The Swiss Bitcoin reserve initiative is running out of time. Campaigners have gathered roughly half the 100,000 signatures needed to force a national referendum on whether the Swiss National Bank should hold Bitcoin in its reserves, with only weeks left on the deadline. Switzerland already has indirect exposure through its massive holdings in companies like Strategy and Tesla via the SNB's equity portfolio. The irony is that the central bank is already accumulating Bitcoin exposure whether it wants to or not. The signature shortfall says less about Bitcoin's viability as a reserve asset and more about the difficulty of grassroots political campaigns in a country where direct democracy sets a high bar by design. 100,000 signatures in a nation of 8.8 million is not trivial. Either way, the conversation has been planted. Even failed referendums in Switzerland have a way of resurfacing once the conditions change. And the conditions are changing fast.

President Trump announces a three-day ceasefire in the Russia-Ukraine war from May 9-11. The deal includes suspension of all kinetic activity and a prisoner swap of 1,000 from each side.

Keonne Rodriguez wrote from prison asking for help with $2M+ in legal fees from the Samourai Wallet case. "We have to stand up for our own." Donations are being tracked on-chain. When the state comes for one of us, we show up.

Jeff Walton: "Our balance sheet needs to go up about 5.5% annually to pay the dividends forever. The money supply is growing at 6.7% annually. We are underwriting the next 8 to 10 years of Bitcoin to go up 30 to 35% compound annual growth rate." Coffeezilla: "It's not going to do that." Walton: "That's just a disagreement. The world's never seen a fixed supply asset. The supply of Bitcoin is asymptotically approaching zero. You've got ETFs growing rapidly, institutions coming in, credit being issued against it. The entire credit market is $300 trillion. This is the biggest total addressable market on the planet."

Jeff Walton: "Is an insurance company a Ponzi scheme?" Coffeezilla: "No. They have business activities that are providing cash flow. They're taking on risk." Walton: "Insurance companies have capital and they're taking on risk to pay liability into the future. Almost 100% of the claims that get paid out on insurance company balance sheets is from premiums that they're collecting in the door. So under your definition, you would call an insurance company a Ponzi scheme." Coffeezilla: "No, no. They have real profits. They have real cash flows." Walton: "The profits are the assets that are protected on their balance sheet." Coffeezilla: "People are paying for products." Walton: "What's the product?"

Strive's Jeff Walton responds to Coffeezilla calling $STRC a Ponzi scheme: "The difference between a Ponzi scheme and a capital management vehicle is that a Ponzi scheme doesn't have reserves. A capital management vehicle does." "Almost 100% of insurance claims paid out are funded by premiums they collect. Does that make an insurance company a Ponzi scheme?"

The U.S. government just put its classified UFO files online. No clearance required. The Department of War released its first batch of declassified UAP files as part of a new interagency program called PURSUE (Presidential Unsealing and Reporting System for UAP Encounters). The collection is live at http://WAR.GOV/UFO, with more files coming on a rolling basis. The effort involves the White House, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, the Department of Energy, AARO (the Pentagon's All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office), NASA, the FBI, and additional intelligence agencies. The collection includes previously classified UAP videos, photos, and original source documents from across the entire U.S. government. Secretary of War Pete Hegseth said the files had been "hidden behind classifications" and had "long fueled justified speculation." DNI Tulsi Gabbard called it an "unprecedented review" of the Intelligence Community's holdings. FBI Director Kash Patel said it was "the first time in history" the American people have "unfettered access" to declassified UAP records. NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman said the agency will "remain candid about what we know to be true, what we have yet to understand, and all that remains to be discovered." The files have been reviewed for security but many have not yet been analyzed for resolution of the anomalies they document. It's worth asking why every major intelligence and defense agency chose this moment to coordinate a joint public release. The files are live.

Trump just dropped the first tranche of UFO/UAP files at http://war.gov/UFO.

NVIDIA and IREN have announced a strategic partnership to deploy up to 5 gigawatts of AI infrastructure, alongside a $3.4 billion contract for IREN to provide AI cloud services for NVIDIA's internal research workloads. NVIDIA also received a five-year right to invest up to $2.1 billion in IREN shares. The flagship deployment will be IREN's 2-gigawatt Sweetwater campus in Texas, built to serve as a model for NVIDIA's DSX AI factory architecture. IREN also signed a separate $9.7 billion deal with Microsoft last year for AI data center capacity. Jensen Huang called AI factories "foundational infrastructure for the global economy." The race to build them is now a race for power, land, and cooling at scale.

