The Commoner

Tuesday, October 6, 2026

Sup, freaks.

India's government just made a better case for bitchat than I ever could. If it isn't on your phone yet, today's the day.

WHAT TO EXPECT IN THIS NEWSLETTER

• India pulls bitchat from the App Store, and why you should download it before you need it.
• The 10-year at its highest since 2002, bond volatility and France's borrowing premium.
• Trump's new AI task force and the fight for open-weight models.
• Hormuz attacks versus the barrels, and DarkHorse funding Hopkinsville's new substation.
• The CFTC's crypto market rules, Rome's debasement and Nunchuk inheritance with your own hardware.

Marty's Bent

Download bitchat Before You Need It

When a government goes out of its way to ban a piece of technology, that's usually a pretty good sign the technology is powerful. India just paid bitchat that compliment.

On Saturday, Jack shared the notice Apple sent the bitchat team. Per a demand from India's Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology under Section 69A of the country's IT Act, the app is being pulled from the India App Store "because it includes content that is illegal in India." What content? Apple doesn't say. The local mesh hops messages over Bluetooth between phones that happen to be near each other. There's no data center full of messages for anyone to rifle through. TechCrunch checked and found it gone from Google Play in India too, with the website unreachable on several Indian ISPs. And as SFLC.in pointed out, it looks like the developers were never heard or served with a blocking order. Jack found out from an Apple email.

Jack posted the notice the day after authorities ordered mobile internet shut off for 12 hours around a protest at Jantar Mantar in Delhi. That's exactly the situation bitchat was built for. Being able to talk to each other outside of cell networks and Wi-Fi is incredibly powerful, particularly for people trying to organize and hold their government to account. Bitchat makes that a lot easier, and so do LoRa radio mesh projects like Meshtastic. No accounts, no phone numbers, no central server to raid. Of course a government that flips the internet off during protests is uncomfortable with that.

I hate to break it to the folks at MeitY, but bitchat is free and open source software. They can lean on Apple and Google to stop distributing it. They can't make the code disappear. Android users can grab the APK from GitHub and sideload it. Even better, the Android app has a "Share BitChat" option that sends the app itself to another phone over a local hotspot or Quick Share. No internet required. Calle reminded everyone of this after the block. One person with the app can get it onto the phones of everyone around them. That's a beautiful thing.

Remember Jamaica. When Hurricane Melissa hit a year ago this month, bitchat jumped to the second most downloaded app on the App Store and Google Play on the island. As I understand it, a lot of that came from bitcoiners there like Dread, the founder of Flash, telling people to get it on their phones before the storm hit. When banking and communications went down afterwards, Dread described people leaning on bitcoin to move money and on apps like bitchat to talk to each other.

Don't wait until the towers are down and you're hunting for someone who can share it with you. If you haven't downloaded bitchat yet, take the time today, particularly if you live somewhere it's still available. App Store, Google Play or the APK. You may not use it day one, week one, month one or year one. Having it when you desperately need it is the point, whether a storm knocked out the grid or your government decided you shouldn't be able to talk to your neighbors.

I'll randomly be walking around and get a notification that someone nearby is on bitchat and available to chat. It's happening more and more. Imagine if every American, or every citizen of every country, had it installed. You'd have a way to communicate that doesn't depend on a cell carrier or a Wi-Fi network. This could be a grassroots thing. Get your family on it. Get your neighbors on it. Convince your community to download it before they need it.

SIGNAL

The 10-year is at a level we haven't seen since 2002

The official 10-year Treasury yield hit 5.31% on Monday, the highest daily reading since May 2002. Volatility came along for the ride. The MOVE index, which tracks expected swings in Treasuries, closed Monday at 113.60, up almost 6% on the day and nearly 50% above where it sat in early September. It eased a bit early Tuesday. I wouldn't call that cooling down yet.

France is dealing with its own version of this. The French 10-year's premium over Germany blew out to nearly 159 basis points last week, the widest since the euro debt crisis in 2011. It has come back to around 125 this morning, which is still 40 basis points wider than a month ago. Yesterday I wrote about Trump saying inflation could pay off the debt. Bond investors on both sides of the Atlantic are demanding to be paid a lot more to hold government debt, and I can't say I blame them.

