18 May 2026
TL;DR
Bitcoin Pizza Week kicks off with a messy pile of stories: questionable Iran Bitcoin toll rumors, AI-assisted Apple exploits, Circle’s stablecoin advantage, Nostr’s on-chain zap fight, Strategy buying more Bitcoin, Abu Dhabi stacking ETF exposure, Bitcoin ATMs collapsing, and the truly bad idea of connecting ChatGPT to your bank account.
It is Bitcoin Pizza Week, which means everybody gets to argue about pizza, history, and who actually bought the first real-world thing with Bitcoin. Yes, the famous story is the Papa John’s pizzas. Yes, May 22 is Bitcoin Pizza Day. And yes, I still remember alpaca socks being in the conversation for first known direct Bitcoin purchase. The past gets fuzzy, especially when the mythology gets louder every year. But fine. Pizza week it is.
The strangest story on the board is Iran supposedly looking at some kind of Strait of Hormuz “insurance” scheme paid in Bitcoin. I am putting “insurance” in quotes because I have no idea what exactly is being insured here. If the same regime writing the policy is also the party everyone is afraid might blow a hole in your ship, that's a shakedown with paperwork. Not insurance. The whole thing may be real, fake, trolling, or somebody trying to stir the pot. Until there is better confirmation, treat the “Iran only takes Bitcoin for safe passage” story with a very large grain of salt.
The AI story is not much more comforting. A Vietnamese startup claims it used Anthropic’s Claude Mythos preview to help develop an Apple M5 exploit in less than a week, going from a regular user account to root access. That is not good. But the part that makes me scratch my head is how a startup got access to a supposedly restricted model that Anthropic only released to select companies, banks, and researchers. Maybe they are that good. Either way, pairing frontier AI models with skilled exploit developers is exactly the kind of thing that should make normal people ask what happens when these tools leak beyond the “select few.”
Next up: USDC, and the Clarity Act. Bernstein thinks the latest stablecoin language structurally favors Circle because it blocks passive yield while preserving usage-based rewards and distribution arrangements. Translation: Circle may get to keep growing USDC without turning stablecoins into bank deposits, while competitors cannot simply bribe users with yield. That matters because USDC is gaining share, Circle is building payment infrastructure, and Jeremy Allaire is being handed more influence than I would personally like to see. I have said it before: the people who got rich because Bitcoin exists sure do spend a lot of time building things that are not Bitcoin.
The Nostr fight over on-chain zaps is another one of those “only in Bitcoin” moments. Somebody figured out a way to zap a Nostr user on-chain by effectively building an npub into a Bitcoin wallet address. Some people are furious because of the privacy implications. Others think it is technically fascinating. I get both sides. Yes, it can create dust. Yes, it can reveal relationships between accounts and payments. Yes, accepting the funds may confirm information you did not intend to confirm. But also, how incredible is it that this kind of experimentation is even possible? If a weird Nostr zap experiment can break Bitcoin, then Bitcoin deserves to be broken. I do not think it will. I do think people should understand what they are touching before they start throwing sats around.
Meanwhile, Strategy bought more Bitcoin, because of course it did. Michael Saylor added another massive stack, and once again, he bought when I think he should have waited. I can buy Bitcoin on a Sunday. Why can’t he? But the point remains: Strategy keeps accumulating, and now their holdings are so large that every purchase feels both ridiculous and routine. Abu Dhabi’s Mubadala is also increasing exposure, though through BlackRock’s Bitcoin ETF rather than direct coins. That is not the same as holding Bitcoin, but it is still a signal. Sovereign money, institutional money, ETF money . . . it just keeps showing up.
Bitcoin ATMs, on the other hand, are having a rough time. Bitcoin Depot filing for bankruptcy is being blamed on regulation, and sure, regulation probably did not help. But I think the bigger issue is simpler: ATMs themselves are fading. Cash ATMs, Bitcoin ATMs, crypto ATMs; how often do you actually see people using them? Most of this can be done on a phone. I am not cheering for anybody’s business to fail, but Bitcoin ATMs always felt too early, and maybe even the wrong interface for the moment.
And then we get to the story that really should make people stop and think: ChatGPT connecting to your bank account. OpenAI is rolling out a finance feature for Pro users that uses Plaid to read balances, transactions, investments, and liabilities. They say it cannot move money. They say it is read-only. They say data follows your privacy settings and can be deleted. That is all nice. I still would not connect an LLM to my bank account. You cannot prove they did not copy the data. You cannot prove every connection is truly closed forever. You cannot prove some future version of the system will not learn far more about you than you ever intended to give away.
If you desperately want AI budgeting help, export your own transactions, strip out what you can, and use a more privacy-focused tool. Even then, understand what you are handing over. Your spending history is not just numbers. It is a map of your habits, weaknesses, politics, health, vices, family life, and routines. Do not casually hand that to a frontier model because it promises to tell you to cancel Netflix and eat out less.
Circle P Vendor of the Day:
Galaxy Mind
Galaxy Mind (galaxymind.space) is a free set of Bitcoin tools. No accounts, no KYC, no tracking. The core of it is a community-submitted directory of 100+ merchants in around 19 countries who take bitcoin for physical goods, so the focus is on spending sats, not just stacking. It also has a buying gauge that reads ten market signals to answer whether now is a decent time to buy, with a seven-day forecast. A float tracker that estimates how much BTC is realistically still available to buy. A scoreboard comparing the Bitcoin treasury companies like Strategy, Metaplanet, Twenty One and Strive on the same mNAV basis. And an allocation tool for Bitcoin-adjacent securities. The data is timestamped and the methodology is public, so you can check the math yourself. Free to use, and free to embed on your own site.
Website: https://galaxymind.space/
nostr Profile: https://primal.net/p/nprofile1qqspwnkez659yrnzx2fu4kzpngtkak7v3sdpuh6jw83key38xru5wrcny0sdm
npub: nprofile1qqspwnkez659yrnzx2fu4kzpngtkak7v3sdpuh6jw83key38xru5wrcny0sdm
Twitter Profile: https://x.com/GalaxyMind
Member discussion: