September 10, 2026
Let's start with Hunter Biden’s LAPTOP token, because the marketing is almost too perfect. He launches a coin called LAPTOP and the thing crashes roughly 95% in its first hour. The laptop crashed. You could not write the joke any better. And I have absolutely no intention of buying this thing. I would not recommend anybody else buy it either. But I have to admit there is something interesting about how this was constructed. The allocations, the prediction-based token burns, the airdrops, the public statements about founders not selling all give the appearance of something that wants desperately to be taken seriously while simultaneously being a meme coin named after Hunter Biden’s laptop. These memecoins have become elaborate pieces of fiction with real money attached. The better the story, the more convincing the production, the easier it becomes to forget that you are participating in the fiction.
At the same time, the adults who used to laugh at all of this are walking directly into the building. Nasdaq Ventures is investing $100 million in Payward, Kraken’s parent company, while the companies work on Nasdaq Equity Tokens. And these are not being pitched merely as synthetic price exposure. The plan is to move actual equities onto rails that do not close while preserving shareholder rights. That matters. There was a time when people pointed at Bitcoiners and laughed. Now Nasdaq is writing nine-figure checks into the infrastructure surrounding this market. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent is publicly pushing the Senate to move crypto market structure legislation forward and talking about American leadership, allies and adversaries while quoting Satoshi Nakamoto. I do not know what timeline we ended up in, but I am pretty sure the laughing part is over.
That does not mean we should start believing every pro-Bitcoin headline we see. Steak ’n Shake says it has enjoyed double-digit same-store sales growth since adopting Bitcoin, with franchise-partner same-store sales recently up 19%. Great. I like Steak ’n Shake. I like Bitcoin. I like Bitcoin being used over Lightning. But those facts do not prove Bitcoin caused 19% sales growth. Maybe it helped. I hope it did. But maybe they are also running better restaurants, making better deals with suppliers, advertising effectively and selling food people actually want to eat. Bitcoiners should be especially careful about believing something simply because we want it to be true. If we demand skepticism from everybody else, we need some for ourselves too.
That same skepticism matters when we move into the AI story. BIS chief Pablo Hernández is warning that major AI companies are spending enormous amounts of capital, increasingly relying on debt and private credit, with financing arrangements that can be opaque and interconnected. He points to earlier investment manias involving canals, railroads, electrification and the dot-com era. Companies can spend themselves straight into bankruptcy building infrastructure before the profits arrive. But bankruptcy does not make useful infrastructure disappear. During the internet boom, companies laid absurd amounts of fiber because everybody thought the money was going to arrive immediately. Some of those companies got wrecked. The fiber did not evaporate. We use it all today. Railroads were overbuilt but the tracks still moved things; it just moved them a little later. Infrastructure can outlive the bad investment thesis that paid for it. So I am less interested in another “the sky is falling” warning than I am in why the world’s central banking institution feels the need to plant its flag in the AI conversation in the first place: because financial institutions want a permanent seat at that table.
Then we get to quantum, and IonQ says its Superion 256 platform is bringing trapped-ion quantum computing into a system designed around semiconductor manufacturing and eventual scale. Maybe they can do exactly what they say. I still want to see it before I swallow every marketing claim. But suppose quantum computing eventually becomes powerful enough to seriously threaten modern cryptography. If your immediate reaction is, “Oh no, Bitcoin,” you are thinking way too small. Banking, identity, communications, government systems, corporate systems and huge pieces of the internet all depend on cryptography. Bitcoin would not be standing alone in the blast radius. The more interesting question is not whether we should panic. It is how much of our lives we should allow to become dependent on systems that we personally cannot repair, inspect or operate without somebody else’s permission.
That brings me to something a listener - Permanerd - brought up in a boost: the eight forms of capital used in permaculture thinking. Financial capital is only one.
There is also:
- social capital
- material capital
- living capital
- intellectual capital
- experiential capital
- cultural capital
- spiritual capital
Think about that for a second. Your friends are capital. Your skills are capital. Your soil is capital. Knowing how to repair something is capital. Knowing how to grow food is capital. Having a community with shared knowledge is capital. Being connected to a place that gives your life meaning is capital. Quantum computing cannot hack your pitchfork and AI cannot delete the experience you gained from building something with your own hands. A financial crisis cannot erase the relationship you have with a neighbor who will help you fix a fence because you helped him last year. It's not that technology is evil or that everybody needs to run into the woods. I am saying that as these systems become more powerful, complicated and fragile, building capital outside of them starts looking less like nostalgia and more like risk management. If you can build that firewall without spending a fortune, why wouldn’t you?
Circle P
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eight forms of capital permaculture
AI investment bubble financial risk
quantum computing and Bitcoin security
Nasdaq Kraken Payward investment
Hunter Biden LAPTOP meme coin
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