The Commoner

Monday, November 9, 2026

Sup, freaks.

Republicans promised to make life more affordable and keep America out of unnecessary wars. EJ Antoni joined me to discuss how they squandered the progress he was seeing, and what can still be done. Also today: Cory Fields' quantum landmines, FinCEN's withdrawal of the $250 proposal, the LNbits shutdown and the work required to give an agent a useful memory.

WHAT TO EXPECT IN THIS NEWSLETTER

• EJ Antoni on the affordability recovery Washington squandered.
• Cory Fields' quantum landmines and the costs of deterring future theft.
• FinCEN's reporting retreat, the MEXC order and LNbits' security response.
• Last week's bitcoin ETF outflows and the work behind useful agent memory.
• An experimental Rust node, plus the latest bitcoin data.

Marty's Bent

The Recovery Trump Squandered

Republicans were given control of Washington after promising to make life more affordable, cut spending and keep the country out of unnecessary wars. They went to war with Iran and failed to deliver the spending cuts. Now they're dealing with voters who are pissed off that the life they were told would become attainable is still out of reach. There is no reason to be confused about this.

My conversation with EJ Antoni, published Saturday, made the extent of the wasted opportunity painfully clear. EJ's assessment is that purchasing power and housing affordability had started to improve before the war reversed that progress. We weren't anywhere close to undoing the damage that had been done, but people were beginning to get some breathing room. The administration chose to put that at risk while Congress carried on spending.

Someone saving for a house can afford the rent and groceries while watching homeownership move further out of reach. Meanwhile, people who already own homes and financial assets get to watch their wealth appreciate. This is the divide EJ is describing when he talks about the K-shaped economy.

Going to war makes it harder to close that divide. EJ traces the setback through energy prices, which feed into the cost of moving food, manufacturing goods and operating businesses. The expense spreads well beyond filling up your car. As he explains it, the resulting inflation pressure also works its way into borrowing costs. A prospective homebuyer gets squeezed while saving the down payment and again when trying to finance the purchase. An administration elected to focus on problems at home has made those problems harder to solve by taking on another war in the Middle East.

Congress cannot hide behind the White House here. I asked EJ whether the refusal to cut spending came from a fear that doing so would crash the economy. He didn't buy it. His explanation was much less charitable: lawmakers agree to support each other's spending so they can return to their districts with something to take credit for. The constituent sees the project their representative secured. They don't get an equally enthusiastic explanation of what it will cost them to pay for all the other projects that representative agreed to support. Everyone in Congress gets to participate and everyone outside Congress gets the bill.

EJ wants people to stop confusing the accounting with prosperity. Government purchases count toward GDP, and transfers feed spending elsewhere. That doesn't tell us whether the activity makes people better off or whether the resources could have been put to better use. If the goal is to make it easier for Americans to build wealth, we should care what is being produced and what people are able to keep after paying for it.

There are things the administration has done that EJ thinks deserve credit. Full expensing makes it easier for businesses to justify investing in equipment. Tax predictability and deregulation give them more confidence to commit capital. His frustration is that these gains are being undermined by other decisions. He used the example of a domestic canned-food producer paying a tariff on the material needed to make its cans while competing with imported finished goods. Wanting to bring production home doesn't make the intermediate inputs appear overnight. Businesses need time to rebuild those supply chains, and they need to be able to survive while doing it.

The same applies to getting permission to build. The Supreme Court's Chevron decision created an opening to challenge agency rules; it didn't make the existing rules disappear. EJ sees more room to remove them even with a hostile Congress. Making a business wait years to find out whether it will be allowed to build a facility is a great way to ensure that facility never gets built. There is work that can be done here without another spending program.

EJ still expects growth, though with more inflation and weaker performance than he had previously anticipated. He sees business investment helping carry the economy and worries that higher borrowing costs could disrupt the AI buildout. He is also more optimistic about what Bessent can accomplish than someone watching all of this might expect. EJ favors decentralized money, but thinks Treasury and the Fed need to coordinate within the system we have. He describes Bessent as constrained by inherited short-term debt and explains how Treasury cash movements affect liquidity in repo markets.

