Interesting Stuff
Library Card Fallacy - Freddie deBoer argues that LLMs are not the end of college or learning as many proponents like to believe. The title is a very useful way to describe that line of thinking: the idea that access is what’s missing. As he points out, we’ve had libraries for a long time and that hasn’t produced tons of geniuses. As with all things education, the real value isn’t the information, tooling, or even opportunity. The real bottleneck is grit and fortitude to suffer through the hard work of actually learning stuff that’s difficult and won’t give itself up easily. People need more than access to do useful, difficult things like deadlines, peer pressure and inspiration, most of which require other people.
Time Preference Violations - John Carter flips the famous marshmallow test on its head and argues that the current generation’s high time preference is not due to their lack of character, but the institutional promise breaking. Governments, central banks, and corporations have been telling citizens to wait, sacrifice, and trust the system for decades while systematically extracting value from their patience, so it’s no wonder generations after Boomers simply act in a high time preference manner. There are two sides to the Marshmallow test and there’s plenty of blame to go around for the lack of low time preference behavior today.
You Can't Build - Christopher Sandbatch writes about the deep moats of the current corporatocracy. The motivating question of the article is what it would take to build a big company from scratch in almost any industry in America today. He goes through banking, food, manufacturing and even software and concludes that it’s pretty much impossible to build anything without many tens of millions of dollars, largely due to regulation. He brings the receipts and shows how few banking charters have been issued in the last 15 years, for example. The implication of the article is that we live much closer to being a communist/socialist state than most believe.
Before Originalism - Grant Starrett traces how constitutional interpretation worked before originalism became a movement, revealing that the Founders assumed their words would be read plainly, not decoded through evolving judicial philosophies. The article argues that the need for originalism as a doctrine only arose because progressive jurists had already corrupted interpretation so thoroughly that returning to normal required a name. Unfortunately, this has meant that conservatives are not able to stand on principles that are higher, like Natural Law and Liberty, which has defanged much of their argumentation to interpretive squabbles.
Tabula Rasa - FutureDad dismantles the blank-slate theory of human nature that underpins most modern education and social policy, arguing that children are born with innate dispositions that parents must work with rather than override. Rousseau's idea that children are naturally perfect and only corrupted by society has produced a generation of parents afraid to discipline, structure, or direct their children. Original sin isn't popular in polite company, but it produces better parents than original innocence.
What I'm up to
Bitcoin Way - I was on this show talking a bunch about quantum computing in general. It’s unfortunate, but QC seems to be a vector for grifting these days, and not just in the Bitcoin space. As I’ve said before, once you show me a quantum computer that can factor 6 using Shor’s algorithm without precomputed circuits, I’ll start listening.
BTC Prague - I’ll be at this conference June 11-13.
Origin Seoul - I’ll be in Seoul July 18th to be at this meetup. Stay tuned for the link.
Nostr Note of the Week
What I’m Promoting
Bitcoin
2026 BOSS Challenge - The BOSS Challenge showcased over 50 portfolio projects from new Bitcoin open-source developers, ranging from transaction ancestry explorers and dust-removal tools to Lightning innovations and blockchain visualization platforms. This is one of the on-ramps onto Bitcoin development and I’m glad these contests exist. That said, I wish there were more opportunities for developers to get a bit more training first before doing projects like this.
Mempool Policy - Buck Perley draws a provocative analogy between Bitcoin Core's mempool relay policies and the regulatory bureaucracy of the administrative state. He suggests that unelected rules shape behavior without formal consensus. The argument highlights the tension between mempool policies not being consensus rules, yet having enormous influence over what transactions get propagated and eventually confirmed. It’s similar to the idea that of the tyranny of the default in software, and until people take more care in setting their own values, this will always be true.
On-Chain Zaps Are a Terrible Idea - Gigi makes a forceful argument that moving Nostr zaps on-chain is a privacy disaster because it permanently ties user identities to Bitcoin addresses, creating a surveillance goldmine for chain analysis companies and criminals alike. Lightning zaps preserve plausible deniability but on-chain zaps destroy it forever. This is a crucial reminder that convenience should never trump privacy, especially when the whole point of Bitcoin is individual sovereignty.
Lightning
CLINK Offers - Zeus wallet is implementing CLINK, a Nostr-based payment protocol that replaces LNURL-pay and Lightning Addresses by using encrypted Nostr DMs as transport, eliminating the need for a public HTTPS endpoint. This is a huge deal for self-sovereign Lightning usage because it removes the web server dependency that made Lightning Addresses a centralization vector. Lighting micropayments (zaps) have made Nostr better and perhaps it’s time that Nostr made lightning better.
Ark Spark Explained - This article compares the privacy trade-offs between Lightning, Spark, and Ark, making the crucial point that going off-chain does not automatically mean going private. Lightning's onion routing hides payment paths well, but Spark concentrates visibility with operators, while Ark could become the privacy leader if it implements blinded credentials. Understanding these trade-offs is essential because privacy is a spectrum. Every Layer 2 solution shifts where your metadata is visible.
Mostro v0.17.4 - Mostro is the Nostr-based peer-to-peer trading platform. v0.17.4 ships with comprehensive anti-abuse bond functionality and improved dispute resolution. As above, the synergies between Lightning and Nostr are undeniable and useful. I suspect that the two will grow in sync with each other as the network effects of both compound.
Economics, Engineering, Etc.
Path to Bitcoin Contribution - A Ugandan civil engineer named Jemimah Nagasha discovered Bitcoin through a local BitDevs meetup in Kampala and worked her way through the Btrust Builders program into full-time open-source development. This is the kind of story that gives you hope. Real people in the developing world find purpose and opportunity through Bitcoin, not through government handouts or NGO dependency. The fact that she got there through curiosity and consistency rather than credentialism is a testament to Bitcoin's meritocratic ethos.
Strategy is Old Banking - This piece argues that Strategy (MSTR) and its imitators are essentially doing old-fashioned banking. They borrow cheap to arbitrage an asset they believe will appreciate more. The observation is accurate as this is why fiat money is subject to so much value capture and rent-seeking, but the key difference is that the underlying asset is truly scarce sound money rather than speculative securities. Still, Bitcoiners should be wary of any entity that introduces excessive leverage and counterparty risk into what should be a simple self-custody proposition.
Quantum Attack Game Theory - Jameson Lopp catalogs the many ways a quantum-capable adversary could wreak havoc on Bitcoin, from stealing coins to reorganizing the blockchain to griefing attacks that could persist for years. The analysis is mostly pathological and assumes an adversary whose purpose is to make Bitcoiners suffer rather than make profit. Though the title is about game theory, I don’t see it as such. It’s mostly what an infinitely patient and well-funded adversary would do if their goal was to hurt Bitcoin.
Quick Hits
SpaceX has 18,712 BTC - SpaceX disclosed it holds nearly 19,000 BTC purchased at an average price of about $35K per coin in its IPO filing.
BIP Editor - The Bitcoin development mailing list put out a call for new BIP editors.
Bitaxe Gamma 601 - This is a tiny open-source ASIC miner with 1.2 TH/s, which is not too shabby.
Trump Expands Bank Secrecy Act - Trump signed an executive order expanding Bank Secrecy Act compliance requirements, adding more KYC burdens.
Fiat delenda est.