Tom Thinker retweeted
I think one way to understand why so many crypto projects eventually fall apart is to look at the shape of the economy around them.
A healthy crypto economy should look like a pyramid.
At the bottom is real economic activity: people producing things, selling services, paying workers, buying goods, running businesses, sending remittances, and using the currency in everyday transactions.
On top of that come payments, savings, lending, exchanges, liquidity markets, derivatives, prediction markets, and the rest of the financial layer.
There is nothing wrong with those things. A real economy needs finance.
The problem is that a lot of crypto projects end up building the pyramid upside down.
There is a huge amount of trading, staking, yield farming, leverage, derivatives, speculation, and token activity, while the amount of actual economic activity underneath remains tiny.
The token gets traded, staked, wrapped, borrowed against, put into another protocol, and used to earn yet another token.
But who is actually buying things with it? Who is getting paid in it? What businesses depend on it? What useful services are being exchanged?
Often, not much.
That is why these ecosystems can look enormous during a bull market and still be very fragile. Most of the activity is financial activity feeding on more financial activity.
And sometimes this is not even an accidental outcome. It is the design. Some projects are built around creating a narrative, attracting liquidity, pumping a token, and giving early participants a way to extract money from those who arrive later. There was never much intention to build a real economy underneath it.
This is where Bitcoin Cash is different.
The $BCH culture has always been unusually focused on the bottom of the pyramid.
Peer-to-peer electronic cash. Merchant adoption. Low-cost payments. Remittances. People actually spending BCH. Businesses accepting it. Building wallets, payment processors, point-of-sale systems, marketplaces, and other tools that make BCH useful outside an exchange.
And importantly, this is not just an aspiration. Progress has already been made.
There are communities where BCH is used for everyday commerce. There are merchants accepting it. There are companies building payment infrastructure around it. There are stablecoins, tokens, smart contracts, DEXs, lending projects, and other financial tools beginning to develop on top of that payment layer.
So BCH does not need to abandon DeFi or financial innovation. Quite the opposite. Those layers can make the ecosystem much more useful.
But the culture of BCH already understands something that much of crypto seems to have forgotten:
the financial layer should sit on top of an economy, not pretend to be the economy.
That is why I think Bitcoin Cash is particularly well positioned to build the first pyramid.
We should keep growing the base: more merchants, more users, more salaries, more services, more business activity, more machine payments, more real things being bought and sold using BCH.
Then let the financial layer grow with it.
DEXs, lending, prediction markets, derivatives, stablecoins, tokenized assets — all of these have a place. But their long-term value is much stronger when they are serving a growing economy underneath them.
Bitcoin Cash is not starting from zero here.
The culture is already pointed in that direction. The infrastructure is being built. Real-world adoption, while still small relative to what it could become, already exists.
The challenge now is to make that base much, much bigger.
Because the strongest crypto economy will not be the one with the most elaborate financial engineering.
It will be the one with the most real economic activity underneath it.
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Tom Thinker retweeted
Ursula von der Leyen announced this week that everyone in the EU must use the official EU age verification app to verify their age before they can log into or post on social media and other digital services.
As an expert in online child safety, I'm here to expose the disinformation in each von der Leyen's statements. See below.
🇪🇺 The EU Kids Act is a pretext designed to enforce mandatory digital identity verification on everyone in Europe. The proposed legislation applies to any digital service featuring feeds, user generated content, or messaging:
Social media networks, video platforms, online gaming services, AI tools, and media streaming apps like Spotify. (@TimSweeneyEpic)
Under the proposal, digital services must enforce age restrictions across strict tiers. Tech companies must mandate age verification across all accounts to enforce these tiers legally.
When Australia introduced its social media ban, the government conceded it failed because platform level age checks weren’t reliable. They now reject age estimation as inadequate and shifted to demanding "robust" age checking.
💡 If you eliminate every unproven estimation method, you’re left with exactly 1 functional mechanism: identity verification. There's not other way to ensure age checking is "robust".
No government wants to admit citizens must prove their real identity just to access apps and basic streaming services like Spotify, so they hide behind the ambiguous phrase "robust age checking". This language is now used across Australia, the US, and Ireland to mandate identity checks while avoiding the public backlash of calling it what it is. I will research to see where else it’s being used.
