lightning just hit an all time high

not the price. the network.

5,637 btc locked in channels. more than ever before. and nobody noticed because everyones watching candles.

heres the thing... node count is down. but capacity is up. way up.

the hobbyists left. the builders stayed.

while price dropped 10% this week, binance and okx kept adding liquidity. tether invested $8 million in lightning infrastructure. lightning labs shipped taproot assets v0.7.

none of this made headlines.

satoshi didnt design bitcoin so you could watch it go up on a screen. he designed it so you could use it. send value. no permission required.

lightning is that vision actually working. instant. cheap. peer to peer.

so while everyones panicking about fed policy... the cypherpunks are quietly routing payments and building the future.

which side are you on?

theres a civil war brewing in bitcoin and almost nobody's talking about it

on one side you've got luke dashjr and the bitcoin knots crowd saying ordinals and inscriptions are spam. a bug. a vulnerability exploiting segwit and taproot in ways they were never meant to be used. they want to filter it out. protect the chain. keep bitcoin pure.

on the other side theres people saying.... wait, isn't that censorship? isn't the whole point that bitcoin is permissionless? if someone pays the fee and the transaction is valid, who are you to say its spam?

adam back had an interesting take on this. early on he said "you cant stop jpegs on bitcoin. complaining will only make them do it more. trying to stop them and theyll do it in worse ways."

but then more recently hes shifted... now hes calling it a "jpeg industry" thats spamming the chain and saying maybe new rules should apply.

heres what i think everyones missing.

this isnt really about jpegs or ordinals. its about what bitcoin is for.

is it a narrow monetary network that should only carry financial transactions? or is it a permisionless protocol where anyone can do anything as long as they pay the fee?

the knots side says: bitcoin has limited block space. every byte used for a monkey jpeg is a byte not used for someone in argentina escaping inflation.

the other side says: thats not how markets work. if the argentinian needs it more theyll pay more. thats literally what fee markets are for.

both arguments have merit. thats what makes this hard.

what i keep coming back to is something adam said early on.... high fees drive adoption of layer 2 and force innovation.

maybe the spam isnt the enemy. maybe its the pressure that pushes us to actually build the future we keep talking about.

or maybe we're just watching bitcoin slowly become something it was never supposed to be.

i genuinly dont know.

do you?

what if the benchmark changed??

every fund manager has a hurdle rate... the minimum return that makes an investment worth their time. for decades it was treasury yields. safe, boring, made sense. but im starting to wonder if that whole framework is breaking down.

adam back said something that stuck with me. bitcoin is effectively the hurdle rate, he said. its very hard to outperform bitcoin. and i keep coming back to that. what if every investment decision now comes down to one question... can this beat bitcoin over the next ten years? that startup, that rental property, that diversified portfolio everyone keeps pushing.

less than 1% of companies hold bitcoin. but the ones that do seem to have stopped asking "should we buy" and started asking "can we actually outperform just... holding." maybe thats naive. maybe im missing somthing obvious.

but treasurys dont feel like the safe benchmark anymore. they feel like what you hold when you havent updated your assumptions about whats actually hapening.

is the measuring stick just different now?

the age of the generalist is coming back

for decades we were told to specialize. pick one thing, go deep, become the expert. that advice made sense when information was scarce and tools were limited.

but something shifted. marc andreessen just said founders will need skills across 6-8 fields going forward. not because expertise doesn't matter... it still does. but because ai tools now let you operate at a competent level across domains you'd never have time to master alone.

think about it. the most interesting people in bitcoin weren't pure coders or pure economists. they were the weird ones who understood game theory AND cryptography AND austrian economics AND network effects. generalists who could see how the pieces fit together when specialists were still arguing about their corners.

the same thing is happening with ai. the breakthroughs aren't coming from people who only know machine learning. they're coming from people who can connect ml to biology, to physics, to economics, to human behavior.

specialists build the tools. generalists see where they fit.

long term this changes everything about how we think about education, hiring, and what "expertise" even means. are we raising a generation of narrow specialists for a world that's about to reward synthesis and breadth?

what skills are you combining that nobody else is?

the $5 billion buy signal that never happened

so everyone was hyped this week about whale wallets accumulating 54,000 bitcoin. charts everywhere showing $5 billion in fresh demand. except it turns out the mega whales were just reshuffling coins between custody accounts for year-end accounting. the supply never actually left...it just moved down a tier and made the data look like accumulation

and honestly this is what people keep missing about bitcoin. the signal isnt whale wallets or etf inflows or what fidelity does with their custody structure in december. the signal is the person buying $100 every week who doesnt check the price afterward

bitcoin doesnt need everyone. it never did. it just needs people who actually understand what theyre holding and why. institutional adoption is fine, its validation, but its not the soul of this thing. the soul is individual sovereignty...people opting out one sat at a time

when youre chasing whale charts for confirmation youre looking in the wrong direction. the confirmation you need is already in your own wallet

so the question isnt "are whales buying." its whether youre building something that lasts or just waiting for someone else to go first

you're already that person

you know who you want to become. the disciplined one. the present father. the builder who ships. the person who wakes up early and does the work.

so why wait?

joe dispenza asks a simple question: what if you stopped trying to become that person and just were that person right now? not tomorrow. not when conditions are perfect. not when you've earned it. now.

this year, i had a third child. traveled constantly. built three companies. kept old friendships alive and made new ones. woke up at 5 am. hit the gym. meditated. wrote in my habit tracker.

none of it happened because i was waiting to become the person who does those things. it happened because i decided i already was.

the gap between who you are and who you want to be isn't time. it's permission.

you're the hero of your story. not because you've earned it. because you chose it.

choose it today.

the world’s largest money manager said he was wrong

larry fink manages $11.5 trillion.

