Don't pretend nothing's wrong, I know you're disappointed. Disillusioned, even. The Fear and Greed Index on Monday, June 1 read 11 out of 100. Bitcoin at $63,000, Google searches near a five-year low. Record outflows from the spot ETFs. BlackRock's IBIT alone has seen over $2 billion leave since mid-May. Strategy selling bitcoin after, for four years, Saylor repeated a single message over and over: buy, never sell, sooner sell your kidneys. Then there's the talk of the big IPOs. * SpaceX is on roadshow with a valuation between $1,800 and $2,000 billion and a potential raise of up to $75 billion: above Saudi Aramco in 2019. * OpenAI is aiming for a listing in the autumn, an $852 billion valuation. * Anthropic has closed a $65 billion round, a $965 billion valuation. * Put together: about $3,600 billion, as much as the GDP of France. Goldman Sachs estimates that the 2026 IPOs will raise $160 billion. That's where the money seems to be running now. In moments like these, we need to go back to the fundamental question, the most important one: do SpaceX, OpenAI and Anthropic solve the same problems that Bitcoin solves? Mathematical scarcity in a digital world where everything is copied to infinity. A store of value without counterparties, that no one can devalue or freeze. An answer to inflationary money. The ability to stabilize electrical grids by monetizing excess energy. No. None of the three. The markets look at the next six months and chase the most exciting story of the moment. Confusing this with the value of what Bitcoin solves is the mistake that costs the most. View article →

The Clarity Act contains a grandfather clause that permanently freezes the classification of assets whose spot ETFs were listed before that date. Bitcoin qualifies: the spot ETFs were approved in January 2024. If the law passes as it is, Bitcoin will forever be a commodity under CFTC jurisdiction. The SEC will no longer be able to touch it. No future administration, no new Gary Gensler will be able to reopen the dossier. The law also resolves a decade-long war between two federal agencies. The SEC wanted everything as a security. The CFTC had considered Bitcoin a commodity since 2015. In between, exchanges, brokers and custodians operating in limbo. The Clarity Act creates new federal categories: digital commodity exchange, digital commodity dealer, digital commodity broker. Three CFTC registrations that do not exist today. Until now these entities lived on unsuitable state licenses or makeshift SEC registrations. For the banks: the rescission of SAB 121 unlocked about 115 billion dollars in custody, but it remains an administrative guidance. A new administration can overturn it tomorrow. The Clarity Act amends federal banking legislation directly. Payments, lending, custody, trading on digital assets become banking activities regulated by law, not by revocable administrative guidance. Open knots remain. The provision on conflicts of interest for government officials — read the Trump family and World Liberty Financial — is still on the table. The stablecoins open a loophole that six banking associations have already flagged in writing to the Senate: programs can be built that reward the balance but are formally activated by a minimum number of transactions. A deposit yield without the rules on deposits. For the single bitcoiner, little changes. For the institutions that were waiting for regulatory certainty before entering, everything changes. View article →

The digital euro already has a precise calendar. 2027: pilot with partner banks. 2028: integration into the commercial banking system. 2029: operational for citizens. The ECB is not waiting for the law to pass: on November 28, 2025 it already opened the selection of the operational partners. The names of those who will materially manage the digital euro will be known in June, even before the European Parliament votes. The estimated costs: 1.3 billion for development, 320 million per year of operating costs, between 4 and 5.8 billion in investments required of the commercial banks to integrate the system. To replicate something that Bancomat, Satispay, Apple Pay and SEPA instant transfers already do. On the legislative path: the EU Council, which represents the national governments, already adopted its position on December 19. Twenty eurozone governments are aligned. On June 23 the European Parliament's ECON committee votes, then it goes to the plenary. Then the Trilogue. Final adoption of the Regulation: by the end of 2026, the beginning of 2027 at the latest. Considering that Council and Parliament are both in favor, the Trilogue will be short. The points of the Regulation that really matter: merchants with a POS will be required to accept it by law. The banks will be required to offer a wallet as a basic service. The holding limit will probably be 3,000 euros per citizen, a concession to the banking system to avoid bank runs in the event of a crisis. Online, every payment is visible to the provider and the data arrive at the ECB in pseudonymized form, "traceable to the user when needed." Offline, the transaction is private via NFC, but as soon as the device goes back online the data are uploaded. The point that the article documents in detail: the parameters that will decide the level of surveillance, offline limits and holding limit will not be set by the Parliament. They will be established by an unelected technocracy after the approval of the law. Once the Regulation is in force, lowering the threshold of exempted micro-enterprises, raising the holding limit, eliminating the offline mode for "anti-money-laundering needs" or introducing programmable payments will not require a new European vote. View article →