Below is what Ursula von der Leyen told the European Parliament in Strasbourg along with my analsyis:
🇪🇺 "Today, much of this power has been taken out of the hands of parents... What our children need is time... But when a child has a smartphone, all of this is taken away."
💡 This framing falsely presents smartphones as uncontrollable. Apple and Google built free OS controls into iOS and Android settings, covering virtually every smartphone on the market.
These controls achieve every legitimate safety objective without collecting personal data or processing state credentials.
💡 Millions of parents use these parental controls to enforce screen time curfews, block app installations, and restrict communication.
💡 These settings operate at the device level. Teens can't bypass them when protected with a passcode.
To bypass this technical reality, the European Commission uses public grief to shut down logical analysis:
🇪🇺 "Day and night, parents see the costs, loss of sleep, anxiety, even self-harm, and in a growing number of cases, even fatal tragedies… a 14-year-old girl living in Belgium who took her life exactly one month ago, victim of bullying online... Honourable members, enough is enough."
💡 Citing personal tragedies replaces software engineering facts with emotional rhetoric. State laws and age gates don’t alter human behaviour or prevent online harassment. Regulators exploit grief to pass surveillance legislation without explaining how the underlying software mechanisms operate.
The Commission outlines specific age tiers to restrict access:
🇪🇺 "In sum, no social media under the age of 13. No personal account under the age of 15. That means from 13 to under 15, only mini accounts set up and supervised by parents or guardians with limited features and time restriction to one hour a day. And between 15 and 18, safe design will be an obligation for the platforms."
💡 Enforcing age tiers forces tech companies and service providers to rebuild their architecture around total access control. The must disable self-service account creation, purge unverified accounts, build supervised parental workflows, strip algorithmic feeds, and enforce strict session cutoffs.
💡 Social networks operate on open interaction algorithms that inherently expose people to unvetted content. Because software can’t dynamically filter these risks for minors, tech companies must block access for everyone until a person proves their real identity.
💡 It’s not just about social networks. They want the same bans for almost everything, including games and stream services. Even Spotify because it’s possible for customers to message people.
The Commission claims its proposed zero knowledge proof app protects personal privacy:
🇪🇺 "Age will be verified using EU certified tools like our age verification app. This app is built on zero knowledge proof. That means that the platform only learns one single thing, and that's whether you're old enough to allow access or not."
💡 This framing describes what an app or service receives while hiding what everyone must give up. A zero knowledge proof provides a mathematical confirmation, but that confirmation requires an authoritative issuer. Before the app generates a proof, a state approved entity must verify the person's real identity.
The Commission frames this shift as a victory against tech corporations:
🇪🇺 "I am aware that many perceive the power of Big Tech as overwhelming and impossible to roll back. I disagree... So we do not accept this. We are reversing the burden of proof. Now platforms will have to prove to us that they are safe. Because this is not about our minors accessing social media. It is about when and how we allow social media to access our minors."
💡 Social networks don’t access children; parents hand smartphones to children. Reversing the burden of proof forces everyone to verify their identity.
The European Commission confirmed the broader scope of this mandate:
🇪🇺 "We also know that not only minors are at risk. Addictive design, for example, are harming everyone. This is why we need a wider framework too, the Digital Fairness Act that we will propose in autumn."
🚨 Child safety is merely the initial wedge. The Digital Fairness Act expands state mandated identity verification to adults across all online services. Binding real identities to online activity permanently eliminates pseudonymous access, private communication, and democratic accountability.
🚨 Senior state officials and regulators know their demands have nothing to do with child safety. They work closely with tech companies and understand that iOS and Android already provide complete authority to restrict devices locally without collecting personal data. State officials deliberately ignore well established parental controls because they keep internet access under family control. Child safety is a public pretext.
🚨 Governments and regulators use child safety to establish mandatory identity verification across every app and digital service, eliminating online anonymity. When tech companies and state agencies link every social media post, private message, search term, geographic location, and financial transaction to a verified identity, they create a permanent digital dossier on every citizen with a global social graph that makes Cambridge Analytica look like a 2nd grade school science project.
