BIP-361 proposes freezing every bitcoin that doesn't migrate to a quantum-safe address within five years of activation. If you're incapacitated, in prison, or simply unaware of the deadline, your coins aren't stolen. They're frozen by consensus. The justification: 34% of all bitcoin have exposed public keys on-chain. If a quantum computer existed, those coins could be stolen and dumped. The proposal wants to invalidate legacy address types before that happens. The problem: Bitcoin has survived 80%+ drawdowns. The network would recover from a quantum-enabled theft. What it might not recover from is the precedent that consensus rules can freeze coins based on address type. If you can invalidate addresses for quantum protection, governments will point to that precedent to freeze "sanctioned" coins next. Two-thirds of the vulnerable supply comes from address reuse by a small number of large custodians. That's fixable today. No protocol change needed. Exchanges just stop reusing addresses. The Presidio Bitcoin report found that with 25% of block space dedicated to migration, 90% of bitcoin's value could move to quantum-safe addresses in four days. Post-quantum signature schemes already exist. Developer discussion on quantum has gone from 5% to 50% of the mailing list in two years. The work is happening. The right approach is voluntary migration, not protocol-level coercion with a deadline. Bitcoin's core value proposition is that no one can freeze your money. BIP-361 proposes doing exactly that.

Allbirds is a shoe company. They just announced they're pivoting to AI and the stock went vertical. $BIRD is up nearly 370% this morning.

Vice President J.D. Vance responds to a heckler accusing the Trump administration of killing and bombing children in Gaza during a Turning Point USA event.

In a recent Texas federal trial, the FBI testified it recovered Signal messages from a defendant’s iPhone notification database long after the app was gone. Signal president Meredith Whittaker confirmed the organization has requested an explanation from Apple.

CLARITY Act not listed on Senate Banking Committee schedule for the week of April 20.

"Oil prices are up 50% in the last month." Tim Scott: "Well, they're still lower than they were under President Biden, so that's good news. We can thank President Trump."

Nike's CEO and Tim Cook just put over $2 million of their own money into the stock as it trades near an eight-year low. CEO Elliott Hill bought 23,660 shares at $42.27 on April 13, spending $1 million and increasing his stake by 10%. Apple CEO Tim Cook, who has served on Nike's board since 2005, bought 25,000 shares at $42.43 on April 10, totaling roughly $1.06 million and boosting his Nike holdings by 24%. They aren't alone. Director Robert Holmes Swan bought 11,781 shares on April 7 at $42.44 and Director John W. Rogers Jr. picked up 4,000 shares on April 9 at $43.34. Four separate insiders buying within the same week. The timing is notable. Nike's stock has been devastated, down 70% from its 2021 all-time highs. It hit $42.09 on April 7, its lowest level since 2018. The drop accelerated after the company warned on April 1 of a projected 20% sales decline in Greater China for the upcoming quarter alongside significant margin contraction. The stock fell 15% in a single day. Goldman and JPMorgan both downgraded to Neutral. HSBC slashed its target from $90 to $48 and cut the rating to Hold. Hill took over as CEO in late 2024 after returning from retirement to replace John Donahoe, whose tenure saw Nike lose ground to competitors like On, Hoka, and New Balance. The turnaround plan is still early. Analysts broadly rate the stock a Hold with an average target of $62.34, but most don't expect a growth inflection until late fiscal year 2027. When a CEO and a board member who runs the most valuable company on Earth are both writing seven-figure personal checks for the stock in the same week, it's worth paying attention to what they see that the market doesn't.

A fake Ledger Live macOS app listed on Apple’s official App Store stole approximately $9.5 million in crypto from more than 50 victims between April 7–13. Apple has removed the app.

