Control-Plane Capital

Have you noticed that Bitcoin influencers are almost never objective? This is a Pierre Rochard quote from today (but could really be any of the Bitcoin influencers on any given day) "Bitcoin’s November candle was ugly. Lots of uncertainty about USD rate cuts, AI investments, and altcoin leverage. Notice that these are all external factors? Bitcoin’s fundamentals are stronger every day. The long term BTC accumulation thesis is unchanged." So "Bitcoin’s fundamentals are stronger every day... long-term accumulation thesis unchanged." 1) Are Bitcoin’s fundamentals "stronger every day"? Depends what you call a "fundamental". If you actually list them, you get a mixed picture, not a monotonic up-only story. A) Monetary fundamentals (fixed supply, issuance, uptime) Still strong / unchanged: - 21M hard cap still intact. (Context: https://controlplanecapital.com/p/why-bitcoins-21m-cap-is-not-guaranteed ) - Halving schedule intact. - Chain uptime high. - Global awareness higher than ever. These are the only things influencers usually mean when they say "fundamentals". They talk about design, not control surface. But there are other axes they conveniently ignore. B) Censorship resistance & sovereignty This is where things are not "stronger every day": 1. Paperization — A growing chunk of "Bitcoin exposure" sits in: - ETFs - MicroStrategy & treasury cos - Custodial exchanges - Structured products, futures, notes This pushes more BTC into KYC, surveilled, easily frozen pools, and more price discovery into instruments that are trivial to regulate. 2. Self-custody share vs AUM: More normies hold "BTC" via brokerage accounts and apps, not cold storage. That weakens the monetary sovereignty story, even if total holders go up. 3. Node centralization & implementation politics: - Heavy reliance on Bitcoin Core + a tiny dev set, with funding from a small number of entities ( Context: https://controlplanecapital.com/p/how-bitcoins-developers-are-attacking-2a5 ). - Now a split narrative (Core vs Knots) over policy and spam / OP_RETURN / inscriptions. - A non-trivial part of the full-node network sits on centralized cloud providers (AWS, etc.) - Context: https://controlplanecapital.com/p/governments-dont-like-sovereign-bitcoin . 4. Chain bloat / illegal content risk — Inscriptions, arbitrary data, and v30-style policy loosening expand the attack surface: - Legal/regulatory risk for node operators and infra providers. - Easier vectors for spam from actors with deep pockets. From a regulatory capture perspective, that's bearish sovereignty, bullish for "we need to regulate/filter nodes" ( Context: https://controlplanecapital.com/p/governments-dont-like-sovereign-bitcoin ). 5. Bitcoin mining is more centralized than ever. Context: https://controlplanecapital.com/p/bitcoins-mining-centralization-problem These are just a few. Obviously, I won't cover everything in a nostr note. Net: monetary schedule is still clean, but sovereign, censorship-resistant usage is under attack on multiple fronts. That is not a daily increase in "fundamentals". C) Use as medium of exchange vs asset If BTC's real threat is as self-custodied, censorship-resistant MoE, then: - KYC perimeters, FATF travel rule, AML pressure, exchange surveillance ( Context: https://controlplanecapital.com/p/how-governments-and-large-institutions ) - Stablecoins + cards giving people "almost-crypto" UX with fiat rails - Institutional BTC treated as risk asset, not transactional money All of that is pushing BTC away from MoE, toward "digital gold-ish risk asset". So the honest version isn’t "fundamentals stronger every day"; it's: - Monetary design mostly unchanged ( Context: https://controlplanecapital.com/p/how-bitcoins-developers-are-attacking-2a5 ); freedom properties under strategic containment pressure; usage skewed toward paperized SoV, not sovereign MoE. D) "Multiple implementations" as a positive It's good that not 100% of nodes run Bitcoin Core. A monoculture is easy to capture. So yes, on this narrow axis, BTC's fundamentals are better than when Core was a totally unchallenged monoculture. That's one of the few genuine positives. 2) Why Bitcoin influencers almost never give this picture A) Their income, identity, and status = "number go up" Most big Bitcoin voices have: - Bags (obvious). - Revenue tied to: Courses / coaching ("how to hodl / self-custody / retire with BTC / BTC inheritance"), Bitcoin Treasury Companies, Conferences, merch, subs, referrals, sponsorships, Speaking gigs premised on being a maximalist voice. If they seriously said: - "Look, BTC's sovereignty is under coordinated pressure; paperization and regulatory capture are real; upside is path-dependent on state behavior," they would: - Lose a big chunk of their audience (no one wants nuance, they want certainty). - Threaten their own business model (fear + hopium sells, balanced realism does not). - Risk ostracization inside the tribe (maxi culture punishes deviations). So they rationalize: - Any negative is "short-term noise". - Any structural attack is "bullish because it means we're winning". - Any critique is "FUD". Incentives > ideals. Full stop. B) Audience capture & algorithm design Platforms reward strong, one-sided emotional narratives. "Ugly candle but fundamentals stronger than ever" outperforms: "Mixed structural picture: some fundamentals up, some under attack". Audience selection: - People who need BTC to be salvation filter into those feeds. - Over time, the creator optimizes for retention: more hopium, less doubt. If they suddenly became fully objective, their audience would either leave or revolt. That's the prison. C) Cognitive dissonance / sunk cost Most of these guys: - Went all-in socially and financially. - Built their entire identity on "Bitcoin fixes this". Admitting: - "BTC is being co-opted as a controlled, paperized SoV and its true sovereign potential is under active containment" is psychologically brutal. So the mind does what it always does: selective blindness + glorious narrative spin. 3) My best attempt to steelman "fundamentals stronger every day" If I had to steelman that tweet, the strongest points: - Global knowledge / Lindy effect: more people, companies, and states now know BTC exists and treat it as an asset; it hasn't died; that's real Lindy. - Infra maturity: wallets, custody solutions, multisig, hardware devices, and analytics tools are better than they were 5–7 years ago. - Implementation plurality: Knots vs Core, other clients exist — less monoculture. - Regulated access: ETFs / brokers make it easier for large pools to get exposure (even though this as a double-edged sword). Bitcoin is stronger as productized financial exposure, weaker as off-grid monetary counter-system. 4) A more accurate statement would be: - BTC's monetary design fundamentals (fixed supply, issuance) are intact and robust. - BTC's institutional acceptability as a paperized SoV is increasing. - BTC's sovereignty fundamentals (MoE freedom, censorship resistance, self-custody share, uncaptured infra) are under sustained attack and not obviously "stronger every day". - Influencers mostly cannot say this because their incentives, audience, and identities punish that level of honesty. I have explained this in more detail here - https://controlplanecapital.com/p/what-made-me-sell-most-of-my-bitcoin Perhaps this is obvious but unfounded hopium does more harm than good. You can't expect the community to address issues they don't know exist.

