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Did Epstein influence Bitcoin core development? Short answer: No. This is not how Bitcoin works. Here’s what happened: Epstein donated to MIT Media Lab…who in turn supported MIT Digital Currency Initiative…which in turn funded Bitcoin developers. These devs used to be funded by The Bitcoin Foundation (which I used...

231,596 views • 4 months ago •via X (Twitter)

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So, does it matter that Bitcoin seems to be moving away from its cypherpunk roots? Bitcoin ETFs and Bitcoin Treasuries have taken BTC mainstream. So I asked Saifedean Ammous this very question. His answer might surprise you... 👀👇 "If you have very strong feelings about how people should and shouldn't use Bitcoin, you're in for a rough time." "To be honest, a lot of people project too much onto Bitcoin. Ultimately, it's just a bunch of software and anybody can use it in any way they want. Initially, it's a small subset of people that use it and then they start projecting their values onto it. And then over time, they expect it to continue to abide by that," Ammous said. "If it's a successful technology, it's going to be used by everybody. It's going to be used by small businesses, large businesses, governments, individuals. It's money. Everybody uses money. There are 8.5 billion people on Earth, they all use money and they're all going to continue to use money. And Bitcoin is just the best money." Ultimately, the protocol itself is immune to the financial instruments that TradFi has concocted. If people want to lend against their BTC or create complex financial products, that does not actually impact the underlying network. "The way that the protocol works is that it's completely blind to what you're doing with your coins on the Bitcoin blockchain there is no paper Bitcoin there's no such thing as paper Bitcoin there's only 21 million Bitcoin and every node makes sure of that every 10 minutes and then if somebody who has some of these Bitcoin on their private key decides to sell obligations or financial liabilities referring to that Bitcoin under any condition, that's their choice. It's outside of Bitcoin and it's outside of the realm of other Bitcoin users being able to say this is right or wrong and this should happen or shouldn't happen. People are going to do whatever they want with the Bitcoin, including selling access to it or exposure to it in all kinds of different ways. And if you don't like it, you don't buy it, you can stack your own Bitcoin." You can find the full interview for Cointelegraph in the 🧵. If you enjoyed this content, please like 🧡, retweet 🔁 and follow me 👋!

