Lessons from a Decade building on Bitcoin & Decentralized Protocols 1️⃣ Self‑custody isn’t an afterthought – it’s the core security model - Design every component assuming the user holds the private keys. - Eliminate hidden custodial layers; expose clear key‑management flows and recovery paths. 2️⃣ Unilateral exit must be baked in, not bolted on - On‑chain settlements and Lightning withdrawals should be executable by a single party without third‑party approval. - Expose an immediate on‑chain close or Lightning force‑close, preserving funds even if the service disappears. 3️⃣ UX = abstraction of complexity, not removal of it - Hide protocol jargon behind intuitive actions while keeping the underlying guarantees visible in the UI for power users. - Provide progressive disclosure: basic flow first, advanced settings on demand. 4️⃣ Security is non‑negotiable - Threat‑model from day 0: key leakage, replay attacks, fee‑sniping, and network partitioning. - Adopt formal verification where feasible (e.g., script validation, channel state machines). - Run continuous fuzzing and audit pipelines; treat every new dependency as a potential attack surface. 5️⃣ Assume the network will fail – design for fault tolerance - Graceful degradation: fallback to on‑chain paths when Lightning nodes are unreachable. - Stateless services where possible; store only immutable transaction data. - Redundant routing and multi‑path payments mitigate temporary topology failures. Bottom line: Build for self‑custody, unilateral exit, and inevitable network disruptions. Simplicity in the UI masks the rigorous, fault‑tolerant architecture underneath—because security and resilience are the only things that survive the long run.

Agreed. Discovered that world. It is crazy how it is expensive either to participate or to share something. Everything it is turned for marketing over disruption.

Today I just replaced my website blog post system by coding a simple Nostr client. Awesome how slick and powerful it is.

With the rise of AI on social media , one day we will pay human to create content… and Nostr is already building the rails

I’ve spent a long time in this space, and one thing is clear to me: Bitcoin didn’t “fix money.” It fixed something more specific — the need to ask permission to settle value. Every system before it broke at the same point: someone had the final say. And final say always turns into leverage. Bitcoin changed the incentives. Control became fragile. Censorship became costly. But that’s just one layer. Governance, credit, RWAs, stablecoins — those still need serious engineering. The next decade won’t be about BTC vs fiat. It’ll be about permissioned systems vs protocol-native ones. That’s where the real work is.

Love that kind of initiative to project Bitcoin usage beyond just payment and resolving a painful subject for investor while supporting disruptive project. I do appreciate the Bitcoin only as it is anchoring more into the ecosystem.

French lawmakers just passed a bill that would ban social media by under 15s. This raises a lot of concern, as this comes perfectly with the agency of next presidential campaign starting in the next September 2026, the same date as the bill's application date. Strange timing...! Thing is to ban social media for teenagers, this will require massive identification either through AI, identity method (KYC like), trusted certification issuers. The problem is even bigger as this will not only check ID of teenagers but every French citizen to make sure they will be above the age. IMO, everything is in place to prevent foreign interference for the election campaign, and shut the most freedom network and go in the censorship. Fortunately, Nostr is there, completely decentralized, free, p2p. This will become the only alternative long term for freedom of speech and opinion.

New to nostr and experimenting for a couple of days. I’m really amaze of powerful and how disruptive it is. Particularly with Primal with zap integration. All social network app should look like this, being able to tip publishers, content creator to reward useful content. It would be great to see tools like extension plugged into existing social app to onboard more users to Nostr and support zaps based on their content while no exiting at first the app they know, they use for couple of years. Could do something like that in near future…

Bitcoin is powerful not because it can change — but because it refuses to break. Its real innovation isn’t speed, features, or flexibility. It’s constraint. It has a powerful execution layer because it enforces what must last. Not flexibility. Not velocity. Determinism. Every serious execution environment needs hard guarantees: - Supply cannot be altered - Past state cannot be rewritten - Rules cannot be hot-patched under pressure Bitcoin provides these at the base layer. Fixed supply is not an idea — it’s enforced by consensus. Immutability is not a promise — it’s verified by every node. Monetary policy is not governance — it’s execution. This is why Bitcoin works as a settlement and execution anchor. You can build faster systems on top. You can add expressiveness off-chain. You can optimize UX, throughput, and latency. But the execution root stays boring, slow, and extremely hard to change. That’s the point. At the base layer, innovation is risk. Stability is the feature. Bitcoin doesn’t maximize what you can do. It minimizes what cannot happen. And that’s why everything else can safely execute on top of it.

