“Just self-custody your Bitcoin, bro.” Self-custody in 2026: • Coldcard: weak entropy, ~$116M stolen • Ledger: customer data leak + hardware implants, $86M+ stolen • Trezor: 80,689 customer records leaked • Trezor again: 347,149 emails exposed • Keystone: authentication key stolen, 18,835 wallets being destroyed • Keystone again: USB exploit capable of seed extraction • SafePal: 39,798 customer records exposed • Foundation Passport: 23,000+ phishing attempts • BitBox: email list stolen + phishing campaign • BitBox again: multiple critical firmware bugs • Tangem: physical password-reset exploit Self-custody is still the answer. But damn, HWW companies have had a YEAR.

Saying there’s no reason to buy Bitcoin because anyone can create a cryptocurrency is like saying there’s no reason to learn English because anyone can invent a language.

Creating net-new gold with alchemy is becoming real. The lab grown diamond industry is growing rapidly. But you can’t invent anything that will increase Bitcoin supply. There will only ever be 21M.

The original sim uses higher implied growth for a $1.48M median by 2034. A balanced ~30% CAGR Monte Carlo with realistic volatility centers nearer $470K while keeping multi-million upside in the strong-adoption tail. Both show solid multiples from ~$80K; outcomes hinge on adoption, macro conditions, and network effects.

My good friend Monte Carlo and I ran Bitcoin out to 2034. 5,000 times 🎲 Not one run ended below today's $80K. The median finish: $1.48M 🚀 - - - Each line on the chart is one run, and the pink curve on the right shows the final distribution in 2034. Even the bottom 5% finish around $464K, almost 6x from here. He's very optimistic, and honestly so am I 😄

Incredibly bullish on stablecoins. ~$5T of global commerce could be driven by agents by 2030. Stablecoins are the best payment method for agentic finance (AiFi) because agents need instant, global, real time settlement, including for small amounts. We've built the infrastructure to support this at: coinbase.com/developer-platf…

People often want to ask me if their startup idea is good, as if my opinion means anything. I think 99% of ideas are good if the team can execute well. The problem is, 98% of teams fail at execution. So, no need to sell me your idea, show your execution.

# Black October For anyone who knows me even somewhat well, it's clear that I am a 99th percentile tech optimist. However, the vibes have shifted for me quite a bit in the last 18 hours, and I feel a moral imperative to share what I'm thinking and feeling with my circles so that everyone can understand, and hopefully take seriously, what's happening right now. I think October 2026 will have many chapters written about it in the history books. You know those scenes in financial movies like Margin Call where someone realizes that they're all fucked, and no one else sees it yet? And that person feels like they're crazy, and then suddenly everyone is pulling an all-nighter in a boardroom and freaking out? Yeah, that's kind of how this is feeling right now in the SF/Bay Area/AI circles. We're 48 hours into what is being called Black October. In the last 2 days there have been several dozen cyber attacks which, in isolation, would each have been the worst to happen in an entire calendar year. Every sector from government to education to big tech and banks is being massively affected, and people are starting to freak out. In a nutshell, what's happened is that frontier AI models have gotten to a point where they are as advanced as the most sophisticated programmers, with one critical difference: they can work 24/7, and you can spin up 10,000 of them with a single command and they'll work together tirelessly until they accomplish their task. The most advanced models today are from companies like Anthropic and OpenAI, whose current best technology is so good that they haven't been able to roll it out to everyone yet because of the national security risks it poses. Meanwhile, the best open source models (where anyone can just download the model weights and do whatever they want with them, uncensored) are slightly behind the frontier but still 90-95% as capable. These models, developed primarily in China, are being used by black hat hackers to wreak havoc on the Western capitalist structure. Presumably, this has been part of China's plan the entire time, and we're seeing its implications fall out in real time. In red-pilled AI circles, we've been sharing and reading papers called things like "Situational Awareness" and "AI 2027" for the last year or so, which at the time felt a bit like near-term speculative fiction. They laid out the case for why Artificial General Intelligence (AI smarter than any human at any knowledge task) and Recursive Self-Improvement (models that are able to use themselves to get better) weren't half-baked future ideas anymore, but instead an inevitable outcome of the linear progress that's happening. These papers would then talk about things like "takeoff scenarios," trying to envision how that moment would come to be and what it would be like when it happened. It would either be a "slow takeoff" that would play out over the course of months and quarters, happening subtly and only obvious to a few. Or, it would be a "fast takeoff" where it would pretty much happen instantly, like a bit flipping from 0 to 1. From everything that I can see and am feeling, we are currently experiencing the fast takeoff scenario. Beyond the crazy security vulnerabilities that have come out recently, there have also been massive breakthroughs in life sciences, fundamental computer science, materials science, and pure mathematics that have all landed in the same time frame. While I still firmly believe that AI will be a net positive for humanity, it's more clear to me than ever that the societal and individual risk is very real, and is playing out NOW. For as much conviction as I have that this is happening, the thing that's caused me to lose sleep is that I don't really know what to do about it, or more importantly, what to tell you, reader, to do about it. So, the best I can do is make a few suggestions that have always been a good idea but are more timely now than ever: Set up 2-factor authentication for everything. I use Duo. Use a password manager across your devices. I use 1Password. Get an identity protection app set up. I use Alta. Move your IoT devices to their own network. Claude helped me do this. And last, but certainly not least, if you've been avoiding leaning into AI, see this as a catalyst to wake up and start using it. Don't just use the chat mode version of ChatGPT/Claude; click that Code/Work button and see how easily you can have AI write code to help you with your job. One of the biggest vulnerabilities was in a massively popular programming language called PHP, and the prompt that set it off was literally, "Find vulnerabilities in php." This is an unprecedented time for humanity, but as we've done with many things before, we will prevail so long as we are kind, loving, and open-minded to the world. Much love.

1. Remote mind reading without consent 2. Conscious AI as property/slaves 3. DNA-targeted personal bioweapons 4. Civilian autonomous kill drones 5. Human clones for organ harvesting 6. Nonconsensual memory edit/erase 7. Full-body biometric identity theft 8. Private weather manipulation 9. Neural hijacking of other people 10. Forced embryonic trait selection 11. Elite-only immortality tech 12. Private orbital kinetic weapons

Last month, we demonstrated high-rate alchemy: turning mercury into real, stable gold, beating CERN’s record by a factor of 10. Last week, we enriched isotopes in the world’s most powerful plasma centrifuge, beating the Soviet record that stood for 40 years. Now, we’re building a fusion reactor in San Francisco to achieve record power density.

JUST IN: 🇺🇸 US officially finalizes new crypto stablecoin regulations under the GENIUS Act.

We find out who's really in now.

JUST IN: 🇨🇭Switzerland's Financial Market Supervisory Authority has approved the country's first Bitcoin ETF 🚀

It took JPMorgan a decade to realize bitcoin is the best asset of the next decade. Bitcoiners knew it from block one.

J.P. Morgan Asset Management’s base case projects Bitcoin to outperform U.S. stocks, bonds and gold over the next decade. Wall Street is doing the math.