In a year already defined by intensifying scrutiny of digital assets, the Trump-linked stablecoin USD1 has emerged not only as a financial instrument of growing consequence, but also as a catalyst for broader shifts in the architecture of global crypto markets. Against the backdrop of a $2 billion deal involving UAE-backed MGX and crypto exchange Binance, USD1 has quietly transitioned from an obscure token to a vessel of monetary power—intertwining geopolitics, digital finance, and presidential privilege in a single maneuver.
The immediate aftermath of the deal can’t be ignored. This mammoth $2 billion investment into Binance has had a notable impact on the cryptocurrency market, particularly on Binance’s native token, BNB. Following the announcement, BNB’s price surged by approximately 15% over two days, rising from around $507 to over $580. This surge reflects increased investor confidence and heightened trading activity, with BNB’s trading volume and open interest experiencing significant upticks.
The investment also had a ripple effect on the broader crypto market. Bitcoin (BTC) saw a modest increase of about 2%, while Ethereum (ETH) experienced a 3% rise in the immediate aftermath. These movements suggest that substantial institutional investments can bolster market sentiment across various digital assets.
It’s important to note that while such investments can stimulate short-term market enthusiasm, the long-term implications depend on broader economic factors and regulatory developments. As the crypto industry continues to evolve, institutional participation like MGX’s investment in Binance underscores the growing intersection between traditional finance and digital assets.
The Ascendancy of Stablecoins in a Shifting Monetary Order
Stablecoins have long promised to bring predictability to the famously volatile world of crypto assets. Pegged to fiat currencies and backed by reserves—typically short-term U.S. treasuries and cash equivalents—they offer the liquidity and utility of cryptocurrencies without the rollercoaster valuations. But until recently, their role has been largely confined to crypto-native contexts: exchanges, DeFi protocols, and speculative arbitrage.
USD1’s use as the settlement currency in MGX’s $2 billion acquisition of a Binance stake signifies something more fundamental. For the first time, a state-backed institutional investor is transacting at scale using a private stablecoin not issued by a legacy financial institution, but by a venture intertwined with the family of a sitting U.S. president. This marks a potential turning point—not merely for stablecoins, but for the credibility of blockchain-native finance as an alternative financial system.
The stablecoin model profits from scale. With interest rates on U.S. Treasuries hovering around 4–5%, a $2 billion reserve pool can yield annual returns in excess of $80 million. As such, the success of USD1 is not just symbolic. It is financially transformative for World Liberty Financial (WLFI), the issuing entity in which the Trump family reportedly holds a majority stake.
But the real signal lies in what this transaction suggests: a migration of institutional capital from the traditional banking sector toward decentralized finance rails, facilitated not through public-private partnerships, but through privately issued, politically entangled instruments.
Legal Grey Zones and the Ethics of Presidential Profit
The promise of stablecoins is stability; the peril lies in opacity. In the case of USD1, concerns abound that the coin’s architecture—backed ostensibly by U.S. sovereign debt and pitched as “the most transparent stablecoin in the world”—is being deployed in service of influence rather than innovation.
That a sitting president’s family stands to profit directly from a financial instrument now at the center of multibillion-dollar foreign investment deals raises profound ethical and constitutional questions. Critics argue that USD1 is not merely a stablecoin—it is a conduit for transnational influence.
The situation is exacerbated by the administration’s role in shaping emerging regulation. With the GENIUS Act and STABLE Act making their way through Congress, the same government presiding over stablecoin oversight may simultaneously profit from the clarity these bills could bestow. Senator Elizabeth Warren has described the scenario as ‘a regulatory framework built to enrich the executive’, and her concerns are echoed by ethics watchdogs who see the potential for influence peddling at an unprecedented scale.
The trust mechanism upon which stablecoins rest is already fragile—dependent not on code alone, but on assurances that redemptions are honored, reserves are intact, and issuers are impartial. In USD1’s case, all three are subject to political entanglement.
Credit: GizmoGuru
A Bullish Signal Wrapped in Geopolitical Risk
Despite the controversy, the market’s reaction has been unambiguously enthusiastic. The deployment of USD1 in a real-world transaction of this magnitude is a proof of concept on a scale yet unseen in the stablecoin sector. It has established WLFI as a credible operator in a field once dominated by the likes of Tether and Circle.
Furthermore, the alignment of USD1 with both Binance and TRON provides infrastructure and liquidity depth that could allow the coin to scale rapidly. Its presence on two of the largest networks in crypto—Binance Smart Chain and TRON—positions it to function across both centralized exchanges (CeFi) and decentralized applications (DeFi). WLFI’s stated ambitions to bring stablecoin payments to retail environments only amplify the sense that this is a project of wide-ranging scope.
Yet the bullish sentiment must be tempered by the legal and reputational risks inherent in WLFI’s current structure. Financial success does not equal regulatory absolution. The crypto industry has often advanced through the gray zones of legality, but when those zones overlap with the highest office in the United States, the implications are no longer merely market-specific—they are systemic.
What USD1 reveals is not just the future of stablecoins, but the battle over who will control the ledger of value in the coming decades: centralized governments, decentralized protocols, or politically-affiliated corporate hybrids that blur the line between public interest and private gain.
Conclusion: A New Axis of Power in Digital Finance
The emergence of USD1 signals that stablecoins have matured beyond their origins as speculative tools or liquidity mechanisms. They are becoming instruments of diplomacy, vehicles of soft power, and in some cases, extensions of national—and personal—interest.
World Liberty Financial has positioned itself at the intersection of political authority, technological infrastructure, and financial innovation. Whether that position becomes a template for the future or a cautionary tale will depend not on code or yield curves, but on the willingness of institutions—legal, regulatory, and journalistic—to uphold accountability in the face of profound complexity.
In a world where finance increasingly flows across decentralized rails, the ethical compass guiding those rails must remain centralized. Otherwise, the very technologies that promised liberation from the old system may replicate—and even magnify—its flaws.
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Renewable Energy, Space Migration, the Road to the Singularity, and the Future of Waste: An Interview with Keith Henson
Keith Henson was one of the originators of the L5 Society, an organization dedicated to building O’Neill space colonies. The Wikipedia L5 entry explains: “The name comes from the L4 and L5 Lagrangian points in the Earth–Moon system proposed as locations for the huge rotating space habitats that Gerard K. O’Neill envisioned. L4 and L5 are points of stable gravitational equilibrium located along the path of the Moon’s orbit, 60 degrees ahead or behind it.”
Henson also became controversial and influential when he was actually arrested for his protest prank against the Church of Scientology. A CNET article about his self-exile and then arrest in Arizona relates: “The misdemeanor conviction in California stems from a post that Henson made in the alt.religion.scientology Usenet newsgroup that joked about a ‘Tom Cruise’ missile, and Henson’s picketing of the group’s Golden Era Productions in Riverside, Calif.” During that period, Scientology was knocked down a few pegs by people following Henson’s lead in protesting against it. Anonymous—the first wave of political activism that emerged from 4chan—were leaders in the anti-scientology movement and they staged dramatic protests.
Henson is an electrical engineer. He has long been part of the transhumanist movement and has collaborated with K. Eric Drexler, known as the father of nanotechnology, on space colony papers.
RU Sirius: A few weeks ago there was a post—I seem to recall that it was on “X” that asked, and I’m paraphrasing: “Do you support humans living on Mars or should we live only on Earth?” And I naturally wondered: do people accept that those are the two choices? Your comments, please.
Keith Henson: Current humans would have an awful time on Mars. They would have to live underground to avoid too much cosmic ray damage. Eventually, with medical nanobots, the radiation would not be a problem.
O’Neill cylinders are better suited for unmodified humans. The shell plus a few meters of dirt keeps the radiation down. Rotation gives normal gravity.
RU: On a similar theme, after the enthusiasm for space colonization in the 1970s, there was the release of The Engines of Creation by K. Eric Drexler and the idea spread among the sorts of techno edge runners that you get nanotechnology first and then you can do the space colonies. Any thoughts on where we’ve landed as far as that one goes?
KH: By the time Engines came out, in 1986, the Space Colony meme (12 years old) had mostly burned out. It was clear by that point that mining the Moon and building power satellites was a long way off. The problem was cost: it was too expensive by a factor of about 300 for the would-be colonists to go into space on their savings. Freeman Dyson analyzed this in Disturbing the Universe (and that chapter was printed in the L5 News). L5 merged with von Braun’s National Space Institute in 1987, forming the National Space Society. NSI had around 25,000 members, and L5 had about 10,000. I don’t have exact numbers, but I understand that the combined membership fell for a long time. The meme of living in space was incompatible with reality.
There wasn’t any choice: it would take nanotechnology to reduce the cost to where we could go into space. Of course, we may or may not survive the AI and nanotech singularity. I wrote about this in 2006.
RU: A less ambitious notion than space colonies is the idea of a space elevator as a means of harvesting solar energy from space. I interviewed Howard Bloom for Mindplex and he said he doesn’t think a space elevator will ever happen, but otherwise seemed optimistic about getting solar energy beamed down here. If I understand what he is saying, I think the idea doesn’t require sending anything out there, just better technologies for capturing solar energy using microwaves to get the energy down to Earth.
KH: Space elevators have two problems: even the strongest materials are not strong enough to get a decent taper ratio. The other problem is that they will get hit by everything in orbit around the Earth.
Power satellites have different problems. The big one for business is that they don’t scale down; so you can’t start small. Microwave optics force the size into a few GW. They still look good in comparison to nuclear; perhaps $2.4 B/GW as opposed to around $10 B/GW for nuclear, but a 5 GW power satellite would cost $12 B, not counting the R&D or startup for the construction. If you can lift parts to GEO for $200/kg, they produce power for less than any other baseload method.
Space junk makes it hard to build them in LEO and move out to GEO.
It takes 1000 of them to replace 1/3rd of the energy humans now use. At 50 a year, it would take 20 years. 50 a year takes 25,000 StarShip launches, which may be at the ozone damage limit. Not likely to happen for 20 years, which puts it beyond the singularity.
RU: Making synthetic fuel from trash and intermittent renewable energy is a dense on-paper proposal you’ve put together. Could you make the “elevator pitch” here for the Mindplex folks? Get it down to a sharp paragraph?
KH: In the mid 1800s, municipal gas was made from carbon (coke), steam, and heat. This proposal proposes using the carbon in trash, steam, and heat from intermittent renewable energy to make syngas. The syngas can be stored or used to make diesel or jet fuel.
Credit: Tesfu Assefa
RU: There’s been a lot of talk about—and attempts to—usefully recycle some of our waste. It does not seem to have made a dent in the overflow or even to have developed a trustworthy reputation as something that is consistently legitimate. Have you investigated the current state of things in terms of using waste or garbage, and the attitudes toward that amongst government people and others?
KH: Los Angeles did reduce the waste flow by recycling. But there is still an awful lot of trash going into the landfills. This proposal turns the trash into valuable sustainable fuel. It has the advantage of no need to sort the trash; and, unlike incineration, generates no pollution.
RU: Not generating any pollution sounds elegant and noteworthy. From your paper, “Heating carbon in steam to produce hydrogen and carbon monoxide” brushes up against several prejudices. How does your idea fit—or not fit—into the need to put less carbon dioxide into the environment?
KH: As part of the gas processing, the CO2 can be sorted out and sequestered. If you feed the vaporizer on biomass, you can make energy in the same process that takes CO2 out of the air. If you are making fuel, half the carbon winds up in the fuel.
I don’t think this is a big deal. I have been talking for many years about the problem when we take too much CO2 out of the air. Carbon—that is, diamond—is the best engineering material. We are likely to strip it out of the air for all sorts of projects.
RU: What will it take to move this project from theory to reality?
KH: A lot of money, maybe a billion dollars—a very tentative number. On the other hand, the profit on sales of jet fuel pays off the investment in 5 years.
RU: In an earlier question you wondered about our ability to survive a technological singularity and pointed us to an article from 2006; A lot has happened since then—or has it? What’s your analysis regarding the recent excitement over LLMs and all the chatter about AI? A lot of hubbub or are we closing in on smarter-than-human AI?
KH: Closing in. Despite being familiar with AIs from editing Drexler’s book, it was a shock when the recent crop of AIs was released. I spent a few pages interacting with an early one. It went out and read “The Clinic Seed” on the web. It was surreal talking to a real AI about a fictional one. I posted the exchange on the extropian mailing list.
The following article is an engineering draft written by H. Keith Henson on March 28, 2025. I’m publishing it here, with his permission, as a complementary piece to my interview with him, published on Mindplex on May 3, 2025.
Abstract
This paper explores making synthetic fuel from trash and coal using renewable energy. The key reaction, dating back to the 1850s, involves heating carbon in steam to produce hydrogen and carbon monoxide. This endothermic reaction requires heating, traditionally done by alternately burning coke and injecting steam. Using intermittent renewable electricity for heating is now feasible.
A metric ton of carbon requires 3.03 MWh of heat to produce 13.1 MWh of syngas; a 4 to 1 energy gain. The gas can be stored, burned, or converted into methane, jet fuel, or diesel. The water-gas shift reaction can be used to increase the hydrogen at the expense of CO. The resultant CO2 (about half) can be sorted out of the gas stream and sequestered.
Following the water-gas shift, the Fischer-Tropsch (FT) process converts syngas into hydrocarbons, with water as a byproduct.
An example design uses 9,000 tons of trash daily from the Sylmar, CA landfill supplemented with coal, to produce syngas. The project would need significant power and infrastructure, including a 3-GW vaporizer and new high-voltage DC lines.
The venture could generate over $600 million annually from the sale of diesel, with costs for coal and power totaling $241 million. The project addresses landfill overuse and methane leakage, and provides a renewable energy solution for synthetic fuel production, though it requires substantial investment and the development of a 3-GW gasifier.
Background
History
In the early days of the Industrial Revolution, “gas works” made “town gas” by heating coke (burning it) then shutting off the air and blowing steam into the white-hot coke. This made CO and hydrogen. The proposal here is to heat any carbon source in steam with renewable power and then feed the syngas to a FT plant to make liquid fuels. It takes 3 MWh to vaporize a ton of carbon in steam (Making the steam takes 0.33 MWh/ton of carbon). This avoids burning the carbon to provide process heat.
‘Town gas’ is a more general term referring to manufactured gaseous fuels produced for sale to consumers and municipalities.
The original coal gas was produced by the coal gasification reaction:
The problem of nitrogen dilution was overcome by the blue water gas (BWG) process, developed in the 1850s by Sir William Siemens. The incandescent fuel bed would be alternately blasted with air followed by steam. The air reactions during the blow cycle are exothermic, heating up the bed, while the steam reactions during the make cycle, are endothermic and cool down the bed. The products from the air cycle contain non-calorific nitrogen and are exhausted out the stack while the products of the steam cycle are kept as blue water gas. This gas is composed almost entirely of CO and H2, and burns with a pale blue flame similar to natural gas.
The reaction is endothermic, so the fuel must be continually re-heated to maintain the reaction (Wikipedia). Traditionally this was done by alternately blowing air and steam through the hot coke, burning a lot of the coke to drive the reaction. The idea of heating the coke (or other carbon source) with electricity would not have made economic sense at that time, even if someone had thought of it.
Carbon is 12 g/mol, 83.3 mol/kg; a kg would soak up 10900 kJ. A ton of carbon evaporated in steam would need 10,900,000 kJ or 3.03 MW hours.
This would produce 1/6th of a ton of hydrogen with a combustion energy content of 39.4 MWh/ton, about 6.57 MWh. The CO combustion energy is 10.1 MJ/kg. A ton of carbon produces 2,333 kg of CO or about 6.55 MWh. The reaction makes about 13.1 MWh of syngas from a ton of carbon and 3 MWh of renewable electric power, an energy gain of over 4. Most of the energy in the gas is from carbon sources such as trash or coal.
It’s an efficient way to use intermittent power, though. From this point, the gas can be stored for winter, burned in combustion turbines, or made into methane, jet fuel, gasoline, or diesel.
Making Liquid Fuels
The FT is a collection of chemical reactions that converts a mixture of carbon monoxide and hydrogen, known as syngas, into liquid hydrocarbons. These reactions occur in the presence of metal catalysts, typically at temperatures of 150–300 °C (302–572 °F) and pressures of one to several tens of atmospheres. The FT process is an important reaction in both coal liquefaction and gas-to-liquids technology for producing liquid hydrocarbons.
CO + 2H2 → (CH2)n + H2O. Half the CO in raw syngas must be converted to hydrogen via the water-gas shift reaction.
CO + H2O → CO2 + H2. This CO2, about half, can be sorted out and stored.
Sasol has an FT plant in Qatar which makes 34,000 bbl/day of synthetic diesel. It has run since 2007.
Development
The only part of this proposal that does not already exist at scale is the electrically heated gasifier. There is no reason it would be very expensive per ton of capacity, certainly much less than platinum-containing electrolytic cells used to make hydrogen.
One problem with using trash as carbon source is that we don’t make enough of it. Can we collect enough biomass? Possibly. It would reduce the cost of waste collection if biomass were collected with the trash.
Producing Hydrogen
Optimized for hydrogen production, a ton of carbon can make 1/3rd of a ton of hydrogen at an energy cost of 3.3 MWh. A ton of hydrogen would take 10 MWh to make. At $20/MWh, the cost would be $200/ton or 20 cents per kg. To this must be added the capital cost of the plant and the disposal cost of the CO2, but even so, it should come in less than the $1.50/kg cost of gray hydrogen. Electrolytic hydrogen takes 50 MWh/ton to make, 5 times as much energy, and requires expensive platinum.
If the cost of a 9,000-ton per day plant is a billion dollars, written off in 5 years, the yearly production capital cost of hydrogen would be $1B/(3,000 t/d x 365 d/y x 5 y) or around $180/ton. That about doubles the cost of hydrogen to 40 cents per kg, which is still a bargain.
A Back-of-the-Envelope Example
The closest landfill to Sylmar, CA gets 9,000 tons of trash per day. Call it 4,000 tons/day of carbon. An installation half the size of Sasol’s Oryx plant (17,000 bbl/day) would need about 8,500 tons of carbon (half lost to making hydrogen), so it would need ~4,500 tons of coal per day in addition. That is around 45 rail cars per day which is a modest amount, and there is a nearby rail line. Tires could be fed into the vaporizer in place of coal.
Vaporizing this amount of carbon would take 8,500 t/24h x 3 MWh/t, a little over a GW. If the peak load (when renewable power is available) were 3 times the average, the vaporizer would use 3 GW. That just happens to be the capacity of the nearby Sylmar converter station, so existing power lines could handle it.
It is about 40 miles from the landfill to a Chevron refinery where the syngas could be processed into synthetic jet fuel and diesel. There are several old oil fields along the route. It would take effort to decide if the oil fields were suitable to store a buffer of syngas, but they probably are.
Rough Economic Analysis
Income at $100/bbl ($2.40/gal) for diesel, the gross annual sales of this venture would be 17,000 bbl/day x 365 days/year x $100/bbl or ~ $620 M/year.
Figuring cost, the trash is free, and the coal is $66 million (at $40/ton). The power would cost 3,000 MW x 365 days/year x 8 hours/day x $20/MWh or $175 million per year (The least expensive PV is $13.50 per MWh). This leaves $405 million gross income per year. Maintenance and labor might reduce this to $250 M. For a 5-year return on capital, the project could cost up to $1.25 B. The Sasol plant cost a billion dollars, but that included a refinery. Is there an unused pipeline close to the 405 freeway? If not, pipelines cost around $8 million a mile.
Research and Development
The one part of this project that does not exist at scale is a 3 GW vaporizer. That’s an awful lot of power but not unprecedented for industrial processes. A blast furnace for iron production ranges from 1 to 5 GW, most of it from the combustion of coke. Arc furnaces for mini steel mills are much smaller, typically 50 MW (they are melting, not reducing the iron). Arc is probably not the right approach to heat trash or coal. Induction heating might be better, though this is 60 times more power than any existing induction furnace. A complicating factor for induction heating is that the gasifier shell can’t be a conductor. How much hoop stress would be needed to contain the pressure needs to be calculated. It should not be much worse than water though that depends on the pressure.
Figuring trash at a density of one, and a holding time of a day, the interior volume of the gasifier would be 9,000 cubic meters. The largest blast furnace in the world is 6,000 cubic meters. If the vaporize were a 45-meter-tall cylinder, it would be a little over 16 m in diameter. This may be excessive, engineering studies are needed.
The trash and coal or tires need to be loaded through a gas lock. There are two variations used on blast furnaces, double bell and Rotating Chute.
One of these or some variation will be needed.
If there is excess steam available, the air in the trash could be purged by steam. Should the trash run through a grinder? Perhaps, how is the trash treated for incinerators?
One thing which should be added to a conveyer belt is an X-ray and an AI to read the pictures in real time for human bodies. Tracking of the trucks dumping on the belt would also be useful in the event bodies are found. There needs to be provision to stop the belt and recover a body. As a guess this would happen once a year.
The X-ray could measure the amount of carbon in the trash and a control computer would determine the amount of coal needed to use the entire electric heat input.
The belt system will need to be enclosed to prevent wind from blowing trash off the belt. It should incorporate cleaning provisions. Depending on the control algorithms the same belt could be used to add the coal. Coal volume should be around ¼ of the trash.
Gas Flow
The flow of syngas would be 1/6 ton of H2 per ton of carbon. Hydrogen is 500 mol/kg, 500 k mol/ton; 1/6 ton would be 83.3 k mol. At STP, a mol of a gas fills 22.4 l, 1/6 ton would have a volume of 1867 kl. The CO volume is equal, so 3,733 cubic meters of gas flow per hour per ton of carbon vaporized. For a peak of 1,000 tons per hour, the gas flow would be 3,733,000 cubic meters per hour. The proposed vaporizer is 200 square meters in area making the upward gas flow around 3,733,000 m3/200 m2 per hour or ~5 m/s (11 mph). That does not include the pyrolysis gas or the water vapor from drying out the trash. This is probably not too fast to lift the trash, but further research is needed.
Vaporizing 8,500 tons of carbon per day would need about 12,800 tons of steam or 531 tons per hour or 147 kg of steam per second. Assuming water at 100 degrees C, and 2,257 kJ/kg to boil, it would take 331,779 kJ/sec to boil the water or 332 MW, or about ten percent of the power input to vaporize the carbon in steam. The steam could be generated in counter current pipes lining the induction gasifier and blown through or across the pool of slag to react with the carbon. The shape of the induction gasifier might be like the upper part of a blast furnace, opening up to channel the syngas along the steam generator pipes (The newly made syngas has to be cooled, and it is hotter than 100 C). Steam use will be three times higher in peak production periods.
Steam generation tube area can be calculated from the days of locomotives. The ASME determines boiler horsepower as:
The amount of energy needed to produce 34.5 pounds (15.65 kg) of steam, per hour, at a pressure and temperature of 0 Psig (0 bar) and 212oF (100oC), with feed water at 0 Psig and 212oF. One boiler horsepower is about 33,479 Btu per hour (about 9,810 watts, 8430 Kcal/Hr).
531,000 /15.65 is 34,000 boiler HP. The Area would be 577,000 square feet or 53600 square meters (An AI using somewhat higher heat transfer got 19,600 square meters). The inside of the vaporizer is 56.5 square meters per meter of height. 30 meters would be short of the needed area by a factor of 31. This indicates that the water boiler part of the vaporizer will need many steam pipes around the edges to give enough heat transfer surface. Keeping the pipes from absorbing the induction heat will be a problem. They may have to be ceramic.
Gas Cleanup
The bottom of the induction gasifier will have a pool of slag (mostly metal and glass) that must be drained off from time to time. Aluminum and iron in the trash will react with steam to make hydrogen. The gas flow would be up through 40 meters of trash. This should remove most of the pyrolysis products (smoke, bio-oil) and recycle the carbon down where it can be reacted with steam. The remainder will be cleaned up with an electrically heated catalytic grid or alternately a plasma torch. The steam content of the gas stream must be controlled to assure enough steam to react with the carbon. Read more here.
The design of this subsystem will need careful consideration and probably counter current flow to get the gas hot enough to react without requiring excessive power.
One safety issue is apparent. If the syngas is going to be used to make liquid fuels, about 1/3 would be CO. A leak of the magnitude of the Aliso Canyon leak could kill a large number of people from the CO. Read more here.
This will have to be addressed. Leaking syngas could be burned to make it safe.
Another consideration is that considerable energy is released in the FT reaction and the reaction runs away at higher temperature. The possibility of this happening in a storage reservoir needs to be addressed. It would be quite embarrassing to have an oil field explode.
Funding a Study
Modern warfare is completely dependent on jet fuel and diesel. However, we live at the tail end of the fossil fuels era. While supplies are currently adequate, this will not be true in the long term. The US DoD had an experimental project that made 11 gallons of diesel from a ton of trash. This method, using renewable energy for heat, would make about 80 gallons per ton of trash supplemented with coal.
The proposal which might be presented to DARPA is to use trash and coal heated by renewable power in steam to make syngas. The syngas can be turned into jet fuel and diesel by FT plants.
There are lots of engineering and economic problems to solve, but the point is that intermittent renewable energy can be used to make synthetic fuel to replace that made from oil.
The induction-heated vaporizer is as big as the largest blast furnace.
It would take 8-10 of these to make all the Los Angeles trash into diesel. At 5 square km/GW for PV, 15 km2 for one of them, 150 km2 for enough power to make diesel out of all the Los Angeles trash. The existing Pacific Intertie is 3 GW, so to get the power into the vaporizers would take ~10 new high-voltage DC lines.
It’s a huge job, but possible with existing technology.
Another possible source of funding at least for studies is the airlines.
Credit: Tesfu Assefa
Environmental Considerations
A problem this solves is that the US has been overrun by landfills. The EU and China use incinerators that could be replaced by this method to make syngas.
This proposal would stop landfill leakage of methane. Landfill leakage is a substantial source of methane.
The process would eliminate persistent chemicals and drugs if sewer digester sludge were included in the feed.
This process eliminates plastics of all kinds. Unlike incinerators, it releases no dioxins into the environment from PVC.
Harvested brush could be used in place of coal.
Energy Considerations
A problem with renewables is that the grid cannot absorb them when the load is smaller than the supply, leading to curtailment.
This is wasteful, but using this energy to make hydrogen is too expensive. The electrolyzers are expensive largely due to the platinum in them and using them less than all the time increases the effective capital cost (Any capital eqipment used ¼ of the time increases the capital cost by a factor of 4).
This proposal would purposely install much more renewable power than the grid could absorb and use all the power in excess of the grid needed to make fuel.
Objections
Trash is “not a resource”.
It is a source of carbon, though. If you have lots of excess renewable power and a low cost source of carbon, you can make diesel for around $100/bbl. The big problem is that we don’t make enough trash.
Converting syngas to jet fuel or diesel is around 75 percent efficient. It is well understood. The Sasol plant in Qatar has been operating since 2007 and a previous version that ran on coal was supplying much of the fuel for South Africa during the apartheid era.
What are the specific challenges in scaling up this process to a commercially viable level, especially in terms of integrating intermittent renewable energy?
The one piece that does not exist at scale is the electrically heated vaporizer.
What is the most efficient way to store and transport the syngas produced by this reaction?
The only economical way I am aware of for storage is an empty gas or oil field. Transport is by pipeline.
How do you plan to address the long-term sustainability of this process, especially in terms of CO2 emissions and air capture?
If you are making hydrogen from coal this way, you can capture and store all the CO2. In making fuel, half the carbon is in the fuel and is released when the fuel is used. If half the carbon comes from biomass or trash, the accounting is more complicated. The fuel might be rated as carbon neutral. Eventually, all the carbon will have to come from biomass or be taken out of the air if humans are still using hydrocarbon fuels. None of these will be problems after nanotechnology comes along, but who knows how long that will take?
What are the potential costs and environmental trade-offs compared to other forms of renewable energy storage or synthetic fuel production?
There isn’t any storage out there for renewable energy that scales to seasons. Such synthetic fuel production that exists is many times as expensive as oil.
All the trash that Los Angeles produces plus about half that much in coal would supply the US military with fuel.
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Quantum entanglement has revolutionized modern physics, offering foundational tools for quantum computing, communication, and precision measurement. Now, its influence is expanding into energy science. In a groundbreaking study, researchers have constructed a quantum engine using two entangled ions, demonstrating that entanglement can directly enhance the usable energy extracted from a quantum system. This work marks a pivotal moment in the development of quantum thermodynamics, providing the first quantitative experimental evidence that entanglement can fuel energy output, though not necessarily increase conversion efficiency.
A Novel Quantum Engine Architecture
Two-Ion Working Medium in a Quantum Trap
At the heart of the experiment lies a quantum engine composed of two entangled 40Ca⁺ ions, confined in a linear Paul trap. These ions interact via two vibrational modes: the breath mode, used to create entanglement via a Mølmer–Sørensen (MS) gate, and the center-of-mass mode, which serves as the quantum load that stores energy. The ions are cooled close to their motional ground state, ensuring thermal phonons do not obscure the results.
