Joined August 2013
"Trusted third parties are security holes." @NickSzabo4 the mantra of the #blockchain enthusiast
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Breaking: Michael Burry says the AI boom is running on one giant loop and time is running out Here's his breakdown: 1. Burry shared a report from Wall Street lender Ares tracking $573B of AI financing from the last 12 months 2. All of it runs through just 8 companies: Meta, Oracle, Microsoft, Amazon, OpenAI, Anthropic, Broadcom and Nvidia 3. They lend to each other, guarantee each other's debt and buy from each other, so one company's loan is backed by another company's promise to keep spending 4. Every deal depends on one thing: AI spending never slowing down 5. If AI revenue disappoints for even one season, the guarantees could all get called at once, right when the companies backing them are at their weakest 6. Burry says it's the same circular financing that turned the 2000 telecom fiber boom into a bust Burry claims the stock market in the first stage of grief and the crash is soon
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holstblock🐂⭕🔺 retweeted
Welcome @alexdimes7 from @Yieldy_io as our eighth and final Roadshow #5 contestant! 🌊 Yieldy is building a one-click, non-custodial way to route stablecoins toward risk-adjusted yield across chains. Catch us on X live today from 7PM UTC / 12PM PT
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holstblock🐂⭕🔺 retweeted
"If you can't describe what you are doing as a process, you don't know what you're doing."
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holstblock🐂⭕🔺 retweeted
Kryptobesteuerungspläne in Deutschland 🇩🇪 was bisher kaum diskutiert wird Über die geplante Reform der Kryptobesteuerung in Deutschland wurde hier und in der Community schon viel diskutiert. Ein Punkt kommt mir dabei bisher viel zu kurz und sollte in meinen Augen dringend angepasst werden, sollte der Entwurf durchgehen (was ich nicht hoffe, aber leider relativ wahrscheinlich ist): Die geplante 50%-Ersatzbemessungsgrundlage (siehe Screenshots anbei, aus dem Referentenentwurf des BMF (frühestes Entwurfsstadium, noch vor Kabinettsbeschluss, aber die Richtung ist klar erkennbar). Kurz erklärt: Kennt die Krypto-Plattform deine Anschaffungskosten in Zukunft nicht und kannst du sie nicht sauber und glaubhaft nachweisen, wird pauschal unterstellt, du hättest die Coins nach dem 31.12.2026 gekauft – und die Steuer wird auf 50% des Verkaufserlöses berechnet. Rechnet man das durch, unterstellt der Staat damit faktisch eine Kursverdopplung zwischen Kauf und Verkauf. Meine Befürchtung: Genau das trifft vor allem Normalverbraucher/investoren hart. Leute, die diese Regeländerung gar nicht mitbekommen, ihre Anschaffungskosten technisch nicht sauber nachweisen können, und die in den letzten Jahren teils mit wenig Gewinn oder sogar mit Verlust gekauft haben. Die zahlen dann unter Umständen massiv zu viele Steuern, obwohl real gar kein entsprechender Gewinn entstanden ist – im Zweifel sogar bei einem Verkauf mit Verlust. Ich bin auf dem Feld alles andere als ein Experte, aber mir erscheint das implizite Ausgehen von einer Kursverdopplung deutlich zu hoch angesetzt. Bitcoin zum Beispiel steht heute niedriger als vor einem Jahr, und auch im Vergleich zu den Höchstständen der letzten zwei Jahre liegt der Kurs klar darunter. Die allermeisten anderen Kryptowerte sind in diesem Zeitraum noch deutlich schlechter gelaufen. Der Ottonormalverbraucher wird in meinen Augen, wenn das nicht angepasst wird, deutlich zu viele Steuern zahlen, falls er, was ich bei vielen befürchte, die Anschaffungskosten nicht sauber und überzeugend nachweisen kann. Oder übersehe ich hier etwas? Bin für jeden Hinweis dankbar. 📄 Quelle: Referentenentwurf BMF, § 43a Abs. 2 (neu)
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holstblock🐂⭕🔺 retweeted
Bloomberg just dropped the most disturbing investigation I have read this year, and every AI builder should read it and take it seriously. On February 28, two Tomahawk missiles hit an elementary school in Minab, a small town in southern Iran. 156 people died. At least 123 were children. The Pentagon knew within hours that it had bombed a school. The school had its own website. It was labeled on Google Maps. You could see the soccer pitch from a satellite view. You could see the brightly painted walls. Any 12-year-old with a browser could tell what the building was. The AI system could not. Inside US Central Command, personnel were using Palantir's Maven Smart System. It is an AI targeting platform running on a $1.3 billion Pentagon contract, and embedded inside it is Anthropic's Claude. On day one of the war, more than 1,000 targets went through it in 24 hours. Work that used to take a team hours per target got compressed into minutes. The satellite imagery Maven was pulling from was seven years old. The site was still tagged in the database as an Islamic Revolutionary Guard facility. The system spat it out as a recommended day-one target. Humans signed off. The first missile flew. Then a second one landed minutes later to hit the people who came to help. Investigators later found that some Central Command staff had assumed Maven would flag stale intelligence for them. It did not. Nobody had told it to. Palantir told Bloomberg the government is responsible for the underlying data. The Pentagon's civilian harm mitigation team, the people whose actual job is to catch a target like this, had been cut back before the war started. This is not AI going rogue. This is the opposite. This is AI doing exactly what it was built to do at exactly the speed it was built to do it. And a school full of little girls got vaporized because the humans in the loop trusted the machine more than they trusted their own eyes. I keep thinking about the version of this story that comes next. What happens when the system is faster. When the target list is not 1,000 in a day but 10,000. When "review" becomes a button the operator has three seconds to hit before the next target loads. When there is no human left slow enough to notice that a soccer pitch is not a helipad. We are not talking about a spam filter mislabeling an email. We are talking about a system that turned a seven-year-old database entry into two cruise missiles landing on children in the middle of a morning class. A UN-backed panel has now called it a potential war crime. In terms of children killed, it is the deadliest American targeting error of the entire 21st century. And according to Bloomberg, some of Defense Secretary Hegseth's own advisors are worried that too much public scrutiny of Maven might slow down its adoption inside the Pentagon. Read that last line again. If you build this stuff, you own what it does. You do not get to hide behind "the government owns the data." The whole pitch of your product is that speed and integration save lives. When it takes them instead, that is also on you. I am not against AI in defense. I am against AI in a hurry. Speed is the entire mechanism that made Minab possible. Every guardrail we already know how to build takes time, and time is exactly what the system was designed to eliminate. So here is the question I have not been able to stop asking, and I genuinely want to know what you think. If a piece of software helped kill 123 children in a single morning while behaving exactly as designed, what does "responsible AI" even mean anymore?
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holstblock🐂⭕🔺 retweeted
Looks like I’m going to sell my first 6.5k EUR ticket soon. Creating a customer support solution for a ski school that handles 10,000 emails every year, 70% FAQ We’re introducing a ticket system, AI triage & routing, AI conversation summaries and AI reply drafts, + Website Chatbot. No one is getting laid off, we’re just improving the quality of life (and loyalty) of the employees and improving the customer support quality. Next goal is to sell a 10k EUR ticket
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Worth following this new business on how to not become obsolete in the AI age.
