I cannot let a steam engine analogy go by without bringing up John Wilkinson, perhaps the most underappreciated engineer of the Industrial Revolution. Watt had figured out how to dramatically improve the steam engine, but he spent years struggling to actually manufacture one. The problem was embarrassingly simple: nobody could make a sufficiently round cylinder. The casting and machining tolerances were atrocious. Watt complained that one 18-inch cylinder was out of round by as much as THREE-EIGHTHS OF AN INCH. Steam leaked past the piston. He tried packing the gaps with cork, oiled rags, paper, and apparently even old hats. Nothing worked particularly well. Enter John Wilkinson, a British ironmaster whose immediate concern was manufacturing better cannons. At the time, iron cannons were commonly cast around a core, introducing defects and misalignment that could make the barrels inaccurate or dangerously weak. Wilkinson developed a process for boring cannons from solid castings, and in 1774 patented a vastly improved boring machine. The key innovation was almost comically mechanical: a massive, rigid boring bar, supported at both ends, that could cut a genuinely straight, circular hole instead of following the irregularities of the casting. He adapted this technology to Watt's cylinders. By 1776, Matthew Boulton was boasting that Wilkinson had bored a FIFTY-INCH cylinder accurate to within the thickness of an old shilling. Suddenly, the steam engine was a commercially viable machine. And the story gets better. Wilkinson became one of Watt's first customers, buying an engine to drive the blast machinery at his own ironworks. The steam engine was now helping manufacture the iron that made more steam engines possible. I find this whole episode absolutely extraordinary. The Industrial Revolution was, for a critical period, bottlenecked on the ability to make a sufficiently round hole. We remember Watt, and rightly so. We remember the invention of the steam engine and the subsequent development of thermodynamics. But the man who made the machinery that made the whole thing possible is practically a footnote. I think we consistently underestimate how much of scientific progress is actually downstream of advances in tooling, measurement, and manufacturing precision. It's not just that technology precedes theory. Sometimes the decisive breakthrough is that someone finally figures out how to build the thing the theorists have been talking about for twenty years. Anyway, I think John Wilkinson deserves considerably more credit for modern civilization than he gets.

Argentina to offer citizenship for foreigners that make a $350,000 contribution to its treasury, or invest $800,000 in its bonds

So Charles is basically saying that @MidnightNtwrk will be bigger than @Zcash. Bold claim. Especially since there's currently a massive difference in trading volume: → $ZEC: $25B market cap | ~$1B daily volume → $NIGHT: $463M market cap | $20M daily volume There's quite a gap in the activity as well: → Midnight: ~148K transactions since launching in March → Zcash: ~10K-15K transactions on individual recent days At that pace, roughly 10-15 days of Zcash activity equals Midnight’s entire public transaction count so far. Looking at it realistically, Midnight is a much younger protocol compared to Zcash. It’s only been live for ~6 months. And Zcash already has almost 10 years of liquidity, exchange support, wallets, infrastructure and usage behind it. Not really possible to close a big gap like that in such a short time if you ask me.

The ARC token has been minted. Circle is the first publicly traded company to mint a network token for a new blockchain. This is a technical milestone in the Arc roadmap as the network explores a future transition from Proof of Authority toward Proof of Stake. The minting of ARC does not represent any commitment to a public launch of the token. ARC is not live, tradeable, available for public use, or active for staking, governance, fees, or utility. The Arc network remains Proof of Authority today. Future ARC functionality and activation remain subject to change. Official ARC contract: explorer.arc.io/token/0xA12C…

Real yields on 10-year Treasuries are back at post-2008 highs, at 2.66%.

“I could be just like [trencher] if I wanted to but it’s beneath me” Bro if you could hit a button and make 300k+/month and change the lives of your bloodline you’d do it in a heartbeat There’s a huge gap in grind and skill. They’re online 18 hours. They want it more than you.

Bessent’s plan to use the TGA to fund Treasury buybacks makes possible exactly what I warned would happen. This reckless plan will substantially shorten the average maturity of the national debt, increasing our exposure to rising short-term rates and making it even harder for the Fed to hike rates without exploding federal interest expense and budget deficits. It’s a recipe for massive QE and runaway inflation. Got gold?

🚨 KOREAN BOND MARKET IS BREAKING DOWN Today, South Korea's 30-year bond yield hit 4.73%, its highest level ever. After the US and Japan, Korean long-term bond yields are going parabolic too, and this always ends badly.

The top editor of Forbes, Randall Lane, was fired last month after the company discovered that he had received a payment of about $6 million from the founder of a firm that does business with the magazine, according to people familiar with the decision. nyti.ms/4xXqVjB

APPLE HAS IS NOW WORTH $5 TRILLION DOLLARS IN MARKET VALUE FOR FIRST TIME EVER $AAPL

Zero probability of QE (expanding the balance sheet by buying long term assets) until inflation is dead and Fed funds is zero