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 A watershed writing experience. Indianapolis has no river worth the name, no port, no reason to exist on paper. It lost the canal bet, lost the auto bet to Detroit — and losing might be exactly why it had the capital and nerve left for the county merger, the stadium with no team, the NCAA move. 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. Part 3 of the honest weights series. 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. New essay up: “The Trust Problem Was Never About Bitcoin” They brought Jesus a coin. He didn't bring one himself. BIP-110’s mandatory signaling window opened at block 961,632 yesterday. Signaling had been under 3% against a 55% threshold — the split was the expected outcome, not a surprise, and it happened exactly the way the mechanism said it would. 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. 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. My boys are home. We went for a bike ride the other day. 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! Moral failure rarely feels like failure while it’s happening. Thanks for linking to https://talkingbitcoin.com/podcast 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. Honest weights and measures show up in Leviticus, Proverbs, Deuteronomy. Not as economic policy. As moral requirement. Audio companion for this digest is on @fanfares_io — two AI hosts working through twenty essays in twenty-five minutes. Grateful for a Bitcoin-native way to publish long-form audio without asking permission from a platform that extracts it. Institutions are not buildings. They are agreements. For thousands of years, every significant ledger had an owner. A mushroom is not the organism. It's the visible expression of one. New essay: When the Machine Asked the Right Question New essay: Immanuel @npub1xts…kk5s https://blossom.primal.net/3f39d4e9941d47c8663b61734438a59dccb0b421ba30abe61092eef59fb2e899.png Updated my Lightning address to [email protected] via @rizful @nprofile…pqaa @nprofile…xkxk @nprofile…fv5u New essay: spent an afternoon trying to connect a Lightning wallet to Damus on iOS. What I found was a map of everything Apple and the funding problem have cost the sovereign stack. 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. I’ve also just posted a note about not being able to link an existing wallet to Damus - please take a look. I’m on an iPhone - Apple gatekeeper might be the real issue I have tried every single option I can think of - alby, mutiny, wallet of Satoshi - no existing wallet is possible @jb55 @karnage @getAlby 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 Early preview: 22 minutes of AI audio discussion covering 21 essays on institutions, trust, and monetary architecture — unified by Claude, analyzed by NotebookLM. Three months of writing in one listen. 500 sats on Fanfares. Check out this exclusive content on Fanfares! 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. I don’t like talking about politics. 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: One thing I’ve learned from living through multiple institutional transitions: We trusted twentieth-century oracles. When I was a kid in Indiana, we washed my dad’s black station wagon while Paul Page’s voice carried the Indy 500 through our garage radio. We often talk about information asymmetry as though it were a market concept. Solidarity did not only oppose. It built. An old philosophy thesis on knowledge. A 256MB flash drive from 2003 once held nearly my entire graduate school life. In 2004, I co-wrote a cost-benefit analysis of Grameen Bank at Indiana University. I found an old drive from 2003. Found a 256MB Lexar JumpDrive from 2003. You notice infrastructure most clearly when it stops fitting your body. 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. Ran 13.1 miles through downtown Indianapolis and onto the Indianapolis Motor Speedway at sunrise. 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: 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.
