Christian. Grantmaker. 20 years in Istanbul. Philosophy → MPA → Grant Making → Bitcoin & AI. Writing about where trust lives — and what happens when it moves.
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2026-06-20T22:21:26Z Event JSON
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Last Notes I doxed myself. Today my new Fold card was declined at the airport. It's a Visa card that pays rewards in bitcoin, and it still needed permission. I had dollars, lira, lari, and euros in my wallet, and none of that changed the fact that the money was there and the permission wasn't. Coldcard is where the real lesson lives, not the fork. Banfield spent a summer in a poor Italian village in 1958 trying to figure out why it stayed poor. His answer: radius of trust. Every system has a boundary past which cooperation quietly stops. That used to be villages. Now it’s messaging apps. That’s the detail I want to sit with. If Foundry’s absence at the split is why both chains took so long to extend, that’s really a question about whether “the room” still exists inside mining, just relocated from a cabin to a pool’s uptime schedule. Curious if you think that’s a temporary quirk of this fork or a structural feature of how hashpower concentration will always slow down exactly the moments where speed would prove the network’s independence. Nodes checking the rules and nodes influencing the network aren’t quite the same claim though. Validation is nodes refusing what’s invalid. Influence would be nodes steering which valid chain wins. The essay’s point was the first one — the math gets checked without asking permission. Whether that checking amounts to influence in a contested fork is a separate argument, and probably the one you and Mow are actually having. BIP-110 did not activate. The miners did not signal. Knut Svanholm wrote an honest retrospective landing on two explanations: capture, or insufficient economic weight. Gold took five thousand years to monetize. Bitcoin is walking the same road compressed. Two phones. WiFi off. Cellular off. My son and I tried to send Bitcoin over Bluetooth mesh with Bitchat. Five deaths of the dollar in 250 years. The Continental, the constitutional dollar, greenbacks, Bretton Woods, the petrodollar. Ours is 55 years old now. Abraham weighed 400 shekels of silver for a burial cave. Weighed, not coined. Not trusted because a king said to trust it. Money is a language. Which is why it’s so hard to think clearly about — you can’t step outside it to examine it, the way you can step outside a sentence. That's a different conversation. This piece isn't about Infantino or Qatar. It's about why a hair-width offside call gets treated as certain when the underlying measurement isn't. Epistemology, not politics. Worth a read if you want the actual argument. Appreciate that, but I’d push back a little. A bent shot off a cable is unpredictable, sure, that’s just physics. What I’m pointing at is different: the same sensor caught a hair and missed a cable. That’s not randomness. That’s a system with a thumb on the pan. Stoicism handles bad luck well. It doesn’t have much to say about opacity by design. Great World Cup start to finish. England-France finished 6-4 in the third-place game. Spain dominated the final on every stat and still needed extra time to close it out. What happens to the 1 in 5 American households outside the banking system when USDT becomes USAT and USAT becomes the only authorized dollar? Indy Bitcoin meetup slide deck from July 15th meeting. About 30 attended. It was fun! The Titanic Museum will tell you about lifeboats, immigration, class, ice water at 28 degrees. That’s a different claim than the one I’m making. Eichmann didn’t need Kissinger or the Vatican. He needed a job, a hierarchy, and a habit of not asking questions. That’s available to anyone, no cabal required. Scarier, not less. Moral failure rarely feels like failure while it’s happening. Thanks for linking to https://talkingbitcoin.com/podcast Proof of work isn’t just a Bitcoin term. Lyn Alden on BIP-110: not in favor of loosening consensus rules. But she names the real move here — framing a minor change as existential is how you push a contested fork through on a lowered threshold. We are building tools that know before we do, decide before we can, and form us before we notice. Twenty-two minutes. Twenty-one essays. Abraham’s silver weights at Machpelah. Nixon’s 1971 gold window. Bitcoin’s fixed supply. Knowledge isn’t a stack of proofs. It’s a structure you already live inside. I don't think we need a formula. That's the fiat move, really. CPI baskets are already an attempt to engineer fair value from inputs. Value doesn't come from labor or electricity, it comes from a stable unit you think in natively. Agreed, and I think that’s why so much of the Bitcoin conversation feels stuck. It’s being pitched as a financial argument to people who are actually asking a moral one. What got you thinking about it that way? Honest weights and measures show up in Leviticus, Proverbs, Deuteronomy. Not as economic policy. As moral requirement. @npub1xts…kk5s https://blossom.primal.net/3f39d4e9941d47c8663b61734438a59dccb0b421ba30abe61092eef59fb2e899.png Updated my Lightning address to [email protected] via @rizful 3/ Genesis 23: Abraham, a sojourner without political power, purchased a burial place for Sarah in silver weighed to the standard of the merchants. Three thousand years later the question hasn’t changed much.