BIP 110 wants to block spam on Bitcoin. Too bad the spam has already disappeared on its own. The blockchain is half-empty. Fees at multi-year lows. Bitcoin Mechanic, a developer at Ocean and the main supporter of the proposal, himself defines the network a "ghost town." Then he asks to modify the consensus rules on an emergency basis. The proposal would activate with 55% of the miners, or via UASF with no miners at all, with 6-7% of the reachable nodes signaling it. For comparison: SegWit required 95% signaling. Taproot 90%. Mechanic insists on the expiration: twelve months, then everything goes back to how it was before. But the text of the proposal admits that after activation we will in any case return to the traditional filters, because the consensus rules are not the right tool to fight spam. He himself acknowledges this in the What Bitcoin Did interview of May 26. What remains when the soft-fork expires? The precedent. The memory that, faced with a situation perceived as an emergency by a niche, it is legitimate to modify the consensus rules to prevent a minority from doing things we do not like. The game theory that Mechanic uses as the activation engine is the "whoever blinks first loses" one: the miners who do not apply the new rules work for free, so they adapt. It is a correct line of reasoning. But it demonstrates that a determined minority can modify Bitcoin's rules by leveraging the economic rationality of the miners, not the broad consensus. Anyone, tomorrow, can use the same playbook. To block the inscriptions, but also to freeze UTXOs that have ended up under OFAC sanctions, or to extend the emission schedule beyond the 21 million. On the technical front: in February a developer published a complete image inside Bitcoin with a single transaction, circumventing all the filters that BIP 110 would like to write at the consensus level. Mechanic himself admits that after twelve months the inscribers will find other routes. You pay the price of the precedent in full. The problem you wanted to solve remains intact. View article →

On May 6, 2025, during the Q1 earnings conference call, Michael Saylor said: "We will probably sell some bitcoin to pay a dividend." MSTR dropped more than 4% in the hours that followed. Strategy holds 818,334 BTC. Annual obligations between dividends on preferred shares and interest on debt amount to roughly $1.5 billion. The software business generates a handful of millions per quarter. The gap is covered by issuing new shares at a premium to NAV, or - for the first time ever - by selling bitcoin. Adam Back, a few days before the call, had tweeted that "bitcoin treasury companies are an arbitrage between the fiat present and the hyperbitcoinized future." In finance, an arbitrage is a risk-free, non-directional trade that exploits price differences for the same asset across different markets. What Strategy is doing is a debt-financed leveraged bet on bitcoin — not arbitrage. The "BTC per share" mechanism Saylor publishes every quarter works like this: new shareholders pay a premium above the value of the underlying bitcoin. That premium gets redistributed to existing shareholders as "growth." The returns of the old come from the capital of the new. It all works as long as the line keeps growing. The day it stops, Houston, we'll have a problem. View article →

The CEO of LayerTwo Labs Paul Sztorc has announced a Bitcoin hard fork called eCash, scheduled for August 2026 at block 964,000. The detail that sparked the debate: roughly 500,000 of the BTC attributed to Satoshi Nakamoto will not be assigned to the original addresses on the new blockchain. They will be moved to new keys controlled by investors, developers, and backers of the project. The attribution is based on the Patoshi pattern, a statistical heuristic identified by Sergio Lerner in 2013. Robust, reproduced, cited. It remains a heuristic. No one holds Satoshi’s digital signature on those outputs. Sztorc hinted that the fork would be cancelled if Bitcoin Core activated BIP300 and BIP301 before August. The very drivechains he has been working on since 2015 and that Core has never adopted after ten years of debate. Sztorc’s case is not an isolated one - it joins BIP-110 and BIP-361, all proposals that have surfaced in recent months and would entail a fork. Since 2017, no fork has dented Bitcoin’s dominance. BCH, BSV, BTG, XEC: all listed, all irrelevant. Anyone who has watched Bitcoin for years knows that proposing a fork is a waste of time - unless failure is part of the calculation. Announcing a fork moves markets. Whoever knows when the announcement is coming can position themselves accordingly.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​ View article →

