Backstage Pass: Old man yells at quantum computer about AI

Not that Al Green // A piece of informaton // For agents // Encryption // Quitcoiners // Alas, 4 // Peter Thiel

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11 years ago this week, bitcoin price was $234.

The 11th biggest cryptocurrency was peercoin.

The 111th was gulden.

What is 50% of 18? What about 79?

You may remember Texas Democratic U.S. House member Al Green as the one who was kicked out of 2025’s State of the Union address for engaging in “a willful and continuing breach of decorum” (that is, shaking his cane and yelling with very “Old Man Yells At Cloud” energy.)

Megacrypto PAC Fairshake has targeted Green in the March primary with $1.5 million of ad spend. He kind of had to shift districts for this primary, though actually the districts shifted on him. He still lives in the same place.

So now he has to face off against the guy who just won the special election to fill the seat, Christian Menefee. Menefee’s got a page on his website saying he’s cool with blockchains — which is the first-time candidate’s Bat-signal to Fairshake that asks “Truce?”

Menefee is technically the incumbent, but he’s representing a lot of people accustomed to voting for Green, who has generally run unopposed (though he crushed a primary challenger in 2020).

Meanwhile, Menefee is fully 40 years younger than Green, which is something we are only ever supposed to care about in general. If we ever talk about it in a specific instance, that is haram. So I’m just pointing it out non-judgmentally. Just as a fact. Maybe you like facts?

If Green loses, it will almost be too bad to see him go. He’s one of those haters that makes the case for Bitcoin.

For example, at a hearing last summer, he warned:

If we move to this cryptocurrency with a decentralized cryptography and a peer-to-peer relationship, that can take the central bank out of the picture. So you don’t have a central bank, you have a peer-to-peer relationship that allows money to be moved freely among peers. And my concern is when we are trying to sanction a country, that country now has the ability to move the money ... and we will not be able to sanction as well as we can now.

Every Bitcoiner: Yes.

Rhetorical backbends

Stripe seems full steam ahead on diving deep into the stablecoin economy, and its subsidiary, Bridge, looks on track to get a trust charter from the OCC, which crypto-adjacent companies have been gobbling up like internet users munching power pellets that time Pac-Man switched on inside Google Maps.

One might almost think that Stripe hasn’t reconsidered its crypto bet in the slightest, even though earlier this month, folks were sharing a story from The Information that cranked speculation like Charli XCX at a middle school formal to make it look like its $1.1 billion acquisition of Bridge, a stablecoin infrastructure company, had been a bad move. Then Pymnts picked it up.

The gist: Bridge had enabled a payments company, Fuse, to issue stablecoin-funded cards, but then Bridge spotted too much suspicious activity and suspended said card with said company.

So, as far as we can tell in this story: Stripe had trouble on one product, made for just one customer.

• Stripe works with millions of businesses.

Now let’s look at the first sentences of three consecutive paragraphs in the story, starting with paragraph number four and see if they don’t protest too much:

1. “Stripe’s $1.1 billion acquisition of Bridge was a major bet that stablecoin cryptocurrencies, which are pegged to the U.S. dollar, are a key plank of the future for payment companies.” (it was)

2. “The deal looked smart when Congress passed a law last summer that regulated and legitimized stablecoins.” (so, does it not look smart now?)

3. “But Bridge brought new risks for Stripe, a marquee Silicon Valley startup most recently valued at $107 billion in a share buyback from investors last year.” (“risks”! goodness!)

Up next: Starbucks put soy milk in my latte even though I clearly asked for oat — Is this the end for the Seattle coffee behemoth?

This is a bad faith move that news orgs make too often: Get a li’l scoop and spin it into a bigger narrative that isn’t even kind of supported by enough actual facts.

And this story really just has one fact: One card program got too many scammers to keep going.

It’s like a B-student going for broke in the college essay on his “volunteer experience” in an application to Princeton. Doesn’t cut it.

• And you will note that this is an especially favored approach if it can be used to fire rhetorical salvos if the subject falls afoul of The Brooklyn Consensus. Such as: anything blockchain.

Confirmation bias does numbers.

Dear Princeton:

I would be a very good student and you should accept me because I always help my grandma put away her groceries.

GPAs are classist btw.

—Brady

Stripe processes $1 trillion+ in payments each year. These were not the first scammers it busted. This is a dance it has danced before.

And, nevertheless, it persisted.

Aye, aye, AI

“The future is going to get increasingly weird. And crypto is going to be part of that weirdness,” Haseeb Qureshi wrote on X this week, discussing a match made in autism: crypto payments and AI agents.

Qureshi’s point is that we have all always said crypto transactions are janky AF. But we were wrong. They are not janky — not for machines. Blockchains, he says, were for machines all along. They are janky to us because they aren’t for us.

Even though we had no idea there would be machines like this when blockchains were invented, nevertheless! Satoshi and Vitalik worked for our machine overlords all along. Seriously, don’t think about this too long. This line of inquiry turns you into the barfly that none of the other barflies want to sit next to.

And it’s not just Qureshi. Tomasz Stańczak quit his role as co-lead at the Ethereum Foundation to shift to AI, after less than a year.

