AI Makes Real Education More Valuable

My conversation with Josh and Hannah Centers of Chapter House is out, and it gets to the heart of what education should look like in the age of AI.

The fiat education system rewards grades, credentials, and standardized tests. It can produce students who decode the syntax of a sentence without understanding its meaning. Josh and Hannah argue that reading comprehension, clear writing, virtue, wonder, and independent judgment matter more than spreadsheet thinking. Those skills become more valuable when LLMs can perform more technical work. Children need to communicate clearly with machines and, more importantly, recognize when the machine is lying or hallucinating.

The industrial-era school system was designed to create cogs for a machine that no longer exists. Children need to learn how to learn, think from first principles, and build the character required to use powerful tools well.

Softer Inflation Gives the Fed More Room

The June CPI fell 0.4% from May and core prices were flat. Today's PPI report showed final-demand prices falling 0.3%, while the index excluding food, energy, and trade services rose only 0.1%.

The bank reports I reviewed broadly agree that the two prints reduced the odds of an imminent Fed hike. The next question is whether continued disinflation raises the odds of a cut later this year or in 2027. Nobody should treat that as a certainty. PPI is still up 5.5% from a year ago, and oil can reverse the energy relief quickly.

But the fiscal backdrop has not improved. The federal deficit reached $1.367 trillion through June, net interest expense reached $827 billion, and gross interest on Treasury securities exceeded $1 trillion. If softer inflation gives the Fed room to turn dovish while Washington keeps spending, credit creation and M2 can begin accelerating again. M2 already reached $23.052 trillion in May.

That mix is bullish for bitcoin. It is a bearer asset outside the banking system, disconnected from governments and central banks, with a monetary policy no committee can change when the debt bill becomes uncomfortable.

Tadge Dryja Is Building a Bitcoin Recovery Path

Maelstrom awarded a grant to Tadge Dryja to research how bitcoin owners could recover funds if elliptic-curve cryptography were ever broken. The work explores contingency mechanisms including hash-based signatures and commit-and-reveal recovery schemes.

The quantum panic remains overhyped. A practical attack on bitcoin is not around the corner. That does not make contingency planning a waste of time. Dryja co-authored the Lightning Network white paper and has spent years building foundational bitcoin technology. Funding him to explore a recovery path before one is needed is exactly what responsible protocol engineering looks like.

Bark Removes the Lightning Channel Headache for Merchants

At BTCPay Day 2026, the Second team demonstrated its new Bark plugin for BTCPay Server. Bark is Second's implementation of Ark, a bitcoin layer-two protocol built around virtual UTXOs, or VTXOs.

The merchant can accept Lightning and Ark payments through BTCPay Server without running a Lightning node, opening channels, sourcing inbound liquidity, or managing routing. The customer's payment looks like a normal Lightning checkout. The Ark server handles the Lightning infrastructure, and the merchant receives a self-custodial VTXO stored locally. The merchant can later pay over Lightning or move the funds on-chain.

The demo showed another important UX improvement. When sender and merchant are on the same Ark, the software can route the payment over Ark automatically. The customer scans one QR code without deciding whether to use Ark or Lightning.

The plugin is available through BTCPay's plugin builder, and the code is open source. Ark does introduce a server coordinator that manages liquidity and charges fees, but the merchant keeps a unilateral exit path if that server becomes unresponsive. This is what progress looks like: hide the channel-management complexity without giving up self-custody.