9-26-2025
Hard fork rumors around Luke Dashjr spark noise but little substance. BlackRock dresses futures gambling as a yield ETF. Regulators probe treasury firms for insider trading. China and the UK advance digital currencies, while Cipher lands a $3B Google-backed AI hosting deal.
Rumors are swirling again, this time around Luke Dashjr and a supposed plan to hard fork Bitcoin. Screenshots of private chats suggest he wants to build a censorship committee to strip CSAM and other data from the chain using zero-knowledge proofs. Let’s all calm down. I lived through the block size wars from 2016 to 2018, and this isn’t it. At most, this is fog of war mixed with gossip. Even if Luke really is talking about it, conversations are not hard forks. And if anyone does fork, we already know the winning side is the one that keeps Bitcoin’s censorship resistance intact.
While that noise carries on with itself, BlackRock is back in the headlines. They want to launch a Bitcoin yield ETF that sells covered call options on futures. In plain English: gambling dressed up as fixed income. Suit-speak will call it innovation, but it’s really just a Wall Street play to squeeze yield out of thin air and rubes. They’re building around Bitcoin because it’s the only asset in this space worth their time. Don’t fool yourself into thinking this product is about sound money. It’s about fees and control.
Meanwhile, regulators are sniffing around treasury companies. The SEC and FINRA contacted over 200 firms after suspicious stock moves ahead of crypto treasury announcements. That smells like insider trading. Buy stock before telling the world you’re adding Bitcoin to the balance sheet, and you’ve already crossed the line. Some companies may escape, but many will get hammered. This is part of the larger pattern we’ve been seeing: desperation on the long tail of firms chasing the “Bitcoin treasury” label without understanding what it means to hold Bitcoin responsibly.
On the global stage, China and the UK are pressing ahead with digital currency experiments. The digital yuan’s new international operations center cements its role in cross-border trade, while the UK launches a tokenized sterling pilot with six megabanks. Both scream CBDC. They’ll be marketed as efficient and inclusive, but watch the gates, caps, and reversibility.
Amid all that, miners are pivoting. Cipher signed a $3B, Google-backed AI hosting deal in Texas. Instead of turning themselves into another treasury zombie, they’re building high-performance compute infrastructure that plugs into AI demand. It’s worth watching at least.
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