He takes you through how AI models do rather obviously deteriorate and hallucinate as they are trained on output from other AI. What you likely do not know is that this trait goes much deeper and this article takes you through Mouse Colony collapse in Mouse Paradise and even discusses related premonitions for humans in modern society and large cities in particular. Well worth a read and some quality reflection.

Urban Bugmen and AI Model Collapse: A Unified Theory

A solution indicating that Mouse Utopia is an inherent property of intelligent systems. The problem is information fidelity loss when later generations are trained on regurgitated data.

Always The HorizonCopernican

How interesting

During the week I listened to this fascinating discussion between James and a Canadian physicist who is obviously well awake to what is going on in the world these days. He writes about ‘scientism’ or the corruption of science by philosophy and materialism. Here he explains to James how the moon landings were obviously fake because they were impossible to achieve.

Of course the Soviets were in on it because most of their space endeavours - especially Yuri Gagarin’s - were fake too. Once you see it you cannot unsee it - it is all rather obvious!

🤔 Closing Thoughts

I am closing out this week with a couple of recent monologues from Jason. In the first, he lays out all the evidence for cataclysmic events throughout history; suffice to say - what you have been taught is a rather different story. In the second one he zooms in on the year 713 BC - as we discussed before, this is the year that the current 365.25 day year came about - changing from 360 days per year till then; here again he lays out all the evidence - don't say that nobody told you!

The Cataclysmic History

Since 5239 BC the Earth has been scoured by at least fourteen global cataclysms—and hundreds of lesser ones—each stripping culture, collapsing atmospheres and re-writing geography within days. The surprise is not merely the frequency of these events, but that every ancient text we possess is contains eyewitness accounts of them and that the evidence is literally under our feet yet labelled “anomalous” and ignored by mainstream propaganda.

All the evidence

Jason (Archaix) delivers a sweeping, provocative reinterpretation of recorded human history as a sequence of repeated, relatively recent planetary catastrophes — “resets” — driven by recurring celestial actors (a Nemesis/dark-star object and a “Phoenix” destructive body) and by a brief, historic vapor‑canopy epoch. He frames his argument around cross‑checked

Letter from ...around the worldRoger Price

There used to be 360 days in the year

A global reordering of the heavens and human chronology occurred in 713 BC. Jason ties together Bible passages, Mesopotamian and Egyptian inscriptions, Mayan calendrics, archaeological calendar reforms (Rome, Persia, India, Egypt), and non‑mainstream physical claims (magnetic/polar shifts, plasma phenomena) to argue that the ancient world shifted from a 360‑day, moon‑based temporal order to a 365+‑day solar regime.

The year everything changed

Jason (Archaix) presents a broad, intricate thesis arguing that a global reordering of the heavens and human chronology occurred in 713 BC. He ties together Bible passages, Mesopotamian and Egyptian inscriptions, Mayan calendrics, archaeological calendar reforms (Rome, Persia, India, Egypt), and non‑mainstream physical claims (magnetic/polar shifts, plasma phenomena)

Letter from ...around the worldRoger Price

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No one can be told what The Matrix is. You have to see it for yourself.
- Morpheus to Neo in The Matrix

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