My audition for Karoline Leavitt: "Open weights are a right, not a privilege. Next question." A crazy week of meetings in DC. To sum up the vibes across Congress in a single quote: "There is lots of affection for open source here. But the ecosystem is going to be absolutely steamrolled if they keep saying 'don't do anything' ". And a timely opportunity to speak at Freedom Tech DC alongside @matthew_d_white and @matthew_pines about the importance of open source and open science! We need to continue thoughtfully bridging the Bay-Beltway divide.

Her comments are not random. This is part of a well funded and carefully organized campaign to demonize open models and our civil liberties in DC. Multiple Senate staffers have told me that outside groups are requesting meetings to provide “demonstrations” where open source models are used to attack simulated hospital websites and demand bitcoin as ransom. These are cheap scare tactics funded by groups seeking to control open systems. In reality, cyber defenders rely on open models daily to find critical vulnerabilities before attackers get there first. If these groups are successful, we will all be poorer, less free, and more vulnerable to adversaries with increasingly capable systems.

Bitcoin Red Team Goes to Washington 👀

America’s power rests on economic freedom and the deepest capital markets in the world. The next century belongs to the country where people are free to build and capital is free to back them. That should be America. Our policy should make it inevitable.

It was a true honor to host Michael for a conversation here in DC. There is no second ₿est to explain the civilizational stakes of preserving freedom in the digital age.

And we’re LIVE! Tune in below 👇

In town for @bitcoinpolicy's Freedom Tech DC? Join us for @DCbitdevs at @PubKey! Justin of Localhost and @darosior will be co-moderating. Topics include PQ output type design, Bitcoin Core PRs, PoCs of BIP 448, recent security disclosures, and more. 🌭 & 🍻 on us!

I don’t normally mingle with suits, but when I do I get to discuss defending open source code and access to frontier models for cyber security 😎 Very excited for the BPI Freedom Tech DC conf next week!

Only 72 hours until our best event to date! See below for full program over both days. 👇

Yesterday, @RepNickBegich's American Reserve Modernization Act cleared the House Financial Services Committee. Next week at Freedom Tech DC 2026, he'll lay out what's next for ARMA and why America must continue to pursue Bitcoin as a strategic national asset.

The only clarity you need is Bitcoin.

If you’re in town, make sure to come by! Will be a great time.

A genuinely historic step for Bitcoin policy today. For the first time, a Strategic Bitcoin Reserve bill was considered by a federal committee and it passed. ARMA is common-sense policy: secure the Bitcoin America already owns and steward it as the strategic national asset it is. Credit to @FinancialCmte and @repnickbegich for the strong leadership. This is how America stays at the forefront of the digital era.

Next Tuesday, Michael will join us here in DC to discuss Bitcoin’s civilizational importance for the age of intelligence. Livestream at 2pm ET will be provided @bitcoinpolicy on X, hope you all can tune in!

I want to give a huge public thanks to @SenLummis and her staff for all their work. There were multiple, repeated attempts at “compromise” throughout this process that would have thrown Bitcoin and open source developers under the bus. At every turn she stood strong for what she believed was the right policy. We are very lucky to have her voice in Congress and she will be sorely missed next year.

Whatever happens to CLARITY, I’m grateful for the extraordinary amount of work that went into protecting software developers along the way. Developer liability was never the biggest-dollar issue in this bill. Market structure, securities law, commodities law—those questions understandably consumed most of the oxygen. But developer protections implicated something more fundamental: whether the law can distinguish between the person who builds a tool and the person who uses it to commit a crime. I’m especially grateful to @SenLummis and her staff. They stood up for that principle under enormous pressure and kept fighting for it through every iteration of the bill. Senator Lummis will be sorely missed when she leaves the Senate. And I’m grateful to my colleagues at @bitcoinpolicy, @fund_defi, @coincenter, and especially @valkenburgh, who kept this issue from becoming an afterthought and consistently defended the rights of people who write and publish open-source software. The legislative fight may be ending for now. The legal one is not. That matters well beyond crypto. As software becomes more autonomous, and agentic commerce increasingly blurs the line between tools and traditional intermediaries, one of the defining legal questions of this century will be whether peer-to-peer systems can exist without making the people who build the software responsible for every bad act committed through it. The answer has to be yes. The work continues.

If you are concerned about concentration of power with a frontier lab duopoly, the _single most effective_ check on them is not regulation or oversight, it is open models. What stops frontier labs from censoring certain viewpoints or deploying obviously biased models? Open models. What stops frontier labs from sandbagging their capabilities or withholding the best products for consumers? Open models. What stops frontier labs for charging ridiculous markups on the tokens they serve? Open models. Any proposal that tries to regulate frontier labs at the expense of open models will strangle the best defense we have against rapid concentration of power. Instead, we should search for proposals that support open models so they can serve as an ever more effective check against the rapidly growing power of frontier labs. Do not underestimate the power of the open-source community to keep the future free.

The language is far from perfect, but we believe the compromise on BRCA is substantially better than the status quo. Tomorrow’s vote represents our last chance for legal clarity for both developer protections and self custody for the foreseeable future.

"The revised BRCA would still represent meaningful progress. Congress would, for the first time, put into statute the principle that developers who do not control user funds should not be regulated as money transmitters simply because they build the tools that allow people to transact."