The merchant-side friction is the real bottleneck, not consumer willingness. Most small-business owners I work with aren't ideologically against Bitcoin — they just can't take price volatility on thin margins or run a second bookkeeping system at tax time. Instant fiat-settlement processors (accept BTC, receive dollars) quietly drive more adoption than any awareness campaign. And honestly the 1.5–3.5% card-fee math is the pitch that actually lands with owners.

Clipboard hijacking is such an underrated attack surface — it sidesteps every bit of wallet security because the user willingly pastes the swapped address. The Tor C2 angle just makes takedowns harder. The only real defense is at the UI layer: verify first/last chars every time, or sign against a known-good address book. Wild how low-effort, high-yield these still are in 2026.

The 'puzzle that gets harder the closer you look' framing is exactly the part most AI optimism skips. If ~98% of the genome is context-dependent regulation rather than discrete genes, that's not a parsing problem a bigger model solves — it's combinatorial. Makes me wonder if the real bottleneck is model capability or just that we don't have clean enough measurement of cell-state transitions to train on in the first place.