You have noticed it. ChatGPT feels dumber than it used to. Your prompts that worked six months ago produce worse results now. The writing sounds flatter. The ideas sound safer. The internet itself feels like it is shrinking. Every article reads the same. Every email sounds the same. Every answer sounds like it was written by the same voice. You thought it was you. It is not you. Researchers at Oxford and Cambridge published a paper in Nature proving what is happening. They call it Model Collapse. Here is the mechanism in one sentence. AI trained on AI-generated data gets dumber every generation until it forgets what real human data looked like. The internet is filling with AI-generated content. Blog posts. Articles. Reviews. Comments. Social media. AI companies scrape the internet to train the next generation of models. Which means the next generation of AI is being trained on the output of the current generation. Each cycle loses information. Not randomly. It loses the rarest, most unusual, most creative parts first. The researchers call these the "tails of the distribution." The weird ideas. The unexpected perspectives. The things that made the internet feel human. Those disappear first. What remains is the average. The safe. The expected. The bland. Then the next generation trains on that. And loses more. And the next generation trains on that. And loses more. The researchers proved this is not a slow decline. Major degradation happens within just a few iterations. Even when some of the original human data is preserved. They tested it on large language models. On image generators. On statistical models. The pattern was the same every time. The output converges toward a narrow, flattened version of reality that looks nothing like the original data. The lead researcher put it plainly. "Large language models are like fire. A useful tool. But one that pollutes the environment." The pollution is invisible. You cannot see which sentence on the internet was written by a human and which was written by AI. Neither can the AI that is about to train on it. And once the tails are gone, they do not come back. The damage is irreversible. This is not a prediction anymore. It is a diagnosis. The internet you grew up on was built by humans writing things no algorithm would have written. Strange, personal, imperfect, alive. That internet is being diluted. One generation of AI at a time. And the models trained on what remains are learning a smaller and smaller version of the world. Model Collapse is not a technical problem. It is a cultural one. The thing that made the internet worth reading is the thing that disappears first.

The results are in. Almost 60% of Bitcoiners believe that even if Bitcoin crashes to $1,000, a more than 99% decline, wiping out almost all Bitcoin investors, bankrupting $MSTR, and devastating the entire crypto industry, I’m still wrong. That’s not rational. That’s a cult.

People convicted of fraud who received pardons from Trump this year: • Jason Galanis — $200M fraud • Joseph Schwartz — $38M scheme • Lawrence Duran — $205M Medicare fraud billing • Carlos Watson — $60M investor scam • Trevor Milton — $20M investor losses • Todd & Julie Chrisley — $30M bank fraud • Devon Archer — $60M bond fraud scheme • George Santos — multiple fraud cases ($44K–$1M ) • Michele Fiore — charity fraud • Brian Kelsey — campaign finance fraud • Scott Jenkins — bribery and fraud scheme • Paul Walczak — $10M tax fraud • Adriana Camberos — counterfeit/fraud operation

Today is commencement. PhD student life is officially over.

SAM BANKMAN FRIED PICKED EVERY WINNER OF THE 2020s AND HIS LAWYERS SOLD THEM ALL AT THE BOTTOM. If the FTX estate hadn't panic-sold its assets during bankruptcy, SBF would be sitting on a $114 billion empire today. Instead, he is watching the greatest trades of the decade from a prison cell. The data is almost impossible to believe: - Anthropic: $82.3 billion (165x) SBF bought an 8% stake for $500M. The estate sold it for $1.3B in 2024. Today, that stake would be worth over $80B. - SpaceX:$15 billion (75x) A massive stake liquidated early to pay creditors. - Solana: $5.1 billion (27x) SBF was an early backer at $8. The estate offloaded a massive chunk at $64. - Robinhood: $4.9 billion (8x) - Genesis Digital: $3.5 billion (3x) The Latest "Missed" Fortune: CURSOR In 2022, Alameda Research wrote a tiny $200,000 check for a 5% stake in the AI startup Cursor. In April 2023, the bankruptcy estate sold that entire stake back for exactly what they paid: $200,000. Yesterday, SpaceX announced a deal to buy Cursor for $60 billion. That "worthless" 5% stake would be worth $3 billion today. That is a 15,000x return that vanished because the lawyers wanted a quick exit. SBF was a genius at picking generational winners and a criminal at managing their money. The lawyers recovered $18 billion for users. If they had just held, they would be sitting on $114 billion and the most valuable venture portfolio in history.

holy fuck, a hair dryer at a Paris airport broke Polymarket weather markets & made someone $34,000 richer - polymarket was settling Paris temperature bets on a single Météo France sensor sitting near the Charles de Gaulle runway perimeter - basically unguarded - the guy bought the long-shot outcome (like "22°C" when everyone expected 18°C) for pennies, since nobody thought it'd hit - then he walked up to the probe and briefly heated the air around it with a portable heat source, spiking the reading just long enough to register as the daily max - temperature snapped back to normal in minutes, the market resolved in his favor, and he cashed out - twice, on April 6 and April 15, before Météo France caught on and filed charges hyperstitions.

ANNOUNCEMENT: @bitstorian and I are thrilled to announce the winners of the Student Bitcoin Research Prizes for the 2025-2026 academic year. We got a number of good submissions, and these are the best of the best!

Yesterday I finished the final editing for “The Stolguard Incident” by @LynAldenContact, narrated by me and @carlabitcoin Just sent it out for mastering, then we’ll do final proofing. It’s a bittersweet moment to finish the audiobook… Carla and I both absolutely loved TSI when we read the manuscript, and through narrating we got even closer to the characters… It’s been a true honor to use our voices to bring Lyn’s words to life. It’s also quite a surreal timeline, because we recorded the final chapters the day before I had to call an ambulance for Carla… then emergency surgery… then a week in the ICU… then yesterday she was back at home recording the final minor edits. Just wild. Audiobook officially coming soon but grab yourself a physical copy in the meantime.

Universal HIGH INCOME via checks issued by the Federal government is the best way to deal with unemployment caused by AI. AI/robotics will produce goods & services far in excess of the increase in the money supply, so there will not be inflation.