Dave Smith

[SightBringer @_The_Prophet__]

⚡️Schiff is making a category error.

Tokenized gold solves gold’s transport problem. It does not solve gold’s trust problem.

The token still depends on an issuer, a custodian, an auditor, a legal jurisdiction, redemption rules, and the continued honesty of everyone connecting the digital claim to the physical metal.

The gold may be real while the token is frozen, censored, overissued, seized, or rendered worthless by the failure of the institution standing between owner and asset.

That makes tokenized gold useful. It could become powerful collateral for banks, stablecoins, cross-border settlement, and investors who want gold exposure on digital rails.

But the rail remains permissioned.

Bitcoin removes the warehouse.

It removes the redemption promise.

It removes the administrator who decides whether ownership is recognized.

A Bitcoin holder owns the asset directly through control of the keys. A tokenized-gold holder owns a claim whose value depends on someone else honoring the map between token and metal.

That difference is the whole war.

Gold carries five thousand years of monetary memory. Bitcoin carries digitally native sovereignty. Tokenization gives gold speed, divisibility, and programmability, while preserving the institutional dependencies Bitcoin was designed to escape.

The deeper pattern is that the old monetary world is trying to enter the new one without surrendering control.

Gold gets wrapped.

Treasuries get tokenized.

Deposits become stablecoins.

Traditional collateral moves onto programmable rails.

Bitcoin took the harder path. It created collateral that requires no wrapper.

So tokenized gold will probably grow. It may become a major bridge asset inside regulated finance. It could outperform many crypto assets because institutions understand the underlying collateral.

It still cannot replace Bitcoin’s core function.

Tokenized gold is ancient trust moving faster.

Bitcoin is trust becoming optional.

[Lyn Alden @LynAldenContact]

Hard to say.

For this fork, I’d have to agree that something is indeed killing me by a thousand cuts, rather than just a background nuisance held in check by the block size limit and fee market. Defining the scale of the problem, in other words.

Second I’d have to see what methods of fighting back actually work without breaking much, and weigh those methods relative to my perception of the threat (existential or nuisance or somewhere in between). Can it solve the problem or just move it somewhere else? I’d make sure I’m not putting effort into something that is more performative than functional. And what commitment am I getting into? Can one fork mostly solve the issue, or am I starting a never-ending whack-a-mole process against the problem, while the problem evolves around my attempts, and each attempt comes with potential technical trade-offs such as potentially affecting the prospects of LN Symmetry (a monetary improvement) and so forth? And *precisely* how small do I want to make the spam bucket that doesn’t contribute much to UTXO bloat (op return) while preserving the other spam methods that do? Who knows- the burden of evidence and specifics are on the proponents.

Third I’d make sure not to damage the movement with sensationalist marketing. Self-appointed main characters don’t last long in the bitcoin space. “Pass my fork or Bitcoin dies” is unlikely to win, and may set back the movement. The sensationalist marketing and scale of infighting is what led a podcast host to ask me about it, for me to answer, for others to respond to me, and for me to respond to them with a more public position against this specific fork at this specific time. I’d have otherwise remained publicly indifferent at this time (since it’s a young fork and doesn’t mitigate a whole lot). Wasn’t it @giacomozucco who said that the knots movement was growing until this fork killed it, (his words, not mine)? Something like that. You know how many forks are looking to solve problems in bitcoin and have been seeking consensus for years? Welcome to the party.

Fourth, I’d weigh it against other development considerations in terms of time-resources spent. How does this compare to making Lightning better via LN Symmetry? How does this compare to preventing some potentially serious exploits via Consensus Cleanup? Etc.

Fifth I’d weigh it against other threats. How about governments trying to ID-verify everything at the operating system level? The attack on net privacy is about 100x a bigger concern to me than this. It’s a gift for them to have half the bitcoin space fighting over a contentious fork that just mildly rearranges the buckets for where spam goes (and for which some aspects I might even be in favor of) rather than defending against all the ways that Bitcoin’s privacy and usability can and is being attacked. I want to see a flourishing ecosystem of coinjoins, smooth lightning UX, Chaumian ecash, Ark, and whatever else people can build to improvement payments and route around censorship and ubiquitous surveillance.

Best thing an enemy can do is get you to focus on paper cuts while they’re swinging their machete.

[Dave Smith @DaveSmith3dgm]

@WatcherGuru LOL

[Teddy - PolyBackTest.com @Bitcoin_Teddy]

Japanese actor Hiroyuki Sanada spoke about the contradictions of human nature:

“Some people dream of having a swimming pool at home, while those who have one hardly ever use it. Those who have lost a loved one feel a profound sense of loss, while others often complain about their living relatives. Those without a partner long for one, while those who have one often don't appreciate it. The hungry would give anything for a meal, while the satiated complain about the taste of their food. Those without a car dream of owning one, while those who have a car are always looking for a better one.”

The key to happiness is gratitude: truly seeing and appreciating what we already have, and understanding that somewhere, someone would give anything for what we take for granted.

[Jordi Visser @jvisserlabs]

In case you have not heard, Bitcoin is dead and Michael Saylor is back again as the villain.

The trend is still bearish but signs of change are showing up as I showed in this week's YouTube.

The next rally will not start because everyone suddenly becomes bullish. Sentiment is too bad.

The catalyst may be the reverse of two negatives rather than a positive. It may start because of two forces that have punished Bitcoin ease:

1)AI equity momentum is crashing and the AI trade volatility is rising, forcing capital to look for new beta.
2)The market may have gone too far pricing AI capex as a hawkish Fed story.

AI agents are not just a demand shock. They are also a supply shock through digital labor, productivity leverage, and financial automation.

That is where Bitcoin becomes interesting again.

The Fed may have to unlearn its old framework.

Investors may have to relearn Bitcoin.

New piece:

Bitcoin and the Art of Unlearning the Fed

https://t.co/b4DHzWHHxo

[Jordi Visser @jvisserlabs]

Equity momentum is crashing.

AI is not over — the easy-money phase is.

Now the story shifts to AI agents, enterprise adoption, and “productivity leverage.”

"Even at tens of millions of agents users, we're still early"

"There's just not going to be enough compute in the world to satisfy all the demand."

Warsh speaks too and doesn't seem concerned about inflation. Could we see a cross-asset momentum regime shift soon?

And Bitcoin?

Shorts are getting greedy. Vol is compressed. Bad news is no longer breaking price. First bottoming signs are showing up.

New video: Momentum Is Crashing, Bitcoin Is Bottoming, AI Agents Are Rising
https://t.co/QPZaCJ2Zwb

[Adam Livingston @AdamBLiv]

Nobody warns you. That's the sick part.

Nobody sits you down and says, hey, if you spend one weekend actually reading about money, you will lose the ability to enjoy anything for the rest of your life.

Your brother-in-law just mentions it at a barbecue. That's how it starts. Some guy holding a hot dog says "you should look into Bitcoin" and you laugh at him.

You laugh AT him.

You make the tulip joke. You feel superior for eleven more days.

Then it's 2:47 in the morning and you're on your fourth Saylor podcast and your wife thinks you're having an affair.

And in a way, you are.

You're cheating on your entire worldview.

ou came in to debunk it. That's the trap. Everyone comes in to debunk it. You wanted to find the flaw, dunk on your brother-in-law, and go back to your Vanguard target date fund like a respectable adult.

Instead you found out what happened in 1971 and now you can't make eye contact with your 401k.

Because here's what actually happens.

Bitcoin is cool and all, but you REALLY learn about the dollar. Bitcoin is fine, Bitcoin is twenty-one million and a schedule, you understand it in an afternoon. The dollar takes months, because every time you think you've hit the bottom of that thing there's a trapdoor.

The Fed just... prints it? And they gave how much to the banks in 2008? And the banks did WHAT with it?

And the guy who ran that got a MEDAL? You're up at 4am reading about the Cantillon effect like it's your kid's toxicology report.

Then comes the phase where you're insufferable.

Everyone goes through it, nobody admits it. You ruin Thanksgiving. You genuinely ruin it. Your aunt says turkey prices are crazy this year and you see your opening like a lion seeing a wounded gazelle.

Forty-five minutes later you're drawing the M2 money supply on a napkin and your mother is crying and your uncle is saying "it's not backed by anything" for the ninth time while his pension is backed by the promises of a government that's thirty-seven trillion in debt.

He's worried about YOUR risk profile.

He has unit bias so bad he'd rather own a whole Shiba Inu coin than a fraction of the hardest asset ever created, because his brain, poisoned by seventy years of fiat, thinks "whole thing cheap" beats "piece of thing good."

And the prices. God, the prices. You can't turn it off.

You're in the grocery store repricing eggs in sats. The eggs are getting cheaper in sats. Everything is getting cheaper in sats except your will to explain that to anyone.

You look at a house and you don't see a house, you see the number of Bitcoin it costs, and that number falling forever, and you realize the housing crisis is a measuring stick crisis, and you say this out loud at a dinner party, once, and now you're not invited to dinner parties.

Then the anger burns off and something worse arrives.

Clarity. You realize nobody is coming to fix this.

The people in charge KNOW. That's the part that breaks you. They're not stupid, they're incentivized.

The debt can't be paid, only inflated, and every serious person in a suit on television knows it, and their plan is to be dead before the invoice arrives.

So you buy. Coinbase, first time, hands shaking like you're doing something illegal, and the fee annoys you, and that annoyance is the last normal financial emotion you will ever feel.

You set up the DCA. You learn what a hardware wallet is. You write twelve words on steel like a doomsday prepper, because that's what you are now, except your bunker is math.

And then the loneliness. Nobody tells you about the loneliness. You've seen it. You can't unsee it.

And you're surrounded by people you love who are working forty years to fill a bathtub with the drain open, and when you point at the drain they get mad at YOU.

So you stop pointing. You just stack quietly, in the dark, waiting for the day one of them comes to you, at a barbecue, holding a hot dog, and says the words.

"Hey... you were into Bitcoin, right?"

And you smile. Because it's their turn in the barrel.

Welcome. Nobody warned me either.

[Dr Sara Pugh PhD @spugh01]

If light is the information, water is the medium, melanin is the transducer, DHA is the receiver and electrical wiring, mitochondria are the processors, and hormones are the messengers.

Perhaps we’ve been looking at biology backwards.

Health may begin not with hormones or supplements, but with the environment that powers and organises them.

[Adam | Faithful Messenger @Adam_FaithfulM]

God gave Moses 50 chapters of instructions for a tent.

Fifty.

More space in the Bible is devoted to the design of the Tabernacle than to the creation of the universe.

That's not an accident.

Every measurement, material, and color was pointing to something, and once you see it, you can't unsee it.

A thread. 🧵

[Adam Simecka @AdamSimecka]

I "simply" can't believe they produced this video.

They're covering this at great personal and professional risk.

They're sharing truth that other platforms are influenced, coerced, and paid to ignore.

Great work, @RustinPeace_SB, @SimplyBitcoin, @hodlonaut, and @plebjkruse.

[Simply Bitcoin @SimplyBitcoin]

They couldn't ban Bitcoin. Every government that tried failed.

So the question changed: if you can't ban it, can you just make it too heavy for ordinary people to carry?

Rustin spent 3 days in a basement pulling the receipts on the code change, the money behind the developers who made it, and why nobody with a platform said a word. 👇

[Pastor Coin @pastorcoin]

Did you know you could earn Bitcoin for reading the Bible? Join me

https://t.co/EuktMGXIC6

[Jordi Visser @jvisserlabs]

This week's Video:

The AI Mid-Cycle Slowdown: OpenAI, Anthropic, and the AI Price War

As Gavin Baker said on BG2 - “You've had a lot of stocks that forget climbing a mountain or hill. They've gone straight up a cliff.”

“They're tired. They need to rest.”

At the same time, the only people doubting AI are the perma-bears which means a two-sided consolidation is likely from here.

The easy part of the trade is over.

The next phase is about price compression at the model layer, rising costs at the physical layer but with continued rotation away from the spenders (hyperscalers) toward the companies receiving the capex.

This is not bubble collapse.

It is digestion.

Watch here:https://t.co/Z5JwstESCF

[NOBUNAGA🇯🇵🏯_夏樹蒼依 @japan_nobunaga]

USA. A Mexican restaurant. We had not yet ordered anything, and the food was already arriving.

Chips. Salsa. Unrequested. Free.

I stopped the waiter. "We have not earned these."

"They just come with the table, man."

