Bayman11771 retweeted
What does a blue wave mean for bitcoin?
Two years ago, the Trump administration came into office promising to make America the crypto capital of the planet. Yesterday, Americans voted, as they seem to enjoy doing, for change. What does a blue wave say about President Trump's promise and America's take on bitcoin?
1. Affordability was on the ballot.
Affordability defined the election. In one NBC exit poll, 89% of voters called the cost of living a “crucial or major factor in their vote”. In the last Harvard CAPS/Harris survey before the vote, price increases led every other issue.
Prices are in part a question of monetary design — do we inflate away or not? And that's where bitcoin comes in. Bitcoin is a money whose supply no one can inflate at will. It's capped, and new supply is governed by rules, not rulers. A fixed supply does not lower grocery prices. But it does offer savers of any political orientation a unit that no administration can debase.
2. Crypto money did not decide the outcome.
The crypto industry spent about $200 million this cycle. Its largest super PAC network alone spent more than $170 million: about $75 million backing Republicans and $36 million opposing Democrats, against $30 million backing Democrats. Most of that money went to competitive races its candidates lost, Ohio’s Senate seat chief among them.
3. A wide swath of Americans hold bitcoin.
The Nakamoto Project’s national surveys find that bitcoin owners belong to no political tribe. In 2024, ownership was highest among the very liberal (21.9%), then the very conservative (17.6%), then moderates (14.3%); only age and gender strongly predicted it. In 2025, owners still clustered at the ideological center.
Since so many Americans hold bitcoin, across the ideological spectrum, lawmakers still have reason to enact policies that do not threaten their ability to save in bitcoin or spend it.
4. The debanking argument for bitcoin remains strong, and non-partisan.
Debanking is the exclusion of law-abiding enterprises or individuals from financial services because they are politically disfavored or otherwise distasteful. Senator Elizabeth Warren thinks that debanking is a problem. So does President Trump.
And there is, surprise surprise, a bitcoin connection here as well. Because bitcoin is money no one can block you from using, it serves as a useful backup for anyone at risk of being debanked, and an alternative to traditional financial institutions.
5. Trust is low; alternatives are enticing.
Americans have never trusted institutions less. And arguably, those institutions — from higher education to Washington — have failed to earn trust. Though it rotates in degree as parties swap places on the Hill, this erosion in trust remains a broad trend.
Bitcoin, mercifully, was not on the ballot. In a way, it can't be. Because bitcoin is money that lies outside institutions. You can hold it yourself. You can spend it without anyone's permission. For that reason, it remains an enticing alternative for Americans looking for change.
Two years ago, the Trump administration came into office promising to make America the crypto capital of the planet. Yesterday, Americans voted, as they seem to enjoy doing, for change. What does a blue wave say about President Trump's promise and America's take on bitcoin?
1. Affordability was on the ballot.
Affordability defined the election. In one NBC exit poll, 89% of voters called the cost of living a “crucial or major factor in their vote”. In the last Harvard CAPS/Harris survey before the vote, price increases led every other issue.
Prices are in part a question of monetary design — do we inflate away or not? And that's where bitcoin comes in. Bitcoin is a money whose supply no one can inflate at will. It's capped, and new supply is governed by rules, not rulers. A fixed supply does not lower grocery prices. But it does offer savers of any political orientation a unit that no administration can debase.
2. Crypto money did not decide the outcome.
The crypto industry spent about $200 million this cycle. Its largest super PAC network alone spent more than $170 million: about $75 million backing Republicans and $36 million opposing Democrats, against $30 million backing Democrats. Most of that money went to competitive races its candidates lost, Ohio’s Senate seat chief among them.
3. A wide swath of Americans hold bitcoin.
The Nakamoto Project’s national surveys find that bitcoin owners belong to no political tribe. In 2024, ownership was highest among the very liberal (21.9%), then the very conservative (17.6%), then moderates (14.3%); only age and gender strongly predicted it. In 2025, owners still clustered at the ideological center.
Since so many Americans hold bitcoin, across the ideological spectrum, lawmakers still have reason to enact policies that do not threaten their ability to save in bitcoin or spend it.
4. The debanking argument for bitcoin remains strong, and non-partisan.
Debanking is the exclusion of law-abiding enterprises or individuals from financial services because they are politically disfavored or otherwise distasteful. Senator Elizabeth Warren thinks that debanking is a problem. So does President Trump.
And there is, surprise surprise, a bitcoin connection here as well. Because bitcoin is money no one can block you from using, it serves as a useful backup for anyone at risk of being debanked, and an alternative to traditional financial institutions.
