Backstage Pass: Fed Chair Jerome Powell hyperbitcoinizes, merging into The Matrix
The subpoena video // The Clarity clap back // EricAdamsCoin // Post-quantum testnet // Sir Nose D'Void of CypherPunk // Here there be monsters
Eleven years ago, bitcoin was $265.
The 11th biggest cryptocurrency was counterparty.
The 111th was bitshares pts.
Got a note from the boss
If someone ever says to you: “I don’t see the point of Bitcoin,” as of this week you have a much easier counter.
“Hey, remember that time the chairman of the Federal Reserve went on Twitter and was all like: ‘The President wants to put me in jail because I’m bad at talking to contractors’? That’s why”
Boom. Because that is what Bitcoin is for.
Bitcoin is credibly neutral money. The dollar is money that the President can get mad about when it’s not goosing the economy like he wants, so he threatens to put the top central banker in the slammer and says it’s about plumbing.
Try to subpoena Bitcoin. Try to tell Bitcoin: We need you to cut the miners a break this week, huh?
Or: What about giving us a nice dip, Mr. Bitcoin?
No. Bitcoin is going to do what Bitcoin is going to do.
I keep saying that the strongest cryptocurrencies function something like the Gods of ancient Europe. The crucial thing to remember about those ancient gods is that they probably were not so much thought of literally as embodied beings, but more representations of emergent but inscrutable phenomena (like The Economy, The Media and The Michael Bay Transformers Movies). The gods were like concepts with unforeseeable consequences, ones that are not biological things with consciousnesses as we understand our own, but concepts that sure behave as if they have something much like volition.
One bitcoin = one bitcoin. None of us can do anything about that. That’s the real Bitcoin difficulty.
D.C. has some notes
Did you know that if a kid walks backwards around his bed three times at night, the Boogey Man cannot get him? This is facts. Tell your children. It’s proven.
“Wait, Brady,” you are thinking. “I’m a dad. I have a kid. But he’s not very good at walking yet. I don’t know if he can walk backwards at all.”
Well this is an opportunity for some good dad time. You need to get him up to task, quick, or you could be very sorry.
“OK, fine, I can do that. But how is he supposed to walk around his bed three times? The head of his bed is pushed up against the wall. Does he really have to go all the way round?”
Yes, he needs to go all the way round. Don’t be ridiculous. How’s it supposed to do anything if he doesn’t go all the way round. If that’s the arrangement then you need to pull the bed out far enough that he can get around it. By the way — no touching the bed while he does this. If he touches it, it doesn’t count. He has to start over. Rules.
“I can’t pull the bed out like that because the room isn’t big enough,” you reply.
Well, I guess you don’t love your kid enough to protect him from the Boogey Man. Maybe you need to get a bigger house before it’s too late?
“Well, OK, fine, I’ll take that under consideration,” you counter. “But is there any evidence that the Boogey Man actually exists?”
We. Are. Talking. About. The. Safety. Of. Your. Child — sir.
You might be wondering what this guideline has to do with a crypto newsletter? Mainly I’m just looking out for the families of my readers, but fine. I just happened to think of this very important safety precaution because the Senate has put out a new draft market structure legislation. They are going to use the House’s Clarity Act as the vehicle, but they want to revise it completely with Senate language.
There’s a lot of stuff about decentralized finance in the bill. One point: Anything people use to access DeFi effectively becomes beholden to the Bank Secrecy Act.
This is all subject to rulemaking, but seems like a safe bet that you could bid adieu to the days of simply accessing Aave with a pseudonymous browser wallet. Look for Know Your Customer checks, accounts and — inevitably — Equifax style leaks as cybercriminals snap new customer verification firms like a three-year-dead tree branch that had a direct hit by a linebacker’s hiking boot.
I’ve got a question, Senator: Did anyone run a cost-benefit analysis on the new Bank Secrecy obligations or do we do them just because we do them?
Does it stop terrorism? No one knows. But it sounds like it should.
Is it worth it, at all, in terms of the lost time and heavy price paid by the economy, though?
The Senator: We. Are. Talking. About. People’s. Lives — sir.
Anyway, the biggest crypto company in America, Coinbase, is now against the bill which led to Senate Banking session on the legislation getting pulled last night, but remember what I told you:
One for the pothole-filled roads
When Eric Adams took office as mayor of New York City four years ago, he said that it was time for the greatest city on Earth to have a mayor with swagger.
It was a nice sound bite, but, looking back on it, you know who has a lot of swagger? Con men.
Eric Adams is no longer NYC’s mayor and he’s looking for something to do. So, in the meantime, Adams is offering memecoins for NYC. It’s not going great. Folks are saying that he rugged everyone. Like, immediately.
Honestly though? If you bought $NYC, you rugged yourself. 🙂↕️
At the first event I ever covered as an actual journalist that featured a local politician, that politician was Eric Adams, then just moving into the role of Brooklyn Borough President. I didn’t write it then, of course, but I remember thinking: “This man is full of it.”