My question near the end was how much time and capital the Iran war is consuming while Bessent tries to prepare America for a possible monetary reordering. Those resources cannot be spent twice. Every additional commitment to the war competes with the work that was supposed to improve life here.

EJ doesn't read the election result as proof that voters have embraced socialism. I hope he's right. Republicans have nevertheless made the job much easier for people offering more government control. They were given a chance to show that cutting spending, avoiding wars and letting people build would improve people's lives. Failing to follow through gives their opponents room to blame the freedom they promised rather than the decisions they actually made. People waiting to buy a home have every reason to demand results. Republicans should be worried about who those people turn to next.

SIGNAL

Cory Fields wants quantum thieves to risk their own bitcoin

A quantum thief might be able to break an old key. Cory Fields is asking whether we can make using it expensive. In his November 4 mailing-list post, he sketches rules under which anyone spending legacy coins would have to put up collateral. Owners could prepare hidden, quantum-safe commitments beforehand, then reveal them during a challenge window to recover the targeted coins and claim the thief's collateral. An attacker wouldn't know which coins were protected by these "landmines."

The cost would fall on legitimate spenders too. Owners would also need to prepare before an attack and respond in time. Fields explores separate auctions for unprotected coins, including a version that burns those coins and rewards challengers from the attacker's collateral. These are thought experiments, with the soft-fork mechanics still to be worked out. Uncertainty about which coins are protected could make even a technically capable thief unwilling to take the risk.

FinCEN backs off $250 transfers while targeting MEXC

FinCEN and the Fed have withdrawn their proposal to lower cross-border transfer recordkeeping and Travel Rule thresholds from $3,000 to $250. The withdrawal took effect today. Good. Expanding collection, retention and transmission duties to that level would have pulled far more ordinary transfers into the system. The existing rules remain, and the agencies can return with a new proposal.

Meanwhile, Treasury has ordered covered U.S. financial institutions to stop processing transfers to and from MEXC Global, citing Russian illicit finance. That prohibition takes effect 30 days after Federal Register publication. Washington can abandon a proposed surveillance expansion while continuing to decide which intermediaries may transact with one another. The MEXC order works through U.S. financial institutions. The government doesn't need to change bitcoin's rules to put pressure on people who depend on those institutions to move their money.

LNbits operators still need verified restart instructions

If you're running LNbits, pay attention to the project's instruction to stop servers immediately. That warning followed a reported wave of attacks Sunday. LNbits also disabled its hosted instances as a precaution.

Developers merged two security-hardening changes Monday, including stronger checks on where requests are allowed to go. At our 9:55 a.m. ET check, we hadn't verified an incident-resolving release or official permission to restart. The rc2 tag retrieved at that point led to an older commit, not Monday's fixes, despite a separate version-bump commit having appeared. That is a particularly bad place to make assumptions from a version number. Keep the server stopped unless the maintainers' current instructions tell you otherwise, and check that the release you're installing actually contains the required fixes.

Bitcoin ETFs lost $1.28 billion last week

U.S. spot bitcoin ETFs had $1.28 billion in net outflows during November 2–6, according to TFTC's tracker. Wednesday was the only day with net inflows. Friday alone accounted for $411.9 million leaving the funds, with about $403.0 million coming out of BlackRock's IBIT. Fidelity's FBTC took in $42.8 million that same day.

The difference between IBIT and FBTC on Friday is worth keeping in mind before treating "institutions" as a single buyer with a single view of bitcoin.

An agent can remember the wrong thing forever

Saving a bad note gives an agent something to be wrong about again tomorrow. Anthropic's article on agent memory gets into the work required to avoid this: checking notes against the original conversations, correcting errors, building linked reference pages and deciding what actually belongs in the next session's context.

The failures in its experiments are familiar information-management problems. One wiki grew larger than the material it was supposed to organize. Concurrent writers lost contract facts. Giving each contract one writer and preserving exact quotations helped address the latter problem.

⚡ FREEDOM TECH CORNER

DATA SNAPSHOT

Spot price, block height and hashrate estimate: November 9, 2026, 10:20:31 a.m. ET. Bitcoin Lab daily series: November 8, 2026. U.S. spot ETF flows: November 6, 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 November 8 observation, not live intraday estimates.

Have a great day, freaks.

Marty Bent · TFTC · Nostr

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