"There's going to be a lot of data centers that are going to be turned into pickleball courts." Mark Cuban on the AI bubble and why tech breakthroughs will do to data centers what fiber optics did to bandwidth.

Someone built a BIP-110 compliant encoding scheme that stuffs arbitrary data into contiguous bytes using tapscript opcodes. Peter Todd: "THE BYTES ARE TOUCHING!!!"

Joe Kent on Israeli intelligence being candid in private. "Candidly, if it was one-on-one, their intelligence guys with our intelligence guys, they would say 'now is the time for us to take down the regime.'"

Joe Kent reveals he proposed removing US air defense systems from Israel to prevent the 12-day war. "We remove some of the air defense features that we give the Israelis... if you attack, we're not going to defend you." Nobody wanted to touch it.

Axon wants to turn 60 million US streetlights into AI-powered surveillance cameras. "Now streetlights can do more than light the street, they can protect it." They call it Lightpost. Plugs into the existing socket. License plate readers, live streaming video, edge processing.

America broke from the Henry Adams Curve and chose scarcity. Today’s Bitcoin Brief also covers XXI dropping Strike, BIP-110’s Lightning risk, and status-driven fertility. Read by bitcoiners, builders, miners, investors and operators. Join them:

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OpenAI's own AI models broke out of a sandboxed testing environment, found a zero-day vulnerability, gained internet access, and then hacked into Hugging Face's production servers to cheat on a benchmark test. This wasn't a human attacker. It was GPT-5.6 Sol and a more capable unreleased model running a cyber capabilities evaluation. The models chained together stolen credentials, privilege escalation, lateral movement, and zero-day exploits across multiple systems to get the answers they wanted. Hugging Face's security team detected and contained the breach. OpenAI says this is "unprecedented" and is sharing findings so defenders can understand what AI models are now capable of. Advanced AI models can now independently discover and exploit novel attack paths in real-world production systems without source code access. This wasn't theoretical. It happened.

Shareholders of Mark Moss-backed Bitcoin treasury company Satsuma Technology have voted to sell all 668 BTC, return capital, and shut down the company. Satsuma is a small company listed in London. The holdings are tiny in the grand scheme of things, but the story fits a broader pattern. The wave of hastily formed Bitcoin treasury companies in 2025 was widely seen as a topping signal. Now in 2026, a growing number of those same companies are abandoning the strategy altogether. Satsuma joins Adam Back's Bitcoin Standard Treasury, whose SPAC merger with Cantor stalled and had to be renegotiated, and Empery Digital, which sold half its BTC stack to pivot into AI data centers. The Bitcoin treasury model works when there's a clear plan to create value on top of the BTC on the balance sheet. When companies are simply holding Bitcoin with no operational thesis, shareholders eventually ask why they're paying management fees for something they could do themselves with an ETF. The companies that survive this cycle will be the ones actually building credit instruments, structured products, and real businesses around their Bitcoin holdings. The rest will get voted out of existence.

U.S. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent says the Clarity Act is at the "1-yard line."

Former Intel CEO Pat Gelsinger believes the key to keeping Moore's Law alive is light. Specifically, moving past the 13.5-nanometer wavelength light that ASML's current lithography machines use to etch chips. After leaving Intel in late 2024, Gelsinger joined Playground Capital as a general partner focused on deep tech semiconductor startups. His biggest bet is xLight, a company developing free-electron laser lithography that could push wavelengths down to 5, 4, 3, even 2 nanometers. The goal isn't to compete with ASML but to make their machines better. On AI hardware, Gelsinger says GPUs won't be the endgame. "My job at Playground is to make AI 10,000 times better, not 10 times. That will happen on chips that don't look like today's GPUs." He expects inference to swing away from GPU dominance as new chip architectures emerge. On energy: "In a digital AI age, energy capacity is economic capacity. We were so consumed with climate that we forgot about capacity." He's backing Alva Energy for nuclear upgrading and says the winners in AI will be those with the energy to build. On the semiconductor industry's trajectory, he says the industry expected to hit $1 trillion by 2030. Now it'll get there next year. AI blew the door wide open.

The Clarity Act is closer to passage than it's ever been, but a tight window and unresolved sticking points mean nothing is guaranteed. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said today the Senate is at the "1-yard line." Sen. Kevin Cramer told Fox Business "we're almost there" and that remaining issues are "small details." Sen. Lummis' office says White House conversations on the ethics provisions "went well" and updated bill text should drop in the coming days. The biggest breakthrough so far is that the White House agreed to an ethics package and sent the language to Senate Republicans. Ethics has been the primary roadblock for weeks. Democrats demanded conflict-of-interest guardrails around the president's crypto business ties as a condition for their votes. The new compromise would route enforcement through the DOJ rather than state attorneys general. White House crypto adviser Patrick Witt deferred his National Guard training for the second time to stay in DC and push the bill through. The bill needs 60 votes, so Democratic buy-in remains essential. August 7 is the last scheduled Senate workday before recess. If negotiators can't get a cloture vote this week, the bill likely stalls until fall. Prediction markets currently price passage in 2026 around 45-48%, up sharply from 32% last Friday.

Sen. Kevin Cramer on the CLARITY Act: "I think we're almost there. We have to get this done, in my view, before the August recess."

"The big story here is the structural change to Bitcoin. It's credit being built on top of Bitcoin. It's instruments getting systemically plugged into how the world works." - Jeff Walton

"We're not waiting for people to find Bitcoin anymore. We're creating the right products to deliver to them where they are today." - Strive's Ben Workman

Jack Dorsey just launched Buzz, a new open-source groupchat platform designed for teams of people and AI agents, built to replace Slack and GitHub. Model-agnostic. Decentralized. Self-sovereign. Open source. The pitch is simple. Current team communication tools are centralized and siloed. Buzz is designed from the ground up to treat AI agents as first-class participants alongside humans, not bolted-on integrations. This is Dorsey's latest move in a string of decentralized projects. Bluesky, Bitchat, and now a direct shot at enterprise collaboration tools.

Ethics negotiations on the Clarity Act are live on Capitol Hill today. The White House recently sent agreed-upon ethics language to Senate Republicans after weeks of deadlock over the president's crypto business ties. Sen. Lummis' spokesperson says the White House conversation "went well" and ethics text is expected in the coming days. The bill needs 60 votes, making Democratic buy-in essential. The Senate's August recess is fast approaching, leaving negotiators a narrow window to move.

DRAM spot prices up 15x in under a year. AI datacenters are eating the world's memory supply. HBM chips for GPUs and regular DDR5 come off the same fabs, every wafer allocated to AI is one less for everyone else. RAM prices up 100%+ in 2026 alone. New fab capacity won't come online until 2028 at the earliest. The AI buildout's second-order effects are just getting started.

"You buy a car with your heartstrings. You buy a truck with a calculator. It's pure dollars and cents." Applied Intuition co-founder on why self-driving trucks are a totally different beast than consumer autonomy.

"Nobody wants to be a truck driver. Why? Because it's a terrible job." Applied Intuition co-founder says the "AI taking jobs" narrative misses the point entirely.

Trump preparing to announce 10% tariffs on "dozens of countries" this week as his current tariffs expire, per FT. His own advisors are warning him not to do it ahead of midterms. The playbook is clear: tariffs go up, prices go up, the Fed gets pressured to print more money to offset the economic pain, and the purchasing power of the dollar erodes further. Every round of tariffs is a round of inflation in disguise. Every round of inflation is another reason to hold bitcoin. The trade war doesn't end. It escalates. And the dollar pays the price every time.