We have zaps. Nostr solved this. But most of the creators we follow still live on X, Substack, YouTube, and elsewhere, and tipping on those platforms is either broken, custodial, or buried behind yet another subscription nobody asked for. So I built TipBits. tipbits.xyz — a sovereign Lightning tip page for creators. You register once with your Lightning address. You get a personal page at tipbits.xyz/u/yourname. Drop the link anywhere your audience finds you. Tippers visit, pick an amount in sats, GBP, USD, or EUR, and pay. Sats go peer-to-peer, straight to your wallet. TipBits never touches the money. No custody. No KYC. No email. No password. No platform fee. Free forever. It uses LNURL-pay, the same open standard that makes zaps work. No vendor lock-in. Works with any Lightning wallet. I'm a lone developer and I shipped v1 yesterday. It's live, it works, real sats have landed. But it's early days and the Nostr community gives the most honest, most useful feedback of anywhere on the internet. If you try it, break it, love it, hate it, or have ideas, reply here. Seriously. I'm building this in the open and I want to hear it. My own page if you want to test it: tipbits.xyz/u/meridian And if TipBits is useful to you, the value-for-value tip page is at tipbits.xyz/tip ⚡ #Bitcoin #Lightning #Nostr #ValueForValue #TipBits

The Foundation A foundation is being laid beneath the public conversation about AI in Britain. Most people are too distracted to see it. I can see it from a different angle. I didn't choose that angle. I ended up there. I want to tell you something personal before I get into the evidence. When I started my apprenticeship and discovered it was run by Multiverse, I felt an immediate revulsion. A sense that I had made a mistake. But I was in, the commitment was made, and the reasonable thing seemed to be to push the feeling aside, focus on the work, and see how it played out. Then the Sovereign AI Fund was announced. I looked at who was sitting in the managing partner's chair. It was Tony Blair's daughter-in-law. I started turning over stones. What came back was not a loose connection or two. It was an avalanche. And when I understood what I was actually inside, I felt something I can only describe as a cog realising it is part of a machine, a machine being constructed around the lives of people who did not choose to be inside it and do not yet know they are. I have been shaped by Orwell since I was young. The world he warned about has lived in the back of my mind for decades as the thing I most feared. I did not expect to find myself enrolled in it. That is why I am writing this. Not because I chose this position. Because I ended up here by chance, and from here I can see something most people cannot. The foundation. While Britain has been distracted, a foundation is being laid. Not secretly. That is the important thing to understand. Every element of what I am about to describe is in press releases, company filings, parliamentary records, and government websites. The scandal is not that it is hidden. The scandal is that nobody has placed it all in the same frame at the same time. The public conversation right now is fragmented and reactive. The Blair essay. The Question Time panel. The Sovereign AI Fund appointment. The Multiverse valuation. Each story arrives, generates heat, and is replaced by the next one before anyone has had time to understand what connects them. That cycling is not accidental. Exhaustion is the mechanism. By the time people become tired of the argument, the foundations have been poured. Let me show you what is underneath. The family architecture. Tony Blair published a 5,600-word essay on 26 May through the Tony Blair Institute for Global Change. Most coverage focused on Brexit and Net Zero. Almost nobody focused on point four of his ten-point programme: "We should create a major new partnership with the private and voluntary sectors for apprenticeships and training, not just for the young and unemployed, but for the existing workforce whose jobs will be affected by AI and who need to learn AI adoption." This is a policy recommendation. It is also a precise description of a commercial operation already running at scale. Euan Blair, Tony Blair's eldest son, is the founder and CEO of Multiverse, currently England's largest revenue-generating apprenticeship provider. In May 2026, Multiverse raised $70 million at a $2.1 billion valuation. The Chancellor of the Exchequer, Rachel Reeves, was quoted in the company's own press release endorsing the raise and describing Britain's ambition to achieve the fastest rate of AI adoption in the G7. A former Prime Minister recommends apprenticeship and AI training partnerships as national policy. His son runs the country's largest AI apprenticeship company. The serving Chancellor endorses that company by name in a commercial press release. That is one layer of the foundation. The second layer: Suzanne Ashman Blair, Euan Blair's wife and Tony Blair's daughter-in-law, was appointed Managing Partner of the UK government's Sovereign AI Fund, a £500 million vehicle operating under a .gov.uk domain with Crown authority. The fund provides not just capital but sovereign compute, fast-tracked visas, and access to national datasets. It decides which AI companies receive access to the infrastructure of the British state. Three members of the same family sit simultaneously at the policy lever, the training pipeline, and the capital allocation mechanism of Britain's entire AI transformation. Every appointment is individually defensible. Every element is publicly announced. Nobody has placed them in the same frame and asked what it means. The mechanism nobody is explaining. There is a reason Multiverse is valued at $2.1 billion despite losing more money than it earns every single year. Pre-tax losses for the year to March 2025 were £63.3 million on revenues of £79.6 million. Cash nearly halved in twelve months. A company burning money at that rate does not command a $2.1 billion valuation unless the investors understand something that the headline numbers do not show. Here is what they understand. The Apprenticeship Levy is a payroll tax of 0.5% collected from every UK employer with a pay bill exceeding £3 million. The funds can only be spent on government-approved training providers. There is no competitive tender for fee levels. The ceiling is set by civil servants in the Department for Education. Multiverse charges approximately £18,000 per apprentice on its AI for Business Analysis course. In October 2024, Multiverse submitted written evidence to Parliament's Select Committee inquiry into skills and further education. The submission made specific recommendations for how the Growth and Skills Levy, the replacement for the Apprenticeship Levy, should be designed. The Growth and Skills Levy, as subsequently announced, was substantially aligned with those recommendations. Multiverse then announced a commitment to train 15,000 new AI apprentices funded by that same levy. The company receiving the money recommended the design of the mechanism that would distribute the money. There is now a significant development breaking in the background that the public conversation has not yet processed. From August 2026, the government's 10% top-up to levy accounts will end, and employer co-investment rates will rise from 5% to 25%. This makes UK apprenticeship funding significantly more expensive for British businesses, which is almost certainly why Multiverse's European expansion through its January 2026 acquisition of Berlin-based StackFuel is timed precisely as it is. The same model, the same platform, the same alliances, now deployed under German state funding law instead. The foundation is not just being laid in Britain. It is going international. What the apprentices are actually building. There is one more element of this foundation that has received almost no attention. Each Multiverse apprentice is embedded inside a host organisation, producing project work that maps real processes using real institutional data. The curriculum is designed specifically to identify inefficiencies and automation opportunities. Those project portfolios live in Multiverse's proprietary platform, Atlas. The legal basis for data processing is cited as legitimate business interest, not consent. What Multiverse holds in aggregate across 12,000 apprenticeship starts in 2024-25 alone is a distributed map of operational inefficiency across a significant cross-section of British institutional life, inside NHS trusts, government departments, outsourced public services providers, banks, and defence contractors. In May 2026, Multiverse confirmed a strategic alliance with Palantir, specifically to upskill NHS staff in Palantir's tools. The same press release named Oracle, Palantir, and Microsoft as the technology stack that Multiverse sits on top of as "the AI adoption layer." The foundation layer connects directly to the intelligence layer. I will be returning to that connection in detail. The wall. I want to close with the thing I most want you to take from this. People across Britain are enrolled in training programmes, using workplace software, submitting to digital ID consultations, and reading King's Speech announcements, each one individually reasonable, each one presented as progress, opportunity, modernisation. What they are not being shown is what sits underneath all of it. The foundation being laid while attention is pulled elsewhere. The architecture being assembled from components that are each publicly announced but never presented as a whole. The false claims circulating on social media, the viral posts about contracts that do not exist, actually serve the architecture by making the real story seem like conspiracy thinking. The debunking of the false claim creates scepticism about the true one. That too is a mechanism. I did not choose to see this from the inside. I enrolled in a training programme in good faith and ended up inside the machine I had feared for most of my adult life. The wall is being built. Most people will not notice it until it is complete. I can see it from here. More to follow. Sources: Tony Blair Institute essay, 26 May 2026: https://institute.global/insights/politics-and-governance/the-labour-party-is-playing-with-fire-over-its-future-and-the-future-of-the-country Multiverse $70m raise press release, 15 May 2026: https://www.multiverse.io/blog/multiverse-raises-70-million-europes-ai-adoption-platform Multiverse revenue and loss figures, FE Week: https://feweek.co.uk/multiverse-leads-rivals-with-stellar-apprenticeship-revenue-haul/ Multiverse Select Committee evidence, October 2024: https://committees.parliament.uk/writtenevidence/130765/html/ Sovereign AI Fund, Isomorphic investment: https://www.gov.uk/government/news/governments-sovereign-ai-invests-in-british-founded-ai-company-redefining-how-medicines-are-designed Suzanne Ashman Blair appointment, BM Magazine: https://bmmagazine.co.uk/news/suzanne-ashman-sovereign-ai-fund-managing-partner/ Ellison funding of TBI, Lighthouse Reports: https://www.lighthousereports.com/investigation/blair-and-the-billionaire/ Multiverse Atlas data platform: https://support.multiverse.io/en/collections/139106-during-your-apprenticeship StackFuel acquisition: https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/multiverse-to-deliver-ai-skills-to-100-000-german-workers-through-acquisition-of-stackfuel-302670991.html