Gareth Jenkinson

34,417 views • 6 months ago

Making Sense Of Strategy What is happening with $MSTR? If you’ve been following me on X for any meaningful length of time, you will know that I have been attempting to calibrate people’s expectations of the stock's performance for the best part of 2025. Here I have synthesised all of my thoughts and distilled them into a single video. If you prefer YouTube, you can watch it here: If you prefer written format, continue reading. The first thing we need to understand is what Strategy is and why people invest in it. Strategy At the highest level, Strategy is leveraged Bitcoin. That’s it. Strategy leverages debt to acquire more Bitcoin. Therefore, the main reason you invest in Strategy is because you want to outperform Bitcoin. The only thing better than Bitcoin is more Bitcoin. The second thing we need to understand is mNAV. mNAV Generally speaking for a pure-play Bitcoin Treasury Company like Strategy, mNAV is a reflection of the market's expectation of future Bitcoin Yield. Bitcoin Yield comes with diminishing returns because each additional Bitcoin purchase contributes less to Bitcoin Per Share. Thus, the larger your Bitcoin stack, the harder it becomes to generate Bitcoin Yield and by extension the harder it becomes to outperform Bitcoin. This is why on a Bitcoin Standard, over a long enough time horizon, mNAV trends towards 1 since the maximum amount of Bitcoin you can own is 21M. With all this in mind, why is Strategy trading where it is and why is it trading at such a low mNAV? There are a few reasons. 1. Strategy Is A Different Company In 2025 Firstly, Strategy is a totally different company in 2025 to the one it was in 2020. For context, believe it or not, the company only introduced Bitcoin Yield and Bitcoin Per Share in the July 2024 Q2 Earnings Call and so it was only after that that they began optimising for those metrics. In my view, that is also when Michael Saylor truly started to understand the opportunity that was in front of him, which is why in October 2024 we saw Strategy announce the 21/21 plan which became the catalyst for the parabolic run we saw in November 2024 where $MSTR went on to briefly hit an all-time-high of around $550. Since people are comparing $MSTR this cycle to the $MSTR of last cycle when it briefly traded at an mNAV of over 8x, it is distorting their expectations. Again, Strategy is a totally different company today with a totally different set of dynamics. 2. New Industry Secondly, we need to recognise that the Bitcoin Treasury Company industry is entirely new which means that the market has been forced to learn and adapt in real-time. With Strategy being the first and by far the largest Bitcoin Treasury Company, it has gained a disproportionate amount of attention and as a result it has attracted a disproportionate amount of speculative capital along the way while everyone has been trying to figure out how to value it. Consequently, in my view, the move we saw in November 2024 was an over-correction to the upside — which by the way coincided with Bitcoin’s parabolic run following Donald Trump’s election win — and what we’re now seeing is an over-correction to the downside. 3. Bitcoin Yield Thirdly, as I mentioned at the beginning, Bitcoin Treasury Companies are currently valued based on how much Bitcoin Yield they are expected to generate in the future. At the time of recording, Strategy currently holds precisely 637,460 Bitcoin — that’s over 3% of the total Bitcoin supply — which means that it is much, much harder to generate meaningful Bitcoin Yield, which again is why we’re seeing the mNAV compress. However, there is a caveat here. There is another metric that Strategy have introduced which is Bitcoin $ Gain. Bitcoin $ Gain is defined as the $ value of newly acquired Bitcoin within any period. Strategy — and I don’t blame them — have been attempting to encourage the market to interpret Bitcoin $ Gain as “earnings” and to value the company based on how much earnings it is expected to generate in the future. For full disclosure, I personally dislike Bitcoin $ Gain as a valuation metric. I think framing it as “earnings” is misleading and disingenuous. I understand why it has been introduced because it speaks the language of Wall Street. However, traditional earnings are final. Bitcoin $ Gain is not because it is forever subject to the price of Bitcoin. Therefore, for Bitcoin $ Gain to be embraced by Wall Street, the market must collectively agree that Bitcoin is going up forever. I remain very sceptical of that happening — especially in the short-to-medium term. However, I am also not attached to my beliefs and so if Wall Street does decide to embrace Bitcoin $ Gain as its primary valuation metric, then $MSTR is likely undervalued by a factor of 5-10x. If not, then $MSTR is likely undervalued by a factor of 1-2x. If you’re not content with the latter being the worst case scenario, then the stock probably isn’t for you. 4. Preferred Products Fourthly, the Strategy thesis right now revolves entirely around the success of its preferred products. Remember, Michael Saylor wants Strategy to become the Amazon of the fixed income market. Thus, we’re not talking about a small innovation here — we are talking about completely transforming global finance. This means that the process of generating awareness and educating the market that will ultimately drive demand for these products is going to take years — not months — which is why you need to have a long time-horizon. Presently, the market is completely discounting the success of Strategy’s preferred products. What it’s not factoring in however is that the capital markets are desperate for yield right now. Thus, when — not if — but when, they eventually wake up to Bitcoin, how do you think they’re going to get that yield? Who is going to be the entity that is offering Bitcoin-backed credit instruments at scale? The answer is obviously Strategy, but again, this is a 5-to-10 year and beyond story. So with all that said, if you’re reading this right now, what should you do? Valuing Strategy There are 3 steps you need to take: 1. Firstly, you need to define your time horizon. In other words, how long do you intend on holding the stock for? 2. Secondly, you need to estimate either — depending on your preferred metric — how much Bitcoin Yield or how much Bitcoin $ Gain you expect Strategy to generate during that period and then calculate how much you expect $MSTR to outperform Bitcoin based on those values. 3. Thirdly, ask yourself whether you’d be satisfied with the level of outperformance you have calculated? In other words, is the trade-off worth it? Or would you be better off investing in either spot Bitcoin, an alternative Bitcoin Treasury Company or a Bitcoin ETF. If you’re satisfied with the level of outperformance that you’ve calculated, then $MSTR it probably a good choice of investment for you. If you're not satisfied, then $MSTR is probably a bad choice of investment for you. I personally believe that $MSTR will outperform Bitcoin by a minimum factor of 1-2x over the next 5/10 years and potentially much more if Bitcoin $ Gain becomes the primary metric by which it is valued, but again, I remain sceptical of that happening. Regardless, the best is yet to come.

