Why Byzantium was the most successful empire in history, how it flourished on sound money, and fell when they started clipping the gold. "If your civilization is logo-centric, you're aligned with what's true. You're just going to prosper." - (JayDyer) on Tucker Carlson

Waking up (Bitcoinbeach) in El Salvador.

Strategy CEO Phong Le launches the Bitcoin Bank Adoption Index, showing major banks and institutions have reached 32% adoption of Bitcoin and digital assets. Fidelity leads at 71%, with JPMorgan, Goldman Sachs and others in the 40s.

Side-by-side test pits Muse Spark 1.1, Fable 5, GPT 5.6 Sol Pro, and Grok 4.5 against each other in generating 3D environments.

The OMFIF just surveyed 90 official institutions for their 2026 Global Public Investor report. 74 central banks and 16 sovereign wealth funds managing over $10 trillion in assets. The US dollar is the only currency where more reserve managers plan to cut exposure than increase it over the next 12-24 months. Every other currency on the chart is net positive. Euro, renminbi, sterling, Aussie dollar, yen, Swiss franc, Canadian dollar. All green. The dollar is the lone red bar. This is the first time on record that a major survey of public investors has shown more central banks planning to reduce dollar allocations than add to them. Meanwhile, 74% of respondents expect moderate or significantly lower US dollar holdings in global reserves over the next 5 years. A record 45% plan to add gold. The institutions that literally create fiat currency are telling you they don't want to hold the world's reserve fiat currency. They're rotating into gold, into euros, into renminbi, into anything that isn't tied to a $36 trillion debt pile with no credible plan to shrink it. The managers of sovereign wealth are positioning for a world where the dollar's dominance erodes steadily. That's not a prediction. It's a survey of the people making the actual allocation decisions.

Cashu launches public beta of Cashu Me native wallet for iOS and Android with NFC tap-to-pay and Bitcoin support.

Adam Back on Bitcoin's quantum resistance: "There are solutions. We implemented it in liquid. Yesterday one of our researchers implemented it in the hardware wallet. It's more of a perception than a reality."

"Bitcoin is the hurdle rate. It's outperformed other asset classes over the long duration. If it converges to be savings technology that can preserve your spending power, that's actually quite useful." - Adam Back

Rand Paul just announced Fauci will testify publicly before his committee on July 29th. This has been years in the making. Declassified documents now show Fauci didn't just fund gain-of-function research at the Wuhan lab, he personally shaped what the intelligence community told the American people about COVID's origins. 18 agencies relied on his guidance to form their assessments. Think about what that means. The guy with the deepest conflicts of interest in the entire pandemic was the same person guiding the intelligence apparatus on what to tell the public. That's not oversight. That's the fox designing the henhouse security system. Rand Paul has been the only senator consistently pressing this since 2021. The "gain-of-function" exchange in the Senate hearing wasn't a gotcha moment, it was the beginning of a paper trail that has only gotten more damning with every FOIA release and declassified document since. Public testimony under oath is different from closed-door briefings. Questions get asked on camera. Evasions get recorded. The American people get to watch in real time whether the man who told them "I represent science" can explain why he was simultaneously funding the research and controlling the narrative about its consequences.

Adam Back on first reading the Satoshi whitepaper. "He solved the problem a lot of clever people had been knocking their heads against for about a decade."

Adam on first reading the Satoshi whitepaper. "He solved the problem a lot of clever people had been knocking their heads against for about a decade."

President Donald Trump called on the U.S. Senate to pass the Clarity Act in honor of the late Sen. Lindsey Graham.

The war premium is back. Iran widened attacks on US bases in the Gulf. The US hit back. Strait of Hormuz traffic just fell to a multi-week low. Oil up 3%+ this morning. Hormuz is the chokepoint that matters, when traffic slows, markets price the risk that barrels show up late or don't show up at all. Energy gets expensive. Transport gets expensive. Production gets expensive. Inflation expectations rise. The Fed gets less room to cut. The Fed's own July report says headline PCE hit 4.1% in May with core at 3.4%. They've held rates at 3.50-3.75% all year. Another oil shock doesn't make that job easier. Meanwhile Treasury sanctioned an Iranian financier, three exchange houses, and a network of Hong Kong/UAE companies moving billions for sanctioned Iranian banks. Two chokepoints sitting next to each other, Iran squeezes physical energy through Hormuz, Washington squeezes the financial system through OFAC and the dollar. Ships need safe passage. Banks need permission. Trade gets crushed between geography and the ledger. Bitcoin can't clear Hormuz or stop a missile. But it gives individuals something the dollar system can't: a bearer asset outside the permission structure being weaponized on both sides. The war premium is back because the war never really left. Plan accordingly.

Nick Shirley found a single-story building in Queens claiming 7,000 patients and billing $12M Healthcare isn't broken, it's a racket running exactly as designed. Shirley keeps pulling threads the system hopes nobody touches.

Strategy now holds 843,775 BTC and just bumped its USD reserves by $450M to $3B

Trump's 2025 financial disclosure just dropped and the numbers are staggering. The sitting President of the United States personally earned $1.4 billion from crypto last year, more than every publicly traded US crypto company. That's more than Coinbase ($1.26B net income). More than CleanSpark, IREN, and Bitdeer combined. Meanwhile, companies like Core Scientific, Hut 8, Galaxy, and Bitfarms all posted losses. The breakdown: ~$791 million from World Liberty Financial (token sales, governance tokens) and ~$635 million in royalties from the $TRUMP memecoin through licensing deals. For context, the same memecoin that made Trump $635M has cost retail investors over $3.8 billion in trading losses. This is now creating a real political flashpoint. Senate Democrats are using the disclosure to push ethics provisions into the CLARITY Act, the bill that would define when crypto is a security vs a commodity. They want language explicitly preventing the president and his family from profiting off crypto while in office. The irony is thick. Trump went from calling Bitcoin a "scam" in his first term to running the most profitable crypto operation in America during his second. And now his financial disclosure is becoming the centerpiece of every political fight over crypto legislation in Congress.

Translating videos in real time as they play with GPT-Live.

Tech layoffs just hit a 5-year high. The information sector layoff rate is at 2.2%, highest since 2021. And this doesn't even count Amazon, Apple, Nvidia, or Tesla because of how BLS classifies them. AI is eating jobs faster than the economy can create new ones.

Strategy now holds 843,775 BTC worth $54 billion at an average cost of $75,653. Down 15% on their cost basis.

"We got conditioned to think there wasn't a way to achieve privacy online. That's just not true. Signal feels like iMessage, no difference, and yet you get perfect message-level privacy." @Seth For Privacy on breaking free from the surveillance conditioning.