Bitcoiners called it again. A few months ago, Bitcoin was the canary in the coal mine. Over the summer, the Bitcoin ecosystem was hit first: the Coldcard firmware exploit, emergency patches at Core Lightning, and a flood of AI-generated bug reports. The base protocol held. The weaknesses were in the software built around it, and the response was a volunteer red team pointing AI at hundreds of Bitcoin repositories and fixing what it found in the open. This week the rest of the internet got its turn. PHP2Shell, a set of flaws that had sat in PHP for over a decade, was found with frontier AI models and patched on 21 October. PHP runs roughly three quarters of the web, and governments took their own sites offline while they scrambled to update. Bitcoin went first because it is the biggest open bug bounty in the world, and anything with money attached gets probed first. Banks, payment rails, hospitals and government databases are next, and most have relied for decades on obscurity and slow attackers. That cover is gone. It will probably be quite painful for a while. What survives will be simpler, tougher and more honest about its own weaknesses. Stress is how resilient systems get built.

The awkward thing about self-sovereignty is how much you need other people. You can hold your own keys, run your own server and grow your own food. But the truth is, freedom gets much more practical when the people down the road are building it with you.

“How long before the Navy shows up and shuts you down?” @YaronBrook’s objection to floating Free Cities: Bitcoin has no address to raid. A city does. We disagreed about how far governments would go. This is the difficult bit of seasteading.

“To edit who I am at the behest of the state? Then I’m already dead.” Discussing @LucyTCWife’s case, @garethicke answers a personal question: would he risk 13 months in prison rather than change who he is? Full episode 👇 fountain.fm/episode/9ZsXCoUk…

Pay your taxes. Then pay again to protect your shop. Paris police have advised shopkeepers to hire private security ahead of today’s protests. If basic protection costs extra, what exactly is the state’s side of the social contract?

I need someone to explain to me like I'm 5 how you get into a Samsung telly.

After visiting the first Zuzalu, I was pretty sceptical about pop-ups. They’re starting to come of age now, though. Wide reach, real world results and proper business models. I’m bullish.

Time to renew your Adobe software subscription and you're eyeing up the free open source AI-coded alternatives? Buy yourself some time by logging into your Adobe account, clicking the cancel button a few times until they ask you why you're leaving. Say its too expensive and then refuse a new package offer. Eventually they will offer you some 'deals'. I got 3 months of my current package for free which they instantly added on to my subscription. Now you've got more time to look into making the switch to open source. Plus, in 3 months time, who knows what new stuff will exist.

I've got @TelamonArdavani from @JoinEdgeCity on the podcast this Friday. I've been on a long journey with pop-up cities. I thought the early ones had put me off for life. I get it now.

You don’t have to sell the house to find out whether you’d enjoy living in a Free City. @PatrickHiebert’s advice: start with a holiday. The shipping container can wait.

Great project. Great ep.

I've always wanted to work in mining. Until that time I will have to live vicariously through @dusan_matuska. Hard work paying off. You love to see it.

Honduras just won a $460m arbitration case. Next in the queue: Próspera’s $1.63bn claim. And the Attorney General is now inviting talks. Is Honduras about to settle with a Free City? riotimesonline.com/honduras-…

Of course there's a ticket discount code! FREECITIES

Thought experiment: If you're one of the first residents of a Free City, you're helping make it valuable. Should that earn you a share of the business running it, or is owning a plot of land enough?