"Transparency" is what systems offer when they want you calm, informed, and still stuck. 1) Transparency without exit = glass prison If you can see everything but change nothing, transparency just upgrades the UI of your captivity. - Bank shows you every fee and risk flag → you still have no alternative rails. - Platform shows you every "community guideline" and strike → you still can't realistically move your audience. - State shows you surveillance stats and oversight reports → you still can't opt out of the ID/payments stack. You're no longer ignorant; you're powerless with full knowledge. That's not freedom; it's a glass prison. 2) Why systems love "transparency" Legitimacy coating: - "We publish dashboards, reports, APIs. We have nothing to hide". - Looks like accountability; functions as reputation armor. Pressure vent: - Angry? Fine. Here's a dashboard, consultation, or public comment period. - Your energy goes into reading and arguing about metrics, not building exits. Better telemetry on you: - Every "transparency portal" and "consent dashboard” is also a data intake channel. - They watch what you click, what you complain about, which features keep you hooked. They roll out reporting much faster than portability or decentralization. That tells you what it's really for. 3) Information is not power; options are power Power = knowledge × credible alternatives. If you know your bank is abusive, but: - every other bank runs identical rails, and - cash life is criminalized / impractical, then your "informed consumer choice" is fiction. Same with platforms: - You know you're shadowbanned. - Your data export is useless. - Your followers can't find you elsewhere. Without credible exit, transparency is theater. Only when: - exit is cheap, and - re-entry elsewhere is practical, does transparency start to matter — because you can use information to punish bad actors by leaving. Once exit is real, transparency becomes a weapon for you. Without exit, it's just better lighting in the cell. Real shifts come from changing defaults, budgets, and choke points — or from building parallel rails that make the old path economically irrational.

