Jeff Bezos: “Why is a nurse in Queens who makes $75,000 a year paying more than $1,000 a month in taxes?”

We're doing another @Bitkey giveaway! A built-in screen. No seed phrase. 2-of-3 multisig. Follow @Bitkey and us, RT to enter. ✅ Winner announced Tuesday 5/26 at 4PM EST.

2006 Walmart haul. Same cart today?

"Warsh cuts rates, Warsh shrinks the balance sheet, then changes the regulations for banks so banks can buy more treasuries without reducing lending to Main Street. That's the Jedi mind trick. These are not the droids you're looking for." - Luke Gromen

Jeff Bezos responds to AOC saying "you can't earn a billion dollars." "The way you make a billion dollars is you create a service that people love. And if millions of people choose your service, you’re going to end up with a billion dollars."

"This year we're set to spend almost 5 trillion in interest and entitlements alone, which is nearly all of receipts." - Luke Gromen Even a 20% cut to defense and entitlements would trigger a recession that blows the deficit back to 9-13%. "Thank you for playing. Game over."

Senator Lummis says the CLARITY Act needs roughly three weeks to combine the Banking and Agriculture Committee bills, add ethics provisions, and make technical changes to the GENIUS Act. "July is, I think, the more likely of the two months, as between June and July."

Jeff Bezos on Trump: "I think he is a more mature, more disciplined version of himself than he was in his first term." "I'm on the side of America, and that's where business leaders should be."

Rep. French Hill calls the CLARITY Act a "a decent product." "I think we're headed in the right direction to a final package on the market structure for digital assets that President Trump can sign into law, but it's not over till it's over."

South Carolina just banned CBDCs, protected self-custody, and gave Bitcoin miners legal cover in a single bill. The governor signed S. 163 into law on May 19 after it passed the Senate 38-1 and the House 110-1. The law prohibits any state government entity from accepting, requiring, or testing a central bank digital currency. It protects the right of individuals and businesses to accept digital assets for goods and services and to use self-hosted or hardware wallets. And it establishes a legal framework for mining and staking operations. On the tax side, South Carolina cannot impose any additional tax on a transaction solely because a digital asset was used as the method of payment. Transactions can still be taxed, but only at the same rate as if they had been conducted in US dollars. For miners, local governments cannot single out mining businesses with restrictions that do not apply to other industrial operations in the same area. Mining, running nodes, and developing blockchain software do not require a money transmitter license. Staking as a service and mining as a service are explicitly classified as not being securities.

Senator Lummis: "If we don't create a clear regulatory framework, they're going to go to Dubai. They're going to go to Singapore. Those jurisdictions don't have as many consumer protections as the one we've developed." Says the CLARITY Act keeps innovation in the US.

Jeff Bezos: "Politicians are using the age-old technique of picking a villain and pointing fingers, but the problem is that doesn't solve anything." "If you want to help the group of people who are struggling, you have to figure out real root causes and solutions, and that takes skill."

Jeff Bezos: "If I do my job right, the value to society and civilization from my for-profit companies will be much, much larger than the good that I do with my charitable giving."

TFTC 748 w/ Luke Gromen: "Inflation will be running 12 to 15 percent easy, but they're going to tell you it's four, four and a half." We discuss: ⚡ Sovereign debt spiral ⚡ Stealth QE ⚡ Iran's leverage

"We're going to put it all together and present it on the Senate floor, hopefully sometime this summer." (SenLummis) says the CLARITY Act will merge the Banking and Ag Committee bills with ethics provisions and technical updates to the GENIUS Act.

The Justice Department quietly added a one-page addendum to the Trump-IRS settlement that "forever bars" and "precludes" the IRS from examining the tax returns of President Trump, his family members, his company, and all "related companies" for anything filed before the agreement was reached. The addendum was signed by Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche and posted to the Justice Department website on Tuesday morning. This comes one day after Trump dropped a $10 billion lawsuit against the IRS in exchange for the creation of a $1.776 billion fund to compensate allies of the president. The fund will be run by five people who can all be fired at will by the president, with no requirement to publicly disclose who receives money or why. During a Senate hearing on Tuesday, Democrats criticized the arrangement, with Senator Chris Van Hollen calling it "an outrageous, unprecedented slush fund." Democrats also pressed Blanche on whether there were any limitations on who could file a claim from the fund. Blanche said there were not.

River CEO @Alexander Leishman built a time-lock encryption oracle as a side project. Upload a file, choose when it should be unlockable, and the system encrypts it with an RSA key that only becomes available at the specified time. Anyone with the encrypted file can decrypt it in their browser once the key is released. It publishes RSA keys for each minute over the next 30 days, then releases the corresponding private key at the top of each new minute. Works in the browser for humans and via curl and openssl for developers and AI agents. Use cases: delayed data access, embargoes, sending messages or files to the future, or anything else that needs a trustless time delay.

Barnes & Noble CEO James Daunt says the chain has "no problem" stocking AI-written books.

Court filings in the Prime Trust bankruptcy reveal the company rarely held enough bitcoin to cover customer deposits on a 1:1 basis. A chart from the proceedings shows Prime Trust's on-chain bitcoin balance was short of its internal ledger by as much as 1,400 BTC at various points, meaning customer bitcoin simply was not there. Now the bankruptcy estate is making a legal argument that Prime Trust did not have a trust relationship with its customers, despite the company's own custodial agreement stating that "Account Holder owns all Custodial Property held by Prime Trust" and that customer assets would be "segregated on Prime Trust's books and records." The fine print also allowed Prime to "take and hold title to Custodial Property in its own name," a clause that is now being used to treat customer assets as part of the general bankruptcy estate available to all creditors. This matters because it is the legal mechanism behind the $970 million clawback lawsuit filed against Swan Bitcoin last week. The bankruptcy estate argues that because Prime commingled customer assets and the agreements disclaimed fiduciary duties, transfers made before the bankruptcy filing can be recovered from companies that got their bitcoin out in time.

The American Bankers Association: "It's kind of ironic, I suppose, the Clarity Act. At least for this particular section, I think there's still too much ambiguity."