Agentic payments are coming. It’s time for open-source agents to step up, or their days are numbered, writes @Matt Corallo

Open-Source AI Needs to Get Serious

Agentic payments are coming. It’s time for open-source agents to step up or their days are numbered.

To capture the sound and the fury of this latest What’s Matt Mad at Now, @Matt Corallo also recorded an uncharacteristically softspoken version of the post. SPOTIFY

Spotify

Open-Source AI Needs to Get Serious

Spiral: Open Money, Open Intelligence · Episode

APPLE PODCASTS

Apple Podcasts

Open-Source AI Needs to Get Serious

Podcast Episode · Spiral: Open Money, Open Intelligence · February 25 · 9m

Most merchants don’t care about digital scarcity or immutability. What they care about are their margins. Beating 3% credit card fees is how we convince small business owners to accept bitcoin:

Merchants Don’t Read White Papers, They Read Cash Flow Statements

Why the argument for bitcoin to merchants is profit, not theory, and how we can make that case at their registers.

Square did their part, now let’s do ours. For bitcoin to become everyday money, merchants need to accept it. But first, they’ll need a reason to. We've put together the resources to help anyone make the case that only bitcoin can defeat credit card fees:

Bitcoin Merchant Community

Bitcoin Merchant Community

The Bitcoin Merchant Community is a growing global community of small businesses helping one another defeat 3% credit card fees by accepting bitcoin

These resources include persuasive leave-behind materials that bitcoiners can bring to local businesses, from subtle, home printer-friendly handouts to bold, attention‑grabbing combo pieces like, uh, a plushie with impeccable penmanship. But no matter how good a leave-behind is, it’s better with a face. Included with each leave-behind is a playbook for you that includes step‑by‑step guidance for how to make the bitcoin case to merchants. We hope for this community to be an open and independent group with a simple goal: bitcoin payment adoption among merchants—regardless of which point-of-sale solution they prefer. It’s also where all of the resources we’ve mentioned so far can be found for free. For now, if you want the plushie combo, you'll have to pick it up at @bitcoinpark_ in Austin and Nashville, @atlbitlab, @SpaceDenver, and @PresidioBitcoin. This might change, though. Who can say? Bitcoin is weird and it’s only getting weirder.

Just ₿

Bringing ₿ to the World

Bitcoin has a symbol – let’s use It.

Just use Veo3, they said. AI will be able to make him spin on his head while flailing his arms and legs, they said. He won’t look like the post-apocalyptic spawn of a bitcoin and a smoldering pile of sentient nuclear waste, they said.

CoinJoin doesn’t guarantee privacy—it just buys you a chance at privacy. One slip post-mix, and intersection attacks can trace you all the way back. Leaks compound fast, and even “perfect” mixes can collapse under real-world pressure. All this and more in The Scroll #4, the longest document or newsletter we have ever published:

The Scroll #4: Intersection Attacks on CoinJoin Anonymity

This is not only our longest edition of The Scroll yet, it might be the longest document we’ve ever published. But, you know what? This is for go...

Mining centralization is one of the biggest risks facing bitcoin. You can help solve it. Spiral is offering a unique grant opportunity for a Senior Engineer to significantly advance Stratum V2. We’re looking for a highly skilled individual with a proven track record in Rust development, specifically within mining infrastructure and distributed systems. The ideal person will excel at building scalable, application-layer APIs, servers, and proxies for real-world deployments. You’ll be at the forefront of creating open-source building blocks for the mining ecosystem.

In this edition of What’s Matt Mad At Now, he covers MEVil, his talk at bitcoin++ tomorrow, Core standardness rules, and all of it flavored by his incandescent, seething, volcanic rage.

The MEVil of Relay Policy

Matt’s back at it, and this time, he’s madder than ever.

Please welcome our first Texan, @benthecarman, to Spiral. After one year probably doing JPEG work at Taproot Wizards, Ben will tackle LDK Server and a new SDK that simplifies how we onboard self-custodial bitcoin users, two things that his Mutiny wallet work lend themselves to.

Opinions vary on how best to get strangers into bitcoin.

Spiral wizard Yuval Kogman gets to put ”wizard” as his occupation on tax forms, legal documents, and lease applications for a reason. “The Scroll #3: A Brief History of Wallet Clustering“

The Scroll #3: A Brief History of Wallet Clustering

Our previous post in this series introduced the idea behind wallet or address clustering, the trivial case of address reuse, and the merging of clu...

From the same bitcoin co-working and events space that brought you Presidio Bitcoin Jam comes a no-holds-barred adrenaline-fueled thrill ride called 21 in 21, where our own Haley Berkoe asks people like this dude you’ve never heard of 21 questions about bitcoin in 21 minutes:

What does it have to do with bitcoin? I dunno. But it is pretty.

There’s always been a question about how best to onboard new bitcoin developers. Not anymore. Along with our pals at Bitcoin Devs, Chaincode, and the Bitcoin Design Community, we found our answer, and its name… is pure unbridled anime. View quoted note →

Your family will be expecting the bitcoin talk this holiday season. Don’t give it to them. Switch it up. Give them the Nostr talk instead.

We are still in the market for bitcoin wizards. If you know someone who considers themselves a bitcoin wizard, 1) you keep weird company, but 2) please send them our way:

Spiral is Hiring Bitcoin Wizards — Spiral

Spiral is hiring bitcoin “wizards,” though we will settle for bitcoin mages, sorcerers and sorceresses, witches, warlocks, and druids.

The official position of the Spiral team is that Satoshi is a cat: 1) Never around when people want them to be. 2) Impossible to find when they don’t want to be found. 3) Eats weird gross food. 4) Proficient in C++, which has the number of characters as “cat,” starts with a C, and has a character that looks like a lowercase T. 5) Keeps weird hours. 6) Prefers English spelling because all cats have British accents. 7) What are cypherpunks if not mysterious? What are cats if not mysterious? 8) Independent and unknowable. 9) Whiskers, probably. 10) Could be sitting next to you and you wouldn’t know it. 11) Could be sitting on you and you wouldn’t know it. 12) Knows how to use a keyboard. 13) Very popular online. 14) Known to “move on to other things.” 15) Satoshi Nakamoto is a Japanese name. You know who eats a lot of fish? The Japanese. You know who else?

They said being idiots who make bitcoin stickers for a living would never last. They say a lot of things. Use these and all the dozens of others as gifs for whatever dumb stuff you’re up to by searching “herecomesbitcoin” on GIPHY. Or visit

Here Comes Bitcoin

Here Comes Bitcoin is the central resource for all things Bitcoin (puppet, not currency), including license-free creative assets that you can use t...

to download them all for Signal and Telegram and spam your friends until they like you even less.

No idea what he’ll do them with, but it will probably be better than what we’ve done:

Google Drive

Spiral Nostr Ads Hack Week – August 1, 2024 - Google Drive

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