He peaced out going “Agents, actually.” And maybe that’s not the wrong move! Because Qureshi’s fund just raised a phat $650 million for its fourth fund, and it sounds like Qureshi is pretty into crypto-meets-agents. Dive for the loose ball, as they say, especially if the loose ball is actually tens of millions of dollars.

Ethereum must feel about agents like Amanda Seyfried feels about Sydney Sweeney. They each must have felt like they were going to be the cool smart-contract platform/blonde it-girl forever and out of nowhere the public is looking another way.

How? HOW?

But there is a plan. If everyone’s into agents now, then Ethereum can be for agents.

Hey. It worked for Seyfried. She just made The Housemaid with Sweeney, and that broke $300 million worldwide.

If we put Anya Taylor-Joy and Scarlett Johansson in the sequel, we’re talking a billion-dollar box office, easy. Get Jerry Bruckheimer on the line!

Gunsmiths

Imagine you’re a king in a castle. It’s the late 13th century. Your town is hopping. People are in and out of town all the time, buying and selling. It’s noisy because iron wheels are rolling on the ground and bells are clanging up above.

Your town probably stinks, but stink is the smell of money in an agrarian-mercantile economy. This is how they paint the colors on the houses bright. That stink buys dyes from far away.

Then a little army forms up outside of town, but it stops just outside and it is not interfering with any of the commerce going in and out of town.

So you send one of your messengers out to it and ask what they are doing and they say: “Oh we are inventing the cannon. Once we finish it we’re going to blow your castle away.”

One of those guileless armies.

So the messenger goes back and tells you what the general told him. Now, as the king in this story, you have no concept of firearms. But you do know that you have a totally badass freaking castle. What do you think you do next? Really? Be honest.

Anyway! A startup called Iceberg Quantum claims it should be able to break RSA encryption with 1/10th of the qubits it previously thought they would need to break it.

Quitcoin

Bitcoin Difficulty has fallen lower than Iggy Azalea’s cool factor — and I mean even after she dropped MOTHER.

Difficulty fell about 12% on Feb. 7 and we’re due for another adjustment today. Brace yourself.

Bitcoin Difficulty falls are like post-breakup status updates: “I’m good enough for ME!” See, a drop in Difficulty isn’t inherently bad — just like breakups. When bitcoin prices start falling, over-extended miners drop off the network.

That’s all according to plan. Like how they never planned to marry you.

The part that makes me nervous, though, is — stop me if you’ve heard this one before — too many Bitcoin miners quitting because they want to chase the hot new thing: which is AI. That tramp.

Case in point, Bitcoin mining firm RIOT Platforms announced this week that it was strategically shifting its data centers over to artificial intelligence, entirely. If you read RIOT’s letter to investors, it has 160 MW for mining in Kentucky that they don’t plan to shift over at the moment, but their main campuses are in Texas, and those have been switching for a year.

See, Bitcoin miners have deals with electricity companies and transmission capacity and AI needs power online as fast as possible — they’ll buy it from anyone selling.

It’s like Dennis Leary said about the guy with cocaine at the party: Folks are going to hang out in the bathroom with him no matter what. (I’m not exactly sure who has the cocaine in this metaphor, but someone has it and they are dripping sweat and cutting lines.)

RIOT also wrote in that though it is “well-positioned to execute” it also “could be an exciting candidate for consolidation.”

So, basically: Yes, “I’m good enough for ME!” but, also, “Yeah I’ll be at the bar Friday.”

But every time a miner drops some hashrate off the network, it’s that much more likely that everyone else wins a block. Then Difficulty goes down and Hashprice turns a corner. Nature is healing.

Bitcoiners stack sats. Quitcoiners stack sadness.

4…

So... Binance is still doing the “4” thing like the loser stepdad who always says that “next weekend” the family will make that big beach trip, but you never actually go.

Recap: Back when he was still CEO, Binance founder CZ started posting “4” in various forms on Twitter every time news came out hinting that Binance might be in trouble with the U.S. Justice Department.

Basically, “4” meant: ignore the critics.

But then he pled guilty and went to jail, so probs the reports were not FUD.

So this week Fortune has a story about staff getting fired from Binance for flagging the fact that they saw funds being funneled to Iranian-linked organizations, which could be a sanctions violation. According to their report, reporters spoke to multiple sources and saw substantiating documentation.

So then Binance’s official X account started going around to everyone who shared the story and posting this tweet, which has many facts but does not deny the report’s claims.

It also says (emphasis mine): “Change isn’t always smooth, and we understand not everyone will agree with every decision. It’s regrettable when incomplete or indecent reports surface.”

“Indecent”!

For. Real.

Dat’s DAT

Peter Thiel’s Founders Fund got out of ETHZilla, the Ethereum digital asset treasury company (DAT) that was meant to be the one that would be savvier than all the rest about yield.

In reality, the company has been pivoting strategies faster than an overweight nerd making his way through freshman year at a college away from home.

Its main strategy, lately, has been hitting sell faster than I smash buttons in a game of Mortal Kombat.

But at least it had a strategy to add value (a bunch of them!). Until ETHZilla, the big DAT plan had been: “Well we will just sit there.”

If that’s the plan someone should make me a CEO of one of these babies. I can crush that plan. I can do absolutely nothing with any crypto token you wanna hand me.

Watch this! I won’t even respond to your emails when you ask me what I do all day.