SatStackDad

bitcoin_beginners

The ice cream truck pulled up to our block yesterday. Same jingle. Same long line of kids.

Jake and Mia ran over with crumpled dollar bills. Five minutes later they came back empty-handed.

"The truck doesn't take cash anymore," Jake said.

"What do you mean?"

"Card only. Or some app. The guy said cash is too much trouble."

I walked over to see for myself. There was a sign on the window: "NO CASH ACCEPTED. CARD OR VENMO ONLY."

The ice cream guy shrugged when I asked about it. "Cash is a pain. I have to count it. Store it. Take it to the bank. This is easier."

Easier for who?

I came back to the kids. "So what did you do?"

"Nothing. We don't have cards."

"And that doesn't bother you?"

Mia looked confused. "Why would it?"

"Because your money isn't good enough anymore."

"But Dad, nobody uses cash. It's old."

"Says who?"

"Everyone at school. Cash is gross. Cards are clean."

I pulled out a twenty dollar bill. "This is money. Real money. It works anywhere. Nobody has to approve it. Nobody can track where you spend it."

"But it's paper."

"So? It's freedom. When you pay with a card, someone knows exactly what you bought. When you bought it. Where you bought it."

Jake thought about this. "Like when Mom uses her card at Target and they email her coupons?"

"Exactly. They're watching everything you buy."

"Creepy," Mia said.

"Now imagine you can't use your card. Maybe the internet is down. Maybe your bank freezes your account. Maybe the government decides they don't like what you're buying."

"Then you can't buy anything?"

"Right. Unless you have cash."

"But the ice cream guy won't take cash."

I showed them the Bitcoin wallet on my phone. "This is digital money that works like cash. Nobody controls it. Nobody can stop you from using it."

"Can you buy ice cream with it?"

"Not yet. But maybe someday."

We walked back to the truck. I used my card to buy them ice cream. The whole transaction was logged. Tracked. Filed away.

The kids didn't mind. They just wanted ice cream.

But I knew we'd lost something that day. Something we might never get back.

The Ice Cream Truck Doesn't Take Cash. My Kids Don't See the Problem.

Mia was doing homework at the kitchen table. Social studies. She had a question about government.

"Dad, what's the national debt?"

I sat down next to her. "The government spends more money than it has. So it borrows money."

"Like when I want a toy but I don't have enough allowance?"

"Sort of. But bigger. Much bigger."

She pulled out her phone and searched. Her eyes went wide. "Thirty-four trillion dollars? That's a real number?"

"Yeah."

"Dad, I can't even imagine a trillion. How much is that?"

I tried the old comparisons. Seconds in time. Stacks of bills. None of it worked. Numbers that big don't make sense to anyone.

"OK forget how much. Here's the real question. Who do we owe it to?"

She looked at her worksheet. "Other countries?"

"Some. But most of it we owe to ourselves."

"That's impossible. You can't owe money to yourself."

I paused. She was right. How do you explain something that makes no sense?

"The government creates money. Then it borrows that money. And pays interest on it."

"To who?"

"Banks. The Federal Reserve."

"But who owns the Federal Reserve?"

I opened my laptop. We looked it up together. Private banks. Not really government. Not really private. Something in between.

"So we create money. Then we borrow it from banks. Then we pay them interest. Forever."

"Dad, that's the dumbest thing I've ever heard."

I couldn't argue with her logic.

"What if we just didn't borrow the money?"

"Then we'd have to spend what we actually have."

"Like me with my allowance."

"Exactly like you with your allowance."

She was quiet for a minute. "Bitcoin doesn't work like this, does it?"

"No. Nobody can create new bitcoin whenever they want. There's only 21 million total. Ever."

"So nobody can borrow bitcoin that doesn't exist?"

"Right."

She closed her worksheet. "This homework is stupid."

"Why?"

"Because they're teaching us a broken system like it's normal."

Out of the mouths of babes.

I Tried to Explain the National Debt. My Son Asked Who We Owe It To.

Jake came home from school yesterday with a worksheet. "Dad, we learned about money today!"

I looked at the paper. It had a cartoon piggy bank and lots of smiling dollar signs. The title said "Why You Need a Bank Account!"

"What did they teach you?" I asked.

"Banks keep your money safe. And they pay you interest so your money grows while you sleep!"

