The total haul from the Coldcard hack: 1,816 bitcoin, over $116 million, from more than 5,200 addresses. On July 26, Moonshot AI released Kimi K3, 2.8 trillion parameters, the largest open-weights model ever published. It can run on custom hardware, not just on the manufacturers' servers, without the guardrails of Anthropic and OpenAI. The bill came due immediately: after Coldcard, Boltz suspended all swaps, taking with it the Lightning Network functionality of many widely-used wallets. Then Blixt halted operations, not to mention the bug in BTCPay Server and the data theft at Trezor's logistics partner. Calle and Rob Hamilton responded with a sixteen-person Red Team. The time between a latent bug and its exploitation has almost vanished. The only place this logic doesn't touch remains the barest: an on-chain UTXO, a key, a signature. View article →

Donald Trump and Elizabeth Warren have gone at each other for a decade over tariffs, taxes, the Fed, immigration. There's just one thing they agree on: abolishing America's debt ceiling. The ceiling was created in 1917 to simplify borrowing. Since 1960, Congress has raised, suspended, or redefined it about 80 times. Why does it always blow up? Arithmetic. Fiscal year 2025: a $1.775 trillion hole. The last federal budget in surplus was in 2001. On interest on the debt alone, the government paid $1.22 trillion in 2025, nearly a quarter of federal revenue. To pay it, more debt. Yesterday's creditors repaid with tomorrow's creditors' money. A pyramid scheme by definition, with two differences: participation is mandatory, and the manager prints the currency it repays with. It never defaults explicitly; it does so gradually, by diluting the purchasing power of the dollars in circulation. The expansion of the money supply is neither right-wing nor left-wing: it's the one thing the right and the left agree on. View article →

It's the most talked-about news in Italy. On July 15, the Court of Cassation upheld a sentence of 14 years and 9 months for Mario Roggero, the jeweler from Grinzane Cavour who in April 2021 killed two of the three robbers who had just cleaned out his shop. His wife and daughter beaten and tied up, the safe emptied. Under Italian law, the act was over: the robbers had turned their backs.
By the logic of property, the violation was still in progress. As long as the stolen goods remain in the thief's hands, the invasion continues. Flight is the violation carried on by other means. It wasn't the first time. Roggero had already been robbed in 2015: he, his wife and his daughter tied up, the two women locked in the bathroom, €300,000 in stolen goods. The security monopolist failed the same family twice. It collects taxes to protect you, doesn't show up, and when you protect yourself it punishes you. Then it orders you to compensate the families of the men who attacked you. In a free market for security, the court would ask only one question: who initiated the use of force? Three men with a gun and a knife. Every consequence falls on whoever made that choice. View article →

The Binance–ECB case follows a script we've seen played out many times. It even has a name: crony capitalism. Here's how it works: a new sector is born free, because the state doesn't yet know what it is and hasn't had time to regulate it. Companies compete, innovate, grow. When the sector gets big enough and rich enough to matter, the regulator shows up to oversee and tax it. And with the regulator come the barriers to entry: licenses, capital requirements, compliance obligations, thresholds. Those already big can usually absorb them; those who'd like to enter are shut out. MiCA is no exception. To issue a stablecoin in the EU you effectively need a quasi-banking license. Reserves must be held 30% - up to 60% for large issuers - in bank deposits. The banks, which use that liquidity for their own business, cash in. Alternative issuers are shut out. Not even the much-praised GDPR is an exception. A study of 110,000 websites over 18 months found that after it came into force, market concentration increased. Almost every web-technology vendor lost share. Except one: Google. Same with the AI Act. The frontier models are built by OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, xAI: all American. The only relevant European lab, Mistral, is worth €20 billion against the $20–30 billion in annualized revenue of the giants across the Atlantic. Europe wrote the rules before it had any players on the field. We now live immersed in a bureaucratic superstructure we accept passively. Every year one more directive, one more registry, one more obligation, one more threshold. Together, a dense net that smothers innovation in the cradle and fossilizes markets around whoever got there first. And we accept it because we grew up inside it - inside a latent socialism that takes for granted that it's the state's job to decide who gets to do business, on what terms, with how much capital, under which license. The regulator raises barriers to shield what exists from what could exist. #Bitcoin bypasses them in the most subversive way possible: freeing people, one at a time, from the very idea that they need permission. View article →