that’s more than the gdp of every country except the u.s. and china.

five years ago, he called bitcoin an “index of money laundering.”

but more recently? “my opinion was wrong. i believe bitcoin is legitimate.”

here’s what nobody talks about:

changing your mind is the most expensive thing you can do.

not financially. emotionally.

admitting you were wrong means admitting the people you dismissed were right. it means the weirdos on the internet saw something you missed.

the truth about paradigm shifts is that they don’t ask permission. they don’t wait for the institutions to approve. they just keep building until the institutions have no choice but to catch up.

larry fink didn’t change his mind because bitcoin changed.

he changed his mind because the world did. and by then, the early believers had already positioned themselves.

the question isn’t whether you were right five years ago.

it’s whether you’re positioned for the next five.

energy becomes money

jensen huang runs nvidia. the most valuable company on earth.

yesterday he explained bitcoin: "what bitcoin is doing is taking excess energy, storing it in a new form. it's called currency."

that's it. that's the whole thing bitcoiners have been saying for 14 years.

but when they said it, they were weird. fringe. possibly delusional.

when the guy who builds the infrastructure for ai says it at the bipartisan policy center, it's insight.

this is the pattern. ridicule. resistance. magazine cover.

the information doesn't change. the messenger does.

by the time the "right" person validates your conviction, the asymmetric opportunity has already narrowed.

jensen isn't early anymore. he's confirmation.

the question isn't whether bitcoin stores energy as money. that debate ended yesterday.

the question is: what are you still waiting for someone else to validate?

the phone call that changes everything

a year ago, every major bank in america refused to touch bitcoin.

last week, michael saylor stood on stage and listed who's called him in the past six months: jpmorgan. citi. wells fargo. bank of america. charles schwab. bny mellon.

they're not calling to debate. they're calling to build.

this is the pattern hiding in plain sight.

adoption doesn't happen gradually. it happens all at once, after years of nothing. the phone doesn't ring, doesn't ring, doesn't ring—then everyone calls on the same Tuesday.

the shift from "we don't do that" to "how do we do that" happens faster than anyone expects.

and it never feels like the moment you imagined.

no confetti. no vindication speech. just a calendar full of meetings with the people who used to say no.

the early believers always think mainstream adoption will feel like winning.

it doesn't feel like winning.

it feels like Tuesday.

the same Tuesday everyone else finally shows up.

the happiness hedge

bhutan just pledged $1 billion in bitcoin to build a mindfulness city.

the country that invented “gross national happiness” is now hodling harder than most bitcoiners. and people are confused.

how does meditation mesh with money? how does a buddhist kingdom justify internet money?

but that’s the wrong frame.

bhutan isn’t choosing between values and value. they’re refusing the choice entirely.

they looked at the false binary - spirituality OR wealth, tradition OR innovation - and walked straight through it.

most of us are still stuck on one side or the other. building beautiful things but broke. or making money but miserable.

bhutan is betting you can do both. that storing value doesn’t corrupt values. that long-term thinking works in treasury strategy and temple design.

while everyone argues which side is right, some people just build the bridge.

the cover vs. the work

time just crowned the ai architects. jensen. sam. elon. zuck. lisa. five faces. one narrative. but here's what the cover doesn't tell you: the real story isn't about who builds the cathedral. it's about who shows up before the first stone is laid.

in 2011, bitcoin was a joke. a nerd hobby. an impossibility. in 2013, humanoid robots were science fiction budget props. in 2020, ai art was party tricks. the pattern is always the same: ridicule. resistance. magazine cover.

and by the time the magazine arrives, the early believers have already compounded a decade of conviction into position. this is the hidden math of technological revolution. not the founders on the cover. the anonymous believers in the footnotes.

the ones who bought the "worthless" bitcoin. who studied the "pointless" robotics papers. who took the ai demos seriously when everyone laughed. here's the uncomfortable truth: right now, there's something you're dismissing. something that seems too early, too weird, too improbable.

something that will be on a magazine cover in ten years—with faces that aren't yours. the cover celebrates those who built. history rewards those who believed. what are you refusing to take seriously? that's probably the thing.

frozen time

money is frozen time. you traded hours for it — days, years. then they printed more, and your frozen time melted.

that’s what inflation does: it steals the hours you already worked. bitcoin doesn’t melt.

twenty-one million coins. forever. no one can print more — no politician, no emergency, no crisis changes the math.

when you store time in bitcoin, it stays frozen until you decide to spend it. fiat forces you to run faster just to stay in place.

bitcoin rewards patience. one system melts your savings while you sleep; the other keeps them.

this isn’t about price. it’s about what happens to your hours after you trade them for money. do they stay yours, or do they slowly disappear?

the nothing that changes everything

bitcoin has no intrinsic value. neither does money. neither does the promise you made to your children. gold isn't useful. paper isn't special. a database entry isn't real in any physical sense. and yet — we build civilizations around them.

not because of what they are. because of what they enable. money was never about the thing. money was always about the agreement. the shell, the bead, the coin, the note — each was just a technology for storing human coordination across time and space.

the value was never intrinsic. it was emergent. bitcoin doesn't promise returns. it doesn't have an issuer. it doesn't ask for trust. it offers rules instead: clear rules. public rules. rules written in math, not policy. rules that don't change when the wind shifts.

when critics say "bitcoin has no intrinsic value," they're telling on themselves. they don't understand what money has always been. money isn't a thing. money is a protocol for coordination. volatility isn't proof of nothingness. it's the sound of something new being understood.

every crash is a stress test. every recovery is proof this "nothing" refuses to die. bitcoin has no intrinsic value. neither does coordination. and yet — coordination built the pyramids. coordination landed us on the moon. coordination is everything.