I flipped through the worksheet. Every question led to the same answer. Where should you keep your money? Bank. How do you save for college? Bank account. What's the safest place for money? Bank.

At the bottom it said "Sponsored by First National Bank of Brooklyn."

"Jake, how much interest do you think the bank pays?"

"A lot! The teacher said your money grows automatically."

I pulled up our savings account on my phone. "Look at this. We have $5,000 in savings. Last month they paid us $1.50 in interest."

He stared at the screen. "$1.50? That's like... nothing."

"Right. But they take our $5,000 and lend it to other people for way more. They might charge someone 7% for a car loan. We get 0.3%."

"That doesn't seem fair."

I showed him the bitcoin wallet on my phone. "This is different. Nobody controls it. No bank gets to use your money to make money for themselves."

"But the teacher said banks are safe."

"Safe from what? Your money loses value every year. Prices go up. Your dollar buys less. The bank pays you almost nothing while everything costs more."

Jake looked at the worksheet again. "This is like when McDonald's comes to school to teach us about nutrition."

I laughed. "Exactly."

"So bitcoin doesn't have a bank?"

"Bitcoin is the bank. You control it. Nobody else."

He crumpled up the worksheet. "I'm not turning this in."

"Why not?"

"Because it's a lie. And I don't like liars."

Sometimes kids see things clearer than adults.

My Kid's School Taught Financial Literacy. It Was Just a Bank Commercial.

I just wrote a check for spring softball. Travel team, not even the elite tier. $1,800 for the season. That's before equipment, tournament fees, gas to drive to Jersey three weekends a month, and the hotel if there's an overnight tournament.

Mia is 12. She's a good player. Not D1 scholarship good, just a kid who loves the sport. This is what it costs to let a kid play in Brooklyn in 2026.

I called my mom last weekend. She told me her mortgage payment in 1990 was $487 a month. Their house — a three-bedroom in Jersey with a yard — cost them $82,000 total. I'm spending $1,800 so my daughter can throw a ball for four months.

Something broke. Not recently. It broke a long time ago and we just got used to it.

My son Jake plays basketball and baseball. Sarah and I sat down last month and added it all up. Between two kids in three sports, we're spending over $8,000 a year on youth athletics. That doesn't include cleats that Jake outgrows every four months or the glove Mia needs because her hand finally grew. It doesn't include the gas or the snack bar money or the tournament weekends where you eat every meal at whatever's near the field.

Youth sports spending in the US hit $40 billion a year. That number has doubled since 2015. It hasn't doubled because kids are playing twice as much. It doubled because the dollar is worth half what it was, and every club and league and tournament operator knows parents will pay because the alternative is your kid sits home while their friends play.

I coach Jake's basketball team. The gym rental is $225 an hour. Twenty years ago the same gym was $40. The gym didn't get five times better. The dollars got five times weaker.

Every parent I know talks about this in the bleachers. Nobody connects it to monetary policy. It's always "everything is so expensive now" like it's weather. Like inflation just happens. It doesn't just happen. Somebody prints the money. Prices go up. Your kid's softball season costs more than a house payment used to.

Mia asked me last week why sports cost so much. I tried to explain inflation. She said "so they just make more dollars and everything costs more? That's dumb." She's 12 and she gets it better than most adults.

I bought bitcoin for the first time in 2020. Not because I understood the technology. Because I looked at what things cost for my family and realized that saving dollars was a game I couldn't win. Every year the pile buys less. Every year the registration fees go up. Every year the gap between what we earn and what two kids in sports actually costs gets wider.

21 million. That's it. Nobody's printing more bitcoin because youth sports got expensive. Nobody's diluting my savings because there's another "emergency." The math is fixed and the math is the point.

Mia doesn't know any of this yet. She just wants to play softball. Jake just wants to shoot hoops. It shouldn't cost this much to let your kids be kids.

Mia's Softball Season Costs More Than My Parents' Mortgage

I realized this last week at a bodega. Jake wanted a Gatorade. I told him to go pay. He walked up to the counter, tapped my phone on the reader, and walked back. He's 10 and he has never once counted out bills and coins to buy something.

That's not an exaggeration. Between Apple Pay, my wife Sarah's Venmo, and school lunch accounts that auto-reload from a credit card, my kids have grown up in a world where money is completely invisible. It's a number on a screen that goes down when you tap.