They come with the TABLE. In my land, hospitality is a debt. Every gift creates an obligation, weighed carefully, returned in the proper season with interest of feeling. Here, the gift arrives before you have even proven you can pay for dinner.

This is not an appetizer. This is a declaration: we trust you. Eat.

I ate with the gravity the moment deserved. And then — I must report this calmly — the basket emptied, and a new one appeared.

"Did we…?"

"Refill," the waiter said. "It's bottomless."

Bottomless. They have wells of salsa. The supply lines of this nation are beyond anything my ancestors imagined.

My friend warned me. "Don't fill up on chips, dude."

Too late. I had accepted three baskets. Honor demanded each one be finished — an unfinished gift is an insult. By the time my actual food arrived, I was a ruined man.

I was not hungry. I was not comfortable. I had been defeated by a courtesy.

Generosity that arrives before the request cannot be repaid. It can only be survived.

I know the rule now. I have made my peace with the basket. One basket. Two at the most.

Who am I deceiving. There is no number of baskets I would refuse. The trust of a nation is in that salsa, and I intend to honor all of it.

[Critically Thinking & Drinking 🧐 🥃🧉🍸🍹🤪 @TheCriticalDri1]

Very few times have I EVER heard the Star Spangled Banner sang this impressively. Bravo chads 🥃

[FOX Sports @FOXSports]

The Star-Spangled Banner hits different on home soil at the FIFA World Cup 🇺🇸

[Steak 'n Shake @SteaknShake]

If America beats Paraguay in tonight's World Cup match, come celebrate at Steak n Shake tomorrow with a Patriot milkshake for only 25 cents! Limited to one milkshake per customer.
🇺🇸 ⚽️ 🏟 🇺🇸

[Mark Moss @1MarkMoss]

Too many are focusing on Bitcoin's price, and missing the building going on underneath...

Tether just wired self-custodial wallets directly into robots, leading a $1.4B round into NEURA Robotics. And it wasn't just a "Crypto" round... The co-investors are: Amazon, NVIDIA, Qualcomm, Bosch, Schaeffler, and the European Investment Bank.

Industrial capital and a stablecoin issuer in the same cap table.

What Tether shipped into the deal matters more than the dollar figure.
- Wallet Development Kit: self-custodial wallets embedded in the robot.
- QVAC: an edge-AI runtime that runs on the machine, not the cloud.
- USD₮ going native on Bitcoin via RGB.

So this brings the Wallet, brain, and settlement asset, all in the hardware.

This lays the groundwork for an autonomous agent, a robot, a fleet, and a software process, without having a human to approve the payment.

MACHINE TO MACHINE MONEY:
No human in the loop. So it needs a settlement layer that doesn't ask permission: self-custodial, final, programmable, on a Bitcoin base layer.

Why does this route to Bitcoin instead of a Visa or ACH equivalent?

Because permissioned rails have an off-switch and a human gatekeeper by design. An economy of millions of agents transacting 24/7 can't run on rails built to be paused. Censorship-resistance stops being ideology and becomes a spec requirement.

Now this is a direction sign... it's a funding round and an architecture announcement, it's not live today, so...

Treat this as it is... an asymmetric bet.

But one thing to think about here, and it's something I laid out in my keynote at Bitcoin Mena back in 2024...

Every other Bitcoin demand thesis is from humans, but this is Machine Demand.

Watch demand on this into 2027!

https://t.co/4YKdKzCoSB

[Jordi Visser @jvisserlabs]

I do a weekly YouTube on AI to try and share the weekly trends for a mosaic look of the AI buildout, bottlenecks, backlog, pricing, adoption and investor sentiment. As we exit shocking Q1 earnings to reset the bar higher and go into the summer usage slowdown, this mosaic I put together on the recent trends argues for more AI rotation at a minimum. June 2026 is very different for AI than Jan 2026. Be ready for more volatility as investors adjust to less certainty during the AI mid-cycle slowdown.

[Anthony Pompliano 🌪 @APompliano]

Can Eli Lilly become the largest company in the world?

@jvisserlabs thinks so.

"The reason I believe Eli Lilly has a chance to be the largest company in the world, and the number one AI company in the world within 5 years, is because they are building a specialized model."

"They have their own data center with 1,000 GPUs with all the data that $LLY has had [as] a 150 year old company."

"They are creating an innovation hub of using data all for human software."