"Talk to a bitcoin maximalist – someone who believes that bitcoin is the only digital asset with innate value – and, more likely than not, they’ll tell you the world’s oldest cryptocurrency is, in fact, ‘not crypto’ at all. The refrain can be confusing: clearly, bitcoin pioneered the use of cryptography – an ultra-secure type of encryption…

"Bitcoin is often referred to as a secure timestamping service. We never had a global record of truth with trustworthy timestamps, so how did this come about? It’s generally due to Proof of Work being combined to a few simple rules by which miners must abide." — Jameson Lopp Can Bitcoin's sense of time be…

"Bitcoin represents the explicit encoding of previously implicit values of the tech community. It's not just software — it is a Schelling point and a symbol. As such, it will become widely recognized as the flag of technology over the course of the 2020s." — ⁠Balaji S. Srinivasan Today we cover another read from Anil's…

"Some networks are “smart.” They offer sophisticated services that can be delivered to very simple end-user devices on the “edge” of the network. Other networks are “dumb” — they offer only a very basic service and require that the end-user devices are intelligent. What’s smart about dumb networks is that they push innovation to the…

"The obsession with consumer payments in the Bitcoin community is an unfortunate relic of the fiat money era. Generations that have only known monetary hot potatoes that need to be spent before they devalue have come to view life as a quest of mass consumption." — Saifedean Ammous Today we hit an historical piece from…

"To do our best to minimize the economics jargon once again, we might simply ask: what are you going to do with your time? Are you going to create or consume? And how do the characteristics of money, as the salable representation of that time, influence your decision? I sincerely believe that this is the…

"While many of the innovations in the space are new, they’re built on decades of work that led to this point. By tracing this history, we can understand the motivations behind the movement that spawned bitcoin and share its vision for the future." Context matters. If you don't know the history of the cypherpunks and…

"Since 1800, in 51 out of 52 cases where a country’s debt-to-GDP ratio reached 130%, the country eventually defaulted. The only exception is current Japan, who is frankly in the final stages of circling the drain (e.g., central bank asset purchases and yield curve control). Where is the US now? 129% debt-to-GDP." — Jesse Myers Don't…

Ai agents are going to be able to seek out, delegate, and pay for micro services from an ecosystem of other agents & services. But the resources being share will be delivered instantly, and irreversibly in the form of compute cycles. Only an instant, bearer, and irreversible payment method that scales massively will be able…