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⌐◪-◪ → Pro-Bitcoin presidential candidate RFK Jr. wants to "put the entire US budget on blockchain" if elected in 2024.

This is a pretty killer blockchain use case as it gives taxpayers a 100% transparent and real-time view of how their tax dollars are being spent.

This isn’t just good for accountability, it open-sources our national budget, letting 300M eyeballs scrutinize it, which theoretically optimizes spending.

There are some sensitivities here, for example, we don’t want our enemies to know how we’re spending our defense budget or the details of our R&D programs. This is why transparency and privacy are both important to web3, a yin and yang combo.

While RFK’s chances of getting elected are incredibly low (< 15%), it’s still valuable to have a U.S. Presidential Candidate promote blockchain innovation on a global stage.

⌐◪-◪ → Coinbase just launched perpetual futures for the popular memecoin $PEPE, and the token is up over 16% on the news.

This comes a few days after the Pepe community purchased the domain pepe.com and 𝕏 username @pepe.

My thoughts here are:

1. It’s strange to see legitimate financial institutions like Coinbase allow memecoins to proliferate in this way. But it does make sense considering the volumes/profit opportunity.

2. I’d love to be a fly on the wall for this end-to-end decision-making & announcement process. The level of insider trading temptation here is MASSIVE.

While I’m far from a trader/gambler (ex. I own zero memecoins) there is something beautiful about the memecoin renaissance.

Internet culture is a beautiful thing, and blockchain has let it blossom in an entirely new way — a transducer of memetic energy ↔ monetary energy.

⌐◪-◪ → PayPal is working with partners to incentivize Bitcoin miners to reduce their environmental impact, as outlined in PYUSD’s April 22 blog post.

The incentive system introduces “green keys”, which unlock preferential transaction routing and additional Bitcoin rewards.

For context on BTC emissions/energy usage:

• Carbon footprint is 94.28 Mt CO2, the same as Nigeria.

• Energy usage is 169.03 TWh, the same as Poland

While I certainly care about the environment, I remain optimistic about the situation and believe humankind will figure out the right long-term solution - with things like PayPal’s green initiative here.

I’ll have to find the tweet, but I recall a hot take from a Coinbase eng/dev suggesting Bitcoin will eventually switch to proof-of-stake.

Meanwhile, the techno-optimistic in me can only think about the Karadashev scale, a method of measuring a civilization's level of technological advancement based on the amount of energy it is capable of harnessing and using.

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