Why speeches don't matter (but switches do) Speeches are UX. Switches are root access. The system invests in speeches so you stare at the wallpaper instead of the wiring. 1) Narrative vs plumbing Narrative layer (speeches, op-eds, campaigns): - Manages how control is justified ("safety", "integrity", "innovation", "inclusion"). - Soaks up attention and outrage. - Is almost completely decoupled from actual mechanical levers. Plumbing layer (switches, configs, policies): - Decides what can actually happen: which apps can ship, which payments clear, which content gets reach, which identities stay valid. - Is changed quietly, via: policy updates, risk models, SDK / API changes, ToS tweaks, "compliance requirements". If narrative says "freedom" but plumbing says "deny", plumbing wins. 2) Why one switch beats a thousand speeches A single rule at a choke point sets the feasible set for everyone downstream: - App store toggles: "No apps that do X" → entire categories vanish, no matter how many people "support" them. - Bank/compliance rules: High-risk Merchant Category Code / jurisdiction / keyword" → accounts closed, funds frozen, businesses starved. - Cloud / hosting / CDN policies: "No content tagged Y" → you're offline, even if your domain still technically exists. Switches don't argue with you. They route around you. You can win every debate on TV/Social media and still lose: - your payment rails, - your distribution, - your identity token. Outcome: narrative victory, mechanical defeat. 3) Where control actually lives: the narrow bottlenecks Real control sits at the mandatory gateways: - Phones / OS: App stores, push notif rules, device ID, background process limits. - Payments: Card networks, banks, Payment-Service-Providers, stablecoin/custody providers, KYC/AML policy. - Identity: Email/phone, SIM, ID providers, SSO, eID, certificate authorities. - Hosting / infra: Cloud providers, DNS, CDNs, DDoS protection, domain registrars. If you must pass through a bottleneck to: - talk, - trade, - store, - move, then whoever owns that bottleneck can nullify your "rights" with one config push. Plumbing does the coercion: deplatform, debank, de-rank, shadowban, revoke ID. Narrative provides cover: "safety", "misinformation", "terrorism", "protecting democracy", "consumer protection". The sequence is usually: 1. Crisis speech (problem inflation + moral frame) 2. High-level principle ("we must act") 3. Standards / guidance to infra providers 4. Switch flips in ToS, policies, and risk engines The public remembers step 1. Your life is changed by step 4. Don't read only the speech. Read the changelog. For any big announcement, ask what changed in: - app store guidelines, - bank/risk policies, - platform ToS, - cloud/hosting rules, - ID / KYC standards? If nothing in plumbing changed, it was mostly theater. If plumbing changed, that's the real law. Speeches tell you what they want you to feel. Switches tell you what you're actually allowed to do. https://controlplanecapital.com/p/permissionless-technology-permissionless

Trying to zap people using Primal wallet and app and it works maybe ~10% of the time. The zaps go off, then I refresh and no zap most of the time. Sometimes I get a notification: "Unable to zap, try again later." At the same time, I am able to get zapped. I guess the problem is not with me because some days it works 50-60% of the time. Are there any alternatives that are not as broken and have desktop + mobile version?

