"Bitcoin is the hurdle rate. It's outperformed other asset classes over the long duration. If it converges to be savings technology that can preserve your spending power, that's actually quite useful." - Adam Back

Rand Paul just announced Fauci will testify publicly before his committee on July 29th. This has been years in the making. Declassified documents now show Fauci didn't just fund gain-of-function research at the Wuhan lab, he personally shaped what the intelligence community told the American people about COVID's origins. 18 agencies relied on his guidance to form their assessments. Think about what that means. The guy with the deepest conflicts of interest in the entire pandemic was the same person guiding the intelligence apparatus on what to tell the public. That's not oversight. That's the fox designing the henhouse security system. Rand Paul has been the only senator consistently pressing this since 2021. The "gain-of-function" exchange in the Senate hearing wasn't a gotcha moment, it was the beginning of a paper trail that has only gotten more damning with every FOIA release and declassified document since. Public testimony under oath is different from closed-door briefings. Questions get asked on camera. Evasions get recorded. The American people get to watch in real time whether the man who told them "I represent science" can explain why he was simultaneously funding the research and controlling the narrative about its consequences.

Adam Back on first reading the Satoshi whitepaper. "He solved the problem a lot of clever people had been knocking their heads against for about a decade."

Adam on first reading the Satoshi whitepaper. "He solved the problem a lot of clever people had been knocking their heads against for about a decade."

President Donald Trump called on the U.S. Senate to pass the Clarity Act in honor of the late Sen. Lindsey Graham.

The war premium is back. Iran widened attacks on US bases in the Gulf. The US hit back. Strait of Hormuz traffic just fell to a multi-week low. Oil up 3%+ this morning. Hormuz is the chokepoint that matters, when traffic slows, markets price the risk that barrels show up late or don't show up at all. Energy gets expensive. Transport gets expensive. Production gets expensive. Inflation expectations rise. The Fed gets less room to cut. The Fed's own July report says headline PCE hit 4.1% in May with core at 3.4%. They've held rates at 3.50-3.75% all year. Another oil shock doesn't make that job easier. Meanwhile Treasury sanctioned an Iranian financier, three exchange houses, and a network of Hong Kong/UAE companies moving billions for sanctioned Iranian banks. Two chokepoints sitting next to each other, Iran squeezes physical energy through Hormuz, Washington squeezes the financial system through OFAC and the dollar. Ships need safe passage. Banks need permission. Trade gets crushed between geography and the ledger. Bitcoin can't clear Hormuz or stop a missile. But it gives individuals something the dollar system can't: a bearer asset outside the permission structure being weaponized on both sides. The war premium is back because the war never really left. Plan accordingly.

Nick Shirley found a single-story building in Queens claiming 7,000 patients and billing $12M Healthcare isn't broken, it's a racket running exactly as designed. Shirley keeps pulling threads the system hopes nobody touches.

Strategy now holds 843,775 BTC and just bumped its USD reserves by $450M to $3B

Trump's 2025 financial disclosure just dropped and the numbers are staggering. The sitting President of the United States personally earned $1.4 billion from crypto last year, more than every publicly traded US crypto company. That's more than Coinbase ($1.26B net income). More than CleanSpark, IREN, and Bitdeer combined. Meanwhile, companies like Core Scientific, Hut 8, Galaxy, and Bitfarms all posted losses. The breakdown: ~$791 million from World Liberty Financial (token sales, governance tokens) and ~$635 million in royalties from the $TRUMP memecoin through licensing deals. For context, the same memecoin that made Trump $635M has cost retail investors over $3.8 billion in trading losses. This is now creating a real political flashpoint. Senate Democrats are using the disclosure to push ethics provisions into the CLARITY Act, the bill that would define when crypto is a security vs a commodity. They want language explicitly preventing the president and his family from profiting off crypto while in office. The irony is thick. Trump went from calling Bitcoin a "scam" in his first term to running the most profitable crypto operation in America during his second. And now his financial disclosure is becoming the centerpiece of every political fight over crypto legislation in Congress.

Translating videos in real time as they play with GPT-Live.

Tech layoffs just hit a 5-year high. The information sector layoff rate is at 2.2%, highest since 2021. And this doesn't even count Amazon, Apple, Nvidia, or Tesla because of how BLS classifies them. AI is eating jobs faster than the economy can create new ones.

Strategy now holds 843,775 BTC worth $54 billion at an average cost of $75,653. Down 15% on their cost basis.

"We got conditioned to think there wasn't a way to achieve privacy online. That's just not true. Signal feels like iMessage, no difference, and yet you get perfect message-level privacy." @Seth For Privacy on breaking free from the surveillance conditioning.

"You can't dock code. Governments can shut us down, but you can download it and build it yourself. Now with AI, you just feed it into Claude and boom, it'll make you an app." (vikrantnyc) and @Seth For Privacy on why the fight against freedom tech is futile.

"I'm not afraid. You can't comment on every little thing. They're always putting out the lure and the press goes running to it." Jamie Dimon on why he doesn't chase every Trump headline.

Jamie Dimon on why Democrats lost, too far left, too anti-business, too much DEI. Says the fix isn't better messaging, it's a real leader emerging who just says "this is what we're doing."

"We, business, made a mistake by not getting more involved earlier. I do not believe that the problems of society will be fixed by politicians alone." Jamie Dimon says business leaders made a mistake by stepping back from public policy.

Jamie Dimon says AI-powered cyber is the single biggest risk to America. Axios says he's been briefed on capabilities that could enable a catastrophic attack this year with no defense.

"Everyone's already in messaging apps, text, photos, docs. So why not money? Why can't Bitcoin flow through the same system?" (vikrantnyc) on why Radar built Bitcoin payments into Signal instead of starting from scratch.

The Bitcoin Policy Institute just filed to intervene as a defendant in a New York lawsuit that should concern every bitcoiner who self-custodies. A pseudonymous plaintiff "Noah Doe" is trying to use New York's 1958 lost-and-found property law to claim ownership of ~39,069 dormant bitcoin addresses holding an estimated 3.8 million BTC (~$293B). The argument is if your bitcoin hasn't moved in 5+ years, anyone can download your public address, report it to the NYPD as "found property," and claim it's theirs. The addresses targeted include wallets linked to the Mt. Gox hack, the Counterparty burn address, and 21,000+ addresses attributed to Satoshi Nakamoto. Matthew Boyer is stepping in because they hold bitcoin long-term, just like millions of other HODLers, and this legal theory would criminalize the most basic principle of self-custody, holding. Inactivity is not abandonment. A public address is not "found property." And a law written for lost wallets and umbrellas has no business being applied to the Bitcoin blockchain. A hearing is set for July 14. The outcome could set major precedent for property rights in bitcoin.