The U.S. government is seeking the maximum five-year sentence for Samourai Wallet developers Keonne Rodriguez and William Hill, who pled guilty to conspiracy to operate an unlicensed money transmitter. As reported by The Rage’s L0la L33tz, prosecutors allege the pair “solicited criminals” and designed Samourai’s privacy tools, such as Whirlpool and Ricochet, as deliberate money-laundering features, laundering “at least $237 million” in illicit proceeds. The defense argues Samourai was built to protect Bitcoin users’ privacy, not to facilitate crime. Hill told the court, “I co-founded a software company to develop tools that could provide the anonymity necessary to make Bitcoin work as intended.” NYU’s David Yermack compared their work to the Cypherpunk tradition of Orwell and Hayek, emphasizing the developers’ ideological focus on financial freedom. Sentencing is scheduled for November 6–7 in the Southern District of New York.
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Extropic has unveiled what it calls the world’s first scalable probabilistic computer, a thermodynamic system that can run generative AI workloads using orders of magnitude less energy than GPUs. In a detailed post, the company said its new Thermodynamic Sampling Unit (TSU) and accompanying Denoising Thermodynamic Model (DTM) mark a major leap in energy-efficient computation. “Scaling AI will require a breakthrough in either energy production, or the energy efficiency of AI hardware and algorithms,” Extropic noted, adding that its new circuits perform sampling tasks “using radically less energy than the current state of the art.” Early simulations suggest up to 10,000x efficiency gains in generative workloads. The company also released its thrml Python library to enable open-source development of thermodynamic machine learning, positioning itself to lead a new era of energy-aware AI hardware and algorithm co-design.
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Coin Center has filed an amicus curiae brief in the Southern District of New York defending Ethereum validator brothers Peraire Bueno, who face prosecution for alleged fraud linked to validator behavior. Director of research Peter Van Valkenburgh argues the case “would be disastrous if the prosecution triumphed,” saying it risks criminalizing actions permitted by the protocol’s consensus rules. “Code is not law,” he clarified, “but law must take into account the expectations of the people and systems it seeks to obligate.” The brief asserts that validators, like Bitcoin miners, operate under a culture of “cut-throat competition” bounded by protocol, not moral judgment. Citing Satoshi Nakamoto and Vitalik Buterin, Coin Center warns against government prosecutors imposing external norms on permissionless systems. The group urges the court to reject what it calls the government’s “honest validator” theory of fraud as a threat to blockchain innovation.
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In Uncharted Territories, Tomas Pueyo examines growing fears that AI markets are entering a speculative bubble rivaling the dotcom crash. The Financial Times, Economist, and New York Times have all flagged soaring valuations, with AI responsible for 85% of U.S. stock gains in 2025. “AI companies now make up half of the S&P 500,” Pueyo writes, noting a price-to-earnings ratio even higher than 2000 levels. He highlights circular investments, Microsoft funding OpenAI, which rents Azure compute, while Amazon, Anthropic, NVIDIA, and CoreWeave cross-finance each other, potentially inflating valuations and systemic risk. Despite record capital expenditure, 95% of firms report no return on AI spending, echoing early telecom overbuilds of unused “dark fiber.” Still, Pueyo suggests this might not be a classic bubble, since tech giants can sustain losses longer and the underlying innovation may endure even if valuations collapse.
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