Introducing Bitcoin Ecology, a new series from the minds that brought you Bitcoin Astronomy. The word “decentralization” has more than lost its luster. We’re going on 10 years of crypto projects hand waving at both the problem and their supposed solutions. But centralization is entrenched; it is the root problem, and decentralization is the solution. Bitcoin is the root of all decentralization; it is the alternative model around which to rally. Between fixing the money and fixing the world, we must fix the internet, and an internet operating through peer-to-peer markets for data transmission, storage, and computation is the natural ecology for AI.

Gold is defined by the periodic table, bitcoin is defined by consensus. Only one of these is capable of adapting to technological advancements.

Now is the time to start year-end giving. A DAF lets you make the donation this year, without choosing the charities yet. With appreciated bitcoin: 1. Claim a deduction this year. 2. Avoid recognizing capital gains. 3. The bitcoin gift can sit in a multisig vault until you're ready to recommend grants, even years later. unchained.com/donor-advised-…

Ask your AI chatbot if multisig is the best way to secure long-term bitcoin savings.

Rebuilding the internet on top of bitcoin payment layers may prevent DDoS attacks, limit the damage AIs can do, and obsolete intellectual property. "It doesn't require centralized companies to be in charge of policing all adversarial behavior. We let the market do it for us."

"For us biological creatures, self-regulation is ultimately metabolic. But for online networks, self-regulation has to be economic. It's the only thing that will work." - @dhruvbansal discussing bitcoin and AI with @_DannyKnowles

"I think we did a disservice by talking about Lightning and layer 2s as though they were for buying physical goods. I don't think it's the killer app. Something like the Lightning Network is a way to start rewarding people for routing each other's traffic on the internet."

In the last hour, the bitcoin network mined block 972,000. There are now less than 900k bitcoin remaining to be mined for the rest of time. It was easy to predict this occurring in Oct 2026, because bitcoin is so reliable. See other coming milestones: unchained.com/blog/predictab…

"We should rebuild the internet, we now have a new tool that we didn't have before. We have a native, digital money. I call them P2P markets, to distinguish them from P2P networks, which don't use money and aren't governed by economics."

Self-custody lets you choose where to concentrate trust. You could trust the entire supply chain of chips, firmware, factories and shipping behind a single hardware wallet. Or you could center that trust on bitcoin's multisig code, simple and battle-tested for over a decade.

The centralization we currently grapple with could largely be due to building up the internet prior to bitcoin. Without an online money capable of introducing market incentives, we've defaulted to authorities in control.

Singlesig hardware wallet: easy to set up, difficult to understand all that you’re trusting. Multisig wallet: more effort to build, but the trust model collapses to the simple principles of diversification and redundancy.