Interesting Stuff
The Extreme and Center Democrats - Two stories, both about the state of the Democratic party. The first is by Celina101 who traces the rise of the Democratic Socialists of America from Bernie Sanders to Zohran Mamdani. Among other things, the organization had at its conception, an explicit non-Communist policy. That has been scrapped as it has been taken over by the younger people whose conception of Communism is probably more in line with China and Vietnam than the USSR or East Germany. The second is by Paul Waldman who argues that centrist Democrats have zero organization and are destined to lose, despite having pretty lucrative sinecures in academia, media and non-profits. Both articles essentially say the same thing from two different vantage points. Lots of young people, the foot soldiers of the Democratic party are going socialist/communist and there’s little that’s stopping them.
Skid Row - A journalist spends three days on LA's Skid Row expecting to find evidence of malice and instead discovers that the situation is probably much more due to incompetence. To wit, there is over $250 million in annual nonprofit revenue producing virtually zero visible improvement, with open-air drug use flourishing literally outside a LAPD station. The homelessness-industrial complex turns out to be less sinister plot and more bureaucratic entropy, where good intentions get devoured by institutional bloat and six-figure executive salaries. It is a perfect case study in how government-adjacent organizations optimize for self-preservation rather than solving the problems that justify their existence.
Green-lit Lives - Dave Greene argues that certain demographic groups receive pre-cleared career paths into lucrative positions while anyone who notices the pattern out loud gets dismissed as a bitter crank. He illustrates this with his college acquaintance who coasted from undergrad through law school into a cushy government role despite being, by his account, remarkably uninformed and lazy, on a trajectory that simply would not have existed for someone of his profile. The most insightful part of the piece is how The Imposter Syndrome, now nearly ubiquitous among highly positioned people, is essentially due to the thumbs on the scale and as such most of the highly positioned people are loathe to talk about their own success as anything other than merit. Mental gymnastics, in other words, are table stakes for any institutional success these days.
The Millennial Midlife - Sour by Priyanka Desai writes a bout the coming Millennial midlife. The main difference versus previous generations is how they’re coming into midlife without the traditional accomplishments of home ownership and career stability that gave previous midlives a certain shape. The response is splitting into two extremes rather than the classic red-sports-car cliche. One end goes loud with very public and visible obsessions with fitness culture, like run clubs and Hyrox competitions. The other end goes quiet, retreating into a variety of much more private things. Probably the most interesting one described in the article are dopamine sites. These are sites where you can browse fake menus, fill up fake shopping carts and track couriers that aren’t delivering anything. It’s about as sad a way to get a dopamine hit as I can imagine, yet it’s becoming a thing.
Jason Arday - Librarian of Celaeno writes this evastating satirical takedown of how Cambridge University circled the wagons around this blatantly fraudulent academic. A professor credibly accused of plagiarism and fabricated biographical claims that sound pretty crazy, like having only learned to read at 18, ran 600 miles in 6 days, having overcome a brain tumor and having taught at universities that don’t have any record of him. The Cambribdge faculty dismissed all criticism as racism and even weaponized concerns about self-harm to shut down accountability. It is a textbook example of how DEI commitments create perverse incentives where institutional fear of appearing discriminatory overrides simple BS detection. When you replace merit with identity as the organizing principle of an institution, you destroy the credibility of everyone the system claims to elevate.
What I'm up to
Problems of Inheritance - This is a panel I did in Prague about what Bitcoin inheritance currently looks like and why self-custody is so scary for people. We talked about practical considerations and the mental shift between using wealth ourselves and thinking about being a steward of wealth for your family.
Holy Seed - I spoke to some Christian Bitcoiners in Korea and talked about the transition between Judges and Kings. My contention in the video is that Israel wanted a king as a way to shirk responsibility, which ended up in centralization which ultimately added all manner of taxes, oppressing the people. I argued that a decentralized, cooperative system is what makes civilization possible and is the unique teaching of Christ.
Nostr Note of the Week
What I’m Promoting
Bitcoin
A Complete Summary of Covenants - This is the most thorough survey of the covenant landscape to date, cataloging 14+ proposals from minimalist opcodes like CTV to full script restoration, and laying bare the ideological rift between "Bitcoin is money, keep it simple" and "programmable money needs real programmability." After five-plus years of review, no covenant proposal has an activation date. Greg Maxwell challenged people some time back with the observation that nobody builds with these tools even where they already exist and that fact hangs over the entire debate. The gridlock is real, and it increasingly looks like Bitcoin's governance process may be better at preventing bad changes than shipping good ones.