OpenAI is releasing GPT-5.4-Cyber, a version of GPT-5.4 fine-tuned specifically for cybersecurity defense with deliberately lowered refusal boundaries for dual-use security tasks. The model enables capabilities like binary reverse engineering, letting security professionals analyze compiled software for malware and vulnerabilities without needing source code. Standard models would refuse these queries. This one is trained to allow them. Access is gated through OpenAI's Trusted Access for Cyber program, expanding to thousands of verified defenders. Enterprise teams go through OpenAI directly. The highest-tier users get access to the permissive model. The deployment starts limited to vetted security vendors, organizations, and researchers. OpenAI classified GPT-5.4 as "high" cyber capability under its Preparedness Framework. Its Codex Security tool has already contributed to over 3,000 critical vulnerability fixes this year. The company's position is that cyber risk is accelerating regardless of AI, threat actors are already using existing models, and defenders need access to the same frontier capabilities. The tension is inherent. A model trained to be more permissive on security tasks is a double-edged tool. OpenAI acknowledges this, saying future models will need "more expansive defenses" as capabilities "rapidly exceed even the best purpose-built models of today."

Nick Shirley says that a proposed California bill would impose fines up to $10,000 or imprisonment on anyone investigating potential fraud in their neighborhood. "They're trying to make it so citizen journalists or just average Americans who are going about seeing what's happening inside their community, they're trying to scare them from talking about potential fraud taking place inside of these communities."

Andy Stumpf on JRE said if he had a time machine he would tell his younger self to buy bitcoin.

The IMF just cut its global growth forecast and laid out three scenarios for how bad this gets, depending on how the Iran war unfolds. The best case assumes a short-lived conflict with a moderate 19% rise in energy prices. Under that scenario, global GDP growth falls to 3.1% for 2026, down from the January forecast. Headline inflation rises to 4.4%. Oil averages $82 per barrel for the year, down from the current Brent benchmark around $100. Without the war, the IMF said it would have actually upgraded its growth outlook to 3.4%, driven by tech investment, lower rates, and reduced tariff pressure. The middle scenario assumes a longer conflict with oil staying near $100 through this year. Growth drops to 2.5%. Inflation hits 5.4%. The worst case assumes extended energy supply disruptions stretching into 2027, with oil averaging $110 this year and $125 next year. Global growth collapses to 2.0%, which the IMF says would be "a close call for a global recession." Growth has only been that low four times since 1980, the last two being the 2009 financial crisis and the 2020 pandemic. IMF chief economist Pierre-Olivier Gourinchas told Reuters that the Iran war now represents a bigger risk to the global economy than Trump's initial tariff escalation did a year ago. Under the severe scenario, multiple countries would be in outright recession. Inflation expectations would shift from transitory to entrenched, forcing central banks to tighten into weakness. The regional damage is stark. Iran's GDP is projected to contract 6.1%. Qatar falls 8.6%. Iraq drops 6.8%. The broader Middle East and Central Asia region loses two full percentage points of growth. The U.S. outlook is relatively insulated at 2.3% growth for 2026, cushioned by tax cuts, lagged rate cut effects, and AI data center investment. China is forecast at 4.4%, barely moved. The eurozone takes a harder hit, dropping to 1.1%. India is the lone bright spot among emerging markets with a modest upgrade to 6.5%. The IMF's message to governments: resist the urge to subsidize fuel prices. Targeted, temporary support for the most vulnerable is fine, but broad subsidies would blow out fiscal frameworks that most countries need intact to rebuild their buffers.

Claude AI has released a major redesign of its Claude Code desktop app. The update adds multiple AI sessions side-by-side in one window, a new sidebar for session management, drag-and-drop layouts, and built-in tools like terminal and file editing.

Chinese President Xi Jinping met with UAE Crown Prince Khalid bin Mohammed bin Zayed in Beijing today, the final day of the prince’s three-day official visit.