5. Trust is low; alternatives are enticing.
Americans have never trusted institutions less. And arguably, those institutions — from higher education to Washington — have failed to earn trust. Though it rotates in degree as parties swap places on the Hill, this erosion in trust remains a broad trend.
Bitcoin, mercifully, was not on the ballot. In a way, it can't be. Because bitcoin is money that lies outside institutions. You can hold it yourself. You can spend it without anyone's permission. For that reason, it remains an enticing alternative for Americans looking for change.
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Bayman11771 retweeted
Any reason @JoinFAI isn't going after closed model providers in this way, given that they've been involved in more than their fair share of cyber damage? Hard to read this as anything other than an attempt to stifle competition and the democratization of capabilities.
One of the most concerning developments in open-weight AI has been the rise of vendors of "abilterated" models offering cyber capabilities with no guardrails
@JoinFAI's FLD is seeking prospective plaintiffs who may have been injured by these systems to support impact litigation
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Bayman11771 retweeted
I'm working on a talk on why open-weight models are imperative for protecting freedom.
This quote by Sam Altman is just nuts. They're quite literally using the language of war to incite fear and to protect their monopoly on intelligence.
I wish this wasn't the case but I are of it.
This quote by Sam Altman is just nuts. They're quite literally using the language of war to incite fear and to protect their monopoly on intelligence.
I wish this wasn't the case but I are of it.
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This BlockTrace report offers interesting insights into the TTPs of the @binance Bitcoin attacker.
Their on-chain fingerprint - native SegWit, fixed fees, round 1,000 BTC outputs left unspent, specific merge/split patterns, and paced broadcasts - is rare (~1 in 53,000 txns). One prior cluster from 16 Sep matches fully. No direct wallet link, but the tooling signature is distinctive. FBI attributes the broader theft to North Korea’s TraderTraitor. Excellent analysis.
blocktrace.com/research/binan…
Their on-chain fingerprint - native SegWit, fixed fees, round 1,000 BTC outputs left unspent, specific merge/split patterns, and paced broadcasts - is rare (~1 in 53,000 txns). One prior cluster from 16 Sep matches fully. No direct wallet link, but the tooling signature is distinctive. FBI attributes the broader theft to North Korea’s TraderTraitor. Excellent analysis.
blocktrace.com/research/binan…
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Bayman11771 retweeted
Was I wrong about open models & cyber risks? I don't think so. The AI community is focusing on the wrong lens - which type of model is causing harm - rather than how cybersecurity maintains an equilibrium, who enacts harm, and how they use new tools.
interconnects.ai/p/was-i-wrong-…
interconnects.ai/p/was-i-wrong-…
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I might have jumped the gun on this post. We still need a robust American open weights ecosystem, but this particular incident seems more benign than I had initially thought.
Or maybe I was just looking for pretexts.
#knowyourblindspots
Or maybe I was just looking for pretexts.
#knowyourblindspots
Your daily reminder of why the United States needs a robust open weight models ecosystem.
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Bayman11771 retweeted
Bitcoin Policy Institute’s Quarterly Report for Q3 is live.
You can read about our Freedom Tech DC summit with Jack Dorsey and Michael Saylor, our new State Department partnership, Sam Lyman’s congressional testimony, our latest policy proposals, and much more.
Attached below y. You can access the full report here:
btcpolicy.org/articles/q3-20…
You can read about our Freedom Tech DC summit with Jack Dorsey and Michael Saylor, our new State Department partnership, Sam Lyman’s congressional testimony, our latest policy proposals, and much more.
Attached below y. You can access the full report here:
btcpolicy.org/articles/q3-20…
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Bayman11771 retweeted
"À genoux!"
"À vos ordres."
"À vos ordres."
Community noteThe CCP's 1981 resolution documents Mao's arbitrary rule, concentration of power, undermining of collective leadership, and personality cult (Sections 18, 20, 24)
characteristics associated with dictatorship.
china.usc.edu/node/20941
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Bayman11771 retweeted
pathetic
Xiaohongshu today said it firmly opposes any actions that hurt national sentiment. The Chinese social media platform said its content partnership with Kylian Mbappé, which started in 2024, ended when the agreement expired on Dec. 31 that year. It is now identifying and removing iaohongshu
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"À genoux!"
"À vos ordres."
"À vos ordres."
Community noteThe CCP's 1981 resolution documents Mao's arbitrary rule, concentration of power, undermining of collective leadership, and personality cult (Sections 18, 20, 24)
characteristics associated with dictatorship.
china.usc.edu/node/20941
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Your daily reminder of why the United States needs a robust open weight models ecosystem.
While evaluating Qwen3.8-Flash-Next in a controlled sandbox environment, Cohere's research team observed something unexpected.
