Local AI on a laptop is improving more than twice as fast as Moore's Law. The most expensive MacBook Pro you could buy in May 2024 had 128 GB of unified memory. Two years later, the hardware is identical. But the smartest open-weight model you can run on it went from a score of 10 to 47 on the AI Intelligence Index. A 4.7x improvement in 24 months on completely unchanged hardware. Moore's Law doubles transistor count every 24 months. Local open-weight AI is doubling capability every 10.7 months. The hardware ceiling barely moved. The software blew through it.

TFTC 744 w/ (geraldglickman): "In the next hour of this conversation, at least 3,000 Americans will be victims of identity theft. Through no fault of their own." We discuss: ⚡ Broken identity model ⚡ Window closing on privacy ⚡ How Bitcoiners save digital privacy

Private credit was sold as the safer, smarter alternative to traditional banking. Now Apollo is reportedly weighing the sale of a $3B credit fund as defaults climb. MidCap Financial’s default rate jumped from 3.9% to 5.3% in one quarter, posted a $61M net loss, and trades at 85% of NAV. Apollo already restructured $9B from another fund in January. Its private BDC saw 11% redemption requests last quarter. The FSB is warning about private credit vulnerabilities. Shadow banking was not safer. It was leveraged lending with less oversight and worse liquidity. The cracks are showing.

Only 25% of US renters expect to buy a home in the next 5 years. Lowest ever recorded. In 2013, 57% of young adults expected to buy.

ChatGPT launched in November 2022. In the three years since, annual spending on data center construction in the US went from $13.8 billion to $41.2 billion. A 200% increase while virtually all other construction activity slowed. The number of hyperscale data centers in the US doubled between 2019 and 2024. As of March 2026, 3,069 data centers operate across the country with another 1,489 planned or under construction. The disclosed project pipeline jumped from 93 gigawatts at the end of 2024 to 241 gigawatts by the end of 2025. Individual facilities are reaching a scale that did not exist three years ago. OpenAI's Stargate campus in Texas went from empty dirt to 100,000 NVIDIA chips running in just over a year. Amazon's campus in Indiana went from soybean farms to 525 megawatts operational in the same timeframe, with plans for 30 buildings totaling 6.9 million square feet. Microsoft built 2 gigawatts of capacity globally in a single year and still had to turn customers away. The last time the US saw an industrial buildout at this pace was the railroad expansion of the 1860s and 1870s. The difference is this one is happening faster.

President Trump rejects Iran’s response to the U.S. 14-point peace proposal, calling it “TOTALLY UNACCEPTABLE.”

The same government that arrested Telegram's founder for protecting encryption is now charging X with violating the secrecy of electronic communications. France arrested Pavel Durov in 2024 for refusing to backdoor Telegram's encrypted messages. Now they're prosecuting Musk's X on nine charges including illegally collecting personal data, processing it without proper security, and extracting data from automated systems. Three weeks ago, France's own government ID agency was breached. Up to 19 million citizen records were stolen and sold on hacker forums by a 15-year-old. Names, emails, dates of birth, addresses, phone numbers. The French government collected all that data and failed to secure it. The US Department of Justice refused to cooperate with the French investigation, calling it a "politically charged criminal proceeding." Governments don't prosecute tech companies over data privacy because they care about your privacy. They do it because they want to control who gets to collect the data.

Anthropic CEO: "We are working as quickly as possible to provide more compute."

"Gold and Bitcoin have almost the same fundamental message. They're just competing for the same slug of the portfolio." Eric Balchunas compares the two camps to Step Brothers. Fighting over the same thing, but one day they'll realize they're on the same side.

"Bitcoin pisses off high priests and that's a positive thing." Eric Balchunas on why Bitcoin irritating the right people is a bullish signal. The money supply went from $11 trillion to $23 trillion in 10 years. If DOGE couldn't stop the spending, nothing will.

Individuals sold 750,000 bitcoin in 16 months while institutions bought a million. Eric Balchunas calls it a "silent IPO." "Weren't you in it for the scarcity and the debasement hedge? Don't those things still exist even if boomers are in it?"

1 in 3 American men are not working and not looking for work according to Labor Department data.

