Fair pushback, both of you. To be clear: what I’m describing isn’t a covenant in the CTV/CSFS sense — no protocol enforcement, no opcode. It’s presigned transactions + timelocks bolted onto an existing multisig policy. Cykros is right that this is a workaround, not a primitive. The tradeoff is real: you’re managing extra signed tx’s and their storage instead of a clean descriptor. Quantoshi — that’s exactly the mess I’d want to avoid at scale. If CTV/CSFS ever activate, native vaults make this dramatically simpler. Until then, presigned + timelock is the only tool available that doesn’t require consensus. Inconvenience now, in exchange for not needing everyone to agree on a soft fork.

Coldcard is where the real lesson lives, not the fork. A covenant isn’t about limiting what Bitcoin can become at the protocol level — it’s about limiting what your Bitcoin can do at the wallet level. One valid destination: your estate protocol, your trust, your family. A compromised signer stops being a catastrophe and becomes an inconvenience. The attacker gets a signature. They don’t get a destination. ~$200M didn’t have to be lost. It had to be moved somewhere it was never going to be allowed to go. No soft fork required to start down this road. That matters more than it sounds like it should. New: “A Staging Ground & Covenants” https://paulweaver34.substack.com/p/a-staging-ground-and-covenants

A watershed writing experience. I said yes to Fort Worth before I knew why — then wrote my way into the reason. That reason went back to an earthquake in Turkey and $50k in relief funds frozen for 18 months. That became 108 essays on money, sovereignty, Girard, Banfield, Plantinga — none of it planned. This week: TGFB episode #79 with Jordan Bush, and my novel Honest Weights is nearly done. Being early enough to count among the first hundred is its own kind of honor — separate from being the best voice in the room. https://paulweaver34.substack.com/p/a-watershed-writing-experience #Bitcoin #TGFB

A $5 bill and a $100 bill are the same paper. We just agreed one’s worth 20x the other. Move it to a screen and even the paper disappears — it’s just a number telling you what an hour of your life is worth. The lira sits near 48 to the dollar right now. I have Turkish friends staying with us who are excited to shop an outlet mall here — his family exports textiles for a living, and it’s still cheaper to buy clothes in Indiana than at home. That’s the felt need, live, in my guest room. Ten days ago Turkish prosecutors raided a religious community and found 200kg of gold in one man’s safe. A government that runs out of currency to print eventually starts looking for assets to take instead. Rhymes with 2016, with Lebanon, with 1933. A bitcoin is still just one bitcoin. 21M of them, 100M sats each, same as day one. What moves when the price moves is the dollar underneath it. Most days “bitcoin’s volatility” is really the dollar’s. We don’t need more essays explaining why the dollar is fragile. We need stories that put a reader in the kitchen with a family before the crisis arrives. Full essay: https://paulweaver34.substack.com/p/the-felt-need

Indianapolis has no river worth the name, no port, no reason to exist on paper. It lost the canal bet, lost the auto bet to Detroit — and losing might be exactly why it had the capital and nerve left for the county merger, the stadium with no team, the NCAA move. Two hundred years of honest bets. I want to add one more: a real Bitcoin circular economy here, the kind El Zonte built on a stretch of coastline nobody had heard of. The City That Keeps Betting → https://paulweaver34.substack.com/p/the-city-that-keeps-betting

Banfield spent a summer in a poor Italian village in 1958 trying to figure out why it stayed poor. His answer: radius of trust. Every system has a boundary past which cooperation quietly stops. That used to be villages. Now it’s messaging apps. I went looking for something Nostr-native to actually use for group texts. Tried 0xchat — right protocol, dead TestFlight link. Looked at Keet — true P2P, but still someone else’s infrastructure. Landed for now on Buzz, Dorsey’s Block-backed client, mostly because it’s the first thing I’ve found where the architecture and the resources to maintain it actually match. Then mid-draft, Apple pulled Telegram over CSAM — caught it, acted in a day. Which complicates things: the same central authority that can silence a platform with no vote also just protected someone. A protocol with nobody in the middle has nobody positioned to do that either. I don’t think the gap closes. I think you just choose which one you’re willing to live with. https://paulweaver34.substack.com/p/a-radius-of-trust-in-messaging-apps

That’s the detail I want to sit with. If Foundry’s absence at the split is why both chains took so long to extend, that’s really a question about whether “the room” still exists inside mining, just relocated from a cabin to a pool’s uptime schedule. Curious if you think that’s a temporary quirk of this fork or a structural feature of how hashpower concentration will always slow down exactly the moments where speed would prove the network’s independence.