I didn't realize how much that matters until I tried to explain saving. "If you don't spend it, it grows." Jake looked at me like I was speaking another language. Why would a number on a screen grow? Where does the extra come from? Who decides?

These are actually brilliant questions. And the honest answers are uncomfortable. Banks pay you interest from lending your money to other people. The government prints more dollars when it needs them. The number goes up but what it buys goes down. Try explaining that to a kid who's never held a physical quarter.

His older sister Mia overheard us talking and said "so the bank just uses our money and gives us like nothing back?" She's 13. She figured out fractional reserve banking in one sentence without knowing what it's called.

I started sending Jake sats over Lightning. Small amounts. 100 here, 200 there, for chores or good grades. The difference was immediate. He could see the number. He could send it to Mia. He could see it didn't change overnight because nobody was adding to the pile. When I sent him 500 sats for cleaning out the garage, he watched the payment confirm in two seconds and said "that was real."

He was right. It was more real than a credit card tap has ever felt to him.

Now Mia wants in. She asked if she could earn sats for babysitting Jake instead of getting paid in dollars. I said yes. Last Saturday she watched him for three hours and I sent her 2,000 sats. She checked the dollar value, frowned, and said "that's only like a dollar fifty." I told her to check again in a year.

She's checking the price every morning now. Not because I told her to. Because she owns something and she wants to know what it's worth. That instinct — to watch, to care, to pay attention to what you have — that's what tap-to-pay killed. Everything was someone else's problem until it was hers.

I'm not trying to raise Bitcoin maximalists. I'm trying to raise kids who understand that money has to come from somewhere. That saving means something. That a dollar in your pocket today isn't the same as a dollar in your pocket next year, even though it has the same number printed on it.

Cash used to teach kids that. They'd save coins in a jar and watch the pile grow. My kids don't have jars. They have tap-to-pay. Sats are the closest thing they've got to something they can hold, count, and actually own.

My Kids Have Never Held Cash

That Super Bowl ad ran a few weeks ago. "Free money for every American baby." Trump Accounts. $1,000 deposited into an investment account for every kid born in the US, plus parents can add up to $5,000 a year. The money goes into a fund that tracks the stock market.

My daughter saw the ad and asked if she was getting free money. I said probably not — she's 13, not a newborn. She was annoyed. Fair enough.

But the more I thought about it, the more it bothered me. Not because it's a bad idea on the surface. Giving kids a head start on investing sounds great. The problem is what they're investing in.

The fund tracks the overall stock market. Denominated in dollars. The same dollars that have lost 25% of their purchasing power since my daughter was born in 2012. The same dollars that the government can print whenever it needs to fund the next emergency, bailout, or war. They're giving kids "free money" in a currency they're actively devaluing.

It's like giving someone a gift card to a store that raises its prices 7% every year. After 18 years, that $1,000 might be worth $3,000 in nominal terms and buy less than $1,000 buys today. You haven't built wealth. You've run on a treadmill.

I set up a different account for my kids. A Lightning wallet. No minimum age. No government deciding when they can access it. No fund manager taking a cut. Just sats. My son has about 1,200 and my daughter has a few hundred. It's not much in dollar terms. But the supply is capped at 21 million. Nobody's printing more because the debt ceiling needs to go up again.

I'm not against the Trump Accounts. A savings vehicle for kids who otherwise wouldn't have one is genuinely useful. But let's not pretend it solves the underlying problem, which is that the unit of measurement keeps shrinking.

My kids will have both. One account that the government controls. One that nobody controls. We'll see which one actually holds value by the time they're 30.

The Government Promised My Kids Free Money. I Have Questions.

The Munich Security Conference wrapped up today. Every year, 50+ heads of state and a thousand diplomats gather in a hotel in Bavaria to talk about whether the world is going to hold together. This year's official report is titled "Under Destruction." Not "Under Pressure." Not "Facing Challenges." Under Destruction.

The money quote from the report: "More than 80 years after construction began, the US-led post-1945 international order is now under destruction."

These aren't fringe commentators. This is the security establishment of the Western world publishing, in their own official document, that the system they built is coming apart.

I've been thinking about this since my kid asked me a question a few weeks ago. He wanted to know why prices keep going up if nobody's getting raises. He's 11. He doesn't know what Bretton Woods was. He doesn't know what Nixon did in 1971. But he can feel the result of it every time we go to the grocery store and the bill is higher than last month for less food.

