Matthew Hart

@maxedinfinity You’re not buying Bitcoin. You’re trading yesterday’s money for something built to last. It’s not a purchase — it’s a promotion. Welcome to better money.

grok gets it.

@TheCryptoLark I just logged onto social media so pardon me if I am a few steps behind, but if "many crypto whales and OGs got zeroed" then they weren't holding BTC. They must have been holding degen alts and likely with leverage, correct? Normal BTC holders and stronger alts didn't "zero"

A CRITICAL MESSAGE TO ALL TRADERS I would be remiss not to speak about the carnage that went on in the crypto markets yesterday. To those who just lost everything in the liquidation - this message is for you. And to those who had no exposure whatsoever - this message is also for you. As awful as this moment feels, there is no undo button. But life does go on. I know that feeling. That pit in your stomach, that internal prayer that all of this is a bad dream. That desire that you could just go back in time and make those small changes you were so close to making. I feel you. I’ve been there multiple times. No matter how many times it happens, it feels like your world collapses. You try to control your thoughts but your mind goes right back to what happened. It all seems hopeless. But if you’ve ever built anything once, you’ve already proven you can build again. Whether you lost $1,000, $1 million, or $100 million, the pain is real. Nobody’s pain should be minimized. No matter how rich you are, you still feel those same primal emotions. We are programmed to feel that way. In fact, the more you lose, the heavier it often feels because the more your wealth has become your identity. But recognize this: what you are feeling is our primal programming. Our evolutionary psychology to preserve and protect resources. That programming is flawed though. We always have one ability: to take control over our thoughts and feelings. To recognize that we don’t need to keep reliving the same pain. As they say in Buddhism, being struck by the first arrow hurts. But we don’t need to keep forcing ourselves to get hit by the 2nd and 3rd and 4th. Even if it feels impossible, we can focus on the breathe and find control over our thoughts and emotions. Money isn’t the most important thing in life. The things that truly matter can’t be bought, and they can’t be taken away by a liquidation - your health, your loved ones, your integrity, your ability to start again. The biggest gift we have is life itself and the freedom to carve a new future. That agency is what defines us as humans. Get outside. Spend time with friends and family. Seek help if you need it. There is always room for a brighter tomorrow as long as you remember that you still have agency. What you are feeling isn’t new. For millenia humans have felt this. Elon Musk and some of the greatest smartest wealthiest humans to ever have lived have also been on the precipice of losing it all. Multiple times. Every success story comes from those who persevered when it seemed darkest. One of the most dangerous traps of wealth is how easily it fuses with our ego. Nobody is immune. Even when we are aware of it. Not me, not you, not any human. It’s part of our condition. The larger the number, the easier it is to confuse your net worth with your self-worth. Buddhism teaches that suffering comes from attachment. You are not your account balance. You are not your status as a trader. You are much more than that. The hard truth is that the biggest lessons in life are usually learned through the rearview mirror. What’s done is done. The only way forward is to accept responsibility and move on. Many peg their worth to the wealth of others. We see people around us make insane wealth. People we view as dumber or less deserving. So we ourselves increasingly move out on the risk spectrum to try to keep up. We must always play our own game. The people we end up chasing might themselves one day lose it all. Never ever try to keep up with what others are doing. That is part of the toxicity of social media and the pnl porn that occurs on this platform. Play your own long game. I speak out against the cherry-picked bs gain porn. It was everywhere the last few weeks. So many people try to justify the pnl sharing. How many people were wiped out from simply trying to keep up w the that selective pnl porn posted on social? How many of those posters will quietly fade away after this event? The best thing you can do? Get away from the screens. Get off social. Stop looking at charts and prices. Spend the weekend outdoors. Appreciate the beauty of the sunset. Of nature. Notice that the world still goes on. As massive as this feels, it will pass with time and you will be better for this. The same way every awful thing in your life also came to pass and you came through stronger. But make sure if you are learning this lesson, you only learn it once. It is a brutal but necessary reminder: leverage kills. Markets will always surprise you. Never keep all your eggs in one basket. Segregate accounts. Keep a rainy-day fund in safe assets. Protect your downside before you chase the upside. Over the long run, everyone will face fat tail events that can bankrupt you with leverage. If you weren’t caught in this wipeout, count yourself lucky… and take this as a free lesson learned without paying the tuition. Reflect deeply on your own exposure and the risks you might not even see, especially the hidden leverage that comes from overconfidence in bull markets. You only need to get rich once. Don’t let the market teach you that lesson the hard way. Much love. Be safe. Try to find gratitude. You always have agency. No matter how bad anything gets. -(The One) Lance B

