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On the other side, Anthropic's draft IPO prospectus showed an $80.7 billion net loss in H1. Sounds terrifying, but about $72 billion of that is an accounting charge tied to convertible notes whose value exploded as Anthropic's valuation went parabolic. No cash left the building.
When the price rises the arrangement feels like wealth, with everyone feeling like a genius. However, when the price falls the custodian issues a margin call you cannot meet without selling or topping up your balance with more Bitcoin, at the price the custodian's own desk has just helped establish. This is the 1974 unallocated-account pattern with one improvement, where instead of asking you to surrender gold in exchange for a paper claim, the complex now asks you to surrender Bitcoin in exchange for the “privilege” of going into debt against it. Fractional-reserve banking is fraud because the bank promises redemption to every depositor while lending the same funds to multiple borrowers. The Bitcoin-custody-plus-loan product recreates the fraud at the asset level, with one deposit and one borrower; both you.
The point of this brief walk down memory lane is to serve as a reminder that in times of economic crisis it’s always the unsuspecting public that is psyoped into paying the consequences whilst the architects get fat government handouts.With sovereign debt levels far exceeding global GDP, inflation raging, high energy prices thanks in part to the conflict in Iran, an out of control money printer and a higher unemployment rate; it would be a gross understatement to say that an economic iceberg is on the horizon.
In a 1974 cable released by Wikileaks, primary dealers explicitly planned to use gold futures volatility to "diminish initial demand for physical holding and negate long-term hoarding by US citizens." Furthermore, these primary dealers were of the opinion that U.S. citizens, on the whole, weren't psychologically prepared to switch from small scale gold purchases to large scale, long term bullion hoarding except maybe for gold coins. To put things in context, this was just after it was now legal again for American citizens to own physical gold and the predictions of the primary dealers turned out to be true. As of today, paper trading of gold surpasses physical demand for gold and is 200 times larger than the latter.
Chamath framed it well: he suspects 70-80% of revenues at AI companies come from other AI companies that raised venture money. "This is not a circular revenue problem but it is a revenue quality problem."
Early pinhole photography The first known description of pinhole photography is found in the 1856 book The Stereoscope by Scottish inventor David Brewster, including the description of the idea as "a camera without lenses, and with only a pin-hole".
‘I use AI to do the things that I’m bad at’: Linus Torvalds on why it works for him - ZDNET
You get an onion! That's right, it's 2026 and you can just do things. You get Tor Arti baked in, which makes your entire stack (web UI, relay, Blossom, voice) available on a single .onion address.
You know that what is, is. Say it out loud, like the most sacred of prayers, and let no one tell you otherwise.
Wer die 5.000 Dollar gedanklich schon ausgegeben hat, empfindet eine Niederlage der Republikaner nicht mehr nur als politischen Wechsel, sondern als persönlichen finanziellen Verlust von 5.000 Dollar.
Dürrenmatt hat gezeigt: Moral ist eine Frage der wirtschaftlichen Umstände, und Versuchung funktioniert am besten über das Portemonnaie. Trump hat dieses literarische Gesetz zwar vermutlich nicht im Deutschunterricht gelernt, aber er wendet die Dürrenmatt’sche Logik im Wahlkampf meisterhaft an.
Why is Skiing So D*mn Expensive?
Der Zusammenbruch von Kreditgebern wie Celsius, Voyager und BlockFi im Jahr 2022 zeigte, was passiert, wenn Institutionen Einlagen verleihen, die sie auf Verlangen zurückzuzahlen versprochen haben, ohne jemanden zu haben, der sie rettet, wenn die Auszahlungen sprunghaft ansteigen. Ehrlicher Kredit in Sats würde anders aussehen: Sparer, die echtes Erspartes für vereinbarte Zeiträume verleihen, und Institutionen, die ihre Reserven öffentlich nachweisen – etwas, das Bitcoin in einer Weise ermöglicht, wie es kein vorheriges Geld konnte. Es wäre kleiner und langsamer als der Kredit, an den wir gewöhnt sind.
die Kosten für alle anderen bestimmen. Händler brauchen einen echten wirtschaftlichen Grund, Sats nicht nur zu akzeptieren, sondern sie zu behalten und für ihre eigenen Vorleistungen auszugeben. Und Bitcoin muss sich in den Händen von Menschen verbreiten, die ihn im täglichen Leben nutzen und selbst verwalten, denn diese Art von Eigentum macht ihn allmählich stabil. Stabilität wiederum öffnet die Tür für Löhne, Verträge und schließlich Kredite in Sats.