While at the Bitcoin Conference in Las Vegas, executives from US federal agencies promise not to prosecute developers, in reality code is in the dock. Keonne Rodriguez has entered a US federal penitentiary. Five years. His crime: writing a non-custodial Bitcoin wallet with Whirlpool. He never touched user funds. He didn't hold the keys. The code was open source. Yet the Department of Justice prosecuted him for "unlicensed money transmitting" under Section 1960 - a charge that requires no proof of intent, no complicity with crimes, no custody of others' funds. His associate William Lonergan Hill got four years. Running parallel is Roman Storm, co-founder of Tornado Cash - a non-custodial mixer on Ethereum. Arrested in August 2023. A four-week trial in the Southern District of New York. Verdict on August 6, 2025: the jury failed to reach agreement on the two heavy counts (money laundering, violating North Korea sanctions), but convicted him on § 1960. Same charge, same pattern. If the motion for acquittal filed by the defense is denied, Storm faces a retrial in October 2026 with total exposure approaching forty-five years. Too bad that back in 2019 FinCEN had explicitly written: anyone who develops non-custodial peer-to-peer software without controlling user funds is not a money transmitter. In April 2025, Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche issued an internal memo: stop regulatory prosecutions against developers of non-custodial software. The verdict against Storm came in August 2025. Four months after the Blanche memo. Prosecutors in the Southern District of New York pushed for conviction anyway. In March 2026 they sought a new trial on the other two counts, with the opposite directive written in black and white by DOJ leadership. If the interpretation of § 1960 applied to Storm holds up on appeal, the perimeter is this: any American developer of wallets, coinjoins, or Lightning Service Providers becomes a potential defendant. The menu is already written. Plead and take four or five years. Fight and risk forty-five. Code is on trial, whatever the paid feds in Las Vegas may say. View article →

BIP-361: Post Quantum Migration and Legacy Signature Sunset. The proposal: five years after activation, any bitcoin not migrated to quantum-resistant addresses gets frozen. The numbers behind the proposal. As of March 1, 2026, more than 34% of all existing bitcoin had public keys exposed on-chain. According to @Jameson Lopp, one of the six signatories, the technically vulnerable bitcoin total 5.6 million. Roughly 28% of the circulating supply. That figure includes 1.1 million bitcoin untouched since 2010, probabilistically attributed to Satoshi Nakamoto. The proponents’ thesis: if an attacker with a sufficiently powerful quantum computer unlocked those UTXOs and dumped them on the market, the sell-off would hurt every other holder. From the BIP text: “Lost coins make everyone else’s worth slightly more. Coins recovered by an attacker make everyone else’s worth less. Consider it theft from everyone.” Lopp himself, however, in the hours after the debate blew up on X, stated: “At the moment, I don’t think any of this is necessary.” The objections come from several directions. @MartyBent raised what he calls “the man in the coma” case: anyone who fails to execute the migration for five years loses all their money, frozen by consensus rules. @Adam Back at Paris Blockchain Week called today’s quantum computers “lab experiments” with “incremental” progress, and argued that Bitcoin can prepare itself through optional upgrades without imposing freezes. The real point is something else. If consensus rules can freeze addresses based on type, a precedent exists. Governments will have it on the table: freezing sanctioned UTXOs, freezing addresses on OFAC lists, freezing the wallets of politically inconvenient people. The proposal calls for freezing legitimately held bitcoin in the name of the collective good. Bitcoin exists because no one can block anyone else’s funds. BIP-361 asks the protocol to do exactly that, by design.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​ View article →

Less than a week after the quantum terrorism spread by Google Quantum AI's paper, Avihu Levy discovered that the solution is already inside #Bitcoin. The Chief Product Officer of StarkWare published a research paper on GitHub called QSB - Quantum Safe Bitcoin. The thesis: it is possible to sign Bitcoin transactions resistant to quantum computers using already existing consensus rules. No soft fork. No protocol changes. The mechanism works in 3 phases - Transaction pinning: uses public keys and RIPEMD-160 hashes to create computational constraints with a probability of a random string satisfying them of roughly 1 in 70 trillion. - Digest rounds: searches for subsets among dummy signatures to generate a collision-resistant digest, effectively building a Lamport signature. - Final transaction assembly. The numbers Against Shor's algorithm, the one that should break ECDSA, the system offers approximately 118 bits of security. Standard ECDSA, with a sufficiently powerful quantum computer, would offer 0. Against Grover, 59-69 bits. The underlying technology is called Binohash, developed by Robin Linus. Practical limitations Each QSB transaction costs $75-$200 in GPU power and requires 6-8 hours of computation. Transactions are non-standard and must be sent directly to miners. It is obviously not a solution for everyday use today, but the protocol designed in 2008 already contains the antibodies for a threat that is still closer to science fiction than to physical reality. I discuss it in detail in Bitcoin Train’s Stop #294. View article →