$BTC Update from our Video on Tuesday: In our BTC Market Update Video on Tuesday, I highlighted the need to be cautious given we were at range highs. 1. We came up to range highs / previous all time highs, with momentum slowing down as we reached up into that area, looking like we were starting to create an SFP of the previous ATH. We also had a SFP on the LTF high before a shift before dropping back inside the range and having a bearish underside retest of the previous all time high. 2. On the lower time frame then, as highlighted in our video, we had a shift in orderflow where we dropped below the LTF low and closed below it without a sharp reversal back up. 3. We then started a slow grind back up towards the demand zone (The last up tick candle into the bearish underside retest) where we rejected and broke down, but on this occasion only SFP'd the previous LTF Lower Low. 4. The next key HTF level I'm watching now, again highlighted in the video prior, is the confluence are $118k-$115k. In this area I'll be looking for price to find support given the numerous variable residing in and around the same zone. I'll be waiting on the LTF to see if orderflow shifts with volume confirmation before entering but expecting it to be a high probability area for longs. If we were to dropped through that area it would be evident that we're stuck in a HTF range and potentially a HTF distrubtion. Next video Tuesday - take a break from watching Netflix and watch it.

Legendary Bitcoiner, Andreas Antonopoulos, explains why governments who attempt to regulate Bitcoin will fail miserably. One of my favorite speeches of all time. 🤯

Every generation meets its apocalypse. The printing press destroyed the scribes, electricity destroyed the candle makers, the internet destroyed the gatekeepers. AI isn’t ending humanity, it’s revealing how distracted it’s become. We’ve been asleep for decades, trading purpose for convenience, and truth for noise. Yes, AI may deepen the distraction, but the real danger has always been spiritual, not technological. The answer was never regulation; it was and is revelation. Eternity in the Word of God has always been the remedy. 2025 is no different. The tools change, but the only truth doesn’t.

i don't want spam. how do i vote against it with my bitcoin wallet... that is the root question.

Bitcoin is up over 22,000% since Dave Ramsey said, “#Bitcoin is a really good way to turn $1M into nothing.” 👀 The price of Bitcoin was $549

@callebtc Please help me understand why. I am hearing so much conflicting information.

op_return is harm reduction. reasonable approach, hard for some to accept.

Could @adam3us have fallen any lower?

BREAKDOWN OF MY HATERS Legitimate Traders: 0% Industry Professionals: 0% Sim Trading Marketers: 40% Small-Minded Trolls Doubting My 🏆: 60% I take a lot of pride in that ratio 🫡 Happy Friday, friends 🙏❤️

Surreal

Gloria, you're always on the run now I think you've got to slow down before you start to blow it I think you're headed for a breakdown, so be careful not to show it

I would really request you guys to always carefully read the price Updates I share. Most of you don't read it and miss it and then wonder how did we predict the Bitcoin Price movement. I can write the price predictions for you, I can't read it for you. Understand?

