Someone opened a brand-new Ledger from a third-party retailer and found an LTE modem, a SIM card and an antenna soldered under the board. The secure element never leaks the seed, so the implant read it off the display and texted it to the attacker, who sat on hundreds of seed phrases and drained them all at once: ~$102M in Bitcoin. A second implant turned up at a big German electronics retailer, so this is not one dodgy shop. Tyler tells his Cold Card tamper-bag story, Chris wants to weigh every hardware wallet on a microscale, and we revisit Tyler's Ep 1 call that self-custody doesn't scale past the early adopters. Fixes on the table: multi-vendor multisig and Bitcoin vaults. Then: Anthropic left GitHub after going from 2,500 to 30,000 code changes a day. Is SaaS dead? Tyler's agent built an entire SaaS business (Billing Proof, $250/mo, zero customers) and Chris vibe-coded a DoorDash shame tracker instead of paying for one. Layer-2 series, part two: Tyler explains the Lightning Network, channels, HTLCs, inbound liquidity, and why 7 billion channels won't fit in the blocks. Finally, a research paper split an open-weight model across 15 Android TV boxes and it kept thinking at half a token a second. Chris wants a goblin in his toaster. Perp of Fortune: the model picked a 3× long on STBL; we lost $9.

The Ledger implant is at 5:43. Chapters: Cold open (0:00) · Welcome, live from the moon (0:39) · Perp of Fortune: a 3× long on STBL (1:15) · The Ledger implant that read the seed off the screen (5:43) · Tyler's Cold Card tamper-bag story (7:40) · Inside the box: a SIM card, an antenna, and your 24 words (9:11) · Is self-custody dead? (12:58) · Fixes: multi-vendor multisig and Bitcoin vaults (17:14) · The death of SaaS: Anthropic leaves GitHub (20:42) · Tyler's agent built a SaaS nobody bought (22:01) · Chris vibe-coded his DoorDash shame tracker (31:01) · Layer-2 series: the Lightning Network (34:26) · How a Lightning channel works (37:24) · The downsides: inbound liquidity and always-on nodes (43:13) · Why Lightning can't onboard 7 billion people (47:25) · Self-replicating AI on 15 Android TV boxes (52:03) · Perp final: −$9 (59:26)

Recorded fully remote, three cameras, one dashboard. Our opinions are our own, not our employers'. NOT financial advice; Perp of Fortune is a small real-money account we run for entertainment. Glossary: STBL = governance token of a protocol that splits a tokenized Treasury into a principal token and a yield token. Seed phrase = the 24 words that back up a wallet's keys. Secure element = the tamper-resistant chip that holds the seed; the implant read the screen instead. Supply-chain attack = tampering with a product between the factory and the buyer. Multi-vendor multisig = a 2-of-3 wallet whose keys live on devices from different companies. Bitcoin vaults = proposed constructs that add a delay and a veto to withdrawals. Layer two = a protocol that moves transactions off the Bitcoin chain and settles back to it. Lightning channel = a 2-of-2 multisig pot two parties update off-chain. HTLC = hash time-locked contract, the trick that routes a payment across channels so everyone gets paid or no one does. Inbound liquidity = to receive on Lightning, someone else's coins must sit on their side of your channel. LSP = Lightning service provider, the intermediary most mobile wallets route through. Pipeline parallelism = splitting a model's layers across machines so each runs a slice.

Subscribe for next week: Poppy, Meta and Sierra's protocol for letting your agent act for you without your password; OUSD week two; the npm worm that holds packages hostage; Perp of Fortune rides again.

OpenAI dropped a paper on 377 families of open math problems and within a day the timeline decided AI was about to break cryptography. Justin Drake told Ethereum holders to go "bunker mode." Matthew Green said we might lose public-key crypto, full stop. Tyler separates Q-Day from a classical break and explains why the real exposure is address reuse, not the curve. Then the harder question: if a lab actually found it, would they tell anyone? Chris walks through Dankrad Feist's take that the internet just goes back to cleartext (Gmail had no TLS until ~2010), and the three of us rank what we'd delete first: browser history, bank logins, or the Bitcoin that would be worth half a cigarette. Open USD is live at $700M issued, and the yield goes to partners, not holders. Chris flags the suspect wallets behind Tempo's $2B. The Hawley/Murphy bill makes the "operator" of an AI agent liable, and the Roman Storm precedent says tokens flowing back and forth may not count as speech. Tyler takes it to the 90s crypto wars and the feudal estate of Salesforce. Jackson's Instinct booked him a tennis tournament every week in six hours; someone else's posted their bank history to work Slack. Perp of Fortune: Tyler's 15-minute coin flips vs the OG perp, with a live dashboard, start to finish.

The cryptography scare is at 7:55. Chapters: Cold open (0:00) · Welcome back, all three of us (0:49) · Perp of Fortune: 15-minute coin flips vs the OG perp (1:38) · The little man in the computer shorted Circle (6:03) · Did OpenAI's math drop just threaten cryptography? (7:55) · Justin Drake says go bunker mode (9:08) · Q-Day vs a classical break (14:38) · Matthew Green and the FUD contagion (17:47) · If a lab found it, would they tell us? (19:26) · How do you responsibly disclose a broken curve? (22:45) · The internet goes back to cleartext (24:06) · Open kimono, nude beach, browser history (25:16) · Perp halftime (28:43) · Open USD is live: $700M issued (30:06) · Tempo's $2B of suspect volume (32:51) · The Hawley/Murphy bill: who's liable for your agent? (36:15) · Open weights, speech, and Roman Storm (40:30) · How crypto got legalized (48:23) · The cop model and the 90s crypto wars (49:46) · Death of IP, death of owning software (51:11) · Instinct update: a tennis tournament every week (54:07) · The agent that posted a bank history to Slack (57:26) · Perp of Fortune: final numbers (1:00:08)