Do you know why people vote for their jailers? People say they want freedom, but they pay for comfort. When safety and convenience are offered at a discount, comfort beats ideals nearly every time. 1) Freedom is abstract; comfort and safety are immediate. - "Freedom" is distant, probabilistic, and hard to visualize. - "Comfort" is: rent paid, card works, no one yelling at you, fast apps. Most people rationally prioritize a predictable floor over abstract autonomy. 2) The ballot is pre-filtered to "which jailer", not "no jail". Anyone who threatens the underlying control stack (surveillance, compliance rails, financial chokepoints) is filtered out, neutered, or turned into a cautionary tale. So the real question on offer is: - "Which manager of the same basic machinery do you want?" People vote for their jailers because "no jailer" is not on the menu in any scalable, respectable form. 3) Fear of chaos makes the jailer look like a protector - People are more afraid of unregulated downside (crime, riots, bank failures, pandemics, unemployment, social ostracism) than of slow-creeping control. - The jailer markets themselves as the only thing standing between voters and chaos. So voters will accept more surveillance, more emergency powers, more centralized rails, if these are framed as the price for stability and normalcy. 4) "Free" perks as on-ramps to controllable rails "Free" is almost never free. It's subsidized onboarding: - Cashback, reward points, and "0 fee" wallets → get you onto rails where every transaction is logged and gateable (shout-out Square). - Faster payments, instant settlement → lock you into specific intermediaries and standards. - One-tap logins and unified IDs → collapse your identities into a single choke-point. The perk is temporary sugar. The habit and dependence are permanent. After a year: - The incentive shrinks or disappears. - Your life is now wired through the same narrow pipes the jailer can squeeze. 5) How people become defenders of their own cage Once someone's income, social life, and records live on these rails: - Exiting feels like self-harm: "I'll lose my history, my ratings, my contacts, my access". - Admitting the trade was bad means admitting "I helped build my own trap". So they resolve the dissonance by: - Insisting the controls are "necessary", "reasonable", "for everyone's safety". - Voting for whoever promises to protect and extend the rails they now depend on. 6) Treat "free" as an entry drug, not a gift Whenever something is "free", "frictionless", or "automatic", assume it's an acquisition funnel. Before accepting, explicitly list: - Who runs this rail? (state, bank, platform, ID provider) - Who can throttle, freeze, or revoke it? (regulator, compliance, risk team, opaque algorithm) - Who sees the logs, and for how long? - What happens if I'm labeled risky / non-compliant / undesirable? - Can I function without this rail once I'm used to it? If you can't name a credible exit path, you're not taking a perk. You're voting for your jailer with your future dependence.

I've been building a very advanced liquidity tracker and a few other models. It's a lot of work but it's been fun. Basically finance + logic + conspiracy theories. The type of stuff that nuked my Substack from search engines. I was getting search engine traffic up until I wrote my One World Government article 😂 ( https://controlplanecapital.com/p/rivalry-between-countries-is-curated ). Ever since I started doing a deeper dive, I've been shocked to learn how blue-pilled financial analysts are (they are incentivized to be blue-pilled). From time to time, I watch the more popular youtube analysts on 2-2.5 speed and man, they are absolutely clueless, or at least pretend to be. Even the darlings of Bitcoiners — most are absolutely clueless. Often, when they are right, they are right for the wrong reasons (assuming the stated reasons are what they believe in).

Governments love humiliation tests. A humiliation test is a small, pointless obedience drill that trains you to nod first, think later. It's not about the content. It's about proving the system can make you do or say something you know is dumb, petty, or disproportionate — and you'll do it anyway. 1) What humiliation tests buy the system A) Dominance proof: "If I can make you do something obviously unnecessary, I know you're safe for the serious stuff". B) Sorting mechanism. Humiliation tests are filters: - People who refuse: marked as "difficult", "non-compliant", "not a culture fit". - People who swallow it: marked as "safe", promotable, eligible for sensitive roles. No need for ideology diagnostics; a few small, dumb asks tell the system who will bend when it matters. C) Precedent for escalation. Once you've complied with something you privately saw as bullshit, the system has: - A precedent: "You agreed before; this is just more of the same". - A leverage point: your prior compliance can be used to shame future hesitation. 2) What it does inside your head Humiliation tests weaponize cognitive dissonance: 1. You do the thing (sign, chant, click, recite) because saying no is costly in the moment. 2. You feel the internal conflict: "That was dumb / exaggerated / dishonest". 3. To reduce that tension, your brain updates the story: - "Maybe it’s not that bad". - "Maybe they're right". - "I'm not the kind of person who just submits for no reason, so this must be reasonable". You move from "I complied under pressure" to "I basically agree" to protect your self-image. Each petty concession burns your doubt and rewrites your narrative a bit more in their favor. Humiliation tests are small, symbolic and public. Over time, the people remaining in key positions are those who've repeatedly signaled: - "I will override my own judgment and self-respect to keep my place in the system". That's what the system wanted all along. When something feels petty, compulsory, and performative, assume it's not about the surface issue. Ask: - "What larger narrative am I validating by doing this?" - "What future request does this make harder for me to refuse?" - "If I comply now, what will my next self be forced to defend, to avoid admitting I caved here?" That's the real permission you're being asked to grant.

