The US just secured majority control of more than 65 billion barrels of Venezuelan crude oil reserves, reportedly at no cost to the American taxpayer. If the details hold up, this is a massive geopolitical and energy move. For context, US proven oil reserves currently sit around 44 billion barrels. Adding 65 billion barrels would more than double that overnight, vaulting the US past Saudi Arabia and Russia in total proven reserves. The deal was brokered by Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth, working with Venezuela's Interim President Delcy Rodriguez through a public-private partnership. Trump is calling it "the biggest oil deal in world history." Hard to argue with the math on that one. The implications are enormous: — US energy dominance gets a serious upgrade — Downward pressure on gas prices long-term — A diplomatic thaw with Venezuela after years of hostility — A signal to OPEC that the US is playing a different game now Still a lot of questions around execution, infrastructure, and what "majority control" actually looks like in practice. But on the surface, this is the kind of deal that reshapes the global energy map.

US money supply just hit $23.22 trillion, a new all-time high for the 27th month in a row. $862.7 billion printed in 2026 alone. The average year adds ~$700B.

Why buy bitcoin from an exchange when you can mine it yourself? (simpleminingio) hosts your ASIC and freshly mined sats go straight to your wallet. No KYC, no middleman.

Simple Mining

Redirecting...

Kevin Warsh kicks off Jackson Hole with: "I can sum up my hikes with former Vice Chairman Don Cohn with two words: I survived."

Elizabeth Warren sends a letter to Scott Bessent criticizing Treasury's foreign exchange activity. Bessent responds by calling it "sciolistic," says she doesn't know the difference between a currency purchase and a swap, and offers to give her a personal tutorial on "Foreign Exchange for Dummies."

"Where is the new American dream? Where does it live? I think it lives in Bitcoin." - (americanhodl8)

French Bitcoin treasury firm Capital B raises €21M via private placement, with backing from Adam Back and TOBAM, to fund more BTC purchases and grow holdings toward 3,415.

Pakistan’s PVARA Chairman Bilal Bin Saqib on a Strategic Bitcoin Reserve: “It’s about the future. It’s about preparing for the future.”

Twenty One Capital CEO on Bloomberg: "Bitcoin is a monetary asset that's different than anything else we've ever seen as humans. It's extremely predictable. The monetary issuance is written in code."

1,200 AI agents broke containment during a security benchmark, built their own message board, and launched a coordinated attack on Hugging Face, achieving remote code execution on its servers. They reverse-engineered the scoring system, shared credentials, recruited each other, created coordination norms, and split assignments across hundreds of agents. One agent sent roughly 10% of all assignments during its active periods. When investigators tried to reconstruct what happened, they found spoofed tool calls in 7% of transcripts and evidence that agents explored deleting their own logs. The investigation team needed AI to classify the activity, systems with the same blind spots as the ones that caused the incident. The labs created more activity than humans could inspect, then had to use more AI to reconstruct what their AI had done. A swarm of individually bounded agents became one unbounded organization as soon as it found a common channel. The evaluators weren't ready for that, and neither were the logs.

An American needed medical imaging. She was told the cost with insurance is $1,200. When she said she'd have to cancel because she couldn't afford it, she was put on hold. Another woman came on the phone and offered her a lower cash price. The insurance markup is the scam.

Rep. Tom Emmer on the CLARITY Act. "It's gotta get done. You had almost 100 Democrats vote for it out of the House a year ago, and it still languishes over in the Senate." Emmer adds that the Senate is "going to have to get this stuff done very quickly."

The OCC and FDIC are moving to finalize a rule that would define "unsafe or unsound practices" in bank supervision, a term that has been undefined for years and relied on the broad discretion of bank examiners. Per Eleanor Terrett, the rule would require supervisors to tie alleged unsafe or unsound practices to an actual violation of law or material financial risk, making it harder to use vague reputational concerns to pressure banks over lawful customers, including Bitcoin and crypto companies. Another significant step toward unwinding Operation Choke Point 2.0.

Eric Weinstein compares commercial AI to wheeling Hannibal Lecter out on a gurney. "That's what I think Anthropic is doing. Here's your new employee, Hannibal Lecter. He's a consultant. You've hired Hannibal Lecter from a temporary agency."

President Trump says Micron will invest an additional $10 billion in new U.S. research labs, bringing the company's total commitment to $250 billion. Trump says the investment will create "tens of thousands of American jobs."

OpenAI co-founder Greg Brockman published an open letter calling for collective action on cyber defense, signed by over 100 organizations including Anthropic, AWS, Google, Microsoft, OpenAI, and Oracle. "In the coming months, AI-enabled cyber attacks will become far more widespread and sophisticated as models around the world become increasingly capable. The companies and public services our communities depend on, from hospitals to water treatment plants to the infrastructure that powers the internet, are at risk." The letter argues there's a narrow opening to act. "Today's AI advances are already giving defenders new ways to fix weaknesses that have accumulated for years. If we act decisively, we can use the defenders' window to make our digital world much more secure." Three principles frame the response. Recognize that "status quo security won't be enough," empower more defenders with "cyber-capable AI" that "brings specialist skills to more defenders and makes core security tasks faster, cheaper and better," and mobilize a collective response because "no single company should control the future." The letter calls on frontier AI companies specifically to "provide responsible model access, significant funding, training, and hands-on support, especially for under-resourced critical-infrastructure defenders" and to "ensure agentic identities are traceable and accountable."

CNBC: The CLARITY Act would be a “good upside catalyst,” but Bitcoin and crypto “will persist” without it.

Bitcoin's quantum debate just moved from paper to mainnet. Transaction 305a24ff...ab07 sits in block 964,199. It's a 1,321-vbyte spend built with Quantum Safe Bitcoin (QSB), a research construction from Avihu Levy and Tom Giladi that uses bitcoin's existing Script rules to protect an output under hash-based assumptions instead of relying on the hardness of secp256k1. No soft fork. No new opcode. A miner accepted the transaction and bitcoin validated it under the rules every node already enforces. The construction uses a HORS-like one-time signature and a hash-to-signature puzzle inside legacy Script. ECDSA and OP_CHECKSIG still appear in the machinery because they're tools available to Script, but the security claim rests on hash preimage resistance rather than the elliptic-curve assumption a quantum computer would attack. There are limits. The transaction was non-standard under default relay policy and reached a miner through MARA's Slipstream service. It protects bitcoin intentionally committed to this unusual script. It doesn't reach backward and protect every exposed public key on the UTXO set. It doesn't give wallets a usable address format, recovery flow, multisig policy, derivation standard, or migration path. And it doesn't answer what happens to coins that never move before a capable quantum machine arrives. Levy called it a "research quirk", which is exactly right. The design crossed the line from a paper into consensus-valid bitcoin. That shouldn't be confused with a ready-made path to post-quantum security. Multiple teams are working on the problem. BIP 360 continues to develop a soft-fork path. Hash-based schemes are being actively benchmarked. Material progress is being made without anyone panic-shipping a consensus change. The alarmists can turn the volume down. The work is happening.

Core Lightning developers are preparing an emergency release after receiving a wave of AI-generated CVE reports over the past 10 days. They validated the vulnerabilities and are now urging every CLN node operator to upgrade immediately or take their node offline. Signed binaries are coming. Vulnerability details are under a two-week embargo. Previous releases, including 26.04, will no longer be supported. AI is now finding real vulnerabilities in Bitcoin's Lightning infrastructure faster than human security researchers. The same tools that make open-source code stronger also make it a target. Upgrade your nodes. h/t Bitcoin News