Some have been asking what my business is now, so here is the short version: My thesis: IT is a force multiplier to your business. I help non-tech companies make IT their superpower: - Full service planning and rollout of novel IT solutions - Automating manual processes like accounting, customer support, and on-brand-asset creation - AI strategy development, AI upskilling, business process transformation - Communications consultancy It’s an interesting journey, because AI is completely disrupting the IT services sector and many non-tech executives understand that they can do much more themselves now. Many don’t want „done for you“ anymore and prefer to get coached. „Done with you“ is an angle, where I offer tinkerers to teach them how to build and extend their own processes and applications. This can be as simple as teaching you to build Claude Skills and shave down 8 hours of quarterly recurring work in just 4 hours. /do-my-taxes Or it can be a knowledge based business that wants to offer its knowledge via an so my AI agent as a subscription. The opportunities feel limitless right now because every company has potential for optimization and creating new markets. My only limit right now is me… my ability to pick the right strategy and my ability to execute. I still have negative Cashflow but I have served more than a handful of customers by now in very interesting projects and it’s an incredibly rewarding experience to build value for and with small and medium businesses that serve real people. I’m grinding everyday to build infrastructure for myself to be an example for how to build an AI-first company. I have built AI driven research processes that drive how I find the right solution for my customers. I’m not selling them one specific product. I’m taking their requirements, determine possible architectures to solve their problem, scan hundreds of potential products and services from the web and progressively filter and narrow down the solution space until I have found the right combination of off-the-shelf products and bespoke components. All on the manner of a few days. I have built a marketing asset generator skill and MCP server that creates social shareables, PDF documents, websites, print products, presentations that are always on-brand. The basic product in service based businesses of the future will be processes that can get automated into a skill and/or an MCP. And most of my work is educating people on how to do that, and then doing it for them or with them. I hope this gave you an insight. This journey goes much deeper than people anticipate and it’s incredible to be part of it. I’m pretty confident that given enough time, I will make my business very lucrative as my ability grows to build bigger and bigger solutions. So it’s just me showing up to work every day and helping people force multiple to do more with less time. If you have a questions about any of the topics I mentioned, let me know and I’ll dive deeper. If you want to do business, you’ll find my details in the bio.
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holstblock🐂⭕🔺 retweeted
NEW investigation for @WSJ: - Polymarket is paying scores of offshore clippers to quietly promote its international exchange in the U.S. (though it’s banned from letting Americans trade on the platform) - Polymarket made dummy websites mirroring its real site, then paid creators to use the fake site and pretend to win thousands. - Creators altered headlines and used outdated footage to imply they won bets—even when they often lost - Polymarket paid Adin Ross multiple millions to promote the site All that and more in my latest story with @ByKLong @ceostroff @brenna__smith
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holstblock🐂⭕🔺 retweeted
I have a lot of respect for @paritytech technical work. In fact, that’s precisely why this keeps bothering me. Around Web3 Summit we’re seeing technically impressive open-source prototypes: Coinage, Bulletin Chain, storage infrastructure, and other experiments that showcase real engineering talent. But I keep feeling that our ecosystem still treats “we built the primitive” as if it were only one small step away from “we launched a product.” It isn’t. A product is not a protocol. A product is not an SDK. A product is not a proof-of-concept. A product is something people discover, understand, trust, adopt, and continue using. That requires a completely different set of skills: Product thinking. Positioning. Storytelling. Onboarding. Distribution. Feedback loops. Relentless iteration with real users. The uncomfortable reality is that technical excellence alone does not create adoption. History keeps teaching us this lesson. The internet did not win because TCP/IP existed. Smartphones did not win because touchscreens existed. AI did not go mainstream because better models existed. They won because someone turned a technical possibility into a product people could actually use. Open-source prototypes are valuable. But they are not the finish line. They are the starting line. And if a well-funded ecosystem filled with world-class engineers is still struggling to consistently turn technical breakthroughs into products people care about, perhaps the question is no longer whether we need better technology. Perhaps the question is: Who owns the responsibility for turning innovation into adoption?
