8-4-2025
Today, we dig into Bitcoin’s resistance to entropy, the forgotten trauma of UASF, and Europe’s surveillance creep. Bukele tightens his grip in El Salvador, and a massive 127,500 BTC heist finally comes to light. History’s repeating, pay attention.
Jack Kluz said something the other day that stuck with me: “Never before have we had a substrate of immutable information permanently immune to entropy.” That’s one hell of a way to describe Bitcoin. It’s not that it’ll survive the heat death of the universe, but in our human timeframes, it may as well. We’ve never had a system that resists decay like this—especially not in finance. That line kicked off a whole storm of thinking for me, especially as we look around and watch what’s happening to our so-called freedoms, from speech to private communication. Bitcoin carries meaning and memory.
Speaking of memory, we just passed Bitcoin’s Independence Day—August 1st, the day the User Activated Soft Fork finally pushed SegWit through in 2017. It was the day users reminded the suits who actually runs this protocol. But almost no one talked about it this year. And I get why. That period was traumatic. You had people you thought were fighting for Bitcoin turn on you. You had power grabs, secret meetings, and betrayal. But Shinobi’s right: if we forget that day, we leave the door wide open for it to happen again. It should be right up there with January 3rd and Pizza Day. If you’re gonna use the thing, at least know how it survived.
https://bitcoinmagazine.com/culture/bitcoin-independence-bitcoin-history
Then you get to the news out of Europe—mandatory age verification, forced chat scanning on Signal, Telegram, and WhatsApp. All private chats, scanned at the client level before encryption. Straight up dystopian nightmare and we are heading right into it. And if you think it won’t spread to the U.S., think again. That’s why nostr matters. It’s messy, sure. It’s clunky in spots. But it’s alive. It’s not a walled garden. You control your identity. Nobody can boot you because they don’t like what you said. The people writing nostr off because it doesn’t give them fake Twitter engagement are missing the point. This thing is built for exactly what’s coming.
I still can’t believe that a 127,500 BTC hack from 2020 went completely unnoticed until now. That’s not a typo—over $14 billion at today’s prices, just vanished. And nobody said a word. LuBian, a Chinese mining company, got hit, tried to beg the thief with embedded messages in microtransactions, and then folded . . . quietly. It’s surreal. This was one of the biggest mining pools on earth at the time. You want a reason to run your own node and hold your own keys? Here it is.
El Salvador’s back in the news too—and not for the right reasons. Bukele just pushed through constitutional reforms allowing unlimited reelection. As much as I’ve liked what he’s done for the country, this move smells like dictatorship with better marketing. And if the IMF really did get him to halt Bitcoin purchases in exchange for a $1.4 billion loan, then we’ve got bigger problems. You don’t need to bend the knee to those parasites. You’ve already turned the country around—why sell your soul now? I don’t know the full story, but I’m keeping my eyes open. You should too.
Last thing I’ll say: this ecosystem—Bitcoin, nostr, free speech, financial independence—it runs on memory and action. Remember what came before. Act like it matters. And stop waiting for permission to use the tools that are already here. nostr is ready. Bitcoin is ready. The question is: are you?
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