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Bitcoin Brief

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A Sudanese man attempted to behead a disabled Scottish man on a sidewalk in Belfast this week. The video went viral. The city erupted. Masked men burned houses, cars, and migrant accommodation. The British Prime Minister's response was not to address what happened or why. It was to threaten the people who are angry about it. The pattern is familiar. And it connects to something we have been covering for three years.

LEAD STORY

Belfast Is Burning. The UK Government Built the Surveillance State First.

A viral video of a Sudanese man attempting to behead a disabled Scottish victim named Stephen Ogilvie triggered nighttime riots in Belfast. Masked men conducted arson attacks on cars, houses, migrant accommodation, and a Middle Eastern supermarket. The protests spread. London saw peaceful rallies. Glasgow reported unrest. For the first time in living memory, Northern Ireland's Protestant and Catholic communities found a common cause.

The British government's response followed the same script it always follows. Prime Minister Keir Starmer threatened rioters with "the full force of the law." Labour Party leader Anna Turley blamed Elon Musk and X for fueling the violence. Nobody in government addressed the immigration policy that placed an unvetted individual in a community where he attempted a beheading on a public sidewalk.

Cause the problem. Ignore the root cause. Punish the reaction. Blame the communication platform. This is the pattern.

On the other end of the political spectrum, Restore Britain leader Rupert Lowe said "millions must go" and called for the prosecution of "civil servants, judges, and politicians" who placed unvetted migrants in communities. "If they have knowingly placed unvetted dangerous third world savages in our communities, near our children, then a Restore Britain Government will aim to prosecute them."

The political class across the West is arriving at a tipping point. The gaslighting, particularly from the political class, has become so detached from lived reality that it no longer works. People are not confused about what is happening. They can see it. They filmed it. They shared it. The question is whether the state can make them stop sharing it.

Which brings us to what we have been covering for three years. This week, Signal published "Surveillance Is Not Safety", a document opposing the UK government's proposal to mandate content scanning on every device sold or used in the UK. Switched on by default. A "presumption of nudity." On-device scanning with automatic reporting to authorities. Mullvad, the VPN provider, published its own analysis: the proposal means "government spyware on every mobile device" that "shall watch everything that happens including always watching the screen looking for things the government disapproves of."

As I said on yesterday's Rabbit Hole Recap: the UK government is not stupid. Say what you will about their relative incompetence, but they read the tea leaves. They could see where the trajectory of their immigration policies was heading. They could see the social unrest building. And they tried to get ahead of it by locking down the internet and thrusting surveillance technology onto every device. The censorship infrastructure came first. The riots came on schedule.

The last thing they want is for the Protestants and Catholics of Northern Ireland to be able to coordinate in a privacy-preserving way to push back against what they see as an abuse of their communities. Signal's paper makes the technical case for why this surveillance will not protect children, will not stop violence, and will hand Apple and Google even more control over your personal information. But the real reason for the proposal has nothing to do with children. It has to do with what is happening in Belfast right now. A population that can see the truth, share the truth, and organize around the truth is the one thing a failing state cannot tolerate.

This is why bitcoin matters beyond price. A government that funds mass immigration programs, surveillance infrastructure, and the prosecution of dissent does so because it controls the monetary system. The ability to print, borrow, and allocate without consent is what makes all of it possible. Separating money from the state and central banks is not an abstract principle. It is a practical requirement for a population that wants to stop funding its own subjugation.

The attempts to increase surveillance are increasing the need to route around centralized authority in every dimension. Communication, via tools like Signal and SimpleX. Money, via bitcoin. As we continue to transition into the information age, these tools are not optional. They are the infrastructure of a free society.

SIGNAL

AI POLICY

Milei Submits AI Framework to Congress: Zero Regulation, "Non-Human Corporations"

The opposite of everything Dario Amodei proposed this week.

Argentina's President Milei submitted an AI legislative framework to Congress proposing zero regulation on AI development, a new "non-human corporation" category for AI and robot-operated entities with limited liability, and a low-tax regime with flexible governance rules.

