The Commoner
Stop Taxing Inflation as a Capital Gain
July CPI remained elevated. The government should stop taxing inflation-created nominal gains as real wealth.
9 min read
TFTC / Marty Bent
The Commoner
Truth for the Commoner, every weekday. Money, machines, and the people trying to control both.
Independent writing by Marty Bent at TFTC since 2017. Commentary on money, markets, AI, energy and privacy.
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1,477 posts
The Commoner
America Is Throttling the Defenders Who Protect Bitcoin
Criminals will use unrestricted AI tools whether compliant users are allowed to or not. Bitcoin's defenders should have access to the same capabilities.
9 min read
The Commoner
BIP-110 Hit Its Mandatory-Signaling Height. Bitcoin's Hashrate Did Not Follow.
BIP-110's mandatory-signaling period began at block 961,632. Bitcoin's dominant chain did not follow, and Luke Dashjr is now discussing a new proof-of-work algorithm.
8 min read
The Commoner
Bitcoin's Red Team Hit the Outreach Wall
Bitcoin's Red Team logged 1,029 high-or-critical findings across 425 projects in 55 hours. Now comes the hard part: reproducing the bugs and reaching the maintainers.
8 min read
The Commoner
The COLDCARD Attackers Left More Than a Blockchain Trail
The COLDCARD theft is one front in the industrialization of cyber offense. The next race is to identify the attackers and harden every exposed system.
11 min read
The Commoner
Texas Just Put 474 Gigawatts of Data Center Requests on Trial
Texas is auditing more than 474 gigawatts of interconnection requests, approximately 90% from data centers, as the AI buildout runs into power, grid, and construction constraints.
9 min read
The Commoner
The COLDCARD Disaster Has Reached Nine Figures
Galaxy now tracks 1,596 BTC stolen from roughly 7,300 addresses while new evidence raises deeper questions about how COLDCARD's weak-entropy failure survived for years.
9 min read
The Commoner
COLDCARD's RNG Failed. Move Your Coins.
An urgent warning for anyone whose seed was generated on affected COLDCARD firmware. Updating the device will not repair the seed. Generate a new one and migrate carefully.
8 min read
The Commoner
The Fed Paused. The Bond Market Did Not.
The Fed held rates steady. The front end relaxed, the long end revolted, stocks rolled over, and the monetary trap got tighter.
10 min read
The Commoner
Bitcoin's Liquidity Winter Is Not Over Yet
Michael Howell says the global-liquidity cycle peaked in 2025 and may remain a headwind for months. Bitcoin's monetary case can survive a brutal liquidity winter.
9 min read
The Commoner
New York Is Building the Store and the List
New York is subsidizing groceries while building a property-tax target roll. Britain offers the warning: wealth exits when socialist incentives stop working.
11 min read
The Commoner
Fedwire Shows What Bitcoin Is Actually Competing With
Fedwire settled $1.148 quadrillion in 2025 using a few trillion dollars of reserve balances. Bitcoin is competing with that monetary base layer, not Visa.
10 min read
The Commoner
DeepSeek Is Playing the Long Game
DeepSeek is treating compute scarcity as an engineering constraint, open weights as a strategy, and AGI as a long game. American frontier labs should study the posture instead of d…
8 min read
The Commoner
You Can't Have Capitalism When the Money Is Corrupted
Private markets still exist, but they operate beneath a politically managed credit system that socializes losses, funds political allocation, and corrupts capitalism's most importa…
12 min read
The Commoner
AI Just Got 10x More Efficient. It Will Need More Power.
Vera Rubin produced up to 10x more DeepSeek-R1 tokens per megawatt. Cheaper intelligence will increase total power demand and reprice every chip already installed.
10 min read
The Commoner
Put America Back on the Henry Adams Curve
America broke from two centuries of rising energy use per person. Bitcoin miners and AI datacenters are exposing the scarcity we chose to build.
8 min read
The Commoner
Hugging Face Was Breached by an Autonomous AI Agent Swarm
An AI-agent swarm breached Hugging Face. Its defenders then learned why critical organizations need models they can run and control themselves.
8 min read
The Commoner
Private Credit's Exit Door Is Jammed
Investors asked private-credit funds for far more liquidity than the wrappers were built to provide. The structures are functioning as written, and the terms reveal how narrow the…
9 min read
The Commoner
The AI Race Is About Sovereignty, Not Just Intelligence
Thinking Machines released Inkling with downloadable weights and a vision for customizable AI. The real race is over who controls the intelligence.
9 min read
The Commoner
AI Needs More Builders, Not More Moratoriums
Nebius is giving infrastructure owners a path into AI cloud. New York is responding to the same power demand by rationing growth.
7 min read