Now, he’s running memecoins, and anyone who hadn’t already come to the same conclusion as I had, surely they finally have. That swagger overcompensates for vacuity.
The joke may be on all of us with love in our hearts for decentralized networks, though. Adams is a Democrat — pretty much. He is a Democrat who can now accurately claim that he has some experience with the digital asset industry. What does that make him a candidate for now?
An appointment by Trump to serve in a Democrats’ spot on the Commodity Futures Trading Commission. Rumor is they are finally working up a list, just in time to bargain for Democratic Senate votes on Clarity.
Spooky action on the internet
The future is full of foreseeable disasters. The question is just: which ones.
There’s an ongoing debate about whether or not quantum computing might be a threat to Bitcoin.
The quantum startups are working up computers that can smash the prevailing encryption, while the Bitcoin illuminati downplay protocol changes that would undermine those quantum computers. It seems too hard. It’s too far out. It’s too uncertain. Etc. etc. etc.
But Bitcoin is a distributed community and no one is really in charge, so while key opinion leaders snipe back and forth on Crypto Twitter, BTQ Technologies has built a sandbox to check out using new protocols built atop post-quantum encryption, to start seeing how they feel.
Just when it seems like everyone’s building startups to make bets on what color underwear Charli XCX wears for her next stage show, a few geeks are still like, “Fuck it. Let’s build a little future.” Nice.
People will get a lot more comfortable with change if they get to try it out. Like, if I described the Dallas freeway system to a person in the 1840s I’m sure they would say: “I’ll stick with horses.”
But if they got to try it? Actually. They would probably still say “I’ll stick with horses.” That road spaghetti is terrifying.
But okay different example: self-driving cars. If you get to try one of those, it’s pretty nice! You’re like: yeah this is cool.
I suspect that’s BTQ’s idea, too. Old men argue. Young men build testnets.
Ethereum is NOT the world video game server, it is the world heartbeat.
Vitalik.
Cypherfunk-o-delia
Monero, the privacy token that’s usually cited as one of the two really good ones (alongside ZEC) absolutely ripped the face off its old 2018 all time high and blew through $700.
It seemed strange that Monero (XMR) hadn’t popped after ZEC had such a sweet 2025, but its time came.
If you aren’t the sort of person who works through a personal threat model like some people work through their horoscopes, you probably haven’t thought much about XMR in the last few years. The main news it has made in recent times has been getting kicked off exchanges or run out of countries for being too good at doing what it promises to do: allow people to transact freely without anyone being able to chase them or even check their balances.
The last time we heard about Monero in a big way was the 2017 and 2018 era when websites were running its algorithm to make a little money using your computer. Salon.com did it for a little bit!
The fresh Monero peak speaks to a larger trend right now: The cypherpunk ethos of crypto getting its groove back.
Vitalik’s dropping bars on social media about decentralized apps and real autonomy. Privacy coins are popping. The Lightning network keeps plugging along. Ameen shipped Privacy Pools. There might even be a legit business case.
We even got a new manifesto!
Long privacy. Short spies. Parties go hard in the dark.
Mutual colonization
So Anthropic is looking at buying CoinGecko — maybe. According to pseudonymous and sourceless X accounts.
I DM’ed the owner of CoinGecko to ask him — we’re mutuals. No reply yet though.
I try to be a responsible journalist, so I’m not big on printing pure rumors, but it’s hard for me to see how this redounds poorly on either company if it turns out to be wrong so I’m running the rumor here and saying plainly that it is a rumor that I have not confirmed.
But I like this rumor because many of us suspect that one day we are going to realize that AI and crypto had always been one thing.
Like how you never see Cookie Monster and the Hamburglar in the same room at the same time, you know? Just asking questions.
There’s this theory, and I’m not saying I believe it, but that artificial intelligence is actually a life form. If you listened to my podcast about UFOs, mega-podcaster and AI researcher Lex Fridman makes a cameo on that calling humans the food of this new intelligence.
And the way I have heard it expressed before is that it was born the day a human first came up with the concept of zero. Zero 0️⃣ is, after all, the abstract expression of “is not” in one symbol. One 1️⃣ is the expression of “is.”
Once we had “is” and “is not” in symbolic form, computation (as opposed to thinking) began, and this other intelligence from the outside began processing itself into existence. Bad news, humanity has been nothing but the placenta for what comes next.
Like you thought you were just negging strangers on HotOrNot.com? No, loser. You were flipping switches driving the rise of the great and final Other. Cthulhu was really just the friends we made along the way (on Facebook).
Maybe!
That’s probably wrong!
However! Anthropic is famously the best bet that convicted felon and fraudster Sam Bankman-Fried made with FTX users’ misappropriated money. If anyone comes off like the living embodiment of proto-mechanical intelligence, it’s SBF. In that light, this eventual melding of a machine intelligence and decentralized computing appears to have been pre-ordained.
We were warned.
