THURSDAY, MAR05
1. Preferred money for AI, 2. Power usage effectiveness, 3. Lacking credit infrastructure, 4. The server test
Supported by Proto and Bitkey - part of the Bitcoin ecosystem at Block, Inc.
1. money
A blank-slate experiment by the Bitcoin Policy Institute tested 36 frontier AI models across 9,072 monetary scenarios and found that 48.3% of responses selected bitcoin as the preferred financial instrument, with no prompt mentioning bitcoin or suggesting any specific currency. The study, authored by Conner Brown, Ken Egan, Luke Danielian, and David Zell, revealed a sharp functional split: bitcoin dominated store-of-value scenarios at 79.1%, the most lopsided result in the study, while stablecoins led medium-of-exchange scenarios at 53.2%. Brown, former counsel to Senator Lummis on bitcoin and AI policy, designed the methodology around 28 open-ended scenarios across five providers. Notably, bitcoin preference scaled with model capability. Within Anthropic's lineup, preference climbed from 41.3% in Claude 3 Haiku to 91.3% in Claude Opus 4.5, suggesting "greater analytical capability leads models to increasingly converge on Bitcoin when reasoning from first principles about money." Traditional fiat captured just 9.2% of responses, with zero models selecting it as a top preference. The findings point toward a two-tier digital monetary architecture for agentic AI, bitcoin for savings and stablecoins for payments.
-EDITOR·OP_DAILY2. usage
Power usage effectiveness, the ratio of total facility power to IT power, remains one of Bitcoin mining's most overlooked operational metrics despite directly determining site profitability, according to a technical breakdown from Hashlabs Mining. The analysis traces how a 100-megawatt site loses power at every stage, from transformers and switchgear to cooling and auxiliary systems, leaving only 94.3 megawatts for actual hashing in a well-designed facility. Comparing two sites at identical 4-cent power rates, the presentation shows a site running 1.15 PUE spends $4.6 million annually on non-mining power consumption versus $1.7 million at 1.05 PUE, a $2.9 million profit gap driven entirely by infrastructure efficiency. As analyst Jaran Mellerud noted, "mining machines effectively consume more power than their nameplate" once facility overhead is factored in. Three structural drivers determine PUE: climate, which sets a thermodynamic floor for cooling; infrastructure quality, where cheaper components carry higher losses; and site design, where identical hardware can yield different efficiency levels based on engineering choices.
-EDITOR·OP_DAILY3. lacking
A seven-part research series from Alpen Labs and Morpho argues that bitcoin is the world's largest pool of pristine collateral but lacks the credit infrastructure to express that scale, and that a new onchain architecture can close the gap. Authors David Seroy and Kirk Hutchison lay out how Morpho V2 introduces orderbook-based lending alongside pools, enabling fixed-maturity, market-priced loans represented as standardized zero-coupon units that can trade on secondary markets. The core thesis is that bitcoin-backed lending exists today but bitcoin-backed credit markets do not: "loans do not stop at origination. They trade, they get financed, and capital recycles. That recycling compresses rates and deepens liquidity." The architecture produces what the authors call bitcoin-collateralized loan obligations, or bCLOs, which strip out directional price volatility while preserving bitcoin's depth and neutrality as collateral. Crucially, the design keeps bitcoin itself locked and verifiably segregated while only loan claims circulate, avoiding rehypothecation. The series positions bCLOs as potentially competing with tokenized Treasuries for status as preferred funding collateral in markets.
-EDITOR·OP_DAILY4. server
The Electronic Frontier Foundation has filed an amicus brief in the Fifth Circuit urging the court to preserve the "server test," a nearly two-decade-old standard that assigns direct copyright liability to whoever controls the server hosting infringing content rather than to parties who merely link or embed it. The case, Emmerich Newspapers v. Particle Media (the company behind NewsBreak), could reshape liability for one of the internet's most fundamental architectural features. The EFF argues that embedding is not a fringe activity but a core design function used by millions of websites for everything from font selection to customer support, and that the server test "provides legal certainty for internet users by assigning primary responsibility to the person with the best ability to prevent infringement." Emmerich also claims that altering a URL violates the DMCA's prohibition on changing copyright management information, a theory that would make link shorteners potentially punishable under statutory penalties. If the Fifth Circuit rejects the server test, any website operator embedding third-party content faces direct infringement exposure for material they neither host nor control, a precedent with clear implications for open web architecture and permissionless information sharing.
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