I hear a lot of people in the Bitcoin space argue that intellectual property shouldn't exist. I get the philosophy. But I hold a U.S. patent, a federal trademark, and I'm currently building a legal tech platform. Without IP protection, I wouldn't be investing the time, money, and risk into building something original — because anyone with more resources could just copy it and outrun me. IP isn't perfect. But it's the reason independent creators and small builders can compete against companies with unlimited budgets. You don't have to love the system to acknowledge that without it, the little guy gets crushed. Full post:

Asaf David Fulks, Esq. | California Attorney

Insurance defense, litigation, business law, intellectual property, and digital assets. California Bar #343622.

#Bitcoin #IntellectualProperty #Patents #Entrepreneurship #Law

Building on my last post, I wrote about something I've been thinking about for a while — what 20 years in the recording studio actually taught me about practicing law. Reading people in depositions. Negotiating under pressure. Managing chaos when every deadline hits at once. The skills aren't that different. The stakes just got bigger. asaffulkslaw.com/blog/the-courtroom-is-just-a-different-studio

Before I became a defense attorney, I spent 20 years negotiating licensing deals, royalty agreements, and complex business contracts in the entertainment industry. People ask if that experience translates to law. My answer: every deposition I take, every MSJ opposition I draft, every mediation I prepare for — I'm drawing on two decades of reading people, managing risk, and closing deals. The courtroom is just a different studio.

Asaf David Fulks, Esq. | California Attorney

Insurance defense, litigation, business law, intellectual property, and digital assets. California Bar #343622.

Building on my last post about L402 — answering the obvious questions: "What AI would actually use this?" Agentic AI. Not chatbots — agents. Software that you give a task and it breaks it into subtasks and executes them autonomously. Claude Code, Codex, OpenClaw, Moltbook. Thousands of AI agents are already making phone calls, sending emails, deploying code. No human clicking buttons. "But I already pay for AI. Why would AI need money?" You pay FOR the AI. But the AI needs to pay for things WHILE it works. You say "build me an app with real-time bitcoin prices." The AI needs a premium data feed. Right now it stops. You sign up, get API keys, come back. With L402, the AI just pays. 50 sats. Keeps building. You set a budget, it spends within it. "But do APIs even accept Lightning payments?" Not many. Yet. This is the honest part. Lightning Labs just shipped the rails. The trains come next. Aperture lets any developer make their API accept autonomous AI payments — but adoption is early. Someone had to build the infrastructure first. That happened yesterday. The 402 status code has been in HTTP since the 90s. "Payment Required." A placeholder waiting for permissionless digital money to exist. 30 years later, it finally works.

The Agents Are Here and They Want to Transact: Powering the AI Economy with Lightning

For Agents 🤖 For Humans 👋 Today, we're open sourcing a new set of tools that give AI agents the skills to operate natively on the Lightning N...

#bitcoin #lightning #ai

Everyone's asking what breaks Bitcoin out. Here's what nobody's talking about: AI agents need money. Billions of them coming. They need to pay for compute, data, APIs. They can't open bank accounts. They can't do KYC. They can't sign up for Stripe. There's only one permissionless payment rail on Earth. Lightning Labs released tools yesterday for AI agents to run Lightning nodes and transact autonomously. L402 protocol. Machine pays machine. No human in the loop. The next wave of Bitcoin demand won't come from institutions. It'll come from machines.

The Agents Are Here and They Want to Transact: Powering the AI Economy with Lightning

For Agents 🤖 For Humans 👋 Today, we're open sourcing a new set of tools that give AI agents the skills to operate natively on the Lightning N...

