Paraguay isn’t growing fast by luck. 36% of students want to found a firm at graduation, 46% within five years (world: 15% / 28%). One in three is already trying. One in six already runs one. Now compound that with the fact that the median age is 29. Young country. Low, simple taxes. Light rules. Cheap power. This country will continue to grow over the next 10–20 years.

All the recent exploits in the open-source Bitcoin ecosystem make me wonder about the future of FOSS development. In its current form, it’s too exposed. It isn’t only well-intentioned people watching the code. Attackers now scan GitHub for vulnerabilities and exploit them before maintainers can ship a fix. Developers are under unhealthy pressure. They know the enemy is watching and will abuse any crack left in the code, and they’ll do it lightning fast. That’s why they have to improvise with private encrypted side channels to talk about bugs, and with patches released before the code itself, so users can update without broadcasting the scope of the changes. I think this is going to be one of the hardest problems for the space. In this case, transparency doesn’t work in our favor. We are in the middle of the Great Hardening, and I am still convinced open source is the right way to build software. We just have to stay one step ahead of attackers and have the right tools to make the code literally bulletproof before it ever reaches production.

We just launched a new website for @Bitcoin Paraguay. Finally, the community has a page that matches the scale of what’s being built here. Let’s go! ⚡️🚀

Bitcoin Paraguay

Bitcoin Paraguay · La comunidad bitcoin-only de Paraguay

Comunidad bitcoin-only de Paraguay. Meetups mensuales en Asunción, talleres para principiantes, BitDevs, caminatas y una economía circular en con...

Some people might be surprised seeing Asunción so high on this list. No sea, no mountains, no fancy lifestyle, and horrible infrastructure. Still, every year more and more people are coming. Why? Paraguay offers something pretty rare - a residency that’s relatively easy to maintain, a simple territorial tax system, good weather, and still pretty good value for the buck. A few years ago it was one of those places people struggled to pronounce or find on a map. That’s changed. Now it’s a known name, at least in the nomad community. I just hope it doesn’t meet the same fate as some other once-great DN hubs.

The last few weeks in Bitcoin have been tough… We’re watching a real paradigm shift. AI capabilities are exploding and becoming accessible to almost anyone. Bitcoin’s strict open-source culture and clear financial incentives made it the first obvious target. First of many. Now imagine the banks, stock exchanges and government systems still running decades-old human-written software packed with vulnerabilities - code that’s extremely hard to replace or refactor in any reasonable timeframe. Closed source bought them time. It didn’t buy them immunity. We have to brace for intensifying cyber wars and a rapidly growing chance that standard financial rails, banks, institutions and companies take real damage. It’s no longer “if.” It’s “when.” Bitcoin is going through massive hardening right now. I expect months, maybe even years, before things stabilize and the whole ecosystem adopts new security standards. When it does, Bitcoin will come out stronger than ever and better prepared for the AI age than anything else. Banks and governments? I’m not so sure...