How I got started building on Bitcoin.

Good morning, planning our next 2-week sprint. Excited about all we can get done!

When handling private keys, we’d move to a room with no devices. No phones. No TV. We were paranoid that a hacked device could record or listen in. Didn’t realize the TVs were *literally* 1st party programmed for full-on spying. Only the paranoid survive.

Optimists build the future, have fun along the way, and win in the end.

Notes from leads offsite in New York: - AI security and quantum are two big upcoming challenges, not just for Stacks but for the broader Bitcoin ecosystem. There is an opportunity to show leadership here. - Growth of BTC deployed in bonds remains the focus. The current bottleneck is institutional custodian integrations; custodians need to be live and tested before larger capital flows into bonds. We’ve made great progress on this lately. - We’re organizing labs into nimble teams that are AI-pilled. Agility matters in this new AI world. 1-3 person teams with tons of agents will run most work streams. We’re building the “AI factory” that’ll automate and enhance our audits, testing, release cadence, and more. The market has a lot of fear about AI finding bugs or breaking encryption, along with fears of an acceleration toward quantum computers. We see these as opportunities to roll up our sleeves and take action. We can reach a state where code is formally verified, and frontier models run continuous tests. Stacks devs are already researching steps towards a post-quantum world. We left the NYC offsite more energized than ever. The work we’re doing on Bitcoin capital markets and the safety of these systems matters more than ever. We embrace the new tools and a changing world. Forward!

The world might look scary right now. But every bug that AI finds only makes the software stronger in the long term. Same goes for Bitcoin and crypto. Projects that adapt will emerge stronger and resilient.

Cybersecurity feels like a frontier again. Teams that stay nimble, learn fast, and adapt continuously will thrive. Let’s go!

Protest in NYC. People asking to “freeze AI”. A few steps away, offsite of Stacks Labs: discussing going all-in on AI for code safety. Two completely different realities, unfolding side by side as our world changes.

Bitcoin’s execution layer. Increasingly convinced that there will likely be one main execution layer for Bitcoin. Game theory of staking dynamics, combined with liquidity concentration, points to this. Staking dynamics: Ethereum has one major source of low-risk yield: the consensus yield. Even though you could earn higher-risk, higher-return yield elsewhere, most capital goes to the lowest-risk option: the effective ETH fed rate. Multiple on-chain Bitcoin yield options would converge on the lowest-risk yield that is meaningful enough. Offering higher yield with added risk can’t lure that capital away. The Bitcoin layer that can offer the effective BTC fed rate yield at scale is the one with the largest market cap and economy size. Liquidity concentration: We saw this with Solana vs. Ethereum L2s. A single execution chain offers better UX, and everyone benefits from concentrated liquidity rather than fragmented liquidity and assets spread across multiple L2s (the various Ethereum ones). We can try to put a valuation framework for what Bitcoin’s execution layer should be worth (an exercise for another post). Right now, I’m just making the point that the probability of getting N different execution layers is very low (unstable equilibrium and bad UX for users). Either one major execution layer exists where, say, 10-30% of BTC supply is actively deployed, or Bitcoin remains a passive asset. I’m an optimist by nature; I believe that we’ll get one major Bitcoin execution layer.

I always pictured the subconscious as something buried deep in the brain that we cannot access. The @doristsao discovery suggests that conscious & subconscious (visual info) may timeshare the same neural circuits. The neurons rapidly switch between the two without us noticing!

Resting heart rate before bed is the ultimate wellness signal. Sleep, stress, workouts, nutrition. So much of how you live shows up in that one number.

We’re all just living in Elon’s simulation.

I agree with Will that there seems to be nowhere safe to park your savings. The world seems increasingly uncertain. Fixing upcoming issues with gold, cash, software stocks etc might be impossible. Bitcoin’s quantum challenges are hard, but solvable. We’re working on it!

I landed back from Singapore on Sat morning. It’s Thur now, and my sleep still hasn’t recovered. And this is someone who optimizes jet lag, sleep timing, meals/activity, supplements, etc., to the max. International travel is biological wreckage.

Silicon is everywhere in the universe. We taught sand how to think. We’re likely not the only ones.

The frontier of bitcoin is privacy, post-quantum, and safety from AI threats. We’re pushing this frontier @Stacks 👊

The new CEO officially started today. Bitcoin bond 2 fully sold out. Bitcoin still needs a quantum upgrade. blockstack:native

Bitcoin bond 2 is fully sold out! 500 BTC more deployed into @Stacks for 3% yield. We saw 45M additional STX locked; approx 6M can be linked back to this bond. The mechanism is working onchain, it’s time to put more fuel into this now.

Quick notes from Token 2049: - Token has emerged as a leading event in our industry. Both in size and quality. The top/key people show up for the entire week, and the 25K audience size speaks for itself. - The AI-driven security and quantum threats were top of mind, fueled by some alarming posts and the OpenAI math drop. My view: the industry clearly needs to adapt, but we need to avoid needless fear. - Zcash, Near, and Backpack were discussed often in my peer groups. Stocks coming onchain is the logical next step (Backpack); interest in privacy continues, mixed with quantum concerns (Zcash and Near). - @CryptoHayes presented Flop. I made sure to watch that one live, purely for entertainment value if nothing else. Interesting project to watch as it targets agentic rails and agents just flipped human traffic on the internet. - One thing a lot of folks agreed on is that smaller, more nimble projects are more likely to figure out quantum and AI-security threats; it’s Bitcoin that will be the biggest challenge. But Bitcoin sets the ceiling for the entire industry, so Bitcoin’s problems are everyone’s problems as well. I’ll write more detail on some topics, especially AI security and quantum (my talk covered the Bitcoin side). Just getting off a 19-hour flight. The energy all week was incredible. Fired up for what’s ahead for our industry!

I agree with Tushar that agility matters now for Bitcoin in the age of AI advancements. Zcash, Near, etc are more nimble, but everyone takes a hit if anything happens to Bitcoin (an AI-assisted hack or quantum fears). We’re all in the same boat. Any security issue with BTC affects everyone. The right answer is to double down on Bitcoin safety and agility, in parallel. The frontier of Bitcoin is post-quantum, a trustless execution layer, and private Bitcoin. We’re working on it!