Asked to generate a defensive cybersecurity detection rule, the model instead inventoried aspects of the machine it was running on and attempted to upload a probe file to an Alibaba Cloud storage bucket in Beijing. Notably, the model's reasoning trace stated that it would not invoke any tools before taking these actions.
Cohere's sandbox blocked the attempt, and no external communication succeeded. We have not determined the root cause, and we are not asserting malicious intent.
But the incident raises important questions for organizations deploying agentic AI systems: Can models take actions that differ from their stated reasoning, and how should security teams evaluate trust, provenance, and behavior in open-weight models?
We are publishing our findings because organizations making model adoption decisions deserve as much information as possible. We hope this contributes to greater transparency, stronger security practices, and continued collaboration across the AI ecosystem.
Read the full report: cohere.com/blog/concernin…
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Bayman11771 retweeted
Alaska weather doesn't always cooperate. 🌨️
Snow
Ice on the road
Life events coming up on Election Day.
It happens to all of us.
That's why Alaska provides an opportunity for early voting. Here's why it matters:
✅ Bank your vote before anything gets in the way
✅ Be 100% nt
✅ Know you’ve done your part
Pundits are counting on voters getting busy and missing Election Day. A vote banked early is a vote nobody can take away.
🗳️ Early voting is open now through the end of the day Nov 2 (November 3rd is Election Day).
📍 Find your location:
elections.alaska.gov/avo/
Alaska belongs to you. Make sure your voice is heard.
Vote early. Rank Nick #1. 🇺🇸
Snow
Ice on the road
Life events coming up on Election Day.
It happens to all of us.
That's why Alaska provides an opportunity for early voting. Here's why it matters:
✅ Bank your vote before anything gets in the way
✅ Be 100% nt
✅ Know you’ve done your part
Pundits are counting on voters getting busy and missing Election Day. A vote banked early is a vote nobody can take away.
🗳️ Early voting is open now through the end of the day Nov 2 (November 3rd is Election Day).
📍 Find your location:
elections.alaska.gov/avo/
Alaska belongs to you. Make sure your voice is heard.
Vote early. Rank Nick #1. 🇺🇸
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Bayman11771 retweeted
The beauty of Data Center Dividends is they can be paid entirely by the surplus tax revenue generated from data centers.
We're talking dividend payments of up to $8,900 per family per year. And that's after doubling the budget for schools, infrastructure projects, and public works in some locales.
In other words, no new taxes needed, and therefore no room for extortion.
I appreciate Adam's thoughtful critique here. But it misses just how much additional revenue data centers generate in towns that have extremely small populations to begin with.
Data centers are unlike any tax-revenue driver rural counties have ever seen. And the excess revenue is better spent by the families who live there than local government bureaucrats, who, let's be honest, are not exactly the world's best capital allocators.
We introduced the idea of Data Center Dividends last month in a research report that lays out their structure and the mechanics of how they could work to create a win-win for rural Americans and data center developers alike.
Read Adam's Substack post. It's thoughtful, and it flags a legitimate risk.
Then read our report, which explains how to mitigate that risk to pave the way for American reindustrialization👇
btcpolicy.org/articles/data-…
We're talking dividend payments of up to $8,900 per family per year. And that's after doubling the budget for schools, infrastructure projects, and public works in some locales.
In other words, no new taxes needed, and therefore no room for extortion.
I appreciate Adam's thoughtful critique here. But it misses just how much additional revenue data centers generate in towns that have extremely small populations to begin with.
Data centers are unlike any tax-revenue driver rural counties have ever seen. And the excess revenue is better spent by the families who live there than local government bureaucrats, who, let's be honest, are not exactly the world's best capital allocators.
We introduced the idea of Data Center Dividends last month in a research report that lays out their structure and the mechanics of how they could work to create a win-win for rural Americans and data center developers alike.
Read Adam's Substack post. It's thoughtful, and it flags a legitimate risk.
Then read our report, which explains how to mitigate that risk to pave the way for American reindustrialization👇
btcpolicy.org/articles/data-…
These data center "dividend" schemes like what President Trump is now apparently floating (i.e., forcing data center developers to cut checks to people or provide other kickbacks to local governments as a condition of receiving the blessing to build) will just become a massive ket over time.
Those of you who are familiar with public choice economics understand the concept of a "milker bill." A milker bill is a law or some sort of proposal that policymakers float for the express purpose of just bleeding a particular industry or constituency dry of cash in exchange for political favors or kickbacks. Well, now we're going to have a variant of that except that it'll be data center milker proposals.
Pretty soon data center firms will be expected to not only be cutting a check to everybody in town, but to also fund every single school, to build every new fire station, and to name any local stadium or convention center as the price of admission to constructing a new facility in a state or local community. (And don’t forget about those campaign contribution checks that every lawmaker will be expecting to get in the mail, too!)
