CHAINSofBLOCKS

Week 45 - $5,750 #Bitcoin

Write it on your heart by Ralph Waldo Emerson Write it on your heart that every day is the best day in the year. He is rich who owns the day, and no one owns the day who allows it to be invaded with fret and anxiety. Finish every day and be done with it. You have done what you could. Some blunders and absurdities, no doubt crept in. Forget them as soon as you can, tomorrow is a new day; begin it well and serenely, with too high a spirit to be cumbered with your old nonsense. This new day is too dear, with its hopes and invitations, to waste a moment on the yesterdays.

Napoleon on His Legacy: "In spite of all the libels, I have no fear whatever about my fame... Had I succeeded, I would have died with the reputation of the greatest man that ever existed. As it is, although I have failed, I shall be considered as an extraordinary man: my elevation was unparalleled, because unaccompanied by crime. I have fought fifty pitched battles, almost all of which I have won. I have framed and carried into effect a code of laws that will bear my name to the most distant posterity. I raised myself from nothing to be the most powerful monarch in the world. Europe was at my feet. I have always been of opinion that the sovereignty lay in the people. In fact, the imperial government was a kind of republic. Called to the head of it by the voice of the nation, my maxim was, la carrière est ouverte aux talens without distinction of birth or fortune."

Don Tzu: Break an enemy blockade by blockading their blockade.

Scientists be like

In 1948, a 32-year-old at Bell Labs published a paper nobody fully understood. Engineers found it too mathematical. Mathematicians found it too engineering-focused. One prominent mathematician reviewed it negatively. That paper - "A Mathematical Theory of Communication", became the founding document of the digital age. The man was Claude Shannon. Father of Information Theory. At 21, he wrote the most important master's thesis of the 20th century. Working at MIT on an early mechanical computer, Shannon noticed its relay switches had exactly two states - open or closed. He had just taken a philosophy course introducing Boolean algebra, which also operated on two values: true and false. Nobody had ever connected these two things. His 1937 thesis proved that Boolean algebra and electrical circuits are mathematically identical, and that any logical operation could be built from simple switches. Howard Gardner called it "possibly the most important, and also the most famous, master's thesis of the century." Every digital computer ever built traces back to this insight. At 29, he proved that perfect encryption exists. During WWII, Shannon worked on classified cryptography at Bell Labs. His work contributed to SIGSALY, the secure voice system used for confidential communications between Roosevelt and Churchill. In a classified 1945 memorandum, he mathematically proved the one-time pad provides perfect secrecy, unbreakable not just computationally, but provably, permanently, against an adversary with infinite power. When declassified in 1949, it transformed cryptography from an art into a science. It laid the foundations for DES, AES, and every modern encryption standard. At 32, he defined what information is. His 1948 paper introduced one equation: H = −Σ p(x) log p(x) Shannon entropy. The average uncertainty in a probability distribution. The minimum bits required to encode a message. Three things followed: > He defined the bit - the fundamental unit of all information. His colleague John Tukey coined the name. > He proved the channel capacity theorem, every communication channel has a maximum rate of reliable transmission. You can approach it. You can never exceed it. > He unified telegraph, telephone, and radio into a single mathematical framework for the first time. Robert Lucky of Bell Labs called it the greatest work "in the annals of technological thought." Where his equation lives in AI today: Cross-entropy loss - the function training every classifier and language model, is derived directly from H. Decision tree splits use information gain, which is H applied to data. Perplexity, the standard LLM evaluation metric, is an exponentiation of cross-entropy. Every time a neural network trains, Shannon's formula runs inside it. He also built the first AI learning device. In 1950, Shannon built Theseus, a mechanical mouse that navigated a maze through trial and error, learned the correct path, and repeated it perfectly. Mazin Gilbert of Bell Labs said: "Theseus inspired the whole field of AI." That same year he published the first paper on programming a computer to play chess. He co-organized the 1956 Dartmouth Workshop, the founding event of AI as a field. The man: He rode a unicycle through Bell Labs hallways while juggling. He built a flame-throwing trumpet, a rocket-powered Frisbee, and Styrofoam shoes to walk on the lake behind his house. He called his home Entropy House. When asked what motivated him: "I was motivated by curiosity. Never by the desire for financial gain. I just wondered how things were put together." In 1985, he appeared unexpectedly at a conference in Brighton. The crowd mobbed him for autographs. Persuaded to speak at the banquet, he talked briefly, then pulled three balls from his pockets and juggled instead. One engineer said: "It was as if Newton had showed up at a physics conference." He died in 2001 after a decade with Alzheimer's, the cruel irony of information slowly leaving the mind of the man who defined what information was. Claude, the AI model, is named after Claude Shannon, the mathematician who laid the foundation for the digital world we rely on today.

@nickgerli1 This is actually not entirely true. Many retirees move to Florida to live out their days before they retire or go into a nursing home. Turnover is highly correlated with people aging out.

2) Another reason now is that Florida has higher sales turnover than California. There's just more people moving in/out. So more houses get sold. In February 2026, 25,000 homes sold in Florida compared to 18,000 in California (39% higher). Comparatively, California has more owned housing units, meaning the relative sales were much lower.

Some interesting differences are showing up in mortgage rates by state. California: 28% of mortgaged houses are at sub-3% rate Florida: 16% only before pandemic, they both were similar. But now, there's a big gap. California's sub-3% mortgage rates are one of the reasons why prices have held firmer. In Florida, there's now more 6%+ rates, which is leading to higher inventory and cheaper prices. Pay attention to these breakdowns in effective mortgage rates by state, because I think it will have a large impact on the future direction of prices in 2026-27. (overall - the trend is more and more owners taking on a 6%+ rate, but in California the adoption will be slower and Florida faster, likely due to overall sales turnover - Florida has more people moving in and out, so it will have more owners at newer rates)

Holy cow. I’ve been reading the Rockefeller archives, and found this gem, where John D. Rockefeller comments on Napoleon Bonaparte. "It is hard to imagine Napoleon as a business man, but I have thought that if he had applied himself to commerce and industry he would have been the greatest business man the world had ever known. My, what a genius for organization! He also had what I have always regarded as a prime necessity for large success in any enterprise - that is a thorough understanding of men and ability to inspire in them confidence in him and what is of equal importance, confidence in themselves. See the men he picked as Marshalls, and the heights to which they rose under his inspiration and leadership. It is by such traits as these, that men get the world of the world done. It is all a battlefield. Bonaparte, without the able marshals he had about him, would not have been the master of his age. he went into a battle with the knowledge that his marshals could be depended on - that in a given situation they could be relied upon do to the necessary thing. Their devotion to him, coupled with their enthusiasm - that’s another great attribute - and the qualities which his influence upon them brought out, won the fight. Another thing about Napoleon was his virility - his humanity. I mean humanity in the broad sense, of course. He was a human being, and virile because he came direct from the ranks of the people. There was none of the stagnant blood of nobility or royalty in his veins. There’s where he had the advantage over the the monarchs of Europe to begin with. He could think quicker and along more individual and original lines than any of them. And being from the people, he was in close touch with the people. The men with whom he had to combat didn’t understand either him, or the people and it is always hard to successful control what you don’t understand. Napoleon didn’t play the game, as the saying goes, as they understood it. And then, coming direct from the people he had the sympathy; he appealed to their imagination; Europe had not yet been education to the fact that it could get along without any kings at all, and the French people, I believe, reasoned that if they have to have king to rule them, it was better to have a king of their own kind and from their own ranks, than from the breed which had ruled them for a thousand years. In an age when the people had been but recently released from slavery and had not acquired the art of governing themselves, leaders of their own kind were few, and that made it easier for Napoleon to rise to the heights which he attained. A Napoleon would be impossible in our day. Democracy has educated us away from such a think. There are too many able and ambitious rivals to hold in check one who aimed too high."

@wagmiAlexander Stop the marketing ploy APRs yesterday were the worst they have ever been though... ~20% APR (includes the rebase) Users are taking on a lot of risk by locking up their positions for 4 years and being open to potential hacks You're starting to make US Treasuries entertaining.

That is nearly a month’s worth emissions removed from circulation in a single $AERO lock god candle. Make your token useful and people will use it. Who would’ve thought?

The downtown Chicago, Illinois office vacancy rate rose to an all-time high of 28.6%, having now hit new record highs for 15 consecutive quarters. Almost half of the 40M SF of vacant office space downtown has been available for at least three years. Up from 13.8% when the COVID-19 pandemic began. "Companies cutting back on office space as they adapt to remote work trends have left downtown with a far smaller office tenant base than it had before 2020 and decimated property values, creating rampant distress and scaring off many institutional investors needed to fuel the market’s recovery." -Crain's #commercialrealestate

State with the worst gap between population growth and spending in the last decade? Illinois. Population shrunk by 1%. State spending grew 72%, inflation adjusted. I'll continue asking - where did all the money go?