Don't pretend nothing's wrong, I know you're disappointed. Disillusioned, even. The Fear and Greed Index on Monday, June 1 read 11 out of 100. Bitcoin at $63,000, Google searches near a five-year low. Record outflows from the spot ETFs. BlackRock's IBIT alone has seen over $2 billion leave since mid-May. Strategy selling bitcoin after, for four years, Saylor repeated a single message over and over: buy, never sell, sooner sell your kidneys. Then there's the talk of the big IPOs. * SpaceX is on roadshow with a valuation between $1,800 and $2,000 billion and a potential raise of up to $75 billion: above Saudi Aramco in 2019. * OpenAI is aiming for a listing in the autumn, an $852 billion valuation. * Anthropic has closed a $65 billion round, a $965 billion valuation. * Put together: about $3,600 billion, as much as the GDP of France. Goldman Sachs estimates that the 2026 IPOs will raise $160 billion. That's where the money seems to be running now. In moments like these, we need to go back to the fundamental question, the most important one: do SpaceX, OpenAI and Anthropic solve the same problems that Bitcoin solves? Mathematical scarcity in a digital world where everything is copied to infinity. A store of value without counterparties, that no one can devalue or freeze. An answer to inflationary money. The ability to stabilize electrical grids by monetizing excess energy. No. None of the three. The markets look at the next six months and chase the most exciting story of the moment. Confusing this with the value of what Bitcoin solves is the mistake that costs the most. View article →

The digital euro already has a precise calendar. 2027: pilot with partner banks. 2028: integration into the commercial banking system. 2029: operational for citizens. The ECB is not waiting for the law to pass: on November 28, 2025 it already opened the selection of the operational partners. The names of those who will materially manage the digital euro will be known in June, even before the European Parliament votes. The estimated costs: 1.3 billion for development, 320 million per year of operating costs, between 4 and 5.8 billion in investments required of the commercial banks to integrate the system. To replicate something that Bancomat, Satispay, Apple Pay and SEPA instant transfers already do. On the legislative path: the EU Council, which represents the national governments, already adopted its position on December 19. Twenty eurozone governments are aligned. On June 23 the European Parliament's ECON committee votes, then it goes to the plenary. Then the Trilogue. Final adoption of the Regulation: by the end of 2026, the beginning of 2027 at the latest. Considering that Council and Parliament are both in favor, the Trilogue will be short. The points of the Regulation that really matter: merchants with a POS will be required to accept it by law. The banks will be required to offer a wallet as a basic service. The holding limit will probably be 3,000 euros per citizen, a concession to the banking system to avoid bank runs in the event of a crisis. Online, every payment is visible to the provider and the data arrive at the ECB in pseudonymized form, "traceable to the user when needed." Offline, the transaction is private via NFC, but as soon as the device goes back online the data are uploaded. The point that the article documents in detail: the parameters that will decide the level of surveillance, offline limits and holding limit will not be set by the Parliament. They will be established by an unelected technocracy after the approval of the law. Once the Regulation is in force, lowering the threshold of exempted micro-enterprises, raising the holding limit, eliminating the offline mode for "anti-money-laundering needs" or introducing programmable payments will not require a new European vote. View article →

BIP 110 wants to block spam on Bitcoin. Too bad the spam has already disappeared on its own. The blockchain is half-empty. Fees at multi-year lows. Bitcoin Mechanic, a developer at Ocean and the main supporter of the proposal, himself defines the network a "ghost town." Then he asks to modify the consensus rules on an emergency basis. The proposal would activate with 55% of the miners, or via UASF with no miners at all, with 6-7% of the reachable nodes signaling it. For comparison: SegWit required 95% signaling. Taproot 90%. Mechanic insists on the expiration: twelve months, then everything goes back to how it was before. But the text of the proposal admits that after activation we will in any case return to the traditional filters, because the consensus rules are not the right tool to fight spam. He himself acknowledges this in the What Bitcoin Did interview of May 26. What remains when the soft-fork expires? The precedent. The memory that, faced with a situation perceived as an emergency by a niche, it is legitimate to modify the consensus rules to prevent a minority from doing things we do not like. The game theory that Mechanic uses as the activation engine is the "whoever blinks first loses" one: the miners who do not apply the new rules work for free, so they adapt. It is a correct line of reasoning. But it demonstrates that a determined minority can modify Bitcoin's rules by leveraging the economic rationality of the miners, not the broad consensus. Anyone, tomorrow, can use the same playbook. To block the inscriptions, but also to freeze UTXOs that have ended up under OFAC sanctions, or to extend the emission schedule beyond the 21 million. On the technical front: in February a developer published a complete image inside Bitcoin with a single transaction, circumventing all the filters that BIP 110 would like to write at the consensus level. Mechanic himself admits that after twelve months the inscribers will find other routes. You pay the price of the precedent in full. The problem you wanted to solve remains intact. View article →