The framing is worth reading: "The Dutch East India Company gave the world the limited liability company in 1602. Milei wants Argentina to do the same for autonomous AI agents in 2026." This is the direct opposite of what Anthropic proposed this week. One vision concentrates AI power in a handful of funded labs behind government gatekeeping. The other lets anyone build. Peter Thiel reportedly moved to Argentina. Now you know why.

AI ECONOMICS

SpaceX Became the Fourth-Largest AI Hyperscaler in 30 Days. "We Don't Know How Smart These Models Are."

The BG2 podcast with Gavin Baker laid out the compute economics that matter.

The latest BG2 episode with Gavin Baker (Atreides) covered the AI compute picture. Four things stood out. First, SpaceX went from zero AI presence to the fourth-largest hyperscaler in roughly 30 days after signing deals with Google ($50 billion per gigawatt per year) and Anthropic ($22-23 billion per gigawatt per year). Elon stood up the Colossus 1 cluster in 19 days. Industry standard: four years.

Second, Noam Brown of OpenAI published a piece arguing that "we do not know how smart these models are" because nobody has run them continuously for a year and new models ship before we can fully evaluate the prior generation. Baker's framing: imagine Albert Einstein thinking about fundamental physics 24 hours a day, 365 days a year, never eating, sleeping, aging, or getting distracted. These models can already do that.

Third, monetization per gigawatt of AI compute is increasing, not decreasing. The consensus entering 2025 was that token pricing would be smoothly deflationary. Reality: demand is outstripping supply. Early 2025 saw roughly $20 billion per gigawatt. Current rates are pushing $30-40 billion. Less than 0.2% of the global population is using AI agentically.

Fourth, open-source AI doing well is paradoxically bullish for compute and energy demand. If frontier labs capture less margin, more money flows to hardware and infrastructure. Token volumes grow across both closed and open source. This is the same dynamic bitcoin miners understand: the economics of the infrastructure layer matter more than any single application running on top of it.

BITCOIN

BitGo Launches "Lightning Earn" for Institutional Bitcoin Treasuries

Bitcoin-native DeFi that actually works: deploy BTC as Lightning liquidity, earn routing fees.

BitGo announced Lightning Earn, a product that lets corporate bitcoin treasury companies and institutional allocators deploy their bitcoin as liquidity on the Lightning Network and receive bitcoin-denominated routing fees in return. Powered by @AmbossTech rails, it comes with the institutional-grade security controls and governance infrastructure BitGo's clients expect. This is what Bitcoin DeFi looks like when it works: not EVM token swaps ported from Ethereum, but real economic activity on native Bitcoin infrastructure. Institutions earning yield by providing liquidity to the payment network, not by gambling on tokens.

FREEDOM TECH

Ulendo: Global Phone Calls via Bitcoin and Nostr. No SIM Card Required.

"Your phone number is temporary. Your npub is global."

Ulendo lets you call local phone numbers in any country without buying a local SIM card. Open the app, call. Payment via bitcoin. Identity via your Nostr npub. Borderless communication without asking permission from a telecom gatekeeper. In a week where the UK government is proposing to mandate surveillance on every device, tools like this represent the other path: communication infrastructure that does not depend on the entities trying to monitor it.

CIVILIZATION

"We Are the First Species to Get Everything It Ever Wanted, and the Result Is Suicide."

The fertility collapse is not a mystery. We engineered it.

A thread from @IterIntellectus laying out the fertility collapse in structural terms is circulating widely. The argument: children disappeared from daily life (most women turn 30 without ever holding a baby). We killed the single income (both parents working to survive). Schools and media systematically reframed motherhood as failure. Social media finished the job. And underneath it all, we removed people from history. No ancestors you owe anything to, no descendants you are building for. Just one atomic self detached from continuity.

The part that connects to what we cover here: the destruction of the single-income family is a direct consequence of monetary debasement. When it takes two incomes to maintain a household that one income sustained in 1970, you have priced out parenthood. Not culturally. Economically. The fertility crisis is, at its root, a monetary crisis.

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⚡ FREEDOM TECH CORNER

DATA SNAPSHOT

If you found value in today's Brief, forward it to someone who needs to see what is happening in the West right now and why the tools we cover matter more than ever.

See you on Monday,

Marty Bent