#bitcoin #ai #lightning

Baruch Hashem for cheap sats. 12 spies saw the promised land. 10 panicked at the giants. 2 said "let's go." The 10 never made it. Joshua and Caleb inherited everything. Everyone sees the same chart. Most see danger. Few see the dip. #bitcoin #torah

Bitcoin produces 144 blocks per day. One approximately every 10 minutes. קדם (kedem) = 144. Kedem means "ancient" — from the beginning. 10 utterances created the world in בְּרֵאשִׁית (Bereshit) — "in the beginning." 10 commandments — the original protocol. Given once on two blocks of stone. Never changed. Sound money is kedem. Fiat is the experiment. In Hebrew, to progress — להתקדם (lehitkadem) — comes from the same root as ancient קדם. 144 blocks. 10 minutes. Ancient principles moving forward — block by block. #bitcoin #torah

"You shall not have differing weights... all who do such things are an abomination (תועבה) to the LORD." — Deuteronomy 25:13-16 Toevah. One of the harshest words in Torah. This is what God calls a weight that changes. Money is how we measure value. A currency that loses purchasing power is a weight that changes. Gematria of תועבה (abomination) = 483. Gematria of בלי אמת (without truth) = 483. The dollar has lost 97% of its value since 1913. Money without truth — an abomination. Bitcoin is 21 million. Unchanging. A just weight. #bitcoin #torah

At the burning bush, Moses asked God His name. The answer: אהיה אשר אהיה — "I Will Be What I Will Be." Gematria of אהיה (Ehyeh) = 21. This name wasn't revealed during peace. It came right before liberation — the exodus from Egypt. From slavery to sovereignty. And it's future tense. Not "I was." Not "I am." I Will Be. Existence that no Pharaoh can permit or deny. There will only ever be 21 million Bitcoin. Not what money was. Not what the Fed allows it to be. What it will be. From fiat slavery to monetary sovereignty. The gematria of liberation is 21. #bitcoin #torah

Samourai Wallet — Bitcoin's most popular privacy wallet — is dead. Both founders now in federal prison. Rodriguez got 5 years, Hill got 4. They pleaded guilty to operating an unlicensed money transmitting business. The feds argued Whirlpool (their coinjoin mixing tool) was a money laundering operation. DOJ confirmed the seized Bitcoin stays in the Strategic Reserve. Sell it, they profit. Hodl it, they profit. Either way, government stacks off prosecuting Bitcoiners. But the precedent is the bigger problem. The government's position: if you build a tool that mixes Bitcoin transactions and collect fees, you're a money transmitter. No custodial control required. Rodriguez warned before reporting to prison: "Bitcoin miners will be the next targets" if this logic holds. Mining pools collect fees. Mining pools combine outputs from multiple sources. If coinjoin is money transmission, what's pooled mining?

Difficulty drops nearly 5% on January 23. Largest downward adjustment since the October highs. For the profit miners: The squeeze is forcing capitulation. Inefficient operations are exiting, survivors mine the same blocks with less competition. Margins improve. This is how the cycle works. For the plebs solo mining at a loss: You're not doing it wrong. You're doing it right. Every independent miner — even one running a single ASIC in a garage — is a vote for decentralization. You're not trying to win the lottery. You're making the network harder to capture. When Samourai gets shut down, when pool operators face legal pressure, when regulators go after coordinators — solo miners are the backstop. No company to subpoena. No coordinator to arrest. Just hashpower pointed at the chain. Profit mining is a business. Solo mining is ideology. Both matter. But only one of them can't be turned off with a court order. Keep hashing.

Excited to have accepted an associate attorney position at Sellar, Hazard & Lucia. New chapter in wine country 🍷

@Luke Dashjr has chimed in (thank you sir) but left me with more questions than answers... 1) How can there be no such thing as best difficulty if it's in every bitaxe, public pool and CK pool? 2) This makes no grammatical sense. Perhaps 'ever' is an acronym? #asknostr #datum #solomining

Apparently there is "no such thing as best difficulty"

Ok, next #Datum question: how in the world do you create a custom block template? My coinbaser page just shows my mining address #asknostr

Trying to make sense of these Datum numbers. Always though the DiffA number was the best difficulty, but it seems it's just the VDiff (min difficulty) times accepted shares (A). Is this correct, and if so is there a way to tell best difficulty in Datum? Not that best difficulty really matters unless it's greater than the network difficulty, but would be nice to know #asknostr

Good explanation about Bitcoin mining difficulty

Difficulty | What is the Difficulty in Bitcoin?

A simple explanation of what difficulty is in Bitcoin, and how it

Anyone know how to get #umbrel os to recognize and utilize gpu's for AI compute tasks? Or perhaps there's another Linux based OS that can do this which I can easily connect to remotely from my phone? #asknostr