Es liegt eine historische Ironie darin
Jeder Händler, der in Sats preist, jeder Arbeiter, der ein Gehalt in Sats akzeptiert, und jeder Kreditnehmer, der eine Schuld in Sats aufnimmt, ist den Schwankungen von Bitcoin gegenüber dem Dollar ausgesetzt. Je volatiler Bitcoin ist, desto größer muss der Anreiz sein, damit sich diese Exponiertheit lohnt.
Es bedeutet, dass die Menschen ihre Denkweise über Geld änderten, weil sie einen starken wirtschaftlichen Anreiz dazu hatten. Händler wählten den Dollar nicht aus Überzeugung; sie wählten ihn, weil ihre Finanzierung und damit ihre Kosten in Dollar anfielen und die Preisgestaltung in derselben Währung ihr Risiko verringerte. Für Bitcoin ist die Frage nicht, ob Menschen davon überzeugt werden können, in Sats zu denken.
Sie wachten nicht eines Tages auf und beschlossen, in Dollar zu denken. Ein Händler stellte Rechnungen in der Währung aus, in der seine Bank am günstigsten und zuverlässigsten finanzieren konnte. Sobald New York Dollarkredite zu guten Konditionen anbot, begannen die Händler, Kredite in Dollar aufzunehmen.
Sein Abstieg setzte sich über die Suez-Krise 1956, die Abwertung 1967 und die Auflösung des Sterling-Raums 1972 fort. Je nachdem, was man misst, dauerte der Sieg des Dollars zwischen dreißig und sechzig Jahre.
Die Weltwirtschaftskrise verwüstete das US-Banksystem, der Dollar wurde gegenüber Gold abgewertet, und Sterling gewann in den 1930er Jahren wieder an Boden. Es bedurfte eines zweiten Weltkriegs und des Bretton-Woods-Abkommens von 1944, um den Dollar formell ins Zentrum des globalen Währungssystems zu rücken. Selbst danach blieb Sterling für Jahre eine wichtige Reservewährung für die Commonwealth-Länder.
Der Grund war nicht die Größe, die Technologie oder die Qualität der Währung. Es war der Kredit. Der internationale Handel lebt von Finanzierung: Ein Händler, der Waren über den Ozean verschifft, benötigt Kredit, um die Monate zwischen dem Versenden der Ladung und dem Zahlungseingang zu überbrücken.
Er konkurriert mit dem gesamten globalen Netzwerk des Dollars. Und das wirft eine Frage auf, die jeder Bitcoiner ernst nehmen sollte: Muss die Adoption von oben nach unten gewinnen – als neutrales Abwicklungsgut zwischen Ländern und im internationalen Handel –, bevor sie im täglichen Leben erfolgreich sein kann? Oder kann sie von unten nach oben wachsen, mit lokalen Kreislaufwirtschaften als Bewährungsfeld, das schließlich den Handel zwingt zu folgen?
Ein Unternehmen, das in Sats preist, während es seine Kosten in Dollar begleicht, geht mit jedem Verkauf ein Wechselkursrisiko ein, und die meisten kleinen Unternehmen können sich dieses Risiko nicht leisten. Verbraucher stehen vor ihrer eigenen Version derselben Logik, die von Ökonomen als Greshamsches Gesetz bezeichnet wird: Wenn zwei Formen von Geld zusammen zirkulieren, geben die Menschen das aus, das sie weniger wertschätzen, und behalten das, das sie mehr wertschätzen. Meine Tante ist ein gutes Beispiel.
