Interesting Stuff
Hacker Mindset - Henrik Karlsson makes the case that what looks like genius is really just seeing past the “proper” path and considering tasks from first principles, or what he calls the “hacker mindset.” The poster boy for this is Robert Rodriguez who made the film “El Mariachi” for $7,000. This is common for the fiat system, where credentialism and bureaucracy inflate the cost of everything and innovations are often made illegal or at least discriminated against if they threaten the current order. They are conventions masquerading as laws of nature, and while you can route around them entirely and tinker your way to competence, the fiat mentality is pervasive and going around it creates a significant amount of anxiety due to structural bias.
Real Collapse - Kaiser Von Lohengramm makes the somewhat obvious but unintuitive point that broken systems like communism or our current fiat regime never simply collapse. Our fantasy is that they self-destruct under their own weight without anyone lifting a finger, but even the Soviet Union required specific actors to actually pull the plug. Dysfunction can find equilibrium and can last a lot longer without some real alternatives. In other words, waiting might not be enough, and if you want a different system you have to actively build and fight for it.
Zio-Evangelicalism- The New Christian Right takes a hard look at the bad theology of Zionist-Evangelical pastors such as Franklin Graham. The article begins with Tucker Carlson’s critique of Franklin Graham for offering a foreign policy briefing disguised as prayer, blessing potential military action against Iran by ripping the Book of Esther out of its context. It documents the litany of prominent evangelicals providing theological cover for American wars in the Middle East on behalf of the Netanyahu’s government. Dispensationalism has always been a pretty odd theological stance, and the more wars we have, the more we’re finding out why.
AI and Bullshit Jobs - Alex McCann looks back on David Graeber’s framework and catalogs the five flavors of rent-seeking which he labels flunkies, goons, duct tapers, box tickers, and taskmasters. The categorization by itself is very useful for figuring out how rent-seeking positions stick around, but more than that, the piece attempts to predict the role of AI in eliminating such roles. The conventional wisdom is that rent-seeking is where AI will disrupt jobs the most, but the article argues that it will for some, but not all and there will even be some rent-seeking roles that are going to expand as a result of AI (like goons).
Gambling - James Lavish, CFA traces how the 2018 Supreme Court ruling turned sports betting from a Vegas trip into a $167 billion annual habit. Perhaps the most insightful part of the article was that at least in the past, gambling had a natural friction that kept it in check. Yet now, people spend more on just lottery tickets than movies, concerts and books combined. What struck me is that the current system is desperately lacking in hope, and people turn to speculation and gambling as their only perceived path to getting ahead. The explosion of sports betting apps is an expansion of what we’ve been seeing in altcoins for years, and may perhaps be the reason why the last bull market wasn’t quite so frothy as the past.
What I'm up to
The Third Way - I wrote this article to make the argument that a third way is a structural improvement over one and two implementations, respectively. I also made the point that an implementation from scratch has historically not gotten traction despite ample opportunity, and that new implementations are likely to suffer the same fate.
Bitcoin Infinity Show - I was on Knut’s show with Samson to talk about ProductionReady and argue for why we need something between Core and Knots. I made the point, for example, that a third implementation is actually taking some of the enormous burden off of the current Core devs, who all know that their screwup could potentially destroy billions or even trillions of value.
Bitcoin 2026 - I will be at this conference at the end of the month to be in the Open Source Lounge on behalf of Production Ready. It looks like I don’t have any speaking obligations, but stop by if you’re going to be in Las Vegas!
Nostr Note of the Week
What I’m Promoting
Bitcoin
Hornet Node - This is a project to specify the entire Bitcoin consensus protocol, from the block header to what is and isn’t allowed in each transaction. Spelling it out this way is great, in the sense that we have a better understanding of exactly what the limitations on blocks are, but I suspect that there are a lot of subtleties that will require more strictness and rigorousness to make. There’s a reason why miners are generally very reluctant to use anything other than Core software, for example, and it’s not clear what would happen if the specification differed with Core software.