💡 Binding people’s identity to daily activity enables predictive behavioural modelling too. By feeding identity data into automated predictive AI, governments, intelligence agencies, law enforcement, and tech companies move beyond surveillance past behaviour. They can map political affiliations, predict individual actions, flag dissent before it occurs, and control public opinion at scale. Eliminating online anonymity ends free speech, private communication, and democratic accountability.
As Larry Ellison stated at Oracle’s Financial Analyst Meeting in 2024:
"Citizens will be on their best behaviour, because we’re constantly recording and reporting everything that’s going on".
🙏🏻 Share this to expose how governments use child safety as a false pretext to force mandatory digital identity verification on everyone.
paulfwalsh.substack.com/p/th…
Every day our children are engaging with some of the most sophisticated technology ever created.
Technology that was not created with their wellbeing in mind.
We need to set clear boundaries in the digital world.
This is what our KIDS Act will do ↓ nitter.net/i/broadcasts/1RJZzBnnb…
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Try to buy a prepaid sim on @KPN website in order to get myself a phone number, am required to fill in my phone number on the checkout page.
Someone did not think this through...
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End of an era. 😢
Dear CoinEx Community,
Today, I am announcing that CoinEx will cease operations and begin an orderly wind-down.
First, what matters most: your assets are safe. CoinEx’s reserve ratio exceeds 100%, and every user asset is fully backed and available for withdrawal. Withdrawals are open starting today and will remain open until December 22, 2026. Certain tokens may take slightly longer to process while funds are moved between cold and hot wallets, but every withdrawal request within the withdrawal period will be honored and processed.
CoinEx officially went live on December 22, 2017. Exactly nine years later, on December 22, 2026, the platform will be formally closed. Nine years is a long time in crypto. Together, we lived through multiple bull and bear cycles, witnessed the rise and fall of countless projects, and watched many of our peers leave the market in one form or another.
After much reflection, I have come to accept a hard truth. CoinEx did not become one of the industry’s leading exchanges, and the security and compliance risks of running a crypto exchange have become increasingly difficult to contain. Revenues can decline, responsibility does not. Carrying unlimited risk for limited revenue is no longer a rational choice. That said, CoinEx has survived nine years in one of the most volatile and unforgiving industries, weathered every storm, and is leaving intact, and with dignity. We may not have won the race, but we are finishing with honor.
On CET: CoinEx will buy back CET at its initial listing price of 0.005 USDT per token, with no cap on quantity. To every CET holder who has supported us over the years, thank you. CET represents your belief in CoinEx and, for many of you, your belief in me personally. I am sorry that we were not able to create the long-term value we once hoped CET would deliver. The least we can do now is bring that chapter to a responsible conclusion.
I did seriously consider selling CoinEx. Ultimately, I decided against it. Users entrusted their assets to CoinEx because they trusted the platform and, in many cases, trusted me personally. I did not feel that handing the platform and that trust to a new owner was the right way to end this journey. A clean ending is the right ending.
Nine years, millions of users. I did not turn CoinEx into the “great” exchange I once hoped it would become. But I can give it a decent ending: making sure users can withdraw their assets in full, giving my employees a dignified farewell, and providing CET holders with a clear and responsible conclusion. This is the best ending I can give CoinEx.
To everyone who traded with us, built with us, and stood by us through the hardest days of this market, thank you. It has been a privilege to walk this road with you.
To the CoinEx team, thank you for building this platform with me, for carrying it across every cycle, and now for seeing it through to the very last day.
For detailed arrangements, please refer to the official announcement: coinex.com/en/announcements/…
Thank you all for nine years of trust.
Haipo Yang
Sept 15, 2026
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Tom Thinker retweeted
8 years imo. In 2018 someone spun up a Lightning node labeled “Roger Ver.” Other public nodes simply did not open channels to it. A screenshot of the isolated node circulated, and many Lightning supporters treated it as a joke. Ver’s response was that this demonstrated Lightning enables financial exclusion in a way the base layer does not: on-chain, any miner can include a valid transaction; on Lightning, participation depends on other nodes choosing to peer with you.
