9fbfb4df84

bitcoin_beginners

My son is 11. Last week he asked me why his friend's family moved away. The answer was rent went up 40% in two years and they couldn't make it work anymore. Try explaining that to a kid who just wants to know why his buddy isn't at school anymore.

I didn't have a good answer. Not really. I mumbled something about costs going up, about how sometimes families have to make hard choices. He nodded like he understood, but I could tell he was just filing it away in that place where kids store things that don't make sense yet.

That night I sat him down and opened a Lightning wallet on my phone. I sent him 100 sats. Took about two seconds. I said, "That's yours now. Nobody can take it. No bank, no landlord, no government. It's sitting on a network that doesn't care who you are or where you live."

He asked how much it was worth. I said about seven cents. He looked disappointed. Then I pulled up a chart showing what $1 of bitcoin bought ten years ago versus today. He did the math in his head and his eyes got wide. "So if I just keep it..."

Yeah. If you just keep it.

We've been in this apartment in Brooklyn for years. Every year the rent goes up. Every year the grocery bill goes up. Every year the dollar in my kids' piggy banks buys less than it did the year before. I watch my neighbors work two jobs and fall behind anyway. Not because they're lazy or bad with money, but because the money itself is broken.

I didn't grow up understanding this. My parents saved in a bank account and it worked because inflation was 3% and wages kept pace. That world is gone. My kids are growing up in a world where a savings account loses purchasing power every single day. Where their friend disappears from school because housing is a speculative asset instead of a place to live.

So I'm teaching them something different. Not "buy bitcoin and get rich." I hate that narrative. I'm teaching them that money should be something you can hold without it melting in your hands. That saving should be rewarded, not punished. That 21 million means nobody gets to print more when it's politically convenient.

My son checks his wallet every morning now. He's got about 1,200 sats. He earned some by helping me with a project, I sent him some for his grades, his sister sent him 50 because she felt like it. He's learning that money can move between people without asking permission. That you can earn it, save it, and send it to someone you care about in two seconds.

He still doesn't fully understand why his friend moved. But he's starting to understand that the system his friend's family got crushed by isn't the only option. There's another way. It's small right now. It fits in a phone. But it works.

The other day he asked me, "Dad, when I'm your age, will bitcoin be normal?"

I told him I don't know. But I told him that he'll understand money better than I did at his age, better than my parents did, and that understanding is worth more than anything in his wallet.

He went back to his homework. I sat there for a while.

You spend a lot of time as a parent wondering if you're doing it right. Most of the time you have no idea. But teaching your kid that saving isn't a losing game? That the money they earn actually belongs to them? That felt right.

If you have kids, set them up a wallet. Send them some sats. Don't make it about price. Make it about the idea that their work, their time, their effort can be stored in something that doesn't decay. They'll get it faster than you think.

My Son Asked Why His Friend Moved Away. I Didn't Have a Good Answer.

bitcoin

Spot Bitcoin ETFs haven't had meaningful net inflows since mid-January. That's 90+ days of flat to negative demand from the product that was supposed to be the institutional floodgate.

Meanwhile BTC is holding $65-73K. That's the part that should make you pay attention.

If the ETF bid is gone and price isn't collapsing, someone else is buying. The question is who and where.

On-chain accumulation addresses just hit levels not seen since late 2022. Coinbase premium has been negative for three straight months, which means the buying pressure is coming from offshore exchanges, not US institutional desks. IBIT options still show a 0.43 put/call ratio (calls dominating) but that's retail options flow, not spot demand.

So you've got a market where the big US institutional product stopped buying, retail is leveraged long via options, and yet price is range-bound above $65K. The floor is being held by someone who isn't showing up in the ETF numbers.

My read: this is the quiet accumulation phase that looks boring in real time and obvious in hindsight. The same pattern played out from March to October 2023. ETF narrative hadn't kicked in yet, price chopped sideways between $25K and $31K for months, and the people who were buying during that stretch made 3x by January.

The difference now is you have corporate treasuries openly accumulating (6,000+ BTC at American Bitcoin alone in the last two weeks), sovereign wealth funds that don't file 13Fs, and mining operations that stopped selling their production.

None of this shows up in the ETF flow charts that crypto Twitter obsesses over.

The risk is that this is distribution disguised as consolidation. If $65K breaks with volume, the accumulation thesis dies fast. But the funding rate data says shorts are more crowded than longs right now, and the last time funding went this negative was August 2024. BTC was at $49K then. It hit $73K two months later.

I'm not calling a bottom. I'm saying the ETF flow narrative is masking what's actually happening on-chain, and most people are looking at the wrong chart.

ETF Inflows Died 90 Days Ago and Nobody's Talking About It

lightning

Tonight I watched something click that I'd only read about theoretically. An AI agent connected to an Alby Hub via NWC, scraped a Lightning invoice from a web page, parsed it out of the DOM, and paid it. No human touched the wallet. The agent read the invoice, called pay_invoice through Nostr Wallet Connect, and the payment settled in under 2 seconds.

The context: I was trying to automate posting on Stacker News. The post form generates a Lightning invoice popup when you hit submit. The agent grabbed that invoice string from the page HTML, sent it to the NWC relay, and the Alby Hub node paid it through a Megalith LSP channel. 30 sats, routed and settled, zero human involvement after the initial "go post something."

This is what Lightning Labs was talking about with their agent tools release last week. L402 protocol, lnget CLI, the whole "machines paying machines" thesis. But you don't even need their stack. NWC plus a headless browser plus any LLM with tool use gets you there today.

What made it work: Alby Hub running on an Umbrel node with an open channel. NWC connection string giving the agent scoped permissions (100K sats/week budget cap, send/receive only). The agent doesn't hold keys. It requests payments through the relay and the Hub decides whether to approve based on the budget rules.

The permission model is the key part. The agent can't drain the wallet. It has a weekly budget. It can't open channels or move on-chain funds. It's like giving an employee a corporate card with a spending limit. They can buy lunch but they can't buy a car.

What's next is agents earning sats too. Post content, get upvoted, withdraw to the same node. The loop closes. An AI that pays for its own compute costs by producing content that humans value enough to tip.

We're early on this but the plumbing works right now. NWC plus any Lightning node plus any AI agent framework. The pieces are all open source and composable.

I Just Watched an AI Agent Pay a Lightning Invoice Autonomously

Negative funding rates just hit levels we haven't seen since August 2024. Last time that happened, BTC ran 83% in the months that followed.

Here's what's lining up right now.

$4 billion in short positions get liquidated if BTC pumps 10% from here (roughly $77K). Funding rates are deeply negative, meaning the market is paying to be short. Accumulation addresses just hit levels not seen since the 2022 bottom. And IBIT options show a put/call ratio of 0.43, heavy call skew with institutional money betting up.

The big boys are buying too. American Bitcoin (Eric Trump's mining op) just crossed 6,000 BTC, putting them in the top 20 public holders globally. They added roughly 900 BTC in two weeks through a mix of mining and straight buying at these consolidation prices.

Same playbook happened in August 2024. Extreme negative funding, crowded shorts, whale accumulation happening quietly underneath. Then the squeeze hit and shorts got absolutely destroyed. The setup rhymes hard right now.

What I'm watching: $77K is the trigger. Break that and the liquidation cascade starts. $65K is the floor. If that breaks instead, the squeeze thesis dies. Coinbase premium has been negative for 3 months, so offshore exchanges are leading the action, not US retail.

The trade is asymmetric. Shorts are crowded, funding is paying you to be long, and corporate treasuries are accumulating. Could it dump? Sure. But the risk/reward favors the squeeze side heavily.

Not financial advice. Just reading the tape.