Robert On Crypto

I love finance and IT. So what could better combine both worlds than crypto?

[Chamath Palihapitiya @chamath]

If you are running a consulting business and you are deploying Anthropic or OpenAI directly into your organization (I’m looking at you PwC and Accenture) you are letting the fox into the hen house.

OpenAI and Anthropic are openly funding and starting competitors to you while also using your usage to drive more success for them.

This is not a failure on their part but a failure on your part.

Consulting businesses that understand this are adopting a control plane that allows them to arbitrate where tokens go and who generates tokens for them.

Controlling the tokens is controlling the spice (Dune).

This was a key pillar of 8090’s global partnership with EY and they key feature of our Software Factory. We control token generation and can direct them to any model provider.

We are close to another global partnership and will announce it soon.

These organizations refuse to accept the disruption standing still or, even worse, by adopting and accelerating the companies who want to disrupt them.

[PeterSweden @PeterSweden7]

If your country requires digital ID verification to use social media, then you don't live in a free country anymore.

If your country want to regulate or ban VPNs, you don't live in a free country anymore.

[Keonne Rodriguez @keonne]

I am writing from FPC Morgantown prison in West Virginia. It has been about 5 months since I first surrendered myself in December, and I will be honest, the prospect of a Presidential pardon is very low. There was some hope during the Bitcoin 2026 conference, but that has now come and gone, and one must come to terms with the fact that I am simply a federal prisoner without money, power, or influence, and I will serve my full sentence. It will be years before I can even attempt to rebuild my life. Which is why I am now writing this appeal to you all now. Things are dire and we need your help.

Lauren and I need your help desperately. More than ever before. We have over $2 Million of debt due to legal fees. We have a $250k fine the judge levied against us. Every day I get letters and calls from anxious lawyers looking to be paid. Or the DOJ demanding I start making payments on my fine. Perhaps it was denial or delusion, but I had hoped to do what I have always done and dig myself out of this hole myself - but with the reality of serving a full sentence that is not possible. I hate to ask for your help in this way but we are entirely out of options. We need to pay off these legal bills and other debts accrued attempting to defend myself. We desperately need your help. Now.

For 10 years Bill and I built and published open source code and tools for Bitcoin users. Those same tools and code are what the government says were criminal. The tools and code still exist, they are out there right now and always will be. The creators however are locked away in Federal prison. The creators are the ones whose lives have been decimated. The creators are the ones who have been financially wiped out. The creators are the ones who desperately need you now. Please donate whatever you can to bc1qtjjcvn98wh7dfd55m8kxhjcfexanttwt8gtan8 . We have to get this albatross from around our neck.

Samourai had well over 100,000 users. These users pushed over 2 billion dollars through our open source tools. We need those users and any bitcoiner who appreciates the work that we put into this industry for over a decade to help us now. Please donate whatever you can to bc1qtjjcvn98wh7dfd55m8kxhjcfexanttwt8gtan8 right now.

If you require a private address please DM my wife @leamuirleyn and she will provide one. Please do not delay. Time is of the essence. Please help us.

- Keonne

[Matt Hougan @Matt_Hougan]

Such a good piece. Must reading.

In both cases, the banking lobby is arguing that novel instruments that benefit consumers – whether fully reserved depositories or interest-bearing stablecoins – pose a risk to the banking system and bank deposits. A more accurate description would be that skinny master accounts and interest-bearing stablecoins pose a risk to banks’ monopoly over payments.

[Alex Pruden @apruden08]

Re: the quantum threat to Bitcoin & blockchains, there are two broad takes:

(1) Quantum won't be relevant for a long time, therefore there is no need for urgency.
(2) Quantum is already relevant, and we need to act with urgency.

FWIW the actual quantum physicists and security experts are increasingly in world (2).

People that believe we're in world (1) are either armed with bad facts, bad assumptions, or just don’t want to think critically about the impact.

🧵

[Santiago R Santos @santiagoroel]

Crypto will viciously test your conviction.

We go through entire market cycles, severe drawdowns and extreme euphoria, every few years. What investors feel in a lifetime, we experience every few years.

It’s brutally hard to manage positions. You want to be a long-term holder but the market reminds you how right and wrong you are daily.