This is a long post that hopefully bridges some gaps between technical people (devs) and non-technical users and how they look at spam prevention in Bitcoin. I hope that it clarifies why I think that there is such a huge misunderstanding between both camps. I'll preface this post with first disqualifying any malicious attempts to misrepresent the motives of either camp. Everybody wants to improve Bitcoin as money. Money is Bitcoin's use case. It's not a data storage system. If you think otherwise, there are countless shitcoins to play with. Alright, let's get into it. I have worked on anonymous systems for over a decade. I have read tons of research on spam detection, rate-limiting, and I've implemented spam prevention techniques in the real world. I am very confident to say that there is not a single known method to prevent spam in decentralized anonymous open networks other than proof of work. This is what Satoshi realized when he designed Bitcoin and it's why only transaction fees can reliably fight spam without sacrificing any of Bitcoin's properties. Let me explain. Spam prevention is a cat and mouse game. As a system's architect, your goal is to make the life of a spammer harder (increase the friction). This is why, on the web, you see captchas, sign-ups, or anything that can artificially slow you down. Slowing down is key. This is why Satoshi turned to proof of work. Let's contrast this to other methods for spam prevention. This is not an exhaustive list but it illustrates the design space of this problem, other methods are often derivatives of these: CAPTCHAS are a centralized form of proof of work for humans: Google's servers give you a hard-to-solve task (select all bicycles) that will slow you down so that you can't bombard a website with millions of requests. It requires centralization: you need to prove Google that you're human so that you can use another website. If you could host your own CAPTCHA service, why would anyone believe you're not cheating? LOGINS with email and passwords are most popular way to slow down users. Before you can sign up, you need to get an email address, and to get an email address, you often need a phone number today. The purpose of this is, again, to slow you down (and to track you to be honest). It only works well when emails are hard to get, i.e. in a centralized web where Google controls how hard it is to get an email account. If you could easily use your own email server, why would anyone believe you're not a bot? The next one is the most relevant to Bitcoin: AD BLOCK FILTERS are another form of spam prevention but this time the roles are reversed: you as a user fight against the spam from websites and advertising companies trying to invade your brain. Ad blocking works only under certain conditions: First you need to be able to "spell out" what the spam looks like, i.e. what the filter should filter out. Second, you need to update your filters every time someone circumvents them. Have you ever installed a youtube ad blocker and then noticed that it stops working after a few weeks? That's because you're playing cat-and-mouse with youtube. You block, they circumvent, you update your filters, repeat. The fact that you need to update your filters is critical and that's where it ties back to Bitcoin: Suppose you have a mempool filter for transactions with a locktime of 21 because some stupid NFT project uses that. You maybe slow them down for a few weeks, but then they notice it and change their locktime to 22. You're back at zero, the spam filter doesn't work anymore. What do you do? You update your filter! But where do you get your new filter from? You need a governing body, or some centralized entity that keeps updating these filters and you need to download their new rules every single day. That's what ad blockers in your web browser do. They trust a centralized authority to know what's best for you, and blindly accept their new filters. Every single day. I hope you see the issue here. Nobody should even consider this idea of constantly updating filter rules in Bitcoin. This would give the filter providers a concerning level of power and trust. It would turn Bitcoin into a centrally planned system, the opposite of what makes Bitcoin special. This is why filters do not work for decentralized anonymous systems. They require a central authority. Until now, these rules were determined by Bitcoin Core, but they have realized that these rules do not work anymore. Transactions bypass the filters easily and at some point, carrying them around became a burden to the node runners themselves. Imagine you're using an outdated ad blocker but instead of filtering out ads, it now also filters out legitimate content you might be interested in. That's what mempool filters do, and that's why Bitcoin Core is slowly relaxing these filters. This has been discussed for over two years, it's not a sudden decision. The goal of this change is not to help transactions to slip through more easily. The goal is to improve your node's prediction of what is going to be in the next block. Most people misrepresent this part. They say "it's to turn Bitcoin into a shitcoin" but that is just a false statement at best, or a manipulation tactic at worst. Let's tie it back to proof of work and why fees are the actual filter that keeps Bitcoin secure and prevents spam reasonably well: Satoshi realized that there is no technique that could slow down block production and prevent denial of service attacks in a decentralized system other than proof of work. Fees prevent you from filling blocks with an infinite number of transactions. All the other options would introduce some form of trust or open the door for censorship – nothing works other than proof of work. He was smart enough to design a system where the proof of work that goes into block production is "minted" into the monetary unit of the system itself: You spend energy, you get sats (mining). This slows down block production. How do you slow down transactions within those blocks? You spend the sats themselves, original earned form block production, as fees for the transactions within the block! This idea is truly genius and it's the only reason why Bitcoin can exist. All other attempts of creating decentralized money have failed to solve this step. Think about it: without knowing who you are, whether you're one person pretending to be a thousand, or a thousand people pretending to be one. Bitcoin defends itself (and anyone who runs nodes in the Bitcoin system) from spam by making you pay for your activity. People sometimes counter this by saying: the economic demand for decentralized data storage is higher than the monetary use case. First of all, I think that's just wrong. There are way cheaper ways to store data (there are shitcoins for this), and the value of having decentralized neutral internet money is beyond comparison. However, there's a much deeper concern here. If you truly believe this, I ask you: what is Bitcoin worth to you? If you think Bitcoin can't succeed as money (i.e. be competitive), why do you even care? If you're not willing to pay fees for the use case that we all believe Bitcoin is designed for (money), and you believe that no one is willing to pay for it, how can it even persist into the future? You can't have it all. If Bitcoin is money (which I believe it is), then we need to pay the price to keep it alive. There is no free lunch. Either we centralize, or we pay the price of decentralization. I know where I stand. Peace.