Chris Millas

36,835 views • 8 months ago

Debunking the Flat Bitcoin Theory 🧵 In the early days of Bitcoin (2009-2014) there was a massive amount of experimentation and innovation on bitcoin The first NFTs and cryptoart started on Bitcoin The first memecoins started on Bitcoin The first stablecoins and real world assets started on Bitcoin The first dapps started on Bitcoin The first DEX started on Bitcoin The first on-chain governance started on Bitcoin The first crypto degens were playing Satoshi Dice on Bitcoin But then the OP_RETURN wars happened and people like Luke Dashjr vilified innovation and scared builders away resulting in a long period of stagnation (2015-2023) This period of stagnation gave birth to the Flat Bitcoin Theory which infected the minds of nearly everyone The Flat Bitcoin Theory is a belief held by "Flat Bitcoiners" who think that Bitcoin is a boring blockchain that is not capable of the innovative use cases that we see on alt L1s like Ethereum or Solana But thankfully in January 2023 Casey burst onto the scene with the ordinals protocol and one by one people have been waking up from this lie and realizing that Bitcoin is actually multidimensional and capable of everything you could possibly imagine and more Since then Bitcoin has experienced a renaissance of innovation with a new set of builders picking up where the set of OG builders left off Jeremy Lin | 🔄 DotSwap (On Nexus) from @dot_swap has defied all FUD and delivered a trustless liquidity pool style experience on Bitcoin L1 for Runes with zero MEV Stan from Sats Terminal has built an advanced order routing and aggregation engine for Runes trading on Bitcoin L1 Scott 🟠 from radFi has revived the Runes trenches with a token launchpad on Bitcoin L1 that thousands of people use every day Robin | Liquidium from Liquidium | Bitcoin Loans built a Runes and Ordinals lending protocol that has processed hundreds of millions of dollars of volume which proves that DeFi can thrive on Bitcoin L1 domo and Binari from BRC 2.0 and Tagga from Alkanes have been relentlessly pursing a vision for general purpose smart contracts on Bitcoin L1 TO from Pizza Pets built a fully on-chain multiplayer game directly on Bitcoin L1 Ken Liao from built a Bitcoin wallet for interacting with Bitcoin L1 dapps that is so sleek that it puts Ethereum's flagship wallet MetaMask to shame danny huuep from OnChainMonkey® pioneered a new way to store an entire 10K PFP collection on Bitcoin for only $23 that is now widely adopted by hundreds of other Ordinals collections SergeSats has formed the Bitcoin Art Society to preserve Bitcoin's on-chain culture for future generation has dedicated months of his life to ensuring that once a year there is a place where bitcoin builders can gather to celebrate experimentation on bitcoin at Bitcoin Summit Massive decentralized communities like the $DOG Army and Bitcoin Puppets have rallied together to support all of these innovations and champion the Bitcoin ecosystem Do not ever let anyone tell you that Bitcoin is not capable of something or that you must only use Bitcoin in a certain way The Bitcoin network is more secure and robust longterm when it is winning at developer mindshare and blocks are filled with a diverse set of on-chain activity It is up to us, the Ordinals, Runes, and Bitcoin DeFi ecosystem to be stewards of this technology now so go build the most badass applications possible and never stop fighting for innovation on Bitcoin!

Leonidas 🧡 $DOG

62,859 views • 8 months ago

Ed Dowd: "What we're learning from the Epstein files is that it's an operating system...[and] let's not forget Epstein was involved in money laundering... [and now] Bitcoin has been tied to... Epstein, and he's been involved in taking over the network and funding it... If you wanted to set up your own dark-money blackmail operation and launder money, Bitcoin would be the perfect way to do it, I guess." This clip of Dowd (Edward Dowd), a former BlackRock fund manager and co-founder of Phinance Technologies, is taken from an interview with Jesse Day (Jesse Day) posted to the Commodity Culture YouTube channel on February 28, 2026. ---------------Partial transcription of clip--------------- "What we're learning from the Epstein files is that it's an operating system. So we have the public-facing institutions, but we find out there's a layer of people above them that know how to manipulate that whole thing to their benefit through Kompromat and blackmail, and money laundering. "Let's not forget Epstein was involved in money laundering. That's how a lot of this stuff was. It's all dark money. And the other thing that surprised me, that I didn't. This angle I didn't think of. And again, we'll find out more, but Bitcoin has been tied to Jeffrey Epstein, and he's been involved in taking over the network and funding it. I don't know what to think of that and intuitively makes sense. "If you wanted to set up your own dark money blackmail operation and launder money, Bitcoin would be the perfect way to do it. I guess. So, you know, there's a lot that's being revealed, and I don't, you know, I don't know what that means for Bitcoin long term, but, it certainly kind of disrupts the narrative that bitcoin is freedom. "I mean, that was kind of one of the narratives that we were hearing. And I've never been a bitcoin, bear or bull. I've always said it's a. It's a proxy for NASDAQ and liquidity trade, you know. You know, buyer beware. It's not a store of wealth. It's very volatile. So that's what it's always been to me is a volatile, you know, 95% correlated asset to the NASDAQ."

Sense Receptor

21,167 views • 3 months ago