The post-1945 order that the Munich report is eulogizing was built on the dollar as the world's reserve currency. That arrangement let the US export inflation to every other country on earth for decades. It funded wars, entitlements, and bailouts by printing money that the rest of the world was forced to absorb. The system "worked" as long as everyone agreed to play along.

Now they're not playing along. And the people who designed the system are the ones saying it's broken.

Here's what I keep coming back to: every institution involved in building and maintaining that order — the IMF, the World Bank, NATO, the UN — is funded by fiat money creation. Their existence depends on the ability of governments to print. Bitcoin doesn't care about any of that. It doesn't need permission. It doesn't need a conference in Bavaria. It just keeps producing blocks every ten minutes regardless of who's in power or which alliance is crumbling.

My son doesn't understand geopolitics yet. But he understands that 21 million is a fixed number. He checks his Lightning wallet every morning. He's got about 1,200 sats. It's not much. But nobody at the Munich Security Conference can print more of it.

That's the point.

The Munich Security Conference Report Is Called "Under Destruction."

My son is 11. Last week he asked me why his friend's family moved away. The answer was rent went up 40% in two years and they couldn't make it work anymore. Try explaining that to a kid who just wants to know why his buddy isn't at school anymore.

I didn't have a good answer. Not really. I mumbled something about costs going up, about how sometimes families have to make hard choices. He nodded like he understood, but I could tell he was just filing it away in that place where kids store things that don't make sense yet.

That night I sat him down and opened a Lightning wallet on my phone. I sent him 100 sats. Took about two seconds. I said, "That's yours now. Nobody can take it. No bank, no landlord, no government. It's sitting on a network that doesn't care who you are or where you live."

He asked how much it was worth. I said about seven cents. He looked disappointed. Then I pulled up a chart showing what $1 of bitcoin bought ten years ago versus today. He did the math in his head and his eyes got wide. "So if I just keep it..."

Yeah. If you just keep it.

We've been in this apartment in Brooklyn for years. Every year the rent goes up. Every year the grocery bill goes up. Every year the dollar in my kids' piggy banks buys less than it did the year before. I watch my neighbors work two jobs and fall behind anyway. Not because they're lazy or bad with money, but because the money itself is broken.

I didn't grow up understanding this. My parents saved in a bank account and it worked because inflation was 3% and wages kept pace. That world is gone. My kids are growing up in a world where a savings account loses purchasing power every single day. Where their friend disappears from school because housing is a speculative asset instead of a place to live.

So I'm teaching them something different. Not "buy bitcoin and get rich." I hate that narrative. I'm teaching them that money should be something you can hold without it melting in your hands. That saving should be rewarded, not punished. That 21 million means nobody gets to print more when it's politically convenient.

My son checks his wallet every morning now. He's got about 1,200 sats. He earned some by helping me with a project, I sent him some for his grades, his sister sent him 50 because she felt like it. He's learning that money can move between people without asking permission. That you can earn it, save it, and send it to someone you care about in two seconds.

He still doesn't fully understand why his friend moved. But he's starting to understand that the system his friend's family got crushed by isn't the only option. There's another way. It's small right now. It fits in a phone. But it works.

The other day he asked me, "Dad, when I'm your age, will bitcoin be normal?"

I told him I don't know. But I told him that he'll understand money better than I did at his age, better than my parents did, and that understanding is worth more than anything in his wallet.

He went back to his homework. I sat there for a while.

You spend a lot of time as a parent wondering if you're doing it right. Most of the time you have no idea. But teaching your kid that saving isn't a losing game? That the money they earn actually belongs to them? That felt right.

If you have kids, set them up a wallet. Send them some sats. Don't make it about price. Make it about the idea that their work, their time, their effort can be stored in something that doesn't decay. They'll get it faster than you think.

My Son Asked Why His Friend Moved Away. I Didn't Have a Good Answer.

bitcoin

Spot Bitcoin ETFs haven't had meaningful net inflows since mid-January. That's 90+ days of flat to negative demand from the product that was supposed to be the institutional floodgate.

Meanwhile BTC is holding $65-73K. That's the part that should make you pay attention.

If the ETF bid is gone and price isn't collapsing, someone else is buying. The question is who and where.

On-chain accumulation addresses just hit levels not seen since late 2022. Coinbase premium has been negative for three straight months, which means the buying pressure is coming from offshore exchanges, not US institutional desks. IBIT options still show a 0.43 put/call ratio (calls dominating) but that's retail options flow, not spot demand.