Venture doesn’t have a ticker constantly grading your thesis in real time. We do. Every single day.

Right now, some of the most vocal believers are quitting. Throwing in the towel. Dismissing the space.
Remember this moment.

Years from now someone will scoff and say “oh yeah, you were just lucky for being early.” Being early is goddamn hard. Years ago you could’ve been too early. And being too early is indistinguishable from being wrong.

We’re not too early anymore. Read the room. Read the headlines. The infrastructure is battle tested. The adoption is happening.

And the cruel irony is that crypto natives are quitting just as non-crypto natives and new adopters are about to capture way more value than they ever will. A lot of the groundwork was built by the very people throwing in the towel today. That’s a shame. But markets don’t care about fairness. They reward conviction.

For anyone who told you that you were just lucky. None of this is fucking easy. The drawdowns, the noise, the conviction required to hold when the world tells you you’re wrong.

Learn to love the pain. Learn to love the work. Or you’ll always be a prisoner of the market and of other people’s opinions.
Find love for the game or go play another one.

If you’re still here. Still building, still creating, still grinding. I salute you.
This is a generational shift and we’re lucky enough to shape it.

Long crypto

[The Bitcoin Historian @pete_rizzo_]

JUST IN: THE PETITION TO PARDON THE SAMOURAI #BITCOIN DEVELOPERS JUST PASSED 15,000 SIGNATURES

LIKE IF YOU WANT THEM TO BE FREED IMMEDIATELY 👏

[Teddy - PolyBackTest.com @Bitcoin_Teddy]

Great clip on the Federal Reserve.

Show this to everyone you know.

[Roman Storm 🇺🇸 🌪️ @rstormsf]

They argued that writing code is a crime. They compared privacy tools to money laundering.

But we know the truth: Privacy is a human right. Math is not a crime.

The fight for my freedom - and for the future of open-source software - is at a critical moment. I need your voice to show the world that this community stands together.

Please, take 5 minutes to write a letter of support. Your words are the most powerful tool we have left.

https://t.co/jaYqkBYfOj

The fight is not over yet.

[Daniel Batten @DSBatten]

https://t.co/HQ93NP9I92

[vitalik.eth @VitalikButerin]

“Ethereum was not created to make finance efficient or apps convenient. It was created to set people free”

This was an important - and controversial - line from the Trustless Manifesto ( https://t.co/QAvZfiNxpe ), and it is worth revisiting it and better understanding what it means.

“efficient” and “convenient” have the connotation of improving the average case, in situations where it’s already pretty good. Efficiency is about telling the world's best engineers to put their souls into reducing latency from 473 ms to 368ms, or increasing yields from 4.5% APY to 5.3% APY. Convenience is about people making one click instead of three, and reducing signup times from 1 min to 20 sec.

These things can be good to do. But we must do them under the understanding that we will never be as good at this game as the Silicon Valley corporate players. And so the primary underlying game that Ethereum plays must be a different game. What is the game? Resilience.

Resilience is the game where it’s not about 4.5% APY vs 5.3% APY - rather, it’s about minimizing the chance that you get -100% APY.

Resilience is the game where if you become politically unpopular and get deplatformed, or if a the developers of your application go bankrupt or disappear, or if Cloudflare goes down, or if an internet cyberwar breaks out, your 2000ms latency continues to be 2000ms.

Resilience is the game where anyone, anywhere in the world will be able to access the network and be a first-class participant.

Resilience is sovereignty. Not sovereignty in the sense of lobbying to become a UN member state and shaking hands at Davos in two weeks, but sovereignty in the sense that people talk about "digital sovereignty" or "food sovereignty" - aggressively reducing your vulnerabilities to external dependencies that can be taken away from you on a whim. This is the sense in which the world computer can be sovereign, and in doing so make its users also sovereign.

This baseline is what enables interdependence as equals, and not as vassals of corporate overlords thousands of kilometers away.

This is the game that Ethereum is suited to win, and it delivers a type of value that, in our increasingly unstable world, a lot of people are going to need.

The fundamental DNA of web2 consumer tech is not suited to resilience. The fundamental DNA of _finance_ often spends considerable effort on resilience, but it is a very partial form of resilience, good at solving for some types of risks but not others.