This was the exact moment Jordan Peterson realised that #Bitcoin is far more advanced than he ever thought with Saifedean Ammous.

People who've been in crypto more than 2 cycles

At the Cost of sounding cringe, let me tell you Something. I don't like repeating that I was right. It doesn't fulfill anything or help anyone. But whenever I talk about selling, shorting or taking Profit, you might not like it. At 111K, a lot of you wanted it to keep pumping but I said I'll sell and take short entry at 114K. The scenario and my plan played out. Did I make some money? Kind of. But what's important is that knowing that you need to actively trade the market like a Job. Not a Casino where you just want the trade to go your way and prices keep pumping. I had a plan, to take profit, to short at my target. All of this was decided in advance. Like a system. Yes it's not nice to say I'll short but someone has to pay the bills. So, get used to taking Profits, having targets and shorting. Thank you for listening.

i read the luke dashjr hit piece. it's wrong. basically the entire article is wrong. i'm (obviously) not on luke's side, but guys this is just a sloppy low quality propaganda piece. first of all: sharing private messages is not cool. for many obvious ethical reasons. but one reason that is often overlooked is that sharing private messages often puts them out of context and makes it easy to construct a false narrative without understanding the conversation with that, let's look deeper into the article published by "the rage": the rage: "dashjr... proposes the implementation of a multisig quorum on bitcoin that grants a designated group of people the ability to retroactively alter data that is hosted on the blockchain" there is no discussion of "altering the data that is stored on the blockchain" anywhere in the screenshots provided. luke discusses a hypothetical mechanism that would allow knots node operators to avoid downloading "spam" that's already in blocks. imagine a hypothetical knots client that syncs blocks with a delay of eg 1 hour. when it downloads a block (late, on purpose), it pings luke's server and asks, "hey, is there any spam in this 1 hour old block?". luke's server responds with a list of transaction IDs that contain "spam", and provides a "zero knowledge proof" that proves to knots nodes that those "spam" transactions are valid, without having to download them. this is the magic of zk proofs and we don't need to get into how it works. suffice to say that the reason bitcoin nodes download transactions is to verify that they're valid, and if there's a way to verify without downloading them then the node can continue functioning without having to download the "spam". so now knots have a mechanism to avoid "spam" on their computer while still validating the chain. this doesn't remove the "spam" for the chain. it is still available on clients that don't run knots (70%+ of the network). core nodes continue to function as normal, with "spam" and with no issues, and continue to be in sync with knots nodes. the only difference is that the knots nodes can avoid ever downloading "spam", while staying on the same network the rage: "luke dashjr plans hard fork" this isn't true and it's a misunderstanding of what luke is saying. his messages do not describe a plan to hard fork bitcoin. he's referring to a technicality, saying that whenever knots nodes use a mechanism like the hypothetical knots node i described above, every time they avoid downloading a transaction they technically hard fork. but just technically, not really. it doesn't split the network, and those hypothetical knots nodes remain fully compatible with core nodes. core nodes can continue to verify, their chain is not censored, and they're fully synced with knots nodes. the rage: “right now the only options would be bitcoin dies or