The average American today lives better than John D. Rockefeller did in 1926. That is not an exaggeration. It is a fact. Rockefeller could not fly across the country in five hours. You can for $200. He could not video call his family from another continent. You do it for free. He had no antibiotics, no MRI, no air conditioning in July. He could not carry every book ever written in his pocket. You are reading this on a device that does all of that and more. Americans throw away 30-40% of their food. Not because they are wasteful, but because food is so abundant that waste is affordable. Your car has climate control, navigation, and safety systems that did not exist at any price a century ago. Your home has heating, cooling, refrigeration, and entertainment that emperors could not have imagined. None of this was voted into existence. None of it was redistributed from the rich. It was created by free minds operating in what remains of a free market. Every comfort you enjoy today is the product of a man who thought, invented, produced, and traded voluntarily. This is what the remnants of capitalism still deliver, even while it is being dismantled. Imagine what a fully free society could build.

My self-sovereign / local / private / secure LLM setup, April 2026 vitalik.eth.limo/general/2026/0…

CRAZY: 🇨🇳 Under China's divorce law updates, a wife cannot claim assets solely in the husband's name without proving joint involvement.

Strange scene here at Toyota Center as the buzzer has gotten stuck. It’s been blaring for about two minutes. Iowa leads Illinois 22-20 as the game enters a delay with 7:43 left in the first half. #Illini

I'm listening to Plutarch & he starts the life of Pericles with a basically unrelated ramble about how certain women buy 'puppies and young monkeys' instead of having children. Truly nothing is new under the sun

Modi lands in Israel today. And the deals being signed tell you this visit was never about diplomacy. Israel has offered India full technology transfer for Iron Dome and Iron Beam. Not a sale. A transfer. Joint production, domestic manufacturing, integration into India’s multi-layered air defense grid. $8.6 billion in defense agreements expected to be formalized before Modi’s plane leaves Israeli airspace tomorrow. Iron Beam is the part that should stop you. A 100-kilowatt laser weapon that destroys incoming drones and rockets at $2 per shot. Two dollars. An Iron Dome interceptor costs $50,000 to $100,000 per missile. Iron Beam makes the economics of attrition warfare irrelevant. Israel has never transferred this technology to anyone. Not the United States. Not the UK. Not Germany. India is the first. Now ask yourself why Israel is handing its most advanced defensive technology to the world’s fifth-largest economy this week, of all weeks. Because Netanyahu is not selling weapons. He is buying an alliance. The “hexagon” he described publicly, a coalition against what he called radical Sunni and Shiite axes, requires India to have skin in the game. You do not give a country your most classified defense technology unless you need that country committed to your security architecture for decades. Iron Dome technology transfer makes India structurally dependent on Israeli defense integration. Maintenance, upgrades, software updates, threat library sharing, all of it creates institutional ties that outlast any single government. This is not a transaction. It is a binding commitment disguised as a procurement. And the timing is the signature. Modi is addressing the Knesset at 4:30 PM today while a 48-hour deadline expires on Iran. He is signing defense agreements while 11 F-22s sit on Israeli tarmac. He is formalizing a security partnership while Turkey plans border incursions and China sells Iran supersonic anti-ship missiles. Netanyahu is assembling his coalition before the action, not after. Every alliance signature collected before the first bomb falls becomes a diplomatic asset that cannot be retracted once the operation begins. India cannot condemn an Israeli military action 48 hours after its Prime Minister stood in the Knesset endorsing the security partnership that enables it. Modi did not travel to Israel despite the crisis. The crisis is why the invitation was sent.

@MichaelAArouet Even when one accepts the consensus that humanity has contributed to climate change, the context looks quite a bit different when one zooms out, using the same consensus data.

Crypto firm Ledn sells Bitcoin-backed bonds in ABS market first >First ever deal of its kind in asset-backed debt >Secured by pool of 5,400 Bitcoin-collateralized loans that consumers took from Ledn at weighted avg rate of 11.8% >Investment grade tranche priced at +335bps

Andrew Fraser Tytler writing in the 1780s: “A democracy cannot exist as a permanent form of government. It can only exist until the voters discover that they can vote themselves largesse from the public treasury. From that moment on, the majority always votes for the candidates promising the most benefits from the public treasury with the result that a democracy always collapses over loose fiscal policy, always followed by a dictatorship. The average age of the world's greatest civilizations has been 200 years. These nations have progressed through this sequence: From bondage to spiritual faith; From spiritual faith to great courage; From courage to liberty; From liberty to abundance; From abundance to selfishness; From selfishness to apathy; From apathy to dependence; From dependence back into bondage.”

A Chinese kungfu master can lightly touch the water both from the front and from behind…