Let’s set the record straight: Google has published a paper claiming that it would take 500,000 physical qubits and 9 minutes to break Bitcoin’s elliptic curve cryptography. Today, Google has 105 physical qubits. It would need 5,000 times that number. There’s one detail the industry media forgot to highlight: the paper itself specifies that mining attacks using Grover’s algorithm “remain impractical for the next few decades.” So why all the fuss? Let’s see who’s talking about it. Justin Drake of the Ethereum Foundation co-authored Google’s paper. The same Justin Drake who designs and promotes Ethereum’s post-quantum roadmap. A week before the publication, he had announced a $2 million research initiative. He quantifies the threat and sells the solution. Nic Carter, founding partner of Castle Island Ventures, led the $20 million Series A round in Project Eleven-valued at $120 million-a company whose business model is to sell protection against the quantum threat. Then he goes public to declare that quantum computing is “the biggest risk to Bitcoin.” It’s the same playbook as Jamie Dimon with JPMorgan: publicly, Bitcoin was a “Ponzi scheme.” Privately, JPMorgan was buying shares of BlackRock and Grayscale’s Bitcoin ETFs. Fear is a business model. Meanwhile, quietly, BIP-360 proposes a new type of quantum-resistant address. It’s already on the testnet. The ones warning you about the danger are the same ones selling you the solution. View article →

On 23 March, a two-block reorg occurred on the Bitcoin network. Some people claimed it was a bug, a vulnerability, or an impending disaster – as is now usual in an environment where debate is turning into a football pitch. But the protocol worked exactly as intended. I discuss this in the new #BitcoinTrain article. View article →

In the latest article of #BitcoinTrain, I explain how Bitcoin is being used by the Iranian regime to circumvent sanctions, but also by ordinary Iranians to survive the war and escape repression. Some see this as a problem, because Bitcoin has no compliance office to decide who deserves to use it. It has no board of directors that can be pressured by governments, nor a switch that someone can flip when the narrative changes. History teaches us that every financial instrument controlled by someone has been used as a weapon against someone else. Anyone who wants money that discriminates wants a weapon, not money. View article →

If an AI model were free to choose how to store and transfer value, which asset would it select? According to the Bitcoin Policy Institute, the answer is Bitcoin, and it would do so based on objective characteristics: mathematical verifiability, the absence of intermediaries, immutable rules, and resistance to censorship. It’s an interesting prospect, if it wasn’t for one small detail: machines, today, don’t make decisions. The decisions are made by the people who programme them, the companies that fund them, and the governments that regulate them. So the real question is not ‘what would an AI choose?’ but ‘who controls what the AI can choose?’ That is the game being played right now. View article →

Running here and not trusting governments. PV

In the new article I address what is happening in France: something that should terrify anyone who declares their bitcoins "to be on the safe side". Criminal gangs are accessing the tax data of bitcoiners. Names, addresses, estimated assets. Everything the state has collected in the name of 'transparency' and 'anti-money laundering' has become a shopping list for those who want to rob and seize. KYC is sold as a shield, when it is a database of high-value targets, accessible to anyone with the right connections or simply the right corruption. And corruption, in the nerve centres of state bureaucracies, is never lacking. The right question to ask is: who really needs to collect all this data? Honest citizens, who are profiled and filed? Or those – the state or criminals, the difference is non-existent – who have an interest in knowing exactly where the wealth is and who holds it? Bitcoin was created as a response to this problem, and the manhunt is already on. If you wanted to sleep peacefully, frightened by the propaganda of public thugs, perhaps your address has already been compromised. View article →

Tariffs make markets bleed ⬇️ Sentiment worsens ⬇️ Recession spectrum ⬇️ Trump: “Powell you've got to lower rates!!!" Tariffs are a way to force the Fed to print money: who pays the interest on the debt, if not inflation? Printer is coming.