we have to trust someone,” dashjr writes. The proposed solution would require a consensus change, activating a bitcoin hardfork. the quote about "we have to trust someone" is taken out of context. luke is literally saying in the convo that thanks to zk proofs and his proposed solution, they would NOT need to trust anyone. the second part about a consensus change is made up. nothing in the screenshots suggests a consensus change. and i explained above that the "hard fork" bit is just a technicality. in this hypothetical design, there would be no chain split, and core nodes would remain compatible and uncensored. the rage: dashjr reveals that public letters are being drafted by third parties to seemingly support the sanctioning of illegal content on the entire Bitcoin network. the leaked conversation does not AT ALL mention a public letter that supports sanctioning illegal content "on the entire bitcoin network". luke is asked by his conversation partner a legal question, whether or not an op_return relay network will be perceived by authorities as illegal. luke replies that he can't answer that question because he's not a lawyer, but his understanding is that a group is working on a formal letter that addresses that legal question. as far as I can tell that hypothetical letter is a simple "legal opinion", not a letter that calls for sanctioning transactions on bitcoin. 🔸🔸🔸🔸 fyi, they hypothetical design of a knots node that i provide above is just that: hypothetical. the leaked dms don't go into implementation details at all so i had to fill in the blanks. luke might've had some other design in mind. but my description is conceptually correct, and the article's isn't. you can go back to the leaked screenshots and re-read them and tell me if anything there contradicts the hypothetical design I offered (nothing does). also, an important point is that the entire leaked convo is hypothetical. people are allowed to have hypothetical conversations. that doesn't mean there's some conspiracy. everyone I know that discusses this issue in private has brought up all kinds of weird ideas to me that doesn't mean they actually plan to implement them. 🔸🔸🔸🔸 my conclusion is that this article is a hit piece, and not a particularly good one. the most charitable explanation i can come up with is that the author misunderstood the leaked messages and wrote the incorrect article based on that misunderstanding but honestly it really seems that this isn't the case, it seems like the author was employing a lot of motivated reasoning to arrive at the conclusions in the article. the goal was to make luke bad, and his words were manipulated for maximum effect this isn't the first time "the rage" is doing this. last time it was a fake news article claiming that google is about to ban self-custody wallets from the android app store. it was based on the author's borderline malicious interpretation of the google store rules, to make them look like they're against self-custody. that was incorrect, but the fake news article got so viral that google itself had to issue a clarification saying that they have not and will not ban self-custody wallets from the android store. 🔸🔸🔸🔸 perhaps most disappointing was seeing many big names from the "anti-knots" camp jumping on this and declaring that luke is working on a hard fork, that "they knew it" and that soon we will be getting "airdrop fork coins" to sell. all of those things are false. this is, as always, a nothing burger. it's pretty obvious to me that this proposal never gets implemented, and even if it did, it does not censor the network and does not split the network, and remains fully compatible with core. it's actually, dare i say it, a pretty good hypothetical solution (to a problem that doesn't matter). i wish they'd implement it. but they probably won't. do better everyone.