Charlie Lee and others countered that the operator had “censored himself” by using that name and that refusing a channel is ordinary voluntary association, not protocol-level censorship.
Later filtering fights (inscriptions/“spam,” OFAC-aware pools, Knots policy, and the latest proposal to make certain miners’ outputs unspendable) follow the same pattern. Critics who said second-layer routing and policy filters would create exclusion points were dismissed; years later the same camps are arguing over explicit consensus blacklists.
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anyone here ever use coingate for gift cards they buy with Bitcoin Cash?
Seems to no longer work for me, would love to hear if anyone still uses them, since that one has been one of the few stable BCH accepting places for years!
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Tom Thinker retweeted
Great blockchains don't stand still.
They evolve.
#CashTokens
#CashScript
#CashFusion
ShieldKit
Layla
Nine years.
Still pushing the limits.💚💓💚
#HappyBirthdayBCH #BCH9 #ThankYou #KeepBuilding #P2PCash
CashScript 0.13.0 ships with something that sounds incremental until you actually try to write a complex contract without it: bounded loops.
Here's the concrete problem it solves. Before Layla (May 2026), Bitcoin Script had no iteration. If a contract needed to validate five token outputs, you wrote the validation logic five times — literally copied and pasted at the bytecode level. Ten outputs meant ten copies. The contract size grew linearly with the number of items you needed to process, which meant script size limits became a hard ceiling on contract expressiveness. You weren't limited by what you could think of. You were limited by how many times you could repeat yourself before hitting the wall.
OP_BEGIN and OP_UNTIL change this at the VM level. You write the loop body once, define a termination condition, and the VM iterates. The "bounded" qualifier is doing real work here — the VM rejects loops that can't be proven to terminate before execution begins. This isn't a runtime check. It's a validation-time constraint. The miner doesn't execute an infinite loop and discover the problem; the transaction is rejected outright if the termination proof fails. This preserves something BCH's design has always prioritized: predictable validation cost. Miners can bound the work a script requires before committing to execute it.
In CashScript, this surfaces as actual loop syntax. You write it like a loop, the compiler handles the OP_BEGIN/OP_UNTIL translation, and the termination proof is derived from the loop structure itself. The abstraction is clean. What this unlocks in practice: iterating over a variable-length list of $BCH CashToken outputs, implementing merkle proof verification generically rather than hardcoding for a fixed tree depth, writing batch validation logic that scales with actual input size. These were all possible before Layla — they just required either unrolling manually (expensive, verbose, fragile) or simply not building them.
OP_DEFINE and OP_INVOKE are the other piece that matters here. Before these opcodes, Bitcoin Script was a flat sequence. Repeated logic meant duplicated bytecode, full stop. CashScript could abstract this at the source level, but the compiled output still contained every copy. A contract with three settlement paths that all needed to validate a collateral ratio would have that validation logic three times in the bytecode.
OP_DEFINE lets you register a named subroutine in the script itself. OP_INVOKE calls it. The VM maintains a proper call stack, executes the subroutine, and returns cleanly. The compiled output reflects the actual structure of the source — repeated logic appears once. For auditors, this is significant. The gap between "what the CashScript source says" and "what the bytecode actually does" narrows considerably when the compiler can preserve function boundaries rather than flattening everything.
For DeFi contracts specifically, this compounds with the loop support. A PUSD vault contract checking collateral ratios across multiple redemption scenarios — with shared validation logic and iteration over output sets — is now expressible in a way that's both smaller in bytecode and structurally auditable. Smaller bytecode means lower fees. Lower fees on a chain where fees are already a fraction of a cent means contract interaction is genuinely free for practical purposes.
The bitwise opcodes (OP_AND, OP_OR, OP_XOR, OP_LSHIFT, OP_RSHIFT) round out what Layla added to the VM. These were disabled in early Bitcoin and have been absent from BCH Script since the fork. Re-enabling them with well-defined semantics on byte strings sounds like a footnote. It isn't. CashTokens NFT commitments are 40-byte arbitrary byte strings. Contracts that want to interpret structured data packed into a commitment — a type field, a timestamp, a hash — previously had to use arithmetic unpacking, which was verbose and expensive. Bitwise shifts and masks make this clean. You check whether a flag is set with a single OP_AND. You extract a 2-byte field with a shift. The contract logic reads like the data structure it's operating on.
