The Commoner

Thursday, September 24, 2026

Sup, freaks.

Keonne Rodriguez shared an update from prison yesterday about a trip across the country and a program that was supposed to help him get home sooner. We need to keep talking about what has happened to him and Bill Hill, and keep pushing to get them home. We'll get into that first, then take a look at the jump in bond volatility and a few developments in bitcoin and energy.

WHAT TO EXPECT IN THIS NEWSLETTER

• Marty's Bent: Keonne and Bill are still in prison. Keep pushing for pardons.
• Treasury yields are climbing and MOVE has jumped. Foreign demand for Treasury bills deserves a closer look, too.
• Lightning gets a specification in x402, and Halcyon's gas-power pipeline shows 100 GW planned for 2027–2029.
• Another positive day for bitcoin ETFs, a Sparrow privacy check and the latest bitcoin data snapshot.

Marty's Bent

Keonne and Bill Are Still in Prison

Keonne Rodriguez and William Hill are still sitting in prison. These are the two men who built Samourai Wallet, a non-custodial bitcoin wallet that let people transact with more privacy while keeping control of their own money. It is an absolute miscarriage of justice that they are spending years of their lives in prison over this. Writing and publishing privacy technology should not land you in a jail cell.

Keonne received five years and Bill received four. The government's account of their guilty pleas says they admitted conspiring to operate a money transmitting business knowing it transmitted criminal proceeds. I want both of them pardoned. Samourai never took custody of its users' bitcoin, and I fundamentally disagree with applying money-transmission law to the non-custodial privacy tools they operated.

Keonne shared an update yesterday that gives you an idea of what his life has become. He says the Bureau of Prisons transferred him to FCI McKean for a program that could reduce his sentence. What should have been a four-hour drive became 30 days in transit, two cross-country flights and stops in three states, only to end up a couple hundred miles from where he started. After taking more than a month to decompress and beginning to settle in, he was told the program had been “deactivated.” Now he and 70 other participants are facing another trip through that system to a prison where the program still operates. He doesn't know when he is leaving or where he is going.

The government has taken years of his life and apparently can't even organize the program that might let him get some of that time back. We are paying to move him around the country while he waits to find out when he might get home to his wife. Keonne goes out of his way to say that many of the people working directly with the inmates are empathetic and competent. His criticism is aimed at the leadership that has left those staff and the men in their care dealing with the consequences. Lauren has written to BOP leadership asking them to send in someone who can get the current participants through the program rather than ship everyone somewhere else. She is having to ask the government to competently administer her husband's imprisonment when he shouldn't be there in the first place.

Back in February 2021, I was telling bitcoin users to support the people working on Samourai's Whirlpool and other privacy tools. Bitcoin has a public ledger. If someone can connect your identity to your transactions, they can start learning things about your finances that you never intended to share with them. People need ways to prevent that. They should be able to use their money without giving everyone they transact with an opportunity to dig through their financial lives, and developers should be able to help them do it. That was worth defending before the arrests and it is worth defending now that Keonne and Bill are in prison.

We called for pardons before they reported to prison, and we need to keep pushing until they are home. Go to billandkeonne.org, sign the pardon petition and share it with someone who hasn't heard about the case. Contact your representative and ask them to publicly support pardons for Keonne Rodriguez and William Lonergan Hill. If you can help their families financially, use the donation links on the family's site; donations prompted by Change.org do not go to them. And if you have a line into the administration, use it. President Trump should pardon both men. We cannot let them disappear into the prison system because everyone got distracted by something else.

SIGNAL

MOVE is waking up

John Arnold and I have been keeping an eye on the MOVE index, and Wednesday gave us something to pay attention to. The bond-volatility gauge jumped to 95.45, up 21.5% on the day. That's Wednesday's reading, while Thursday morning's Treasury reporting puts the 10-year around 5.1% and the 30-year around 5.4%. We spent yesterday talking about Washington's ability to refinance its debt. It can keep doing that while the cost gets increasingly uncomfortable. Higher yields mean more interest to pay, and rising volatility makes it harder for borrowers and lenders to know what rate they'll be dealing with next. I want to see whether this jump holds over the next few sessions.

Lightning gets a place in x402

Ben Carman's Lightning specification has been merged into x402. It lays out how a client can pay a Lightning invoice to access an HTTP resource or make an MCP tool call, then provide proof that the payment was made. Ben explained why he worked on it: people already building with x402 should have the option to adopt Lightning without replacing their entire payment system. I like that approach. Make bitcoin available where developers are already working and give them fewer reasons to reach for something else. This merge adds the specification; implementations still have to put it to work. The next thing to look for is services actually accepting those payments.

A lot more gas power is being planned

Nat Bullard shared this chart from his talk at Bank of America's AI and Power Infrastructure conference. Halcyon's August snapshot tracks 100 gigawatts of planned U.S. gas-fired capacity additions scheduled for 2027 through 2029. Look at how much the pipeline for those years has grown compared with the August 2025 snapshot. Bullard says these projects have a CPCN or equivalent, or an air permit, rather than simply appearing in a press release. There's a lot of work between those records and a plant producing electricity, but this is encouraging. If we want more computing power and more domestic manufacturing, someone has to build the generation to run it.

Chart: Nat Bullard / Halcyon. Source: Halcyon Gas Power Plant Tracker. Planned capacity, not completed generation.

Foreign buyers added far fewer Treasury bills

StealthQE4 flagged an 80% drop in foreign Treasury-bill buying. The Treasury table behind the post puts it more precisely: foreign net accumulation of bills was $49.4 billion in the twelve months through July 2026, compared with $250.5 billion in the preceding twelve-month period. That is a big slowdown in how much foreign holders added. July alone accounted for $38.8 billion, so demand is still coming through, just very unevenly. Washington has a lot of borrowing to do. When one group of buyers adds less over a year, someone else has to absorb more of the issuance. That is worth following alongside the rates Treasury has to pay to keep attracting buyers.

Another $347 million into bitcoin ETFs

A quick update to yesterday's ETF figures: our tracker now shows $347 million of net inflows on Wednesday, taking the first three sessions of the week to $2.06 billion. Wednesday was the fifth consecutive positive session. It's worth watching this demand alongside what's happening in the bond market, where yields are rising and volatility has picked up. We can't tell from aggregate flows what any particular buyer is thinking, but we can see money continuing to come into the bitcoin products. I'll keep following the daily figures as the rest of the week comes in.

⚡ FREEDOM TECH CORNER

DATA SNAPSHOT

Retrieved September 24, 2026, 9:34 a.m. ET. CoinGecko price, rolling 24-hour change and market cap updated at 9:32 a.m. ET; network readings retrieved at 9:34 a.m. ET. Fear & Greed is dated September 24 UTC. Bitcoin Lab MVRV, realized price and SOPR are daily observations dated September 23 UTC.

Sources: CoinGecko for price, rolling 24-hour change and market cap; mempool.space for network estimates; Alternative.me for daily sentiment; Bitcoin Lab for MVRV, realized price and SOPR. MVRV compares market capitalization with realized capitalization. Realized price is realized capitalization, which values coins at the prices when they last moved, divided by circulating supply. SOPR compares the value of spent outputs at spending with their value at creation; above 1 indicates aggregate realized profit. Bitcoin Lab values are reported as supplied, not calculated from the live CoinGecko price.

If you know someone who hasn't heard about Keonne and Bill, send them this issue.

See you tomorrow,

Marty

Marty Bent · TFTC · Nostr

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