The Commoner

Thursday, October 1, 2026

Sup, freaks.

Marko Jukic's thread got me thinking about how much we're asking AI to fix while we continue to make a mess of the money. Let's dig into that, along with the latest proposals affecting bitcoin companies, spending and courtroom evidence.

WHAT TO EXPECT IN THIS NEWSLETTER

• Marko Jukic on economic decline and the hope that AI will bail us out. I think we need to start with the money.
• BPI pushes back on MSCI's proposed exclusions. Daines wants to make spending stablecoins easier, but leaves bitcoin users doing the tax math.
• Jacoutot and Cordon take bitcoin timestamps to the evidence rules committee. August spending rose without a gain in real disposable income.
• The White House wants America.gov to be the front door for federal services. Plus, how to save a document's timestamp proof yourself.

Marty's Bent

You Can't Print Abundance

Marko Jukic put out a really good thread this morning about the enshittification of the economy and the hope that AI will come along and save us from it. We have a system that makes it harder to save the fruits of your labor and then wonder why the people living under it are cutting corners. Cheap, easy money produces cheap goods. The price stays the same, there's less food in the package, and everyone gets to pretend things haven't gotten more expensive.

When you have sound money you have to seriously consider what you're giving up when you spend or invest it. The ability to hold on to your money without having its purchasing power constantly whittled away forces the person asking for it to make a convincing case. Is this actually worth funding? Would I be better off simply saving? Instead, we've created a system that punishes you for sitting still and encourages you to take more risk just to keep what you've already earned. Then, when enough of those risks blow up, we get another intervention to prevent the losses from being recognized. How are we supposed to figure out where capital should be going when we keep doing this?

The opportunity cost doesn't actually disappear when you print money. The people doing the printing get to ignore it for a while and push the consequences onto everyone else. The government can keep making promises, a bad business can keep getting financed, and the person who did the responsible thing and saved gets to watch that money buy less. We should want individuals, companies and governments to be forced to weigh their decisions against money that is difficult to acquire and impossible to conjure out of thin air.

Instead, the federal government has accumulated more than $40 trillion in gross debt. Bank of America's Michael Hartnett thinks we'll be at $50 trillion by July 2029, according to MarketWatch. And now we're supposed to believe that an AI-driven productivity and profit-margin boom will allow us to grow our way out of the hole we've dug. This is where I agree with Marko's warning about AI becoming a mental escape valve. We should not be getting our hopes up that we're going to thread this needle. We're using that potential as an excuse to keep borrowing and spending as if the problem has already been solved.

Elon was at the White House on Tuesday pushing universal high income again. In April he proposed checks from the federal government, arguing that AI and robotics would increase the production of goods and services faster than the money supply could grow. No inflation because the machines would produce enough to absorb it. Elon is selling the technology that's supposed to deliver this abundance. Of course he wants us excited about it.

We already have incredible abundance in the digital world and AI is going to make it much easier for people to learn and build things very cheaply. You still need food, energy and somewhere to live, and people tend to want to live in places that other people want to live in too. AI can help us produce more, but we actually have to produce it. Sending everyone a bigger check while they're bidding for the same homes and buying the same amount of food is going to drive prices up. Calling the check a universal high income doesn't change that.

Universal high income is a complete oxymoron if we're talking about handing everybody more currency and assuming that makes them wealthy. I'm sure the people in Zimbabwe holding trillion-dollar notes would have preferred money that actually bought them something. Weimar Germany and Venezuela provide their own reminders. People don't need another promise that they'll have a bigger number in their bank account. They need a free market in which they can compete, provide something of value, get paid and save some of what they've earned without having to worry about someone diluting it. The time they spent earning that money is gone. They don't get it back when the government decides it needs to spend more.

Bitcoin gives us money that respects that time. Nobody gets to create more bitcoin because they made a bad investment or promised voters something they can't afford. If you want me to part with mine you have to provide something I think is worth more than holding on to it. I want that calculation happening throughout the economy instead of this constant scramble to outrun the money printer.