Recorded fully remote, three cameras, one dashboard. Our opinions are our own, not our employers'. NOT financial advice; Perp of Fortune is a small real-money account we run for entertainment. Glossary: 15-minute markets = prediction-market contracts that resolve every 15 minutes on whether bitcoin went up or down. Q-Day = the hypothetical day a quantum computer can break today's public-key cryptography; still orders of magnitude short on qubits. Classical break = a mathematical shortcut that breaks a curve on ordinary hardware. Bunker mode = Justin Drake's advice to rotate coins to addresses whose public key has never been revealed. Address reuse = spending from an address exposes its public key; Bitcoin wallets rotate, Ethereum reuses by default. Cleartext = unencrypted traffic; most of the internet ran that way until the 2010s. Open USD = a new bank-backed stablecoin, $700M issued, yield paid to partner banks, not holders. Tempo = a payments chain reporting $2B of stablecoin volume from a handful of suspect wallets. Hawley/Murphy bill = October 1 Senate bill on AI agent accountability; the "operator" carries liability. Roman Storm = Tornado Cash developer convicted on a money-transmitter theory for publishing code. Crypto wars = the 1990s fight over whether encryption counted as a munition. Instinct = a consumer AI agent that reads your email and calendar and acts for you.

Subscribe for next week: Tyler's rebuilt Perp of Fortune goes live, does OpenAI restart training, and does Instinct buy itself a GPU farm?

Jev is a new kind of model: it never writes a sentence. You hand it a question and a set of boxes and it hands back probabilities. It also picked this week's Perp of Fortune (long Aster: perps are becoming spectator entertainment, and Seoul is running a live perp-trading competition with a Korean streamer who trades Trump speeches at 50x). Tyler explains what Jev actually is (a classifier layer on an open-weights model, no moat, but a form factor that struck a nerve), Chris wants to vibe-vacuum his house with it, and Jackson's AI notes claim Jev beat Pokémon Red for $1.65, with Claude's help. Headline inflation is out of control. Then the Bitcoin topic: Spark, the Lightning-without-channels layer two. Tyler's teardown: security rests on the operators deleting their keys ("point your Claude at the code"), it's proof of authority with extra steps, one tester spent 80,000 sats to unilaterally exit 20,000, and the operators see every transaction. Some nice things are said at the end. Finale: Chris's slop auction. Flashbots found L2s full of fizzling MEV orders, EIP-1559 taxed them, and the same Tullock-contest math says the bot internet gets fixed by an auction or a wall. We're getting the wall. Plus: what happens when everyone's agent wants the same reservation. Perp of Fortune finishes +$3.72. One of the few.

Jev is at 11:53. Chapters: Cold open (0:00) · Talking into chopsticks (0:53) · Perp of Fortune: long Aster (1:57) · Who sponsors a cigarette-smoking competition? (3:30) · Seoul's live perp-trading competition (5:52) · Tyler's conspiracy: the pot doesn't exist (10:34) · The marquee: Jev, the AI that can't talk (11:53) · Headline inflation: Jev beat Pokémon, with Claude (18:29) · Spark: Lightning without channels (23:06) · What is a Bitcoin layer two? (24:46) · The trust model: they have to delete the keys (29:04) · Proof of authority, a multisig between friends (32:04) · Unilateral exit: 80,000 sats to recover 20,000 (34:05) · Privacy: Spark sees everything (36:58) · Ark vs Spark, and some nice things (41:06) · The slop auction (44:00) · Tullock contests: the auction or the wall (49:28) · Agent congestion (54:52) · Like what other people don't (58:02) · Perp of Fortune result (59:22)

Recorded fully remote, three tiles on one call. Our opinions are our own, not our employers'. NOT financial advice; Perp of Fortune is a small real-money account we run for entertainment, not a recommendation to long Aster or anything else. Glossary: Jev = a model trained to answer only in typed structures with probabilities, never prose. Transfer learning = training a new head on a pre-trained model with your own data; Jev sells that as an API. Layer two = a network that settles to Bitcoin; Tyler's test is unilateral exit. Spark = a Bitcoin L2 run by a federation (Lightspark, Flashnet, Breez); Spark Service Providers swap in and out to Lightning and on-chain. Delete-the-keys trust model = every Spark payment is a 2-of-2 with the operators; non-custodial only if they really delete the old key. Proof of authority = a network run by a known set of trusted parties, like the Ronin and Wormhole bridges. Unilateral exit = leaving an L2 with only your own keys; on Spark each "leaf" of your balance costs an on-chain fee. Ark = an off-chain Bitcoin protocol with a stronger trust model. MEV = profit from ordering and inserting transactions in a block. Fizzling orders = speculative on-chain orders that fail if the preconditions aren't met; spamming them is positive EV. EIP-1559 = Ethereum's congestion-priced block space, an auction against spam. Tullock contest = the game theory of a raffle; buy tickets until they cost what the prize is worth. The auction vs the wall = price the slot, or gatekeep who gets one. Instinct / Muse = consumer agents that book, buy, and cancel for you.

Subscribe for next week: enclaves III (a $200 board forges the attestation), agent week two, is bitcoin back (still no charts), and Korea's 4× yen stablecoin.