Goldman Sachs filed with the SEC today to launch a Bitcoin Premium Income ETF, marking one of the 157-year-old bank's first direct moves into manufacturing Bitcoin investment products rather than just holding them. The fund uses a covered call strategy. Goldman writes call options against its Bitcoin benchmark, collects the premiums, and distributes them to investors as monthly income. The tradeoff is straightforward: investors capture most of the upside but give up the highest gains in exchange for yield and cushioned downside. It's the same structure Goldman already runs with GPIX and GPIQ, its existing premium income equity ETFs, now applied to Bitcoin. The filing is structured under the Investment Company Act of 1940, which means Goldman has to route its Bitcoin holdings through a Cayman Islands subsidiary to get around regulatory limitations on holding commodities in a '40 Act fund. BlackRock's competing product, filed 80 days earlier in January, uses a '33 Act structure built directly on top of IBIT, its $93 billion spot Bitcoin ETF. The shift from buyer to competitor is what makes this notable. As of February, Goldman held $2.4 billion in crypto ETF positions, including $1.1 billion in Bitcoin. It was one of the largest institutional holders of BlackRock's IBIT. In December, Goldman acquired Innovator, a major Bitcoin ETF issuer, for $2 billion, giving it the infrastructure to build its own products. Bloomberg ETF analyst Eric Balchunas said he didn't see this coming. "I kinda just thought JPM and GS would sit crypto out in favor of competing in other categories." He noted Goldman likely senses an opportunity to leapfrog BlackRock and is hearing from clients who want Bitcoin exposure with less volatility, willing to trade upside for income. He called it "boomer candy." The competitive picture is getting crowded fast. BlackRock, Goldman, and others are now racing to build yield-generating Bitcoin products for an institutional client base that wants exposure without the full volatility profile. The product war has moved beyond spot ETFs into structured products, and the biggest names on Wall Street are now building on both sides of the trade.

Anthropic is preparing to release its Claude Opus 4.7 model and a new AI design tool as soon as this week, according to The Information.

President Trump is pushing for a clean extension of FISA Section 702 through the House this week. He says he is working with Speaker Mike Johnson, Chairman Jim Jordan, and Chairman Rick Crawford to pass it without amendments.

Anthropic and OpenAI are on opposite sides of a proposed Illinois law that would shield AI labs from liability if their systems are used to cause mass casualties or more than $1 billion in property damage. The bill, SB 3444, would let an AI lab off the hook for downstream harm as long as it drafted its own safety framework and published it on its website. If a bad actor used a frontier AI model to create a bioweapon that killed hundreds of people, the lab that built the model would face no legal consequences under this bill, provided it had posted a safety plan. OpenAI backed the legislation. Anthropic is actively lobbying to kill it or rewrite it. The split is drawing new battle lines between the two largest AI labs over how frontier AI should be regulated in the absence of federal law. Anthropic's head of state and local government relations called the bill "a get-out-of-jail-free card against all liability" and said the company wants legislation that pairs transparency with real accountability. OpenAI argues the bill reduces the risk of serious harm while still allowing AI technology to reach people and businesses in Illinois. Illinois Governor JB Pritzker is signaling opposition. His office said the governor "does not believe big tech companies should ever be given a full shield that evades responsibilities they should have to protect the public interest." The deeper context matters. Anthropic is simultaneously backing SB 3261, a separate Illinois bill that would be one of the nation's strongest AI safety laws. It would require frontier developers to create public safety plans and submit them to third-party audits. That positioning has repeatedly put Anthropic at odds with the Trump administration, which has pushed to curb state-level AI regulation. Former AI czar David Sacks accused Anthropic last year of running "a sophisticated regulatory capture strategy based on fear-mongering." The bill probably won't become law. But the fault line it exposes is real. One lab wants to write its own safety rules and call it compliance. The other wants external accountability baked into the legal framework. As both companies ramp up lobbying across state legislatures, these positions will define how AI governance takes shape in the US.

River launches “Banking with Bitcoin.” 3.3% APY on cash balances paid in BTC, zero-fee BTC direct deposits, fee-free bill pay in cash or Bitcoin, and built-in BTC buying.

University of Washington student (isareksopuro) launched a free open-source map tracking 283 global data centers, including construction status, nearby power plants, and 729 AI bills.