Bitcoin can't save us

TRUMP ADMINISTRATION TO BEGIN REFUNDING $166B IN TARIFFS The U.S. government will start refunding up to $166 billion in Trump-era tariffs after the Supreme Court ruled the policy unlawful. From April 20, businesses can file claims through a new Customs system to recover duties paid under emergency powers. Courts found only Congress can impose tariffs, forcing the rollback. Over 330,000 importers across 53 million shipments may be eligible. Once approved, refunds—plus interest—should arrive within 60–90 days, though complex cases may take longer. Officials warn the process will be massive and complex, but payments will go directly to the businesses that originally paid.

thorchain ($RUNE) just processed $176m in DPRK-linked exploit funds from ETH to BTC and the token is up 6.7% on the day. market is pricing pure utility at $0.45 with zero regulatory premium baked in. now monero integration launches may 10 with FROST threshold signatures enabling atomic ETH to BTC to XMR swaps. no KYC, no admin keys, no bridge contracts to freeze, 105 distributed nodes. this is the tornado cash test on steroids except thorchain is embedded in trust wallet, ledger, OKX, and bitget serving millions of users. too integrated to sanction cleanly, too effective at laundering to ignore. RUNE is the highest convexity vol setup in crypto right now. if privacy infra gets legitimized you own the cross-chain backbone. if treasury moves first you're holding the next sanctioned protocol. may and june will resolve this and the current price reflects neither outcome.

POS is a stealth social concensus. Insiders distribute the coins, they then promote the coin and control the concensus via staking nodes. Some exceptions like Decred which used PoW + PoS. ETH which used PoW to distribute is less but still lots of early pre-seed buyers holding vast chunks.