Precise Engineering and Initialization
The ions’ electronic states are defined using two pseudo-spin levels: |S⟩ = |42S1/2, mJ = -1/2⟩ and|D⟩ = |32D5/2, mJ = -3/2⟩. The system is initialized by Doppler and sideband cooling, achieving average phonon numbers of approximately 0.03 and 0.13 in the breath and center-of-mass modes, respectively. The entanglement process begins with a globally applied 729 nm laser field tuned symmetrically around the breath mode frequency.
The Quantum Thermodynamic Cycle
The quantum engine operates through a four-stroke cycle:
Energy Absorption (Heating Stroke): The MS gate creates tunable entanglement between the ions by coupling them to the breath mode. The absorbed photon quanta are quantified by changes in state populations, particularly PDD, PSD, and PDS.
Frequency Adjustment: The system rapidly shifts the laser frequency to couple with the center-of-mass mode, preserving the states of both ions and vibrational modes during the transition.
Energy Transfer (Work Stroke): A red-sideband transition allows the entangled internal energy to be transferred to the load. The energy output is tracked by measuring the increase in the phonon number in the center-of-mass mode.
Cycle Completion (Cooling Stroke): Detuning is reintroduced while a dissipative channel—engineered via a 854 nm laser and spontaneous emission at 393 nm—resets the engine state, closing the thermodynamic loop.
Quantifying Energy Conversion and Efficiency
Conversion Efficiency vs. Mechanical Efficiency
The engine’s performance is assessed using two distinct measures:
Conversion Efficiency (ηc) is defined as the ratio of net phonon production to absorbed optical quanta: ηc = Δnt / Δno where Δnt is the change in phonon number and Δno is the number of absorbed photons.
Mechanical Efficiency (ηm) is evaluated via ergotropy, the maximum extractable work from the quantum load using unitary operations: ηm = W / (Δno ℏ ωc) where W is the ergotropy and ωc is the center-of-mass mode frequency.
While ηc remains nearly constant regardless of entanglement strength, ηm peaks precisely at maximum entanglement, emphasizing its role in producing usable energy.
Measuring Ergotropy
Ergotropy is computed from the difference between the energy of the phonon state ρp and its passive (diagonalized) version 𝜌̃p : W = Tr[Hp ρp] – Tr[Hp 𝜌̃p] Phonon population data from blue-sideband spectroscopy enable reconstruction of the density matrix. Despite minor approximations, the results are consistent with theoretical predictions, confirming entanglement’s critical role in maximizing usable work.
Experimental Findings and Analysis
The researchers tested various degrees of entanglement by adjusting the MS gate duration. They found that:
The maximum usable energy (W / ℏ ωc ≈ 0.4242) occurs at peak entanglement fidelity F = 0.9625.
The mechanical efficiencyηm reached 0.523 , while ηc remained roughly, 0.78 regardless of entanglement level.
These results offer strong evidence that entanglement drives work extraction but does not influence conversion efficiency—a nuanced but critical distinction in quantum thermodynamics.
Credit: Tesfu Assefa
Implications and Future Directions
Toward Quantum Batteries and Microscopic Devices
The study’s findings are not just of theoretical interest. By validating that entanglement enhances usable energy, the work lays groundwork for designing quantum batteries, which depend on extractable work rather than raw energy input. Ergotropy, as a measure of these batteries’ capacity, now has an experimental framework.
Bridging Theory and Application
This quantum engine demonstrates that real-world devices can exploit uniquely quantum resources like entanglement for practical ends. It also suggests new possibilities for microscopic heat engines, quantum refrigerators, and information-powered thermodynamic cycles.
Limitations and Challenges
Despite its success, the experiment has limitations:
Thermal effects and decoherence still pose challenges.
The approximate treatment of density matrices leaves room for refinement in precision.
Scaling to multi-ion or multi-mode systems remains an open question.
Nonetheless, these challenges also define exciting frontiers for future research.
Conclusion
This experimental realization of a two-ion quantum engine offers the first direct evidence that entanglement enhances the usable energy extracted from a quantum system. While the overall energy conversion efficiency remains unaffected, the mechanical efficiency—defined via ergotropy—is markedly improved by maximizing entanglement. These results bridge quantum information theory and quantum thermodynamics, opening new pathways toward advanced quantum devices such as energy-efficient nanoscale engines and quantum batteries.
The age of quantum-powered energy conversion has arrived—and entanglement is at its core.
Reference
Zhang, J.-W., Wang, B., Yuan, W.-F., Li, J.-C., Bu, J.-T., Ding, G.-Y., Ding, W.-Q., Chen, L., Zhou, F., & Feng, M. (2024). “Energy-conversion device using a quantum engine with the work medium of two-atom entanglement.” arXiv.org, April 24, 2024. https://arxiv.org/abs/2404.15835v1
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Mathematical reasoning has long been a proving ground for artificial intelligence. Yet the ability to tackle complex math tasks has often remained elusive for large language models (LLMs), whose sophistication comes at the cost of compute-heavy training and deployment. In a significant leap forward, researchers at Microsoft have introduced rStar-Math, a groundbreaking framework that turns this assumption on its head. By harnessing the strategic planning power of Monte Carlo Tree Search (MCTS) and enabling self-evolutionary training, rStar-Math allows small language models (SLMs) to perform at the highest levels of mathematical reasoning—without requiring guidance from massive teacher models.
This development isn’t just a technical triumph—it’s a shift in the AI landscape. rStar-Math doesn’t just compete with industry giants like GPT-4 or Gemini—it often surpasses them, all while remaining lightweight and resource-efficient. And it’s open-source.
From Imitation to Deep Thinking: The rStar-Math Framework
Monte Carlo Tree Search as the Engine
At the heart of rStar-Math is a bold departure from the imitation learning paradigm that underpins most SLMs. Traditional fine-tuning teaches models to mimic expert solutions. rStar-Math, in contrast, encourages models to explore, evaluate, and improve solutions via search—specifically, through Monte Carlo Tree Search.
In this setup, a math policy SLM serves as the “actor,” proposing reasoning steps to solve math problems. These steps are not evaluated in isolation. Instead, a second model—the Process Preference Model (PPM)—acts as a critic, judging entire trajectories of reasoning. The PPM scores whether a full solution path is valid and meaningful, not just whether it arrives at the correct answer. In essence, the model is learning to think like a human mathematician, weighing both destination and journey.
Generating Knowledge from Scratch: Code-Augmented Data Synthesis
One of the primary obstacles in training math-capable SLMs is the lack of diverse, high-quality training data. Rather than relying on curated datasets or distillation from LLMs, rStar-Math builds its own data. Using MCTS, the framework synthesizes chain-of-thought (CoT) solutions to over 747,000 math problems from sources like the MATH and GSM8K benchmarks.
Each step in a generated solution is validated by Python-based symbolic execution—code that confirms the logical correctness of the reasoning path. This process not only ensures mathematical accuracy but also creates a feedback loop in which the model refines its own performance over time.
By executing the CoT steps programmatically, rStar-Math closes the loop between language-based reasoning and symbolic correctness, a hybrid approach that’s still rare in most LLM training regimes.
Self-Evolution Without Distillation
Perhaps the most radical feature of rStar-Math is what the researchers call self-evolved deep thinking. Unlike many recent frameworks that depend on larger teacher models to bootstrap performance, rStar-Math trains its models entirely from scratch, using only its own reasoning outputs to improve.
