there's an easier and better way to achieve Bernie's objectives to collectivize ownership of AI. buying or seizing AI lab equity won't work. - buying: the taxpayer is paying a wildly marked up rate in the trillions and will be perceived as a bailout - seizing: do I even have to explain why this is a bad idea? giving the government 50% of the equity in the leading AI labs creates an incentive to crystallize them as the forever winners. a sovereign AI fund will want to protect its rents and will dramatically reduce competition in the sector through regulation. this is a very bad idea. so how to share the wealth? (if you had to) a government-run initiative to distill frontier models into open source models. the American consumer can then use frontier models for the commodity cost of the inference. a large share of the OAI/Anthropic margin gets handed directly to the consumer in the form of a surplus. no tricky accounting of who deserves what. no weird airdrops. consumers of AI benefit in proportion to their usage. right now, China is sort of doing this, but they are slowing down because open source models don't monetize well, if at all. so there is actually a case to be made for the government to underwrite the creation of such a product, since it is a public good. Bernie's own stated objectives aren't met by an AI sovereign wealth fund. if he wants to break oligarchic control as he claims, a 50% state ownership guarantees a durable oligarchy rather than busting it. distillation does the opposite by collapsing the moat and pricing power of leading AI labs. his goals also contradict themselves. reducing concentration trades off against creating an endowment for the US taxpayer. if he wants to maximize the value of the fund, that means ensuring that OAI/Anthropic/etc do well. Q: won't distillation destroy competitiveness of leading labs? A: it already happens, and they are still competitive. people will still pay for bleeding edge models while using trailing open source ones. but if the labs threaten to take over the economy, you could make the case that some of their margin should be stripped away Q: would the major labs continue to train new models if the government was funding open source clones? A: if we reach a situation where it becomes politically necessary to reduce AI lab power, they can afford to take a little more time in between models. **the above is a thought experiment, not a policy suggestion** while I am not advocating for state control over AI, if it does become the case that there is a massive populist backlash to power concentrating with the AI labs (let's say OAI/Anthropic each become $10- 20T companies), and something _must_ be done about them, a government-sponsored open source approach would be more efficient and beneficial to the average American than nationalizing the labs.

So much great work lately from Nvidia, the "King of American Open-source AI"! - Crossed 1,000 total public repositories on @huggingface (820 models, 249 datasets & 57 spaces) & almost 60,000 followers - Current #1 trending model on HF with LocateAnything and #5 trending with PiD - Announced that they're adopting the @linuxfoundation OpenMDW framework - Released Cosmos 3, Omnimodal World Models for Physical AI & Alphamayo 2 Super, an open model for autonomous driving - Announced the release soon of Nemotron 3 & work on Nemotron 4 Thank you @nvidia for all the work you're doing for the ecosystem and open-source AI. Can't wait for the next few months!

.@SECWAR “For those nations that rise to this challenge, that embrace responsibility as true partners, the benefits will be clear. As our strategy states, we will prioritize working with “model allies” – those nations that are most capable, clear-eyed, and ready to defend their national interests. For those nations, we are moving them to the front line: Expedited arms sales, deep industrial collaboration, expanded intelligence sharing – the list goes on. But for those who believe they can continue to free ride on the generosity of the American taxpayer, hear us now: Those days are over.  Allies who refuse to step up and carry their own weight for our collective defense will face a fundamental shift in how we do business".

Post quantum security is a solvable problem for all blockchains. Quite frankly, the biggest challenge is the hopium that people cling to to downplay it. The risk is that it gets downplayed as not a problem, until it actually is a problem, at which point it may be too late.

Our team ran a verifiable quantum algorithm that probes how parts of a quantum system interact, from molecules to magnets and beyond. On our Willow chip, it ran 13,000× faster than the best classical supercomputers. A first in quantum computing → goo.gle/42z9E2d

🚨 Scientists just learned how to control magnetism atom by atom. Not with circuits. With electron spin itself. That means memory may no longer live in silicon structures… but in moving magnetic whirlpools called skyrmions. Near-zero energy. Ultra-dense storage. Potentially a new computing architecture. If information can be stored in spin textures what actually limits computation? Follow me I track where physics becomes technology.

The Arbitrum Freeze: Decentralization Theater Meets Reality Two days after the $292M Kelp DAO exploit, the Arbitrum Security Council froze 30,766 ETH linked to the attacker. The funds now sit in an intermediary wallet, movable only by further governance action. Good outcome? Probably. Comfortable outcome? Not at all. 1. What the freeze actually is The Security Council used its emergency powers to execute a state-changing action against a specific address. No smart contract was broken. The code was overridden by humans with keys. This is not a secret or an abuse. It's a documented property of Arbitrum, and of every other major L2 today. By L2Beat's framework, Arbitrum is a Stage 1 rollup: a trusted multisig can upgrade the system and, in emergencies, alter state. Optimism, Base, zkSync, Starknet, Linea, all sit at Stage 0 or 1. No production rollup has reached Stage 2. Call the freeze what it is: a legitimate administrative intervention on an administered chain. 2. Decentralization theater is the default We built this space to give users sovereignty through self-custody, permissionless access, and credibly neutral rails. That ideal is still alive ,in a shrinking set of places: ETH on mainnet, BTC on Bitcoin, a handful of genuinely immutable contracts. Almost everything else is permissioned in some way: upgradable contracts, whitelisted oracles, pausable markets, admin-keyed bridges, multisig-governed rollups, freezable stablecoins. We kept the vocabulary of permissionlessness. We quietly built a governed financial stack underneath it. The Arbitrum freeze didn't create that reality. It made it visible. 3. Why does it persist Because a truly permissionless system at scale is brutal to defend. No pause. No rollback. No freeze. Every line of code public, every mistake final. Attackers iterate for free; defenders get one shot. Kelp is the canonical illustration: a 1-of-1 DVN against LayerZero's written guidance, two poisoned RPC nodes, a DDoS on the rest, and $292M minted out of a fabricated state. No zero-day. No smart contract exploit. An infrastructure-level attack on a verifier that was decentralized in name only. Meanwhile the adversary has scaled. DPRK-linked groups have more capital than most protocols have in treasury, dedicated research teams, timelines in quarters, and now AI that can diff every commit and grep every config at machine speed. Their only real constraint is self-imposed: don't kill the goose. With a 1-of-1 DVN they could have minted $292B as easily as $292M. They're calibrating, not restrained. 4. The honest tradeoff Both of these are true at once: The freeze likely saved real money from a state-sponsored attacker. The freeze confirms that Arbitrum, today, is a chain where sufficiently motivated humans can move your balance. These are not a contradiction. They are the explicit cost of the Stage 1 compromise. The open question is whether we treat that compromise as permanent and rebrand accordingly, or as scaffolding toward something stronger. 5. The only real exit: validity proofs Not better multisigs. Not faster incident response. A verifier that checks a succinct proof of another chain's state transition doesn't trust an RPC, a DVN, an oracle, or a committee. Either the math checks or it doesn't. That's how Ethereum L1 already settles rollups. It is the model every bridge should converge to, and the one Stage 2 rollups will need to reach. In that world, Kelp-style attacks become cryptographically impossible rather than operationally unlikely, and L2s stop needing emergency councils as load-bearing security. Every bridge and most rollups today are an IOU against that future. 6. Where this leaves us Maybe Bitcoin stays credibly neutral mostly because it refuses to do anything. Every system that tries to do more than move a scarce asset drifts toward human governance, because the alternative is getting drained by professionals with better tooling than the defenders. The uncomfortable part is admitting we are running on trust we told ourselves we had removed. The Arbitrum freeze didn't break a promise, it revealed a promise we had already stopped keeping. Until the proofs catch up, every "decentralized" protocol should carry its Stage label on the tin. Users should know which chain they're actually on when they click confirm. Stay safe. Stay honest about your trust assumptions

Justice Clarence Thomas on rebuilding public trust in government: "I think if we don't stand up and take ownership of our country, and take responsibility for it, we are slowly letting others control how we think and what we think."

Alex Pruden of Project Eleven shares his thoughts on quantum threats and why he remains crypto's biggest bull.

Maritime Robotics has quietly become one of Europe's leading USV and autonomous navigation OEMs, serving everything from defense to undersea cable security. Now they're bringing it stateside. We spoke with James Fisher at WEST 2026, who's leading the U.S. expansion.