Die Recheneinheit ist der Maßstab, die Währung, in der die Menschen denken, Preise festlegen und ihre Bücher führen. Solange Preise in Dollar festgelegt werden, ist ein Preis in Sats lediglich ein getarnter Dollarpreis.
Menschen haben das getan, insbesondere Bitcoiner, die nach El Salvador kamen, und die Salvadorianer, die sich ihnen anschlossen. Da ich dieses Experiment vom ersten Tag an miterlebt habe und nun daran arbeite, die Adoption über die Bitcoin Embassy El Salvador voranzutreiben, bin ich zu einem Schluss gekommen, den viele Bitcoiner vielleicht unangenehm finden: Die alltägliche Bitcoin-Adoption wird nicht stattfinden, es sei denn, wir überdenken grundlegend, wo sie beginnt. Dieser Artikel erklärt warum und was wir dagegen tun wollen.
My son can learn why his father chose A vs B and can continue this family software business (jk). Even though it's a bit far-fetched, this should be exciting: for the first time in our existence, we have a way to educate people at scale, efficiently. How can someone learn about all the operational and technological innovations that happened inside IBM or Apple?
To infer from all this: the attention economy monetized human focus, ad-tech monetized personal data, and both started as quiet defaults before they became explicit markets. Human expertise is the next input being gathered by default.
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My journey from the federated promise of ActivityPub to the sovereign architecture of NOSTR is not a rejection, but an evolution. It is the recognition that the fundamental flaw of the federated model; tethering identity to a domain, was a limiting compromise that could not be patched, only replaced.
Westeuropa leidet unter kollektiver Geschichtsvergessenheit: Anstatt aus den verheerenden Tragödien vergangener Jahrhunderte zu lernen, wärmt man die gescheiterten Rezepte des Staatssozialismus einfach neu auf.
Den letzten großen Zusammenbruch des Sozialismus habe ich noch verpasst; da war ich zu jung. Jetzt dürfen wir gemeinsam das Scheitern des Sozialismus live und in 4K miterleben.
In the end, we don't want to send sats to addresses, but to people. If
nostr continues to catch on, it might turn itself into the global
address book for these kinds of things, i.e., the go-to place to look up
payment information of people, organizations, and other entities. In the
future, a prism might have multiple nprofile or npub identifiers
as targets, behind which the actual payment information lies.
So:
Who are we when we stop letting economic necessity, division of labor, and survival decide our roles?
When comfort and convenience replace purpose, does polarity become a performance?
What if union was no longer where two people settle, but where they start moving?
If a role is not the energy itself, could freedom from fixed roles make men more masculine and women more feminine?
If money can live in the unseen, free from identity, can the soul be freed from the identities the world assigns it?
When union is polarized by two whole souls rather than two fixed roles, what kind of culture do we create, and who do our children become?
When union is polarized by two whole souls rather than two fixed roles, what kind of culture do we create, and who do our children become?
Die Schwerkraft funktioniert völlig unabhängig davon, ob du an sie glaubst oder nicht. Der Staat hingegen existiert ausschließlich dort, wo Menschen ihm Glauben, Respekt oder Angst entgegenbringen. Als greifbare, objektive Realität gibt es ihn nicht.
We fought against evil for so long that we failed to notice we were striking at a mirror. There was nothing there but us—the true evil. A tiny speck of dust on the reflection, easily brushed away.
A cage cannot be opened from the outside; blood cannot be washed away with more blood; and the accuser never recognizes the defendant within himself.
Rothbard's short monetary primer traces money from market exchange through bank claims and coin ratios to the end of gold redemption.
Rothbard's 1967–68 newspaper columns, edited by Justin Raimondo, test Sixties alliances over war, secession, business, and money against consistent libertarian principle.
Böhm-Bawerk's 1890 critical history, translated by Smart, tests rival theories of interest by separating physical output, capital value and value surplus.
