Tim Cook just warned investors that Apple is facing "significantly higher" memory costs starting in June, and the crunch will last multiple quarters. SK Hynix, Samsung, and Micron have all confirmed that their HBM, DRAM, and NAND capacity is essentially sold out through 2026 and into 2027. Customers are reserving supply years in advance. Goldman Sachs is forecasting a 4.9% DRAM undersupply in 2026, the worst deficit in over 15 years. The cause: every major AI company on earth is panic-buying memory chips. Google, Meta, Microsoft, Amazon, xAI, and every sovereign AI program from Saudi Arabia to France are hoarding every wafer they can get. High-bandwidth memory prices have spiked over 1,000%. They're calling it "RAMageddon." The downstream effects are already cascading. Sony delayed the PS6 to 2028 or 2029 because they can't get chips. Western Digital is sold out of hard drives for all of 2026. Analysts are saying the entry-level PC market will "disappear" by 2028 because cheap components no longer exist. And now Apple, the most powerful supply chain operator on the planet, is telling you they can't escape it either. When Apple can't source components, what do you think happens to everyone else?

China's property market has now wiped out two decades of price appreciation. According to Hedgeye, the country's real estate sector has given back all gains accumulated over the past 20 years. Researchers estimate that 85% of the gains seen between 2011 and 2021 alone are already gone. The broader collapse stretches further back, erasing valuations to levels not seen since the mid-2000s. For context, real estate accounts for roughly 70% of Chinese household wealth. This isn't just a housing story. It's the largest destruction of middle-class wealth happening anywhere in the world right now. The Chinese government repealed its "three red lines" policy in January 2026 in an attempt to stabilize the sector, but prices continue to fall. The property crisis that began with Evergrande in 2021 has now entered its fifth year with no bottom in sight.

Jack Dorsey’s Block drops its Q1 2026 Bitcoin Proof-of-Reserves: 28,355 BTC ✅ fully verified on-chain. While most corporations hedge or play games with shareholder money, Jack keeps stacking real Bitcoin and showing the receipts publicly.

US Attorney General: "If you are developing software, if you are a coder, and you are not the third party user and you are not helping and knowing the third party is using what you develop to commit crimes, you are not going to be investigated and not going to be charged." "If you're a coder out there and you are under investigation or you have to hire a lawyer to respond to subpoenas, your lawyer should feel very comfortable communicating with the FBI, communicating with the prosecutor on the case and making sure that they are not violating my memo."

Another Strategy buy is coming. 815,061 bitcoin on the balance sheet. $63.46 billion.

TFTC 739 w/ @Matthew Mezinskis: "Bitcoin grows at 40% per year compounded. Better than anything in the markets. Central bank balance sheets only grow at 12.5%." We discuss: ⚡ The power law math ⚡ $22M Bitcoin target ⚡ Why fireworks are coming

The AI doom narrative about college grads getting wiped out just got a reality check. Hiring of new college graduates is up 5.6% year over year. Youth unemployment for degreed 20-24 year olds dropped from 8.9% to 5.3%. Remember when we were told AI was going to eliminate 50% of entry-level jobs? The data says the opposite is happening right now. This is the melt-up hitting the labor market. CapEx spending from the Mag 7 is flowing into real companies that need real workers to build real infrastructure.

Robert Downey Jr. on Wall Street in 1993: "Low IQ, high energy."

Trump on Strait of Hormuz: "Right now we have it closed. We have total control of the strait."

World, Sam Altman's digital identity project, just unveiled World ID 4.0, what the company calls "full-stack proof of human" infrastructure. The partner list: Tinder, Zoom, DocuSign, Shopify, Okta, AWS, and Vercel. Altman opened by saying we're heading to a world where AI generates more content than humans. Pantera Capital says we've already crossed that threshold. World's answer is an iris-scanning device called the Orb that creates a unique cryptographic ID proving you're a real person. 18 million people across 160 countries have already verified. Tinder is rolling out "verified human" badges in the U.S. after a Japan pilot. Zoom built a feature called "Deep Face" that verifies the person on a video call isn't a deepfake. DocuSign is adding proof-of-human checks to digital signatures. Shopify is enabling verified-human commerce. The most significant announcement is AgentKit, infrastructure that lets AI agents carry cryptographic proof they're acting on behalf of a verified human. Okta built an agent delegation system on top of it. The problem World is solving is real. The question is whether a centralized iris-scanning identity layer controlled by the same person whose company helped create the problem is the right answer. Altman is the CEO of OpenAI. He built the flood. Now he's selling the ark.

Tether just froze $344 million in USDT across two Tron wallets at the request of OFAC and US law enforcement. This is why Bitcoin exists. Tether CEO Paolo Ardoino said the company "acts immediately and decisively" when links to sanctioned entities or criminal networks are identified. To date, Tether has cooperated with 340+ law enforcement agencies across 65 countries, supported over 2,300 cases, and frozen more than $4.4 billion in assets. They frame this as a feature. In their own words: "Public blockchains give investigators and issuers something cash cannot. A visible trail. Transactions can be followed, wallets can be flagged, and assets can be frozen before they are moved further." Stablecoins are programmable dollars with a kill switch. And the entity holding that switch cooperates with the US government on demand. Here's the part that should make everyone uncomfortable: the US government's posturing about banning CBDCs is a misdirection. There is no functional difference between a government-issued CBDC with account-level freeze capabilities and a government that can call Tether and have $344 million frozen within hours. The CBDC ban lets politicians claim they're protecting financial freedom while the actual surveillance and control infrastructure gets built through regulated stablecoin issuers instead. It always starts with the easy cases. Sanctioned entities, terrorist financing, fraud that nobody will publicly defend. But the tooling doesn't stay pointed at the easy cases. It never does. Operation Chokepoint started with payday lenders and ended with legal gun shops losing their bank accounts. The freeze capability that targets the Lazarus Group today gets aimed at politically inconvenient actors tomorrow. That's not speculation. It's the documented pattern of every financial surveillance power ever granted to a government. Bitcoin is a bearer instrument. No CEO to call. No company to subpoena. No kill switch to flip. Nobody can freeze a Bitcoin wallet unless they control the private keys. Stablecoins are a useful tool for some. Bitcoin is the exit.

Tether just froze $344 million in USDT in coordination with OFAC and US law enforcement. Your stablecoins are not your stablecoins. They never were.

Adam Back says he has a bet that bitcoin hits $1M before the next halving in 2028. "The $500K to $1 million bitcoin is closer than people think."

Florida's attorney general just escalated his investigation into OpenAI from civil to criminal. It's the first time a state has pursued criminal liability against an AI company for the actions of a user. The case centers on the FSU shooting last April. Court records show the suspect used ChatGPT in the days and hours before the attack, asking about weapons, ammunition, timing, and location. Two people were killed, six were injured. The AG says if a human gave those same answers, they'd face murder charges. OpenAI says ChatGPT "provided factual responses to questions with information that could be found broadly across public sources on the internet," and that it proactively shared the suspect's account with law enforcement after the shooting. The information was publicly available. The question is whether packaging it in a conversational, step-by-step format creates a different kind of responsibility. That's the real debate here. Every search engine indexes the same information. Libraries carry books with worse detail. The legal theory is genuinely uncharted, and reasonable people disagree on where the line should be. The subpoenas target OpenAI's internal policies on user threats and crime reporting going back to March 2024. Whatever comes of it, this case will set the template for how states think about AI liability.

OpenAI’s implied valuation just hit $1 trillion. Three years ago it was worth $28B. Pre-IPO instruments trading onchain are now pricing the company above a trillion dollars, up 163% since last October. It hasn’t filed to go public. Anthropic is nearing an $800B valuation. SpaceX is targeting $1.75 trillion. Three private companies are approaching or clearing $1T simultaneously. That’s never happened. The biggest companies of the AI era may have already done most of their appreciation before a single share trades publicly.

"The bears absolutely hate this rally. I don't believe we have ever seen anything quite like it in Bitcoin history." Perpetual futures funding rates tell you who's paying who. When funding is positive, longs are paying shorts, the market is overleveraged to the upside. When it's negative, shorts are paying longs, traders are betting against the price. Right now, funding is flat to negative while bitcoin pushes higher. That means this rally isn't being driven by leveraged longs piling in. It's spot demand. Real buyers. The bears are actively shorting into this move and getting squeezed. The market is going up on conviction, not leverage, and that's a setup we haven't really seen before.

Elizabeth Warren: "You know what banking system Scott Bessent wants? The one we had right up until 1933, just deregulate the banks, and they crash. The alternative is to say we need better regulation over the private credit market."

The DOJ just indicted the SPLC for paying $270,000 to an individual who was part of the leadership group that planned the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville. The tiki torches. The "very fine people" narrative. The media coverage that was used to define an entire political movement as white supremacist. One of the people involved in making that happen was on the SPLC's payroll, paid through shell companies and prepaid cards by an organization that raised hundreds of millions claiming to fight hate. The DOJ says they weren't dismantling extremism. They were funding it.

You get taxed every time you spend bitcoin. Even on a coffee. The de minimis bill would end that, and the people pushing it through Congress will be at @The Bitcoin Conference on April 28. If you're in Vegas, be in the room.

BFFS

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Another Satoshi documentary drops tomorrow. This time it's "Finding Satoshi," a four-year investigation led by journalist William D. Cohan and private investigator Tyler Maroney, featuring interviews with Michael Saylor, Fred Ehrsam, Joseph Lubin, and Brian Brooks. It claims to name the real creator of Bitcoin. It joins a crowded field. The NYT's Carreyrou says Adam Back with 99% confidence. HBO pointed to Peter Todd. Armstrong has previously leaned toward Hal Finney but now says this film got it right. They can't all be right, and that's fine. Whoever Satoshi is holds over a million Bitcoin, roughly $80 billion, and has never moved a single coin. Seventeen years of complete silence. No interviews. No corrections. No claiming credit. That absence isn't a mystery to be solved. It's the design. Bitcoin has no CEO to subpoena, no founder to pressure, no figurehead to discredit. Every other monetary system on Earth depends on the credibility of its leadership. Bitcoin is the only one that doesn't. Satoshi's disappearance is what makes it work. The search for Satoshi makes for good television. But the entire point of Bitcoin is that it doesn't matter who built it.