I’ve been thinking recently how Lightning became an interoperability layer for Bitcoin apps. It can been seen as a common language, a share gateway for Bitcoin apps to communicate. Whether you are building on state chains, or other l2 network solutions. It allows apps to pick to right tool and build your own infrastructure, make liquidity and scalability way more easier, without blocking your funds and your tech debt into an ecosystem. Really bullish how lightning can scale and bring way more usage to deliver awesome new Bitcoin usage and adoption.

Most people “learn blockchain” by reading. I learned it by building apps… then protocols. And once you’ve built blockchains from the inside, you stop falling for hype. That’s how I ended up in Bitcoin. Not because it’s trendy — because it’s engineered to survive reality. Build > narratives.

Still impressed how deep Bitcoin is in terms of usage and ideas. Discovered RWA started on 2012 with colored coins. The hype we are seeing for the last 2 years about ETH and Solana is just marketing and ease. But the real innovation came way earlier back then, with tokens backing bonds, NFT, shares, properties , etc…

People still think Bitcoin = money. But they’re missing the real shift. Bitcoin is becoming the most secure, censorship-resistant application layer in the world: • Immutable data anchoring • Tokenization with real settlement guarantees • BTCfi without trust trade-offs • L2s inheriting Bitcoin’s security Ethereum got devs early. Solana got them fast. Bitcoin is getting them right. The “Bitcoin can’t do more” narrative is collapsing. A new design space is opening—built on the strongest settlement layer ever created. If you’re a founder or investor: look again at Bitcoin. Innovation isn’t leaving. It’s coming home.

Most people still misunderstand Bitcoin smart contracts because they compare them to the EVM. But Bitcoin never aimed for “maximum expressiveness.” It aimed for maximum reliability — and that leads to a completely different category of financial engineering. The surprising truth: Bitcoin already powers smart-contract-like systems used in custody, marketplaces, asset issuance, governance, and BTCfi — just built with tools optimized for safety, auditability, and long-term resilience.

The Business Case for Bitcoin Infrastructure Most companies still treat Bitcoin as an asset. Few see it for what it really is — a global, incorruptible infrastructure layer. It’s the only network that’s survived 15 years of attack without downtime. No admins, no bailouts, no manipulation. For businesses building on cloud platforms or permissioned chains, that’s a wake-up call: your trust is still rented. Bitcoin lets you own it. You can anchor proofs, transactions, or agreements to a network that no single party can alter. That’s not ideology — that’s a competitive advantage. Because in a world of data breaches and compliance risks, provable integrity becomes a market differentiator. 👉 If your business depends on trust, start treating Bitcoin as infrastructure — not speculation.

Tokenization on Bitcoin isn’t hype — it’s finally real. Most people still think “tokenization” = alt L1s. Meanwhile, Bitcoin has quietly built the strongest rails for issuing and moving real assets: • Taproot Assets → Lightning-native stablecoins + RWA • Spark BTKN → enterprise-grade issuance + APIs • Stacks FT/NFT → programmability anchored to Bitcoin • RGB → client-side validated assets (private, scalable) • Ordinals → indexing + metadata layer powering registries & proofs The infrastructure is here. Stablecoins, identity, registries, RWA… all doable on Bitcoin today. Bitcoin won settlement years ago. Now it’s winning issuance — and the market hasn’t woken up yet. #Bitcoin #TaprootAssets #RGB #Stacks #Ordinals #Lightning

⚡️ Lightning isn’t dead. It’s becoming the interoperability layer Bitcoin actually needed. Statechains like Spark and Ark are rising fast. Each with different trade-offs. Each powerful on its own. Lightning is the glue: message bus, liquidity fabric, exchange layer. Statechains specialize. Lightning connects them. This is Bitcoin scaling like the internet — not a monolith. Read more here: https://hexquarter.com/blog/bitcoin-app-stack-2025