The reason I stuck around in the Bitcoin is that I read Nick Szabo’s essays on trust minimization, God protocols & smart contracts The reason why I’m still around during an era of institutional trust maximization and little to no cypherpunk innovation is that I’m stupid

I really don’t understand the whole “techno feudalism” discourse around AI If you have a computer with 32 GB of RAM, you can run an amazing open source local model like qwen There are also smaller LLMs that work on your phone Coordinate them with Hermes or OpenClaw and you have a team of workers that do anything you ask them Big data centers make it convenient, but they are really not necessary in the long run. If AI is a big part of our future, people will want to run their own models for the same reasons they buy their own computers instead of borrowing cloud computing Maybe computer companies should step up their game and bundle new devices with open source AI models. Same for phone manufacturers.

Which notification do you check first?

Shower thought: how does the country of El Salvador manage its bitcoin? Is there any mechanism in place to prevent the current presidential administration from just taking it and fleeing the country after losing elections? Is the reserve protected against immediate selling via timelocks? You know, to be sure that the next administration won’t dump the entire reserve on day one. Is El Salvador protected against third party custodians that can refuse withdrawals? I’m really curious to know how this works.

Apply the slippery slope principle to these statements: There is no second best crypto asset –> stake your stablecoins on Ethereum & Solana to earn yield Never sell your bitcoin -> buy more bitcoin than you sell What comes next?

Bitcoin Takeover podcast is currently averaging 4610 downloads per episode Can we get much higher?

I didn’t take AI too seriously until I discovered Claude I was mostly using Grok or ChatGPT to do research But what Claude does for coding is absolutely amazing. Now anyone can build a webpage of app from scratch, with the proficiency of an experienced software engineer & actually good guidance all the way through Now everyone can verify code and build applications, smart contracts, wallets, and everything you can use and repurpose from existing open source repositories! So now anyone with enough patience can make significant contributions to make the online world a better place Learning by doing will also help you grow immensely, as you discover stuff you preciously never thought about But the best teacher is the debugging and refinement phase. Claude will get you to a satisfactory 90% result in a matter of minutes – but the remaining 10% can take days to pull off… and this is when most of the learning takes place! Now you have no excuse to not dig up your own notebook with ideas and see which one you still want to build. Become the internet entrepreneur you’ve always wanted. Build a social network like the old MySpace. Create a tailored community forum. Build a better page for your business. Replace Wordpress with something that you build from scratch for your own needs. Claude is as smart as you are, essentially: so if you are able to describe specifically what you want, he will be able to get you there. It’s like having an engineer best friend who actually tells you what is a good idea and what you should probably not be tried from the get-go. Truly amazing! And the best part is that qwen (an open source model you can run on your computer) is about 90% as good as Claude! Man, I haven’t felt this excited about spending all day in front of my computer for years. I wake up wanting to pick up from where I left off, start more projects that I can manage and learn a lot in the process! Over the last 3 months, I’ve learned much more than 4 years of computer science classes taught me in high school.

I think Zooko is by far the most misunderstood person in Bitcoin But a top 10 bitcoiner by contributions to both cryptography & internet money tech that’s 100% BTC-compatible More bitcoiners should study his work: the smartest ones are already trying to bring Zcash to Bitcoin https://www.youtube.com/live/Vs2gTXzqe4Q?is=M5LiSoq1d1ygoi1X

Just in case you were wondering Bitcoin Takeover podcast is doing pretty well 4610 downloads per episode on average in 2026 April was a great month! Onwards 🫡

Made a deal with Zach Herbert yesterday after the podcast ended Now you can buy a Passport Prime using promo code “BTCTKVR” at checkout With this code, you receive a free bumper case worth $19 If I sell 3000 Passport Prime security devices, Zach will buy me a Supra 😍 Buy now! https://www.youtube.com/live/piIhSCxHC6o?is=HkXWWEbUIaKNou2v

I like Saylor because he’s able to bring out the worst in people He reveals the greedy fucks who used to LARP about ending the fed and hyperbitcoinization He sheds light on the hypocrites who said they were Bitcoin-only, but bought MSTR and STRC He perverts the devs who used to talk about Bitcoin maximalism as a movement that brings planetary scale, privacy & smart contracts to Bitcoin It’s tragic, but somehow beautiful too

Even if bitcoin goes to 0 tomorrow the AI bubble bursts the internet gets shut down I’m optimistic about the future as long as I have local open source AI models. We can use these LLMs to rebuild everything from scratch at an accelerated speed, which is truly amazing!

Gm, everyday I wake up having an existential crisis AI has become so good that it can correct me & completely redo hours of my work within seconds. As a worker, I am obsolete. Soon to be replaced by a faster, cheaper AGI. But as a creative person, I am just getting started!

In case you missed it: My interview with @Hunter ₿eaṩt & Mark Karpelès is now live 💪🏻 We recorded it last week at Bitcoin 2026 in Las Vegas 🖥️ we talk about BIP 360, 361 and the pros and cons of Bitcoin’s quantum upgrade Listen 👇🏻 https://www.youtube.com/live/L11orkEbtb4?si=xbLMnf-k1VAHYJ2I

Roger Ver was right When he said that people save the currency that they use for spending One good example is Tron: an unoriginal Ethereum clone that used to be the laughing stock of the industry when it launched in 2017 But has been outperforming bitcoin since 2021 because it’s the most popular gas token for USDT payments Nobody likes it, but it’s useful. Which is why people bought it and held it 🤷🏻‍♂️

Been reading opinions that the Bitcoin community is more “mature” and “tolerant” than 5 years ago when it comes to Ethereum and other successful altcoins I don’t think that’s the case, it’s just that the maximalist dogma has taken so many Ls and thought leaders moved goalposts so many times that everyone must be more careful with their predictions But the biggest issue is that Bitcoin itself hasn’t evolved to incorporate all the altcoin use cases, which renders the dogma moot. Tron has been a much better store of value since adding USDT. Payments in third world countries are made in stablecoins, not Bitcoin. Litecoin is the number one payment coin on BitPay, and now Monero has more user nodes than Bitcoin. Now Zcash is being promoted as a better store of value because it has the same economic scarcity while actually hiding everyone’s amounts, and Ethereum will become quantum resistant before Bitcoin. It’s hard to stay cocky when your worldview is constantly being challenged by the market reality… and your coin fails to compete. So no, I don’t think anyone became nicer or more tolerant. Everyone gets humbled by the free market.

I really dislike the way Bitcoin’s scaling debate is framed as “Blocksize wars” Because everyone agreed that Bitcoin needs larger blocks and it got 4x larger blocks via SegWit The conversation was more about HOW to scale Bitcoin (hard forks were not popular due to their contentious nature) and whether or not layer 2s are the way to go forward Today, Bitcoin mostly scales through custodians (exchanges, ETFs, Lightning operators, federations) while Bitcoin Cash took on the risk of enabling OP codes that ironically support much better layer 2s. In a world where Bitcoin won, there would be no miners choosing to secure BCH. But here we are nearly a decade later, still unable to scale properly for the popular use cases and kicking the can down the road until other projects figure out better cryptography.

You don’t need to be a PhD in economics to understand the basics of supply and demand or Bitcoin’s need for transaction fees If you’re not using bitcoin for payments, you’re not increasing the demand for it and you’re not paying the miners It’s that simple! If you fell for the “HODLing is using” psyop, you’re a gullible fool and I have an NFT collection to sell to you