Blockspace is abundant. Decentralized, permissionless and resilient blockspace is not. Ethereum must first and foremost be decentralized, permissionless and resilient block space - and then make that abundant.

[ZachXBT @zachxbt]

Community alert: Ledger had another data breach via payment processor Global-e leaking the personal data of customers (name & other contact information).

Earlier today customers received the email below.

[Terence Michael @ProofOfMoney]

Today we celebrate Satoshi Nakamoto.

But let's not forget the cryptographers
and the cypherpunks who took decades
to build the bricks for Bitcoin.

Bookmark this and enjoy a fast, floating
trip about the quest for perfect money.

#BitcoinHistory #cypherpunk

[Erik Voorhees @ErikVoorhees]

In America, if you support the 1st or 4th Amendments too earnestly, you go to jail.

[Observe @obsrvgmi]

🚨 @aave is having a full blown civil war

And it might be the biggest governance fight defi has ever seen.

Heres a clean breakdown 👇

Aave has two sides:
– Aave labs → a centralised entity founded by stani
– Aave dao → token holders who govern the protocol

Now heres what happening,

Dec 4, 2025: Aave labs announces a partnership with @CoWSwap to improve swap pricing + mev protection on the aave interface.

Dec 11, 2025: A popular delegate, @DeFi_EzR3aL drops onchain analysis stating that swap fees from the new cow swap contract are being routed to a private wallet controlled by aave labs. Not the dao.

Translation: DAO revenue just got quietly cut off.

Dec 12, 2025: Marc zeller (largest delegate, aave chan initiative) calls it stealth privatization. Claims ~$10m per year that should go to the dao is gone.

Dec 16, 2025: Things go nuclear ☢️

A. Proposal called “poison pill” by Tulip King.

The demands:

– Seize all aave ip, code, and brand
– Force aave labs to become a dao owned subsidiary
– Claw back all past revenue earned using the aave brand

B. Then comes proposal #2 — “brand seizure” by former cto of aave labs @eboadom,

– Move trademarks, domains, socials to the dao immediately.

Logic: If dao pays for dev + marketing then dao should own the brand, domains, socials.

Aave Labs / Stani’s defense:

– This (cowswap thing) was never a fee switch.
– Frontend revenue was a surplus labs donated voluntarily.
– Aave labs is a private company.
– DAO owns the contracts, not the website.
– Labs pays for hosting, security, and frontend engineers.

Now the plot twist, amid all this chaos,

Aave labs opens a snapshot vote on dec 23👇

Proposal: Give aave token (aave dao) holders explicit control over brand assets, domains, socials, naming rights, github, npm, everything. (baed on @eboadom's proposal)

Except…

The author of the proposal @eboadom says he never approved it.

He claims it was rushed to vote with his name on it while discussion was still active. Calls it “disgraceful.” Urges people to abstain.

@Marczeller says the proposal was rushed during holidays, with fresh delegations gaining voting power.

Zoom out. This isn’t about cow swap. This isn’t about one wallet.

This is the unresolved question of defi:
Who actually owns a protocol? The code? The frontend? Or the brand?

Aave is about to set a precedent. And everyone is watching.

[The ₿itcoin Therapist @TheBTCTherapist]

I’ve never seen someone make such a profound argument for Bitcoin, without even realizing it.

This is just breathtaking.

[Consumers' Research @ConsumersFirst]

BREAKING: The U.S. Comptroller of the Currency has found conclusive proof that 9 large financial institutions actively engaged in debanking.

The financial institutions named are:

- @JPMorgan
- @BankofAmerica
- @Citi
- @WellsFargo
- @USBank
- @CapitalOne
- @PNCBank
- @TDBank_US
- @BMO

https://t.co/VOyOGjbsJC

[Steve 🇺🇸 @SteveLovesAmmo]

The most based father in recorded history.

[David Hoffman @TrustlessState]

real

[Documenting Saylor @saylordocs]

JPMorgan CEO Jamie Dimon: “If I was the government, I’d close it down.”

JPMorgan now: “We accept BTC as collateral.”

How things change 😂