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01
May

A warm bed in Grimsby

5.5 First we got GPT 5.5, which has spent the last week proposing all manner of solutions to the Erdős Problems. Terence Tao described one of the solutions as a “meaningful contribution”. He is a notably hard marker when it comes to AI and mathematics, so his comment distills to very high praise indeed. Then

27
Mar

A rude guest

4Chan We have talked a bit about the fines levied on American companies by the European Union. Last year, it was their single largest revenue source. How long will America tolerate this? I think we found out this week from a different source. The UK censorship bureau “Ofcom” decided to fine website 4Chan (an anonymous,

13
Mar

Making Tax Miserable

Making Tax Miserable To great fanfare the UK Government is about to embark on its ‘Making Tax Digital’ program. The idea is to modernise tax collection and reporting by mandating that taxpayers keep digital records and submit returns on specifically approved software. Large companies already do so but MTD makes this mandatory for every landlord,

06
Mar

London

ETF Flows  A little heartbeat on the ETF flows here from Coinglass. Suffice to say until this week, recent outflows have been negative, but not overwhelming so. The net decline in ETF bitcoin holdings is tiny overall from its peak and does little to explain the price movement. The main factor is older holders selling.

27
Feb

Wrong again

One article I worked for a menial’s hire, Only to learn, dismayed, That any wage I had asked of Life, Life would have willingly paid. This article caused ructions across the globe this week. Over 300 million views. It was a rather doomsday scenario about what is happening with the continuing acceleration of general intelligence.

20
Feb

Our heroine is leaving

Dutch Until now Dutch taxpayers have been levied taxes on ‘assumed gains’. Say you have $1,000, you might earn interest of $100 but the law might decide your assumed gain was $300 and on that amount you would have paid tax. The idea was to tax the appropriate income from assets, not the gains themselves.

13
Feb

Regulation was good, now it is bad

Ideas I had, just a few weeks ago, promised you the resumption of bitcoin obituaries. Fair to say I didn’t quite anticipate the violent eruption of the last two weeks, but the responses did not disappoint. The journalist in this particular case pointed out that they have ‘followed bitcoin since 2015’ and so are qualified

30
Jan

Cheat

Something changed The most popular day of the year for financial fraud is 24th December. Everyone is in a rush to get payments out of the door and leave early. So if you slip in some urgent invoices, change bank details you have a chance. What’s more, nobody will be back until early January by

19
Dec

Out of hours

The Quantum Problem Does Bitcoin have a quantum problem? The answer here is, yes. Specifically, some of the encryption on which bitcoin relies, notably ECDSA, is vulnerable to quantum computers. In reality the most exposed coins are those very old Satoshi coins (about 8% of the total supply), and those coins where people have reused

05
Dec

China week

Vanguard (again) December 2024. We are never doing it. December 2025. We are doing it. I was impressed when they held the line last December and said no. Money talks though. Clients want the asset class, advisors want the asset class and Vanguard had no choice. We have had several months of ‘nobody wants bitcoin’