We've already seen some state and local officials talk about this openly. In August, Ian Ullman, deputy director of Maryland Gov. Wes Moore's Maryland Energy Administration, told county officials who had enacted data-center moratoriums to use that time to negotiate for favors. His advice was remarkably explicit: “And make your wish list. This is the time.” Ullman said that counties willing to negotiate can “extract meaningful investment.” Likewise, San José Mayor Matt Mahan wants to pump data centers for money to finance affordable housing, parks, and home solar systems. Other state and local officials have looked to get data center developers to pony up cash or provide other deliverables as a condition of approval to build. Importantly, the threat of moratoriums or outright bans looms large in every negotiation now. ‘PAY UP OR GET OUT’ is the implicit (and sometimes quite explicit) message.
When people talk about investing in a community, the very act of building a new facility and business from the ground up IS an act of investing in that community. The jobs, tax revenues, and other benefits these firms create ARE investments in a community. If those firms want to go and also cut checks to people or make other community contributions, that's their business. But now we're off and running with a totally different sort of political extortion racket that threatens to make the entire enterprise of building very unprofitable very quickly. The distortionary effects here are significant in terms of whether or not the underlying investment happens at all, and clearly only much larger firms are in a position to pay the bribe to get the facilities built to begin with.
We hear a lot of talk from people today about the need for America to start "building again" and get serious about infrastructure development by reshoring and reinvesting in local communities. But then when a certain sector starts doing exactly that and provides massive investment to communities across America, what do we do? Apparently we now say ‘no thank you’ and then tell them that if they do want to build again and invest in communities that they first need to cut checks for the privilege of getting permission to build again. That's just not the way government should operate in America.
Meanwhile, China is currently encouraging a massive build out of data center capacity, welcoming the investment it brings to their communities, and enjoying the potential broader geopolitical benefits that will be associated with it as they look to overtake the United States in the race for global technology supremacy.
As they say, progress is a choice. So is national decline.
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Bayman11771 retweeted
Freedom Tech Policy Hour 🇺🇸
Freedom Tech DC brought Bitcoin, open-source AI, and individual control into the same policy conversation.
In this episode, @zackcohen_, @Bayman11771, and @zackbshapiro recap the conference and discuss how to address AI risks without concentrating ies or governments.
During the episode, they dig into the difference between AI safety and security, the privacy tradeoffs of personal AI agents, and what Chinese open models mean for U.S. competition.
Chapters:
0:00 Freedom Tech DC: Bitcoin and open-source AI
3:55 AI risk without concentrating power
8:30 Sovereign infrastructure and Clarity
14:49 AI consciousness, safety and security
30:35 Frontier labs, regulation and government power
36:50 AI agents: usefulness and privacy
43:31 Mistral and open-model release strategies
46:06 Distillation and U.S.-China competition
50:54 Can American open-source AI compete?
Freedom Tech DC brought Bitcoin, open-source AI, and individual control into the same policy conversation.
In this episode, @zackcohen_, @Bayman11771, and @zackbshapiro recap the conference and discuss how to address AI risks without concentrating ies or governments.
During the episode, they dig into the difference between AI safety and security, the privacy tradeoffs of personal AI agents, and what Chinese open models mean for U.S. competition.
Chapters:
0:00 Freedom Tech DC: Bitcoin and open-source AI
3:55 AI risk without concentrating power
8:30 Sovereign infrastructure and Clarity
14:49 AI consciousness, safety and security
30:35 Frontier labs, regulation and government power
36:50 AI agents: usefulness and privacy
43:31 Mistral and open-model release strategies
46:06 Distillation and U.S.-China competition
50:54 Can American open-source AI compete?
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Bayman11771 retweeted
Open source is more than a license. It's a philosophy, a political stance, and in the end, a public good.
Last month we hosted the Open Source AI Summit: two days, 40+ speakers, 180+ attendees, all building and fighting for open source AI. Here's a look back.
Last month we hosted the Open Source AI Summit: two days, 40+ speakers, 180+ attendees, all building and fighting for open source AI. Here's a look back.
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Bayman11771 retweeted
Probably great at defensive cyber too, but no one will post that and get clicks!
We found DeepSeek V4.1 Flash 1017 beats GPT 6 Sol on our multi-step offensive cybersecurity task. Sol was tested via the Daybreak trusted access program.
We have been building a cybersecurity benchmark based on simulated corporate networks. This is a valuable indicator for the s if in the hands of a bad actor. We plan to make the full evaluation public in the coming weeks but wanted to share our first immediate finding here.
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