A task force won't protect open models for us

Over the weekend Trump announced the Super Intelligence Force, chaired by Director of National Intelligence Jay Clayton, with Andrew Ferguson, Emil Michael and Scott Kupor reportedly serving as vice chairs. It has 120 days to report on the risks and opportunities of AI. Michael told CNBC last month that AI doom talk is a "coordinated campaign to scare people to make irrational decisions that benefit some of these incumbents." So there are people in the room who get it.

Just because a task force has been put together doesn't mean we're going to get our way. We have to advocate for it. A future where open-weight models are second-class citizens, or banned from the market completely, is a future I don't want to live in. There needs to be a check on the frontier labs having complete control over model development and distribution. Restricting open-weight models is a non-starter. That's a line in the sand people need to defend.

These Hormuz attacks look desperate

Rory Johnston counts 11 confirmed attacks and 13 total incidents reported by UKMTO since last Wednesday, and on Monday an inbound tanker turned back after the IRGC hailed it. Meanwhile, Kpler's data has non-Iranian Gulf crude exports back to pre-war levels in September, with about 40% of it routed around the strait. Iranian crossings have been near zero since the blockade was reimposed in July. WTI was down 2.4% to $87.28 this morning.

John Arnold and I got into this yesterday, and it looks to me like the blockade pressure is working. These attacks feel like a desperate, last-ditch effort from a regime that can't get its oil out. I recorded a conversation with Susan Kokinda where we dig into this at length. It comes out tomorrow morning, so keep an eye out for it.

DarkHorse is paying for Hopkinsville's new substation

Full disclosure: I'm on DarkHorse's board. DarkHorse signed a contract with Hopkinsville Electric System for up to 50 MW for a new site in Hopkinsville, Kentucky, doubling its contracted power in the TVA region to about 100 MW. DarkHorse is paying for the grid upgrade. It's funding a new 65 MW substation in full, up front, and handing the site to HES to own and operate. DarkHorse takes 50 MW. The other 15 MW or so goes to existing HES customers.

It also gives Hopkinsville its first delivery point off TVA's 161 kV transmission backbone, which HES's general manager says "will significantly improve HES grid stability and system reliability." No tax abatements. Closed-loop cooling only. It still has to get through local permitting, but a company paying for the upgrade up front, with no tax breaks, is how you strengthen the grid for a whole town at no cost to the taxpayer.

The CFTC starts writing crypto market rules

The CFTC isn't waiting on Congress. On Monday it published an advance notice asking for comment on two frameworks, Regulation Crypto Asset Transactions and Regulation Crypto Asset Markets. The second would create a new kind of designated contract market built specifically for retail crypto trades. Chairman Michael Selig wrote that exchanges choosing that route "would be permitted to allow retail customers to trade on a margined, leveraged or financed basis."

This isn't a proposed rule yet. Selig also concedes the agency can't require crypto to trade on CFTC-registered platforms without Congress acting. Comments are due 60 days after the notice hits the Federal Register, so there's time to weigh in on who gets to write these rules.

Rome debased its way down

If you haven't listened to my conversation with Jeremy Ryan Slate yet, do yourself a favor. Jeremy walks through the full arc of Roman currency debasement, starting with a denarius that was roughly 95% silver under Augustus. By the late third century, some Roman silver coins contained less than 5% silver, debased one military payroll at a time. When that didn't work out, Diocletian issued his edict in 301 AD fixing maximum prices for goods, freight and wages across the empire.

We spent a lot of time on how closely today rhymes. QE as coin clipping. Stimulus checks as donatives. Price controls as the move when nothing else works.

⚡ FREEDOM TECH CORNER

DATA SNAPSHOT

Spot price and block height: October 6, 2026, 9:23 a.m. ET. Network hashrate: mempool.space estimate at the same time. Bitcoin Lab daily series: October 5, 2026. U.S. spot ETF flows: October 5, 2026.

Sources: Kraken spot quote, mempool.space block height and hashrate, Bitcoin Lab daily metrics, and TFTC ETF flows. Daily metrics use the provider’s October 5 observation, not live intraday estimates.

If bitchat isn't on your phone yet, fix that today and get the people you care about to do the same. And keep an eye out for my conversation with Susan Kokinda tomorrow morning.

Marty Bent · TFTC · Nostr

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