What quantum actually breaks 🧵 On March 31st @GoogleQuantumAI published updated resource estimates showing that breaking 256-bit elliptic curve cryptography requires roughly 20 times fewer physical qubits than previously thought, and hours later a team from @TeamOratomic and Caltech demonstrated that Shor’s algorithm can run at cryptographically relevant scales on as few as 10,000 neutral atom qubits. Both papers have been covered extensively. However, there has been a lot of confidently wrong analysis for what this means for the cryptography that underpins digital assets.

I've been so focused on useless political topics, trying to see possible futures while being led by the blind. Now politics, PACs, and so on don't hold the same weight for me. All that matters is that American power wins. And it will. Time to start thinking about the future.

The latest quantum papers from Google and Caltech are an important signal for the industry. Timelines are still debated, but the time to act is now. The good news: post-quantum cryptography exists. This is a solvable problem, and many chains already have roadmaps. Bitcoin needs to catch up though. The bad news: post-quantum cryptography is relatively new and it would be fairly easy to create new security risks if implementation is rushed. The industry needs to align on what happens to wallets that fail to migrate before a CRQC appears. At Coinbase, we’ve been working on this for a while, auditing and upgrading our internal infrastructure, researching post-quantum cryptography and establishing a Quantum Advisory Council. It’s clear Bitcoin needs to make some fast progress here, so Coinbase is taking the role of rallying the troops and getting the right people in the room - Bitcoin core devs and the broader community - so they can start tackling this. But no one developer or company can do this alone. Real progress will require coordinated action across the ecosystem. If you’re working on post-quantum approaches for Bitcoin, we want to support you, and connect you with others that are working on it too. Please DM me directly and I’ll get you added to the working group. Bitcoin can and will upgrade, but it will take the entire community working together.

Ep. 267: Social media = cigarettes? In March, juries in California and New Mexico delivered seminal verdicts holding Meta and YouTube liable for failing to protect young users from harm. Both verdicts found that the companies were negligent in the design or operation of their platforms and that each company knew their platforms could be dangerous when used by a minor. The courts found that the design elements of the platforms could be separated from the content hosted on the platforms, thus removing the need to consider the First Amendment or Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act. CEO & founder of @techdirt & @CopiaInstitute @mmasnick joins @TheFIREorg's @NicoPerrino to break down the rulings and their possible free speech implications. Timestamps: 00:00 Intro 02:29 Why these verdicts scare the hell out of Mike 10:34 Are social media algorithms “addictive”? 21:45 Did Meta fail to protect kids? 30:37 The First Amendment and Section 230 43:13 Is social media the new Big Tobacco? 55:15 The role of parents in social media use 59:04: Outro Enjoy listening to the podcast? Donate to FIRE today and get exclusive content like member webinars, special episodes, and more. If you became a FIRE Member through a donation to FIRE at thefire.org and would like access to Substack’s paid subscriber podcast feed, please email sotospeak@thefire.org.

.@adam3us has said @nic_carter is making uninformed noise, here is his reponse:

January 16, 2026 2.5 months ago it seemed crazy... "We're putting up risk capital saying that Q-Day is going to come at some point during the life of our venture capital fund... That's 10 years by the way." How did @nic_carter @MattWalshInBos @CastleIslandVC know?

“To see it enacted in Israel, in such a blatantly discriminatory way, is a profound violation of the principles that bind the Jewish people together,” said J Street President @JeremyBenAmi. “At a time when there is a near-total lack of accountability for Jewish terrorists attacking Palestinian communities in the West Bank, the double standard embedded in this law is especially egregious.” haaretz.com/jewish/2026-04-0…

In which I attempt to address the most common arguments that yesterday's papers aren't immediately relevant, and challenge skeptics to clearly define what constitutes progress

Bitcoin is more vulnerable to quantum cryptography than traditional institutions like banks, says @apruden08 "One reason is obvious. Satoshi — who we think has gone away or died or something — their early bitcoin hasn't moved. There's a bunch of lost coins. All in all, about 15% of bitcoin supply is estimated to be lost. That's hundreds of billions of dollars. That's a huge incentive." "Let's take the counterexample of if someone wanted to hack into a bank or something. As you pointed out, banks are centralized, they can react. Also, the way that banks implement their cryptography is just one of many layers of security." "Theoretically, if someone tried to wire all the money out of my account, my bank would call me." "That's not true for Bitcoin. All I need is one signature and all of Satoshi's, Coinbase's, or Binance's bitcoin is mine. There's no fallback."