Crypto

There is a classic joke. A girl tells a boy: if you can get everyone on the forum arguing, I’ll go out with you. The boy posts a thread titled “PHP is the best programming language in the world.” The forum immediately erupts. The girl says, you’re amazing, let’s go. The boy replies: no — I have to make everyone believe PHP is the best language. The joke lands even if you know nothing about PHP, because the absurdity is universal. ...

Yesterday, Bitcoin staged a fake breakout above its 30-day moving average (around $83.5k), and today it dove straight back down to the vicinity of its 50-day moving average (around $81.8k). While browsing online, I came across a chart plotting US midterm elections against Bitcoin’s price history [1]. The chart lays out BTC’s price curve, marks the midterm election years, and points an arrow at the election month each time: November 2014, November 2018, November 2022. Nearly all of them land near the bottom of a cycle. This year’s election falls on November 3 [1]. ...

Earlier write-ups have made this point: if we observe life closely and think about the backdrop of well-known news and events, we can now and then find, within those events, investment opportunities that the public has completely overlooked yet are highly valuable. A similar report recently surfaced online (see the reference note at the end). Jack Clark, one of Anthropic’s co-founders, has no technical background at all — he studied English literature and Chinese at university and could hardly be said to understand much of AI theory or the frontier [1]. Yet through a string of research findings during his prior career as a journalist, he stumbled into the grand technology track of AI. ...

Recent industry research has zeroed in on a new security question for Bitcoin: which coins are actually exposed to quantum risk right now, in their current holding state? The core test is whether the public key needed to spend a coin has already been revealed on-chain. By that measure, roughly 6.04 million BTC — 30.2% of total issuance — currently sit behind public keys that are already visible on-chain [1]. The remaining 13.99 million BTC (69.8%) keep their public keys hidden while dormant, and are not exposed under this model. (A subsequent update from the same researcher on October 8 later revised the exposed figure to 6.26 million BTC, or 31.2% of supply [2].) ...

Among the legendary builders of the last Silicon Valley generation, one has always held an unusual fondness for Bitcoin: Jack Dorsey, the co-founder of Twitter and Square. What first drew my attention was how different he was from his peers. Most successful founders either ignored Bitcoin or dismissed it outright. Dorsey was the exception — not only in what he said, but in what he did. The most famous example is how, years ago, he poured money and energy into promoting Nostr, a decentralized social protocol [2]. ...

Eighty-two thousand dollars — that is the level Bitcoin spent the entire week probing, without ever really leaving. On Monday, U.S. spot Bitcoin ETFs took in $527 million of net inflows, their best day since September 22, with BlackRock’s IBIT alone absorbing $665 million and trimming October’s net outflow to roughly $88 million [1]. Money is flowing back; the price is standing still. That same day, JPMorgan Asset Management published its 2027 Long-Term Capital Market Assumptions (LTCMA). This is the 31st edition of the annual report — and the first in its history to put Bitcoin in it [2]. ...

A reader asked a question: having missed an earlier article about the on-chain chip “tape-out” project and grown increasingly fascinated while researching it recently, they wanted to invest but did not know where to start — specifically, whether the project’s value, under normal evolution, would ultimately land on the transistor (component) tokens or on the mined BEM token. Tape-out is indeed a closely watched, phenomenon-level on-chain experiment and infrastructure project on BNB Chain. It brings the chip industry’s “tape-out” concept on-chain, letting users build and run digital logic circuits on-chain [1]. ...

On Tuesday, Bitcoin nudged lower around the $81k line, the tape as grindy as ever. Away from the price action, the quantum-computing front saw fresh movement — the latest turn in a story we have followed about the quantum threat to Bitcoin’s signatures. On October 16, nine blockchain companies announced the formation of the Quantum Alliance, a body meant to set a set of quantum-safety testing standards for blockchains, wallets, and infrastructure. ...

One man, one playbook, two exits. On October 2, the Ethereum Layer 2 network Blast posted a short announcement: operating costs exceeded revenue, so it would shut down [1]. Ten days later, the NFT marketplace Blur announced it would take its site offline on November 12 [2]. Both projects came from the same person — Pacman, whose legal name is Tieshun Roquerre. At its peak, Blur’s monthly trading volume reached $1.43 billion. DefiLlama puts the protocol’s cumulative revenue at $2.26. ...

A reader recently asked a sharp question: how should we think about combining AI with blockchain? Beyond financial speculation, what is a blockchain with a token actually good for? If its only real use is finance, how does that sector ever grow large? And how is an ordinary person supposed to take part? I have long believed that AI and blockchain are fated to strike sparks off each other, and that at some point in the future the two technologies will show a strong, mutual relationship of dependence, connection, and complementarity. ...