8-11-2025
Corporate Bitcoin treasuries spark fears of U.S. nationalization. El Salvador opens Bitcoin banking to institutions. Tether-backed Rumble targets AI over mining. Trump’s Bitcoin adviser exits. Nostr Wallet Connect quietly rewires Lightning payments. Harvard buys a slice of BlackRock’s ETF. MicroStrategy marks five years stacking. Kidnappings of Bitcoiners rise sharply.
There’s a conversation starting to bubble up that I think we need to have. At what point does a corporate Bitcoin treasury become big enough for the U.S. government to take notice and nationalize it? If one or two public companies start stacking to the point where their reserves rival a meaningful slice of U.S. gold holdings, do you think the State Department will just clap from the sidelines? History says no. We’ve seen resource nationalization before. We’ve seen asset seizures. And if Bitcoin’s strategic importance continues to grow, the biggest corporate stacks could find themselves in the crosshairs. I don't think it's going to happen but we should start thinking about how to head that off sooner rather than later.
El Salvador, meanwhile, keeps moving in the opposite direction. They just opened up Bitcoin banking to institutions. Legal, regulated financial products built on top of Bitcoin rails for banks, funds, and corporate treasuries is happening down south. If they can make this work - and if they can maintain independence while doing it - they could turn San Salvador into the Miami of Latin America’s Bitcoin economy. It’s another step toward their stated goal of becoming a global Bitcoin hub.
Tether’s making headlines again, but not for mining. They’ve decided to pull out of Bitcoin mining entirely and redirect resources into AI ventures. On one hand, I think it’s good that mining becomes less concentrated in a handful of big players. On the other, this is Tether, and every time they change direction, the industry shifts with them. AI is the new corporate buzzword, and you can bet they’ll try to spin this as a better long-term bet.
While everyone else is chasing shiny objects, Nostr Wallet Connect is quietly doing something far more important. It’s building a simple, private way to connect Lightning wallets across apps and devices. No KYC, no API keys handed to some cloud service, no single point of failure. It’s the kind of infrastructure work that gets ignored until, suddenly, everyone’s using it. I’ve said it before: Nostr is messy right now, but it’s alive and Nostr Wallet Connect is sewing the entire ecosystem together. Soon, NWC could be the thread that pulls a whole payments layer together without compromising sovereignty.
Curveball: Harvard’s endowment just picked up shares of BlackRock’s Bitcoin ETF. An Ivy League "stamp of approval" if I’ve ever seen one. They’ve been playing with commodity exposure for years, but this is a step function for an ancient institution. Bitcoin is now showing up on the balance sheets of the most risk-averse, reputation-conscious capital pools on the planet. If the smartest guys in the room are starting to dip in, don’t be surprised when their peers follow.
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