Jensen Huang making the case that open source AI is a national security advantage.

A former inmate claims Epstein "definitely" committed suicide because the guy in the next cell heard bedsheets ripping. This is the level of evidence we're working with.

Germany's Left Party has submitted what's being described as one of the most aggressive anti-Bitcoin proposals in European history. The motion calls on the German government to abolish the country's 1-year holding rule that currently allows tax-free Bitcoin gains for long-term holders, tax Bitcoin profits like stock market gains, introduce an "exit tax" on unrealized crypto gains for anyone leaving Germany, expand blockchain surveillance, require identity verification even for self-hosted wallets interacting with regulated services, create a centralized EU crypto supervisory authority, and push for EU-wide trading bans on proof-of-work assets like Bitcoin, citing energy consumption. This isn't just the Left Party. German Finance Minister Lars Klingbeil has separately announced that crypto taxation will be revised as part of the 2027 federal budget. The 1-year tax-free holding period that made Germany one of the most attractive countries for long-term Bitcoin holders appears to be on the way out regardless of which proposal moves forward. The Left Party claims billions in untaxed crypto profits are being lost. Austria already tried this. They abolished a similar exemption in 2022 and imposed a 27.5% crypto gains tax. The result: far less tax revenue than expected, more complexity, and more bureaucracy. Bitpanda's CEO says the Austrian experience proves the approach doesn't work. The exit tax on unrealized gains is the most alarming part. If you hold Bitcoin in Germany and decide to leave, they want to tax gains you haven't even realized yet. That's not a tax on income. That's a claim on your property for trying to leave.

“It reeks of a deep state operation.” Rep. Tim Burchett told Joe Rogan about the string of missing alternative-energy scientists.

The IMF claims AI-powered cyberattacks pose a systemic risk to the global financial system, saying in a new report that extreme cyber incidents could "trigger funding strains, raise solvency concerns, and disrupt broader markets." The report argues the financial system's reliance on a small number of platforms and cloud providers means one exploited weakness could cascade across institutions and borders. The IMF says advanced AI models can "dramatically reduce" the time and cost of finding and exploiting vulnerabilities. The warning follows Anthropic's recent disclosure that its unreleased "Mythos" model proved extremely effective at discovering zero-day vulnerabilities that developers didn't know existed. The White House says it is running an "all-government" effort to test the model before release, and the U.S. government announced a new policy requiring access to tech companies' AI models for evaluation before they go public. The IMF also claims emerging and developing countries face disproportionate exposure because they lack the resources to defend against these attacks. IMF chief Kristalina Georgieva said last month the global financial system is "not ready" for the cybersecurity threats posed by AI.

"They quoted me $5,100 for an MRI with insurance. Without insurance, it drops to $700." Same scan. Same machine. Same hospital. Insurance didn't lower the price. It raised it by 7x and won't let you opt out.

US Senator Angela Alsobrooks (D-MD) says lawmakers have resolved the stablecoin yield issue blocking the Clarity Act.

Sen. Warren: "Any crypto legislation that doesn't shut down this presidential corruption isn't worth the paper it's written on."

Bitcoin Core's first memory safety bug just got patched and disclosed. Miners could remotely crash nodes with invalid blocks. Nearly half of all active nodes were running vulnerable versions.

President Trump: “I had a great call with The President of the European Commission, Ursula von der Leyen.” The two leaders reaffirmed they are “completely united that Iran can never have a Nuclear Weapon.”

OpenAI's former CTO Mira Murati testified under oath in the Musk v. Altman trial that Sam Altman lied to her about safety standards for a new AI model and routinely told different executives completely opposite things. Murati said Altman falsely claimed OpenAI's legal department determined a new GPT model did not need to go through the company's deployment safety board. When she checked with general counsel Jason Kwon, she found their accounts did not match. She overrode Altman and sent the model through the board anyway. Her testimony lines up with a 52-page memo from cofounder Ilya Sutskever previously read into the record, which said Altman "exhibits a consistent pattern of lying, undermining his execs, and pitting his execs against one another." Former board member Helen Toner made similar claims in 2024. Murati briefly served as interim CEO after the board fired Altman in November 2023 and said OpenAI was at "catastrophic risk of falling apart" during the transition. She left the company in 2024 and founded a competing AI firm, Thinking Machines Lab. The trial is part of Musk's $150 billion lawsuit against OpenAI and Microsoft.