[email protected] 2/ When monetary trust breaks at the level of ordinary people — not hedge funds repositioning, but families trying to preserve what they’ve built — the flight is messier than the macro analysis suggests. History doesn’t produce orderly exits. It produces a scramble. 1/ In 1992, Scott Bessent helped break the Bank of England. Governments don’t lose control of currencies because traders are clever. They lose control because reality finally catches up with the lie. Remote login is a feature that is a bit buggy on primal but has been a helpful feature when moving between Substack / nostr / fanfares.io / alby etc First post on Damus. Trying nostr someplace other than primal The architecture survived because people built for centuries rather than election cycles. I’ve become increasingly interested in the hidden infrastructure beneath visible problems. We often talk about moving as if it were a logistical problem. Bear markets are for building. A pastor in Turkey once told me the church would never be self-sufficient until it could answer three questions: Found a 256MB Lexar JumpDrive from 2003. Love it. Hope you don’t mind but I hope to continue my Substack but also migrate over to nostr / fanfares Bitcoin changed how I think about infrastructure. The strangest forms of power are often the ones embedded inside standards people stop noticing. The people who dismiss Bitcoin as a speculative novelty have not read enough history. Three thousand years before Bitcoin, the Hebrew Bible condemned dishonest weights and measures as a moral crime. The essay is ultimately about rooms. The Bible condemned dishonest weights and measures thousands of years before modern economics existed. Posted this on x too! https://x.com/_paulweaver/status/2053874533929476102?s=46&t=823LzIGHcU0T8Rulssnbxw Some truths can only be learned by being there. The cloud was never abstract. When large systems feel unstable, people move toward what they can still touch, verify, repair, and care for. The system wasn’t broken. I could do the work. Before Bitcoin, there was a real attempt to build digital cash that preserved privacy. Their loved ones are wrongfully imprisoned and they are paying $millions in legal frees. It is an unfair thing for anyone to carry I recorded a short message on why this matters beyond Bitcoin—down to the people carrying the cost. I wrote this out more fully here: The safest identity in Bitcoin has always been: AI isn’t the killer. Interesting. Exactly. This question came out of something you’ve written about - constraints: npub1dergggklka99wwrs92yz8wdjs952h2ux2ha2ed598ngwu9w7a6fsh9xzpc Most of the week I write about systems. “Just 2%” compounds. Exactly. Got removed from X. Update: I’m back on X. Update: I’m back on X. I’m trying to understand what happens when trust moves— Bitcoin is not the gospel. https://primal.net/pbw34/a-taste-for-rainy-days--and-something-deeper Rainy weekends and murder mysteries go together. Appreciate that — the history wrote itself once I started pulling the thread. Diocletian understood something about money that we lost for over 2000 years. Bitcoin is different. For two thousand years, kings and popes made alchemy a capital offense. Bitcoin doesn’t just change what you own. When systems scale beyond our ability to see one another as persons — responsibility doesn’t disappear. Going forward i plan to just put custom graphs and tables on fanfares and not ever put text behind any paywall. Here is the Reads article that is associated with this Fanfares.io link. A world where generosity flows freely across borders, and where Christian communities have the tools they need to endure, serve, and flourish. https://fanfares.io/s/T63P7-#pay https://fanfares.io/s/iX8dr_ Moving my X profile and projects over to Nostr.
Here with an amazing team from Fanfares.io
If you want to see my framework for thinking about Trust Not all communities are the same. X suspended my account this morning. Iran just made Bitcoin a condition of safe passage through the Strait of Hormuz. Rome's legions weren't weak at Carrhae. Every energy crisis in history trapped people inside failing money. Turkey cut six zeros in 2005. The hardest part isn’t the training. Most people think signing up is a small step. We are not entering a normal cycle. Money is language. We don’t eliminate authority. Not all digital money is the same. We don’t know as much as we think. We don’t know as much as we think.