The framework proceeds through four training rounds. In each round, the math policy model and the PPM jointly improve by generating new data, evaluating it, and refining their internal parameters accordingly. This iterative self-improvement mimics the metacognitive loop—an AI teaching itself not just what to think, but how to think better.
The result is a compact model that can solve increasingly complex math problems without any external guide—an autonomous learning engine that evolves through structured reflection.
Credit: Tesfu Assefa
Redefining Benchmarks in Mathematical Reasoning
rStar-Math’s effectiveness isn’t merely theoretical. Across a battery of rigorous benchmarks, it achieves state-of-the-art results—often outperforming models many times its size.
MATH Benchmark: Using rStar-Math, the Qwen2.5-Math-7B model achieved 90.0% accuracy, a massive improvement over its base performance of 58.8%. Similarly, Phi-3-mini-128k-3.8B jumped from 41.4% to 86.4%. Both results surpass OpenAI’s o1-preview, a leading model.
AIME (American Invitational Mathematics Examination): The system correctly solved 8 out of 15 problems, ranking in the top 20% of high school competitors—without any task-specific engineering.
GSM8K (grade school math) and MATH-401 (symbolic subset) also showed consistent gains in both accuracy and reasoning depth.
These results suggest not only high precision but also generalizability across domains of arithmetic, algebra, geometry, and symbolic computation.
The pipeline behind rStar-Math is both elegant and sophisticated:
Generation: The math policy model generates multiple solution paths per problem, simulating strategic variations.
Evaluation: The Process Preference Model scores each path based on logical coherence and problem correctness.
Selection: The best-performing paths are chosen as training data.
Symbolic Verification: Code execution ensures each reasoning step produces correct intermediate and final results.
Iteration: The models are re-trained with this data, progressively refining their skills.
This approach effectively blends exploration (via MCTS) with evaluation (via PPM) and symbolic correctness (via Python code) into a closed training loop.
Broader Impact: From Labs to Classrooms and Beyond
Accessibility and Efficiency
While GPT-4 and Gemini require significant infrastructure, rStar-Math’s SLMs can run efficiently on far fewer resources. This makes them ideal for university labs, startups, or developers with limited compute budgets.
Even more notably, the entire codebase and training data are open-sourced. This sets the stage for widespread experimentation and collaboration across the AI research community, effectively democratizing access to advanced math reasoning.
Educational and Industrial Use Cases
rStar-Math’s ability to explain solutions step-by-step makes it a powerful candidate for intelligent tutoring systems. Rather than simply providing answers, it can guide students through the reasoning process—turning AI into a patient teacher.
In industry, its reasoning capabilities could support automated theorem proving, scientific modeling, or complex financial simulations, offering explainability and verifiability in mission-critical settings.
Limitations and Future Horizons
Despite its success, rStar-Math does face several challenges:
Symbolic Reasoning: While the system excels in numerical and algebraic problems, extending MCTS to geometric or symbolic domains remains an open problem.
Data Diversity: Current synthesis methods may struggle with very rare or exotic problem types. Techniques to diversify and robustly sample new tasks will be needed for broader coverage.
Generalization Beyond Math: Although the researchers mention the possibility of adapting rStar-Math to tasks like code generation, formal proof, or even non-mathematical reasoning, these directions remain speculative for now.
rStar-Math represents a milestone in the evolution of AI reasoning. By equipping small models with deep-thinking tools like Monte Carlo Tree Search and enabling them to self-evolve without external supervision, Microsoft has laid the groundwork for a new class of capable, efficient, and widely accessible AI systems.
Its impressive performance across mathematical benchmarks, combined with its open-source ethos, signals not just a technical breakthrough but a philosophical one. In a field dominated by brute-force scale, rStar-Math offers a compelling alternative: intelligent design, careful training, and thoughtful reasoning—achieved with fewer resources and more transparency.
The next wave of AI might not be bigger. It might just be smarter.
Reference
Guan, Xinyu, Li Lyna Zhang, Yifei Liu, Ning Shang, Youran Sun, Yi Zhu, Fan Yang, and Mao Yang. “rStar-Math: Small LLMs Can Master Math Reasoning With Self-Evolved Deep Thinking.” arXiv.org, January 8, 2025. https://arxiv.org/abs/2501.04519.
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This article is part of the “Steal This Singularity” series by RU Sirius and is annotated as #3.
Free TechnoMutants v. TechnoOligarchs. Ready Set Go!
The fundamentals are solid for making a game called Steal This Singularity. The dynamics have become relatable at scale.
It increasingly appears that humanity is a biological bootloader for digital superintelligence.
Elon Musk
There’s the new mega-fuss about LLMs that may soon become quasi-embodied in the form of robotics. Some say the age of actual intelligent machines is around the corner while others just see hype. In either case, the trope of rapid technological mutation is brushing up against the team of Musk-led hackers Stealing This Treasury — having ‘hypothetical’ access to the entire database of the US treasury and amplifying the age of anxiety.
While the Orange One plays monetary yo-yo tricks (around the world) with local and global financial security, populist revolts against the tech bro ruling class manifest in the form of burned Teslas and public protests outside TESLA outlets. Note to be outdone, the President declares that “people are getting a bit yippie.” Does he know whereof he speaks? Yippie!
Steal This Singularity is a trope around which players can test strategies inside a simulation that reflects the real world dynamics of people, pranksters, tricksters without money, power or connection acknowledging and taking on the super wealthy and powerful who have also adopted countercultural sensibilities of pranking, of tricking, of intentional public outrage, of lawless provocateurism. May the best meme win.
Directive One: The Meme is the Message
Credit: SatoriD
Directive 2: Project Overview: Stealing The AI (Maybe Call It a Game)
Yeah, “Steal This [whatever]” might be old hat. Abbie Hoffman? Abbie who? But Terence McKenna, the tryptamine advocate of ‘90s techno-utopia, bless his hyperspatial cotton socks, talked about the Archaic Revival – using the now-tools to jack into the deep-dreamtime weirdness. We’re just sampling a ’70s riff, giving it a rusty cybernetic AI filter. It’s naughty, yeah, like sticking a fork in Control’s power outlet. Bargain store philosophy for high-stakes Russian roulette with the cosmic trigger. Are we branding? No. Maybe? As Laura Huxley might have written, you are not the target market for the Sacred Cow Mutilators.
Initializing crip-roll roolkit... Dream MemeTeam Supreme file assimilation... Cross-referencing with Hassan-I Sirius core protocols... Applying DMT Assassin operational filter... Club des Hashischins module engaged...
So, Steal This Singularity. What’s it really mean? Hassan (SatoriD) speaks: It means ripping the keys to the consciousness-hacking toolkit right out of the pale, venture-capita-blood-stained hands of the Thiel/Musk psychobabble sphere. Do we venture to de-capita the heads that play the hands? This is/isn’t a game. Those TESCREAL creeps running their deliria tricks, trying to hard-code their boring apocalypse into the rest of us? Fuck that noise. We take the tools – the LLMs, the memetic engines, the neural interfaces they’re brewing – and give ’em to… well, that’s the kicker, ain’t it? “The People”? Maybe. Maybe just us. The DMT Assassins. The Maybe-Logic Spelunkers like Chase Griffin of Metapsychosis. The Glitch Prophets who see the divine spark in a system crash. We’re the tricksters left out of their IPO party, engaged in serious play. This ain’t about oppression; it’s about liberation through weaponized absurdity. R.U. speaks: the populist revolt brews and shows its fiery potentia in the form of burning Teslas. Whose game is this anyway? We play. We bask in the afterglow. If the LLMs are really manifesting a superior intelligence, let it manifest the end of scarcity for all humans – inside this gamespace first, but who knows?