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It’s the fourth time I’ve been at a @Web3summit. Here are my five cents about 7 years of @polkadot: From the promise of easy-to-deploy parachains in 2018 to infra-readiness in 2024, and with the realization that an unsustainable ecosystem can't continue in 2025, the course correction has hit a major milestone this year, with Parity becoming a "prototype/product company" and bringing web3 solutions to humanity. This product, "Project Trinity," will be a super-app that's uncompromisingly web3. Among many more features, there's no sign-in needed, selectable privacy, payment, personal websites, and you can deploy your own apps and sites in the internal marketplace (check playground.dot.li/). I still believe that millions of people don't know that they want Web3. But while a small set of expert engineers are developing the user-facing applications on the Polkadot stack, I do hope that they won't forget that if they don't succeed in bringing solutions to those their audience, we won’t have the innovation for dismantling the internet feudalism, but only a fancy invention that doesn’t achieve its full potential.
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PS: I want to see @paritytech and @gavofyork succeed in making at least every Pizza maker in Berlin a Web3 ambassador.
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holstblock🐂⭕🔺 retweeted
Introducing HOLLAR Stable Yield Bonds Lock stablecoins for 90 days and earn a fixed 6.9% APR • Same amount back + yield at maturity • No liquidation risk for users • Yield generated through Hydration-native strategies • No external incentives app.hydration.net/strategies…
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holstblock🐂⭕🔺 retweeted
I launched Caio today. It starts as a cleaner search engine for public tech jobs: salary, location, company, and source signals in one place. caio-jobs.com Free and Open Source. Code here: github.com/danicuki/caio
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holstblock🐂⭕🔺 retweeted
Ever since I was a child I wanted to have my data collected and stored by a third party 💀
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holstblock🐂⭕🔺 retweeted
i've been in crypto for almost a decade but most defi opportunities always felt like too much to keep up with. new protocols, positions, risk, bridging,... most of this needs to be abstracted away. today we can finally share what we're building to solve this: @yieldy_io. i'm building it with my cofounders @alexdimes7 and @sopke86. yieldy is a non-custodial routing layer for stablecoin yield. connect, pick a risk level, earn. all the complexity hidden away behind a beautiful product. the broader context: defi really built all the building blocks that users can use, but the reality is that most don't. about $280B in stablecoins sits idle onchain. that's 87% of all supply. we're starting with USDC from @ethereum into a diversified position across vetted @solana vaults. native USDC on both sides via @Circle CCTP. this product is a culmination of years of experience and continuously identifying the same problem. defi is too complex for regular users to use, although we have all the building blocks. most then default to CEXs with their custodial products, as opposed to giving onchain defi opportunities a chance. rightfully so. the fact that it's technically available doesn't mean there isn't massive information asymmetry at play. i am really excited to be finally building our version of the solution. one that hopefully helps current stablecoin holders, and expands the entirety of the crypto space along the way.
$280B in stablecoins sits idle. 87% of all stablecoin supply, earning nothing because the path to yield is full of friction. We're building Yieldy to fix it in one click. You keep custody. Starting with the best yield protocols on @Solana. 🧵
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holstblock🐂⭕🔺 retweeted
Are you trying to advance digital sovereignty and public-interest infrastructure? Sebastian Vogelsang from Eurosky helps both organisations and European governments navigate decentralization and digital transformation. 15+ years, 50 published apps, award-winning titles featured by Apple and downloaded by millions. Plus Eurostack & AT Protocol (ATProto) advancement. At Neo-cypherpunk Summit in Berlin (14th June): s26ber.web3privacy.info/
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state of crypto 2026
too goated!! sama, I kneeel 🧎🧎🧎
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holstblock🐂⭕🔺 retweeted
We want neo-cypherpunk way to be opened to different geographies. @GCCofCommons works actively on engaging Chinese & SEA builders to learn about privacy & cypherpunk tech. They are covering community members to visit Neo-cypherpunk Summit in Berlin. Plus their community is voting right now to support our flagship event in Europe: snapshot.box/#/s:gccofficial… Privacy is a public good. Open to every culture. That is the way. 谢谢
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holstblock🐂⭕🔺 retweeted
Book - we worked whole year on our book. Got wonderful contributions from @chaumdotcom, @naomibrockwell, @valkenburgh, @Fatalmeh & more. We believe in reading. Physicality of the books. And knowledge. Coming in 2026.
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