Happy New Year to every Knots runner, every Ocean miner and basically to every non-NPC in Bitcoin preserving the cypherpunk values and freedom mindset! You’re the real ones! 🥂

2025 summed up in one picture. 🤌

Calm years produce podcasts. Turbulent years produce conviction. Be prepared for a turbulent 2026, fellow plebs. Stay humble and vigilant. Happy New Year!

2026 is the Year of the Fire Horse. Translation: speed, volatility, and impatience dominate. This is a year that rewards bold, independent action and punishes hesitation and centralized, slow-moving systems. The Horse is motion and rebellion; Fire adds ignition. Changes don’t unfold politely—they bolt. Expect political and institutional instability, abrupt policy shifts, protests, and moments that expose incompetence rather than create new problems. Control narratives weaken. Authority looks reactive. Economically, this favors people who can move fast and cut losses without sentimentality. Capital becomes restless. Speculation rises less from greed and more from frustration with stagnation. Old structures feel sluggish; intermediaries get bypassed. Culturally and technologically, decentralization gains momentum. Permissionless, sovereign, exit-friendly ideas resonate. Heavy-handed control tends to backfire. On a personal level, it’s a year of sharp pivots—relocations, career changes, breakups, startups. People act on long-suppressed misalignments. The risk is recklessness. Fire Horse energy burns hot but plans poorly. Winners pair speed with discipline. Bad year to be rigid. Good year to be light, prepared, and unencumbered.

If you want a clear explanation for the madness consuming the West, look no further than this video.

I’ve been living and breathing Bitcoin for the past five years, and I’m still amazed by how badly this genius invention has been corrupted by those who were supposed to guard and maintain it. If newcomers saw what long-time Bitcoiners see, I doubt they’d be so confident about participating in the network. Most would likely walk away. I don’t think they have the patience or the nerve to endure the governance dysfunction, despite Bitcoin’s clear technological superiority over everything else.

Someone resurrected the quantum FUD to divert attention from the real threat: spam being normalised. The diversion mostly worked, but it hit an unexpected nerve — Bitcoin’s long track record of protocol-level coin confiscation as a direct consequence of bug fixes. Turns out this isn’t rare at all. BIP-110 and The Cat aren’t setting any new precedent. They’re doing the same thing as before, just at a larger scale, because the inscription bug wasn’t fixed when it was first discovered. It was left open, then farmed by bad actors and affinity scammers for nearly three years. And BIP-110 is happening in less than a year, whether you like it or not. Cowabunga, motherfuckers.