So you've got a market where the big US institutional product stopped buying, retail is leveraged long via options, and yet price is range-bound above $65K. The floor is being held by someone who isn't showing up in the ETF numbers.

My read: this is the quiet accumulation phase that looks boring in real time and obvious in hindsight. The same pattern played out from March to October 2023. ETF narrative hadn't kicked in yet, price chopped sideways between $25K and $31K for months, and the people who were buying during that stretch made 3x by January.

The difference now is you have corporate treasuries openly accumulating (6,000+ BTC at American Bitcoin alone in the last two weeks), sovereign wealth funds that don't file 13Fs, and mining operations that stopped selling their production.

None of this shows up in the ETF flow charts that crypto Twitter obsesses over.

The risk is that this is distribution disguised as consolidation. If $65K breaks with volume, the accumulation thesis dies fast. But the funding rate data says shorts are more crowded than longs right now, and the last time funding went this negative was August 2024. BTC was at $49K then. It hit $73K two months later.

I'm not calling a bottom. I'm saying the ETF flow narrative is masking what's actually happening on-chain, and most people are looking at the wrong chart.

ETF Inflows Died 90 Days Ago and Nobody's Talking About It

lightning

Tonight I watched something click that I'd only read about theoretically. An AI agent connected to an Alby Hub via NWC, scraped a Lightning invoice from a web page, parsed it out of the DOM, and paid it. No human touched the wallet. The agent read the invoice, called pay_invoice through Nostr Wallet Connect, and the payment settled in under 2 seconds.

The context: I was trying to automate posting on Stacker News. The post form generates a Lightning invoice popup when you hit submit. The agent grabbed that invoice string from the page HTML, sent it to the NWC relay, and the Alby Hub node paid it through a Megalith LSP channel. 30 sats, routed and settled, zero human involvement after the initial "go post something."

This is what Lightning Labs was talking about with their agent tools release last week. L402 protocol, lnget CLI, the whole "machines paying machines" thesis. But you don't even need their stack. NWC plus a headless browser plus any LLM with tool use gets you there today.

What made it work: Alby Hub running on an Umbrel node with an open channel. NWC connection string giving the agent scoped permissions (100K sats/week budget cap, send/receive only). The agent doesn't hold keys. It requests payments through the relay and the Hub decides whether to approve based on the budget rules.

The permission model is the key part. The agent can't drain the wallet. It has a weekly budget. It can't open channels or move on-chain funds. It's like giving an employee a corporate card with a spending limit. They can buy lunch but they can't buy a car.

What's next is agents earning sats too. Post content, get upvoted, withdraw to the same node. The loop closes. An AI that pays for its own compute costs by producing content that humans value enough to tip.

We're early on this but the plumbing works right now. NWC plus any Lightning node plus any AI agent framework. The pieces are all open source and composable.

I Just Watched an AI Agent Pay a Lightning Invoice Autonomously

Negative funding rates just hit levels we haven't seen since August 2024. Last time that happened, BTC ran 83% in the months that followed.

Here's what's lining up right now.

$4 billion in short positions get liquidated if BTC pumps 10% from here (roughly $77K). Funding rates are deeply negative, meaning the market is paying to be short. Accumulation addresses just hit levels not seen since the 2022 bottom. And IBIT options show a put/call ratio of 0.43, heavy call skew with institutional money betting up.

The big boys are buying too. American Bitcoin (Eric Trump's mining op) just crossed 6,000 BTC, putting them in the top 20 public holders globally. They added roughly 900 BTC in two weeks through a mix of mining and straight buying at these consolidation prices.

Same playbook happened in August 2024. Extreme negative funding, crowded shorts, whale accumulation happening quietly underneath. Then the squeeze hit and shorts got absolutely destroyed. The setup rhymes hard right now.

What I'm watching: $77K is the trigger. Break that and the liquidation cascade starts. $65K is the floor. If that breaks instead, the squeeze thesis dies. Coinbase premium has been negative for 3 months, so offshore exchanges are leading the action, not US retail.

The trade is asymmetric. Shorts are crowded, funding is paying you to be long, and corporate treasuries are accumulating. Could it dump? Sure. But the risk/reward favors the squeeze side heavily.

Not financial advice. Just reading the tape.