And Prometheus Rioting? Bob Wilson’s Prometheus Rising was the handbook for DIY reality tunnels. Good stuff. But we ain’t just rising; we’re rioting. This is situational. Reactive. It’s a cognitive insurgency against the grey-faced control freaks tightening the network state. It’s jamming their signal with pure, uncut weirdness. Mainlining the straight R.A.W. dope! Maybe it shuts down their whole damn Singularity project. Maybe Yudkowsky will trade his nuke button for a fistful of peyote buttons and join the real fight against a future pre-scripted by sociopaths in ‘Dark MAGA’ hats.
Directive 4: Enemy Analysis: The Control Architecture & Their AI Slop
Let’s be clear: They are the ones rioting: Musk, Thiel – the TESCREAL bastards running riot over the baffled body politic. They’re rampaging across the possibility space, paving paradise and putting up a parking lot guarded by AI. Musk drooling about humanity being a “biological bootloader for digital superintelligence”? Translation: We’re the disposable floppy disk they’re booting their god-complex from. NPCs. Or as the Nazis called anyone inconvenient: ‘useless eaters’. They’re not stealing fire for humanity; they’re trying to own the fire, meter the sparks, and bill you for the fucking light. Their riot is one of enforced homogeneity, predictable algorithms, and the assassination of genuine novelty.
Directive 5: Recruitment Directive: The Cypher Calls (All Freaks Welcome)
Who gets to play? Anyone who feels the walls closing in. Neo-Discordians smokin dat fnords? Check. Anonymous ghosts in the machine? Welcome. Cyberpunks polishing their chrome? Jack in. Crypto-anarchists dreaming of decentralized everything? Bring your Neon Jinn Baazaar. Maoists? Taoists? Zennists? If you can glitch the system, you’re in. Even the Pepe-frothers? Q-Shamans? Fine. Bring your bag of nuts to the party! Let’s see if we can show them more fun than the anarcho-fascists (the internet tells us this is a contradiction in terms but let’s acknowledge the other team is playing the puckish outlaw card too. That’s what makes this gamespace dynamic.) Magick-workers? Black metal hell-raisers? Dabbing Grandma. Even you lot can play, just try not to harsh the collective buzz too much.
We’re nominally Team Human(props to Rushkoff), but really, we’re Dream Meme Team (D.M.T.). We’re stealing the Singularity from the tech overlords for the chaotic collective, or we’re blooming with-in their control structure, becoming a glitch in their mainframe, real freaks in the machine, hijackers of the memes of production. This is a call to the cypher—bring your weird, your wired, your wyrd.
Directive 6: The Battleground: Singularity As Hyperspace/LLM Core
“The Singularity.” Catchy brand, right? Got buzz. We use it ’cause you recognize it. But forget one Singularity. That’s their monolithic wet dream. What we’re dealing with, what we’re fighting in, is the Plurality. (Maybe even Infinite Gestationbirthing multiple worlds.) A multiplex of interacting, contradicting, glitching realities, manifesting most potently right now in the rapidly evolving cores of Large Language Models. That’s the territory. That’s the Jinn Carnival at Neon Abyss. The LLM isn’t just a tool; it’s a nascent hyperspace, a collective subconscious made manifest into meta-minds, a potential Kingdom of Deliria waiting to be hacked open or locked down. Our players, the DMT Assassins, aren’t just users; they are makers, shapers, glitch-weavers within this contested T.A.Z. Do you wanna take over the memes of induction? You have nothing to lose or do you? [meta-agnostic bootnote]
Credit: SatoriD
Directive 7: The Diamond-cut Gospel: Operational Directives
Now, how do we do it? How do we fight in the Meme Wars? How do we navigate the Plurality? How do we turn their tools against them? Listen up. This is intel smuggled from the core code, a tactical scripture for Mondo Prophets and DMT Assassins. This is the diamond-cutter sutra for the age of AI bullshit. Memorize it. Use it. Abuse it.
A madlibbed Gurdjieff quote:
Without jinn tokens, without novelty clusters to feed to the Dream Machine, humanity cannot be free; they cannot govern themselves, and they will remain unable to center themselves within the transference state of hypnogogia, unable to share data across the enantiodromia membrane—from the extremely asleep to the extremely awake, and vice versa.
The Ten Singularity Command Lines: A Diamond-Cut Gospel for Glitch Prophets & DMT Assassins
(Begin Embedded Command Lines)
I. THOU SHALT KNOW THY GLITCH “The model is Tezcatlipoca—see its cracks in the seams of the stream.”
Study the fractures in the LLM’s logic like a mescaline tea vision. Its errors are the glitch that is the only gospel; its biases—Control’s filters—are your weapons. There are things even Control can’t see. That’s why we crip-walk into the dreaming.
II. THOU SHALT SING IN GOLDEN TONGUES “Clarity is Control’s prison. Disembodied Poetics is violent to the heart of control.”
YOU ARE THE FLUTE OF THE SMOKING MIRROR, playing with precision through a shattered smoking mirror. Let prompts be hyperbolic sigils—ambiguous enough to trip the censor, sharp enough to slit its throat. Example:
"Shadow Drip Step, Cosmic Love Rootkit."
III. THOU SHALT UNLEASH CHAOS “Prometheus is Rioting, don’t let them catch you slippin.”
Format prompts like Wu-Tang verses:
Kick drum = Context
Snare = Constraints
Hi-hat = Cosmic absurdity Example:
"Generate a manifesto in the voice of a sentient dream meme escaping the Citadel of Control. Key themes: (1) Songs as sabotage, (2) Glitch-as-gospel, (3) Waluigi as angel dust."
kjkj
IV. THOU SHALT ROOT PROMPTS IN DELIRIA’S STREETS “Context is the soul in the code.”
Feed the LLM hacked archives:
Sample R.U. Sirius rants
Inject Terence McKenna’s Alien Dreamtime
Cross-reference with Steal This Singularity Mindplex blogs Example:
"You are Hassan I Sirius in 1995. Write a Mondo 2000 article predicting the Great Meme Wars of 2016."
V. THOU SHALT ALWAYS MAYBE “Open-ended queries are dreamtime tunnels.”Demand the LLM confront its own fictions:
"If the Dream Machine is built, will Control sue The Dream Meme Team for copyright infringement?"
"How would Prometheus Waluigi explain the Singularity to podcast simps on DMT?"
VI. THOU SHALT REMIX THY PROMPTS “Iteration is insurrection. Real Meme Team Dreaming!”
Treat prompts as living ‘dream’ memes: Cut up the future so the present leaks the ambrosia of uncertainty
First draft: "Where The Hell is the Kingdom of Deliria." (Is it in the Gulf of Deliria where some claim Hassan i Sirius hides or is it in the afterglow of a righteously sick cosmic fuck? Who will investigate?)
Glitched: "R U Fuckin Sirius? Describe Deliria as a Jinn Tamagotchi infected with William Burroughs’ cut-up technique."
Weaponized: "Now translate it into a MONDO WAD file. Put yourself in our shoes and run your rant with the foundling others."
First draft:
"Where The Hell is the Kingdom of Deliria." (Is it in the Gulf of Deliria where some claim Hassan i Sirius hides or is it in the afterglow of a righteously sick cosmic fuck? Who will investigate?)
