(This piece was originally published in 2017.)  In 1977 I began taking road trips up and down Interstate 80. I had taken a few road trips prior, but 1977 was the first time I drove cross-country as an adult and for work… the first time I was looking on the…

GEOPOLITICAL STRATEGIST MICHAEL EVERY EXPLAINS TRUMP'S 'GRAND MACRO STRATEGY'

The best concise clip we've found for making sense of the last two years.

Every argues that geopolitics and economic statecraft drive everything else.

The goal is a disinflationary…

NEW BITCOIN DOCUMENTARY PREMIERES JULY 18

Hummingbird: The Bitcoin Jungle Story explores the rise of Bitcoin Jungle in Uvita, 🇨🇷 Costa Rica, tracing the origins of its organic farmers market and Bitcoin community.

2/8 - The backstory: MtGox was once the world's largest Bitcoin exchange. In February 2014 it collapsed, reporting 850,000 BTC missing (roughly 200,000 were later recovered from an old cold storage wallet). Hundreds of thousands of creditors were left waiting.

3/8 - Karpeles, a French-born programmer who had acquired and run MtGox since 2011, was arrested in Tokyo in August 2015. The charges: embezzling ¥341 million (~$3.2M) of client funds into his personal account, and inflating Bitcoin balances in bogus accounts…

4/8 - He denied the embezzlement, saying he intended to repay and that the data manipulation was done for the company. Meanwhile Japan's pretrial system held him: defendants can be detained for months without trial, and prosecutors can re-arrest on new charges…

5/8 - After roughly 11 months inside, the Tokyo District Court approved bail on July 12, 2016: ¥10 million, about $95,000. Two days later, on July 14, the 31-year-old paid it and walked out, noticeably thinner than when he went in.

https://www.coindesk.…

6/8 - Consider the scale mismatch. Bitcoin traded around $650 in July 2016, which put the missing 850,000 BTC at roughly $550 million. The bail securing the release of the man at the center of it all came to about 0.017% of that.

7/8 - Who actually paid the ¥10 million was never confirmed. Reddit speculation pointed to his Japanese wife, who had relocated to Canada. And freedom came with a leash: the bail terms prohibited Karpeles from leaving Japan, the country that had just held…

2/7 - On July 14, 2016, Seattle startup iPayYou launched Pay-by-Twitter. You sent Bitcoin to any Twitter handle. An automated tweet notified the recipient, who clicked a link to claim it as BTC or convert it to dollars deposited into their bank.

https:/…

3/7 - The elegance was in what it removed. No copying a 34-character address, no QR codes, no "which wallet do you use?" The Twitter handle WAS the payment address. Founder Gene Kavner, a veteran of Amazon, Microsoft, and Expedia, aimed at Twitter's 310 million…

4/7 - One feature stood out as almost heretical: you could cancel a payment after sending it. Bitcoin transactions are famously irreversible, and iPayYou deliberately softened that edge to make Bitcoin feel like a normal payment app, where mistakes can be…

5/7 - The idea wasn't new. ChangeTip had let people tip Bitcoin via Twitter mentions, got acquired by Airbnb in 2016, and was shut down. iPayYou positioned itself as the fuller successor: a complete wallet, not a tipping toy, with the same trick extended…

6/7 - The punchline came from Kavner himself. 3 months later, announcing a gift card marketplace on October 27, 2016: "the world of Bitcoin is desolate. The lack of fully integrated, seamless ways to spend bitcoin for everyday goods and services is what iPayYou…

Aaron presenting at Learning Bitcoin 2024:

Aaron on the "Inflation is a Silent Tax" panel at Learning Bitcoin 2025 with @tomkaradza @bitcoinyqr and @TJMacD :
https://youtu.be/8KkN8O9w9M4

My favourite slide from Aaron's presentation at Learning Bitcoin 2024:

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