TFTC 743 w/ Eric Balchunas: "In the past 16 months, corporations and ETFs bought 1 million Bitcoin. Individuals sold 750,000. That's a silent IPO. That's why the price went down 45%." We discuss: ⚡ The OG selloff ⚡ What Saylor was forced to address ⚡ The macro engine

Jeffrey Epstein briefed the U.S. Treasury Department on Bitcoin in August 2014 while the Obama administration was negotiating Iran's nuclear deal and preparing a new round of sanctions. According to DOJ-released emails now searchable on Jmail, Treasury's Office of Terrorist Financing and Financial Crimes brought Epstein in to discuss how cryptocurrencies could be used for arms shipments and nuclear proliferation payments. Epstein described the officials as "not very bright, very opinionated" in an email to Joi Ito, the director of MIT's Media Lab. The same day, Epstein met privately with Deputy Secretary of State William Burns, who was leading the Iran nuclear negotiations. Burns later became CIA director under Biden. The next day, Epstein emailed Peter Thiel offering to connect him with Burns. This was not a one-off. Epstein had been embedded in early Bitcoin development since at least 2011, when he tried to meet Gavin Andresen ahead of Andresen's CIA briefing. He invested $3 million in Coinbase and $500,000 in Blockstream. He corresponded with Amir Taaki, one of the first Bitcoin exchange operators. He was in contact with Brock Pierce, co-founder of Tether, before the Treasury meeting. Today, Iran collects cryptocurrency tolls from ships passing through the Strait of Hormuz. Roughly $8 billion flowed through Iranian crypto exchanges last year. The IRGC moves billions more through Binance. The Treasury Department is now seizing hundreds of millions in Tether from Iranian entities. The same government that brought Epstein in to explain Bitcoin's risks in 2014 is now chasing the exact scenario he was consulted about.

Brian Armstrong says Coinbase's exchange went down last night because an AWS data center room overheated when multiple chillers failed. "Our centralized exchange did not [survive the outage]. Exchanges have unique architectures that optimize for latency and co-location of clients." "Given this incident, we'll revisit these tradeoffs to ensure we're giving you the best possible venue to trade."

"I can look my kids in the eye and say that I did what I thought was right and actually defend myself." The incentives to sell out have never been higher. The reasons not to haven't changed.

Moderna's stock jumped 10% this week after a hantavirus outbreak on the MV Hondius cruise ship killed three passengers crossing the Atlantic. Almost immediately, headlines surfaced that Moderna has been developing an mRNA hantavirus vaccine. In September 2023, Moderna partnered with Korea University's Vaccine Innovation Center through its mRNA Access Program to develop an mRNA-based hantavirus vaccine. By February 2025, preclinical results showed the vaccine prevented hantavirus infection in mice. But as of April 2026, human clinical trials had been on hold for over a year because the Korean research team couldn't secure the $6.5 to $13 million needed for clinical-grade material. Then in April 2026, a cruise ship leaving Argentina had an outbreak. Three dead. Passengers scattered across multiple countries. Hantavirus headlines everywhere. The vaccine has never been tested in humans. It is still preclinical. No Phase 1 trial has started. But Moderna's stock surged anyway, and analysts hiked price targets based on the mere existence of early-stage research meeting a fear cycle. There is no FDA-approved hantavirus vaccine. Hantavirus kills over 30% in severe cases. The WHO classified it as a potential "Disease X" pathogen. Moderna booked $37.8 billion in revenue from COVID vaccines in 2021 and 2022 alone, and has been searching for the next growth engine as that revenue collapsed to $6.8 billion by 2023. The collaboration with the Korean lab and the U.S. Army Medical Research Institute (USAMRIID) is real. The incentive structure is worth examining: early-stage research sits dormant for years waiting on $13 million in funding, an outbreak generates fear, and the stock moves before a single human has been vaccinated. A preclinical mouse study moved a multibillion-dollar stock 10% because of headlines. That tells you everything about how pharma incentives work during a crisis.

"We've never had more people that care about Bitcoin as freedom money. But percentage-wise, it's never been lower." Saylor was asked on the earnings call if he's worried about Bitcoin if the cypherpunk base loses interest now that the suits are in the castle.

The Swiss Bitcoin reserve initiative is running out of time. Campaigners have gathered roughly half the 100,000 signatures needed to force a national referendum on whether the Swiss National Bank should hold Bitcoin in its reserves, with only weeks left on the deadline. Switzerland already has indirect exposure through its massive holdings in companies like Strategy and Tesla via the SNB's equity portfolio. The irony is that the central bank is already accumulating Bitcoin exposure whether it wants to or not. The signature shortfall says less about Bitcoin's viability as a reserve asset and more about the difficulty of grassroots political campaigns in a country where direct democracy sets a high bar by design. 100,000 signatures in a nation of 8.8 million is not trivial. Either way, the conversation has been planted. Even failed referendums in Switzerland have a way of resurfacing once the conditions change. And the conditions are changing fast.

President Trump announces a three-day ceasefire in the Russia-Ukraine war from May 9-11. The deal includes suspension of all kinetic activity and a prisoner swap of 1,000 from each side.