Defaults decide outcomes. They are soft law. Most people live inside them and call it "choice". At scale, safety/ease beats sovereignty unless the latter is defaulted into UX. Opt-out vs. opt-in can 5–10x adoption with no persuasion. This is how governments and platforms steer behavior at scale. Defaults lower cognitive tax and social risk — so people call them "convenient" while locking into long-term paths (payments, news feeds, storage, wallets). He who sets the defaults: - defines what "normal" looks like, - defines what "consent" is presumed to be, - defines who has to spend effort and social capital to deviate. For most people, "My preference" = "whatever the default made least painful". Defaults are the main interface of coercion that still looks voluntary. Governments and platforms don't need to ban competitors; they just set defaults so that exiting them is slow, confusing, or socially suspicious. If you care about real agency, treat every default as a deliberate bet against you, unless proven otherwise. Assume defaults serve: - the platform's revenue, - the state's control and stability goals, - and only incidentally your convenience. Design your own personal defaults instead of accepting whatever someone selected for you. If you're not actively setting or resisting defaults, you're not "choosing", you're being routed.

Most people don't change beliefs — they change teams. The ones who build the systems know this very well. If you want to see how a person will act, you don't ask "What do you believe?" – you ask "Which team currently feeds and protects you, and which team are you trying to get into?" For anything that touches power, money, or safety, "belief" is a side effect of coalition membership under constraint. If you want to understand or change what people "believe", stop pushing more arguments into the front of the theater. Walk backstage and rewire: - who pays them, - who can punish them, - who they're performing for. The rest of the "belief journey" will mostly take care of itself. In other words — when you want someone to see the truth, change what truth pays them. Trying to "blue-pill" or "red-pill" someone while leaving their dependencies intact is mostly theater. They need a direct incentive shift: - Give them a new coalition: new job, new customers, new patronage, new audience. - Remove personal risk: legal shielding, financial runway, anonymity, alternative credentials. - Once their safety depends on a different story, their mind will "discover" that story's correctness. An audience swap almost always gets the job done. People don't speak to "reality". They speak to an audience. If you want them to change, change who's listening and who they're afraid of: - Move them from a room where accuracy = status, - To a room where dissent = exile. They will quickly learn the new speech patterns. What gets measured, gets believed. If their performance is measured on: - prediction accuracy → they'll slowly gravitate toward more truthful models. - compliance metrics → they'll "believe" compliance narratives. Switch the KPI, and watch their belief vocabulary morph to reduce their fear of being punished. Most people don't change beliefs — they change teams.

In one of Bitcoin Mechanic's videos, he said "Nothing survives the normie, and the normie is coming" Fuck dude, this is so true 😂 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=enxoR9v3oEg

What made me sell most of my Bitcoin a few months ago https://controlplanecapital.com/p/what-made-me-sell-most-of-my-bitcoin My goal with this Substack was to open-source most of my Bitcoin research and with this article, I have achieved my goal.

I rarely get surprised by anything anymore, but a while back when I started researching AI governance, it shocked me how many institutions are actually aware of where the world is moving without divulging much information. 1) How many market participants already know about the AI governance regime (rough estimates): - High-level "AI governance is coming" awareness: ~60–70% of institutions. - Deep understanding (admissibility, provenance, attestation, court-survivable artifacts): <10%. - Positioned in mispriced bottlenecks (T&D, transformers, legal-evidence tech, attestation silicon): ~5%. 2) How coordination happens without a "smoking gun" Standards + perimeters. - Standards (NGOs, fora, regulators) emit the same verbs: attest, revoke, trace, prove, rollback. - Perimeters (banks, clouds, app stores, ISPs, card networks) flip Acceptable Use Policies; law becomes optional. In other words, financial institutions read the standards, and people don't. That's what's reflected in financial markets, not the media screaming "AI bubble" which is a very surface-level take. Just to give you 1 example (of many), look at EU's AI Act ( https://digital-strategy.ec.europa.eu/en/policies/regulatory-framework-ai ) . And before you say "it's just the EU". It's not, it's also the US and the entire world. The US governance template (de facto global) is also being rolled out. - The NIST AI Risk-Management-Framework plus the Generative AI profile (NIST-AI-600-1, Jul-2024) is the check-list legal, audit, and vendor teams are implementing (regardless of DC politics). It maps controls for provenance, evaluation, and traceability. So a large share of institutions knows AI governance is coming — you see it in dated laws, Cloud Solution Provider SKUs, silicon roadmaps, enterprise console updates, and financial markets. I have to admit, it is a well-kept secret. While the plebs are busy food fighting, governments are rolling out the next regime. More context: https://controlplanecapital.com/p/why-we-arent-in-an-ai-bubble-top