Fix the money, fix the world.

SIGNAL

Passive funds still answer to active committees

The Bitcoin Policy Institute is pushing back on MSCI's proposed treatment of non-operating companies. BPI says the proposal's simulation would kick Strategy, Metaplanet and uranium holder Yellow Cake out of its global equity indexes. MSCI wants to treat companies that resemble investment vehicles consistently. BPI's objection is that deciding what counts as an operating asset leaves quite a bit of room for judgment.

The announced comment deadline was September 30, with results expected on or before October 16. A fund marketed as passive still needs someone to decide what belongs in the index. If you own one of these companies through the fund, that judgment can change your exposure whether you agree with it or not.

Daines proposes a spending tax break for stablecoins

Senator Steve Daines has a proposal that would let people spend qualifying dollar stablecoins on goods and services without recognizing a gain or loss. Bitcoin users would still have to do the tax math on the same purchase. Apparently making digital money practical to spend gets a lot easier when it tracks the dollar.

There is a narrower break for eligible users disposing of bitcoin to pay qualifying transaction costs: the digital assets used for those costs must total $10 or less for the same economic transaction. It covers those costs, not a $10 bitcoin purchase. The proposal would also extend wash-sale restrictions to traded digital assets, excluding qualified dollar stablecoins, limiting the ability to sell at a loss and quickly buy back a substantially identical asset to claim the deduction. Congress hasn't enacted this.

A public timestamp for courtroom evidence

Bryan Jacoutot and Rafael Cordon have asked the federal evidence rules committee to consider a clearer way to authenticate distributed digital timestamps. Their suggestion is technology-neutral, though bitcoin is their preferred ledger.

Say two people are arguing about when a document existed. A timestamp proof lets them check a digital fingerprint against the file and establish that those exact bytes existed before a particular point in time. They don't have to take the date supplied by the person holding the file at face value. Someone can timestamp a lie, of course, so a court still needs evidence about authorship and whether the contents are true. Changing the file would break the match with its timestamp proof.

Spending rose while real disposable income stood still

Real spending rose 0.6% in August while real disposable personal income went nowhere, according to the September 30 BEA release. The PCE price index was up 3.4% from a year earlier, or 3.0% excluding food and energy. The saving rate was 4.1%.

Spending more while real income stands still leaves less room to save. The spending figure is adjusted for inflation, so this increase goes beyond people paying more for the same goods. Their after-tax purchasing power didn't keep up.

America.gov gets an order to become the front door

Tuesday's America.gov order tells GSA to build a single entry point for covered federal online services, with Login.gov handling authentication and AI helping people find their way around. Making it easier to find the right form would be welcome. I want to know what the software can do in my name, not just whether it can find the right form.

The order says agencies keep their records and decision-making authority. It prohibits a centralized federal system of records and preserves phone, mail, in-person and agency-specific digital alternatives. IRS tax filing, Department of War services and intelligence-agency services are excluded.

⚡ FREEDOM TECH CORNER

DATA SNAPSHOT

Retrieved October 1, 2026, 11:44 a.m. ET. Kraken last trade and mempool.space network readings are retrieval-time observations. Fear & Greed is dated October 1 UTC. Bitcoin Lab MVRV, realized price and SOPR are daily observations dated September 30 UTC.

Sources: Kraken for last-trade price; mempool.space for network estimates; Alternative.me for daily sentiment; Bitcoin Lab for MVRV, realized price and SOPR. Sats per dollar is calculated as 100,000,000 divided by the Kraken price. MVRV compares market capitalization with realized capitalization. Realized price is realized capitalization divided by circulating supply. SOPR compares spent-output value at spending with value at creation; above 1 indicates aggregate realized profit. Bitcoin Lab values are reported as supplied, not calculated from the live Kraken price.

For a longer conversation about owning the tools you depend on, watch Tommy Eastman on owning your AI stack.

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See you tomorrow,

Marty

Marty Bent · TFTC · Nostr

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