BIP-110 Code Review - Peter Todd writes an independent code review of BIP-110. He sees it as a heavy-handed UASF that bans the Taproot annex, slashes script data limits, and mandates miner signaling, all to fight data usage on-chain. His verdict is that the implementation poses minimal threat to mainline Bitcoin nodes and would most likely just fork Knots into an irrelevant minority chain with no hashpower. Such is more or less what happened, with the BIP110 chain stalling at 2 blocks post-split as of this writing.
PoW change to Knots? - Speaking of which, Chris Guida rebased Luke Dash Jr's proof-of-work algorithm switching infrastructure onto Bitcoin Knots 29.x, adding the plumbing for a coordinated transition away from SHA-256 at a predetermined hardfork time. The code includes difficulty adjustment for the first non-SHA2 block, consensus parameter lookups for algorithm selection, and a test framework all opt-in behind a flag for now. As the BIP110 chain is stalled and the one miner that mined both blocks stopping for now, a PoW change seems like the only path forward.
Lightning
c-otto.de shutting down - One of the Lightning Network's most well-known routing node operators, c-otto.de, is gradually winding down their node. They still hold about 20 BTC in capacity across 32 channels, but the writing is on the wall. Running a routing node has never been a great business proposition, and under the current fee environment it looks less and less like a good business. As with most bear markets, the marginal businesses fail while the efficient ones strengthen. It's a reminder that sustainable infrastructure requires sustainable economics, something miners learned in previous cycles.
Boltz Shut Down - Boltz Exchange, one of the go-to non-custodial swap services for moving between on-chain Bitcoin and Lightning, abruptly shut down its services. The timing is suspicious given that their warrant canary expired just days before the announcement. The loss of Boltz is a significant blow to Lightning liquidity and interoperability, as it was one of the few trustworthy bridges between layers that didn't require KYC. Did a FISA court order shut them down? Are there allegations of drug money flowing through their systems? Or is it AI finding too many exploits in their systems causing them to lose money? I hope we find out which it is.
Solving Jamming - Lightning channels have a jamming problem. Attackers can cheaply tie up network capacity by holding payments hostage. This proposal introduces cryptographic proof of message delivery tied to time-based withhold fees, making such jamming limited. The clever trick is using Bitcoin's scripting and adaptor signatures to make it provably expensive to hold an HTLC without completing it, creating real economic consequences for bad actors. Channel jamming has been an unsolved thorn in Lightning's side for years, and this approach of making attacks costly rather than impossible feels like the right philosophical direction.
Economics, Engineering, Etc.
ColdCard Disclosure Policy - A security researcher apparently found the ColdCard RNG bug some time back, but didn’t report it to them because the previous responsible disclosure ended up going into a black hole. Security researchers spend a lot of time and money on finding these and if you screw them over by not even acknowledging that they found a vulnerability, you’re kinda screwing yourself. A lot of people are angry at the researcher, but I think his position is very understandable. It wasn’t clear to him that ColdCard would do anything and given they had no bug bounty, wouldn’t acknowledge him and might not even correct it, punishing the bad behavior was in a way the right signal to send to the market. I hope Bitcoin companies learn to give security researchers ways to disclose vulnerabilities and add bug bounties from this tragedy.
MARA Slipstream Now Public - MARA opened its Slipstream transaction-submission service to the public on August 3, letting anyone bypass the mempool. They’re doing this for no extra fees so that Coldcard victims racing to migrate compromised UTXOs can move funds without broadcasting their transactions to the public mempool where front-runners could pounce. Whether this is a genuine public good or a mining company building a moat by capturing transaction flow depends on your level of cynicism, but at 5.4% hashrate, it is a meaningful option in a crisis.
Anzen - Luke Childs argues that self-custody today forces you to pick two of three: security, simplicity, and trustlessness. Multisig is secure and trustless but complex, custodial apps are simple and somewhat secure but require trust, and single-sig is trustless and simple but not that secure. Anzen, his side project, claims to solve all three by using just a phone and a hardware wallet in a vault-like construct that achieves 2-of-3 equivalent security with no third-party cosigner, no servers, and no soft fork required. I personally think simplicity is relative and just takes time. What’s perceived as difficult gets easier as people get more conceptually aware and UX is able to take advantage of their improved mental models.
Quick Hits
RAM production worldwide is sold out through 2027 - All three major DRAM producers are sold out through 2027, with AI hyperscalers hoovering up capacity.
The Fed vs. Kevin Warsh - New Fed Chair Kevin Warsh talks like a hawk but markets can't figure out if he'll actually fight inflation.
Central Banks Buying More Gold - Central banks purchased 244 tonnes of gold in Q1 2026, pushing prices above $4,100 per ounce.
Poland now sixth-largest EU economy - Poland's GDP hit 923 billion euros with 3.6% real growth in 2025, more than double the EU average, vaulting it past Switzerland and Belgium to become the EU's sixth-largest economy.
Fiat delenda est.