P2S (Pay-to-Script) as a standard output type completes the picture for covenant chains. P2SH outputs commit to a hash of the script — you can't inspect what an output does without the full preimage. P2S outputs carry the script directly. For a covenant contract that needs to verify the exact script of an output it's creating, this eliminates the hash-preimage dance. The contract can introspect the output script natively. Certain patterns — enforcing that change returns to the same contract type, building contract chains where each step validates the next — become straightforward rather than requiring workarounds.
All four of these features are in CashScript 0.13.0. The compiler handles the translation. Existing contracts don't break. New contracts opt into the new primitives selectively. The BCH VM in mid-2026 can express loops, functions, bitwise operations, and introspectable outputs — none of which existed in Bitcoin Script four years ago. Each upgrade was incremental. The compound effect is a contract environment that can handle real financial logic without contorting itself to fit a flat, iteration-free bytecode model.
The fee for deploying and interacting with any of it: still a fraction of a cent. The infrastructure improved. The fee didn't.
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Using a hardware wallet for storing your crypto is basically a stupid idea. Always has been.
This example of people losing their money is not the first, by far, and won't be the last. So learn now and stop storing your crypto on hardware wallets.
What people expect from a hardware wallet is that they get a simple piece of hardware that never touches the Internet.
The idea behind that ideal is that you move towards storing gold in a safe. Not a paper version, the real thing. And that feels good.
The reality is different, we don't actually move towards something you physically can protect. For instance the ledger and similar companies regularly ship software updates. Which is the opposite of our ideal.
Hardware wallets are basically LESS secure than your simple wifi-only Android phone that you turn off when you don't need it.
That just doesn't feel so good, so people that want the fluffy feeling of security will probably continue to buy hardware wallets.
The first post was the advisory and what users should do.
This second post has the technical details: what actually went wrong, why our reviews missed it, the impact across Mk3/Mk4/Q/Mk5, and what we changed.
blog.coinkite.com/entropy-te…
( current evaluating Mk3 firmware release )
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The Bitcoin Cash conference starts tomorrow. "Cash 3.0"!
This is showing Bitcoin Cash to be at the foundation of the new economy, which is a sentiment I hope many people will feel true afterwards.
cash3conf.com/
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On the BTC side of crypto we're a little over a week away from BIP110 date.
The required support is extremely unlikely to be had at this point with so far only getting 2% support.
How this will play out is going to be very telling about the maturity of the actual BTC community.
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Tom Thinker retweeted
With less than 1% of Bitcoin’s development budget
and a lot of hate that’s second only to BSV and Ripple
BCH is now so far ahead with development that Bitcoin devs study it to figure out how to soft fork some features to BTC
How is this even possible?
Firstly, I have been told that BCH is a dead shitcoin that only exists to fuel the vanity of Roger Ver and Jihan Wu. But it keeps shipping code while both Roger and Jihan moved on.
Secondly, hardcore Bitcoin devs who regularly speak on conference stages now take inspiration from CheckDataSig (which inspired Jeremy Rubin’s CheckTemplateVerify & CheckSigFromStack), OP_CAT, OP_MUL & all the cool introspection OP codes that already work on BCH.
Once again, these guys had 1% of the budget, but did a much better job than Blockstream with Elements/Liquid, MIT, and Chaincode. How is this possible?!
In a world where BTC is winning, this could never happen.
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Great observation:
devever.net/~hl/webcrypto
A cryptosystem is incoherent if its implementation is distributed by the same entity which it purports to secure against.
Relevant for web-wallets, hardware-wallets, for chat-apps, for CBDCs and more.
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The moment you realize that not having npm installed on your box avoids the credentials-stealing packages from even installing. 😎
Arch Linux's AUR Sees More Than 400 Packages Compromised With Malware
phoronix.com/news/Arch-Linux…
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