Quantum Freeze - BitMex Research has this proposal for freezing quantum-vulnerable coins in a way that incentivizes, but does not guarantee a particular address being compromised. The idea is that there’s a canary address that no one knows the key to (using some sort of NUMS construction) which people would donate to. Once it’s spent from (suggesting that ECDSA and/or Schnorr is broken), then a freeze of vulnerable coins would proceed. I still think this is a non-starter for most Bitcoiners, and there would have to be a lot of public pressure on quantum research labs to use the canary address, but it’s at a minimum creative.
Slow-validating Blocks - A researcher tested slow-to-validate blocks on Signet and found validation times ballooned from 176ms to roughly 20 seconds, a 160x slowdown that caused propagation delays exceeding a minute. This is critical research for understanding how adversarial blocks could disrupt the network. It's exactly the kind of unglamorous but essential work that keeps Bitcoin robust.
Lightning
Tether Wallet Launch - Tether launched a self-custodial wallet supporting USDT, gold-backed XAUT, and Bitcoin with username-based transfers. All transactions are signed locally with recovery via standard 12-word phrase. There are some issues being pointed out because the wallet routes all Lightning payments through Spark, which publicly records transaction details on a block explorer. This fundamentally undermines Lightning's privacy advantages, and users aren't being adequately informed. It's a cautionary tale about how corporate infrastructure can quietly strip away the privacy properties that made a protocol valuable.
BlocksRace - BlocksRace lets you wager on which mining pool finds the next block, turning proof-of-work into a spectator sport with skin in the game. It’s a pure Bitcoin-native betting concept needing no altcoins or complex DeFi and instead runs on Lightning payments and the immutable randomness of the hash race. If you’ve ever stared at a block explorer wondering who’d win the next block, now you can put your sats on it.
Onion Message Jamming - Researchers showed how attackers can flood Lightning with spam onion messages at near-zero cost, with a variant bouncing messages between victims until they rate-limit each other instead of the attacker. Proposed fixes range from per-message fees to proof-of-stake schemes tying forwarding to channel balances. Lightning’s privacy features create inherent tension with spam resistance but the same anonymity that protects users also shields attackers.
Economics, Engineering, Etc.
Hash Rate Market - Many BIP110 supporters are wanting miners to signal for the soft fork, and had no easy way, short of setting up their own mining operation, to buy the actual rate. This is now a market and people are able to rent hash rate and mine on particular templates. The article is the experience of one such person who’s in this market. I have to say, this is very different and more verifiable than the hash-rent scams of yesteryear.
The Debt Spiral - The article lays out six uncomfortable realities about US fiscal policy including entitlements being untouchable, tax increases being unable to cover the gap, over half of Treasury debt maturing by 2028, and interest payments now requiring borrowing to service prior debt. The Fed has no choice but to suppress rates through money printing, creating an inescapable doom loop. Of course, people have been rendering the same analysis of the dollar since 1971 and it’s not obvious that the spiral will accelerate enough to really result in a crash, but the analysis is sound.
FBCE - Federation Of Bitcoin Circular Economies is a global network connecting local Bitcoin circular economies, providing grants, educational resources, and tools. This is the grassroots infrastructure work for real circular economies where people earn, save, and spend in Bitcoin. Many of the more famous Bitcoin circular economies like the one in El Salvador (Bitcoin Beach) and Peru (Motiv) were created through similar grants. This is the closest thing to Bitcoin Noblesse Oblige, and perhaps this is how the Method of Payment use case develops.
Quick Hits
Cryobrick - This is a cheap phone that can turn into an air-gapped cold storage wallet.
Core 31.0 - Bitcoin Core 31.0 has shipped and it has cluster mempool, or dependent transactions that stay together or get kicked out together.
Nic Carter’s Quantum Solution - Nic Carter proposes appointing a US-based quantum computing firm 🤮 as court-authorized custodian of quantum-vulnerable coins.
Bitcoin Scholars Fund - The Bitcoin Scholars Fund leverages a 2027 tax credit to fund Bitcoin education in K-12 schools, turning government incentives into a vehicle for teaching sound money.
Fiat delenda est.