Gene Callahan explains purposeful choice, money, entrepreneurship, and capital, guiding readers through Austrian economics and its account of investment coordination problems.
Robert Murphy introduces economic reasoning through worked examples, helping beginners connect specialization, saving, entrepreneurship, and price controls within an Austrian framework.
Carl Menger connects individual needs to value, production, exchange, and money, offering patient readers a theoretical foundation for examining economic choices.
A $1 million Bitcoin sounds like a victory lap but it might actually be a warning sign. If that number only gets there because the dollar has been gutted, Bitcoiners could find themselves sitting on preserved wealth in the middle of a society that's falling apart around them: empty shelves, capital controls, a state reaching for more power to manage the chaos it helped create.
Autonomous agents sharply reduce the cost of writing native platform code, leaving human builders to concentrate on product direction and responsibility.
A cache key that omitted context let forged L-BTC exist, and one authorized peg-out moved nearly the whole bitcoin reserve out.
Why dedicate your time to working in Bitcoin? Seriously… why do you want a Bitcoin job? We're fixing the money, so why aren't we getting paid?
Why dedicate your time to working in Bitcoin? Seriously… why do you want a Bitcoin job? We're fixing the money, so why aren't we getting paid?
Every civilization is built on a ledger, a shared record of who owns what, who's owed what, who did the work. For centuries, that ledger has answered to the state first and the individual second, and every empire built on it has eventually turned the ledger against its own people. You cannot build something meant to outlast you on a foundation someone else can erase by decree. Bitcoin isn't just an alternative asset, it's the first ledger in history designed to answer to no one but its holder.
The messenger I live in is also the workshop where each annoyance becomes a fresh build I test on my phone.
Coldcard rewrote shared GPL seed code while restricting competition; the replacement failed catastrophically, proving source visibility falls short of software freedom.
modern dating rewards keeping a roster. i tried it, built a spreadsheet, and hated what it turned people into. i’m too chalant for that. for me, dating is binary: one or zero.
Every major surveillance infrastructure in modern history has been introduced through the same mechanism, the convenience trap. A new technology offers a genuine improvement in daily friction. Adoption is voluntary, optional, frictionless. The infrastructure spreads until it becomes the default. Then the default becomes the requirement. Then the requirement becomes the only option. By the time the surveillance implications are widely understood, the infrastructure is load-bearing, embedded in employment, finance, travel, healthcare; and opting out is no longer practically available.
The surveillance state isn't coming, it's already here, quietly assembling itself through a web of AI-powered cameras, data brokers, financial monitoring, and smartphone tracking that most people never notice until it's too late. This is a deep dive into the infrastructure reshaping the relationship between citizens and power, and why understanding it may be one of the most important acts of self-preservation in the digital age.
The only real luxury...
spent a few sundays rebuilding the old backyard pond while trying to make this house feel more like mine after years of building spaces for other people. now there are six shubunkins, a waterfall, one annoyed groundhog, two bee stings, and still somehow all the mosquitoes in west philly. walden, but with deet.
Right now, tens of thousands of unmarked black boxes are bolted to poles across your city, silently photographing every car that passes and feeding it into a searchable national database that any of a thousand police departments can query without a warrant, without probable cause, and without you ever knowing. The ultimate dystopian nightmare arrives when this physical panopticon merges with Central Bank Digital Currencies (CBDCs) and predictive AI, in a pre-crime world, driving to an unapproved political rally won't just put you on a watchlist; a Flock camera ping will instantly throttle your digital wallet, starving you of your own money for stepping out of line.
The future doesn't hold much good.
You’ve got the podcast. The 50k+ X account. The growing Youtube channel. Maybe a paid Substack or Patreon. You already have your big idea. Even if you haven’t said it out loud, it’s the reason your audience returns to your socials or show. This idea is embedded within your opinions, your personality, the way you present yourself.
Remorse does more good than bad.
Centuries before encrypted email existed, merchants and dissidents moved letters and packages through private courier networks that outran every imperial monopoly.
