In a new essay, Synonym CEO John Carvalho argues that Bitcoin should not aim to scale transaction throughput, but rather “scale assurance.” Carvalho critiques the industry’s reliance on rollups, sidechains, and custodial solutions, warning that “complexity imports trust, then pretends it didn’t.” He contends that Bitcoin’s scarcity at the base layer is essential for decentralization, security, and verifiability, and that efforts to “make L1 faster” or “just add a new L2” miss this reality. Instead, Carvalho proposes a peer-to-peer “trust fabric” built on mutual credit, cryptographic bar tabs that are assignable, bounded by risk limits, and periodically settled in Bitcoin. He envisions networks of receipts and netting that compress thousands of interactions into a handful of Bitcoin settlements, preserving sovereign exit options. “Tabs, not chains,” he writes, emphasizing a path where Bitcoin remains the final settlement layer while commerce thrives at the edges. Research and development for the model is already underway.
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John Burn-Murdoch in the Financial Times, examines how social media has dismantled the establishment’s ability to control political narratives. He highlights Cologne’s long-standing pledge by mainstream parties to avoid negative campaigning on immigration, now challenged by the surging right AfD, which is polling at historic highs. The case, he argues, underscores how “establishment attempts to set the terms of debate are no longer working.” Unlike earlier media revolutions that expanded access but kept content creation concentrated among elites, social media has radically broadened who can broadcast information. Studies cited show extremist positions are over-represented online, fueled by platforms’ incentive structures favoring indignation and hostility. This shift has normalized once-fringe ideas, with research linking early broadband adoption in Europe to rising populist support. Burn-Murdoch concludes that what appears as populist disruption may instead be the electorate’s unfiltered voice.
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The surge in artificial intelligence is reshaping electricity demand, with global data center consumption rising 80% since 2020 and expected to double again by 2030 (equivalent to Japan’s entire annual use) reports MIT Technology Review’s Casey Crownhart. The load is already pushing up prices in regions with heavy data center clustering. Proponents argue AI could offset its strain by forecasting supply and demand more accurately, streamlining interconnection studies for renewables, and detecting failures before blackouts. “So that’s the gap that AI can help close. We can solve this more complex problem, fast enough and reliably enough that we can possibly use it and shave off emissions,” said Kyri Baker of the University of Colorado Boulder. Utilities are testing AI tools for planning and monitoring, while grid operators in the U.S. are working with startups to accelerate renewable integration. But skepticism remains: “Higher bills caused by the increasing energy needs of AI aren’t justified by existing ways of using the technology,” warned CUNY’s Panayiotis Moutis. The race is now whether AI’s grid-enhancing potential can scale quickly enough to outweigh its intensifying demand.
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BitMEX Research has released fresh analysis on the impact of Ordinals on Bitcoin node operations, finding that BRC-20 tokens now dominate inscriptions by count, 92.5 million versus just 2.7 million image inscriptions, but have very different implications for node runners. While Ordinal images take up roughly the same space as BRC-20s (about 30GB each), their placement in non-executed parts of Taproot witnesses means they require less signature verification and may even speed block validation. By contrast, BRC-20 transactions resemble normal Bitcoin transactions and have doubled the UTXO set since late 2022, from 84 million to 169 million outputs—posing significant costs to pruned nodes. The report stresses that images displace transactional data without bloating state, while BRC-20s increase verification load and consume over 5,000 BTC in fees. Although regression tests on validation speed were inconclusive, researchers noted “more arbitrary data might make it slightly easier to run a node.” The findings suggest scalability concerns remain concentrated in token activity rather than image inscriptions.
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