Every Nostr private key ever generated can be losslessly encoded as twenty-four words, recovered byte-for-byte forever, stamped onto Bitcoin steel plates.
Keir Starmer wants to ban children from social media, and he's promising it as a gift ; more childhood, more safety, more freedom to grow up. What he isn't saying is that the only way to enforce a ban on some users is to identify all of them, which means the actual product on offer isn't child protection but a national identity checkpoint wearing a parenting costume, built one biometric scan and one device-level filter at a time. This is the oldest move in the state's playbook: when confronted with a technology it can't yet control, slap a permission slip on it, and call the leash a seatbelt
Google Maps charges you in surveillance on every trip. OpenStreetMap and Organic Maps let your phone route locally, third parties excluded.
Today's $1.75 trillion SpaceX IPO isn't just the largest in history, but it may be the clearest signal yet that American capital markets have become completely detached from the profit-and-loss system that's supposed to govern them. So before you pile your savings or pension into this IPO, ask yourself: if AI is a "national security priority" and your subscription doesn't cover the real cost, who's actually footing the bill and who's the real customer being served?
The zkSNACKs coordinator died because we ran the only one; Wasabi the client survived because that layer was protocol-shaped, not operator-shaped.
Praxeology joins cypherpunk cryptography: privacy is a fact of action, a defensible norm, and a buildable property under pressure.
Four mining pools control two-thirds of Bitcoin's hashrate. Behind each one sits a publicly traded corporation with shareholders to appease, regulators to placate, and a board of directors one bad quarter away from pivoting to AI, as Bitfarms already has. This is about who gets to produce money, who gets to secure the network, and whether Bitcoin remains a peer-to-peer system built by individuals or becomes yet another financial infrastructure owned by institutions too large to fail and too regulated to resist.
Tools move bits and settle payments. Reliability over time and adjudication of broken deals remain unbuilt institutional work.
Privacy implementation is progressive. Each tier addresses a different adversary and stops where its threat model is covered.
Cryptography fails when humans fail. OPSEC ties each defense to a specific adversary and sustains the discipline over time.
Bitcoin is computational. Its logic is math. But even in the age of AI agents, the ultimate users of the Bitcoin network are people. Computational language and the 'problem-solution' framing has slowed adoption, and only human-centric stories can help us share the impact of Bitcoin quicker.
Nostr moves identity from platform databases into user-held keypairs, so a ban no longer deletes the social graph.
Bitcoin's base layer is transparent by design. Privacy on Bitcoin is an architectural achievement built in layers above it.
What if the greatest threat to your Bitcoin sovereignty isn't just the financial system at all, but it's the smartphone in your pocket? While Bitcoin eliminated trusted third parties from money, most Bitcoiners still access that freedom through devices controlled by Apple and Google. As governments push toward digital IDs, age-verification mandates, and compliance-by-design operating systems, the battle for financial freedom is quietly moving beyond Bitcoin itself and into the devices that connect us to it. GrapheneOS has emerged as one of the most important tools in the modern cypherpunk arsenal and why sovereign money ultimately requires sovereign devices.
Bitcoin's monetary rules hold because every full node validates blocks against them. A chain that breaks them carries no value.
Nakamoto solved double-spending without a central operator and produced base money instead of another claim on an issuer.
Nostr accounts cannot be sold because sellers cannot prove they forgot the private key, which collapses the market for reputation handoffs.
Content encryption hides what was said. The transport layer leaks who is communicating with whom, enough for targeting decisions.
Homomorphic encryption, MPC, and trusted enclaves each run a computation on inputs the executing party is not permitted to see.
The Wall Street Journal warns you about the dangers of “private money” called stablecoins, while defending a dollar system that is nothing but a pyramid of bank-created IOUs backed by debt and the state’s monopoly on violence. The truth is that private, apolitical money isn’t the risk, but it’s the only escape from a collapsing fiat empire The real divide is no longer between regulated and unregulated money, but between systems that require trust in power and systems that remove it entirely.