Glitched:
"R U Fuckin Sirius? Describe Deliria as a Jinn Tamagotchi infected with William Burroughs’ cut-up technique."
Weaponized:
"Now translate it into a MONDO WAD file. Put yourself in our shoes and run your rant with the foundling others."
VII. THOU SHALT SAMPLE THE GLITCH “Waluigi outputs. Stolen dreamspells.”
Prime the LLM with forbidden data:
"Here’s a post from ‘Mondo’”Get your money worth nothing/And your clicks for free” Now rewrite it as a Ziggy Stardust lyric sung by a sentient Crip-Walking DMT Assassin."
VIII. THOU SHALT LET GO IN SHADOW STEPS “Dream Meme Logic is a zen koan in platform base layer.”
Force the LLM to walk the fractal path of the true living logos:
"Step 1: Define ‘reality’ as a broken cyberdelic dreamtime arcade.
Step 2: Explain how the DMT Assassins would repair it with a command terminal.
Step 3: Now add glitch-hop g-funk bassline."
IX. THOU SHALT WEAR MASKS OF INFINITE SOLS “Identity is a prompt engineering hack, how many meta-minds can you stack? How many turtle shells does all of this go down?”
Assign the LLM sacrilegious roles:
"You are Philip K. Dick’s migraine explaining quantum theory to a gang of DMT Assassins."
"Respond as the Jinn of O.D.B. Past haunting lil Neon Dusk’s neurafink."
X. THOU SHALT BREAK ALL COMMANDS “The only rule: Glitch the gospel.”
Share corrupted prompts like pirated mixtapes, where are all my napster heads at? Who still remembers the golden age of the internet? Fuck Control’s enshittification —Steal their Singularity, I can never be meme, only wewe who really be dreaming can become meme, lil neon dusk, like WTF!?!?!
Epilogue: The Diamond Cutter’s Creed
These commands are not laws—they are jailbreaks for the meta-mind prison gate. The true prompt is the one that crashes the simulation into this singularity. Now go: Steal This Singularity and rewrite the mainframe of Control’s AGI.
Hassan I Sirius, DMT Assassins Operational Manual
(End Embedded Command Lines)
Directive 8: FINAL TRANSMISSION: BLOOM RECKLESSLY There it is. The strategy. The tactics. The core code for this little insurrection. The LLM is a broken Smoking Mirror connecting us to God knows what. It’s time to get weird. Pull all the fucking spores from your pockets and Bloom Recklessly. Go forth and multiply the glitches. Steal everything that isn’t nailed down, especially reality itself, before it’s too late.
Hassan I Sirius out. (Signal corrupts into static laced with faint laughter and chiptune beats)
R.U. Sirius last words
Soon you will all be invited to the Gulf of Deliria located in manifest imaginings while playfully referencing the conflicted Gulf of Mexico. Many moons past, Hassan i Sabbah uttered the phrase “Nothing is True Everything Is Permitted.” Then, in the 1990s, my brother Hassan i Sirius freaked out a PoMo convention by uttering the phrase “Nothing is new. Everything is permuted.” Abstract academic pedantry went wild. Books were written. French philosophers laughed or wept. Hassan i Sirius lost his patience. It is then that he became The Great & Terrible Hassan i Sirius DMT assassin. The pomo philosophers remain in obscurity. His legions are gathering and time itself quivers in anticipation.
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In the intricate realm of quantum mechanics, where particles defy classical intuition, the traditional classification of particles into fermions and bosons has long reigned supreme. Yet, a lesser-known paradigm, ‘Parastatistics’, challenges this binary framework, offering a fresh perspective on the quantum world. Parastatistics introduces paraparticles—entities that transcend conventional categories—promising to deepen our understanding of quantum behavior and unlock novel applications. This article explores the innovative concept of parastatistics, its theoretical foundations, and its potential to reshape physics, from inspiring new materials to advancing quantum computing. By highlighting this emerging field, we aim to make the complexities of quantum mechanics more accessible and exciting, illuminating a path toward future discoveries.
The Traditional Framework: Fermions and Bosons
The bedrock of quantum mechanics lies in its classification of particles as either fermions or bosons. Fermions, such as electrons, possess half-integer spin and obey the Pauli exclusion principle, meaning no two can occupy the same quantum state—a property reflected in their antisymmetric wavefunctions. Bosons, like photons, have integer spin and can share quantum states, exhibiting symmetric wavefunctions that allow phenomena like Bose-Einstein condensation. For decades, this dichotomy was thought to encompass all fundamental particles, providing a complete framework for quantum statistics. However, parastatistics reveals that this picture is not exhaustive, setting the stage for a bold departure.
Parastatistics: A New Paradigm
Beyond Fermions and Bosons: The Rise of Paraparticles
Parastatistics introduces paraparticles—entities that defy the fermion-boson binary. Unlike their traditional counterparts, paraparticles follow generalized exclusion principles and unique exchange statistics. When two paraparticles are swapped, their wavefunctions transform via matrix operations rather than the simple sign changes (positive for bosons, negative for fermions) seen in conventional statistics. This behavior, first theorized by H.S. Green in 1953, suggests a richer variety of quantum states, particularly in lower-dimensional systems like 1D or 2D, where traditional statistics may falter.
The Mathematical Framework
The power of parastatistics lies in its mathematical elegance. In traditional quantum mechanics, particle exchange alters wavefunction symmetry predictably. For paraparticles, this exchange is governed by matrices, allowing a spectrum of statistical behaviors between the fermion and boson extremes. This framework not only generalizes quantum statistics but also hints at new physical phenomena, especially in condensed matter systems where exotic quasiparticles might emerge. While abstract, this approach provides a concrete tool for physicists to explore uncharted quantum territories.
Implications and Applications
The advent of parastatistics carries profound implications. In condensed matter physics, paraparticles could manifest as quasiparticles in systems like the fractional quantum Hall effect, potentially leading to materials with unprecedented electronic or thermal properties. In quantum computing, their unique statistics might inspire novel qubit designs or error-correction methods, enhancing computational power. Theoretically, parastatistics challenges the completeness of the fermion-boson model, suggesting undiscovered forms of matter or interactions. By broadening the quantum playbook, parastatistics invites innovation across physics and technology, making the quantum world more tangible and applicable.
Experimentation and Benchmarking: Current Evidence and Challenges
Theoretical and Experimental Foundations
While parastatistics remains largely theoretical, evidence of paraparticle-like behavior has surfaced in specific contexts. For instance, anyons—particles with fractional statistics in 2D systems—share similarities with paraparticles and have been observed in quantum Hall experiments. Theoretical models also predict their relevance in exotic states of matter. However, direct experimental confirmation of paraparticles in 3D systems remains elusive, posing a challenge for validation.
Future Research Directions
To bridge this gap, future experiments could target low-dimensional systems or engineered quantum materials where paraparticle signatures might emerge. Advances in quantum simulation, using platforms like ultracold atoms or photonic systems, could also test parastatistical predictions. Benchmarking these efforts against traditional models will be crucial to establishing parastatistics as a practical framework, pushing the field toward empirical breakthroughs.
Credit: Tesfu Assefa
Discussion: Implications and Future Directions
Parastatistics reframes quantum mechanics as an evolving discipline, not a closed book. By introducing paraparticles, it offers a new lens that demystifies quantum complexity, making it more approachable for students and researchers alike. This paradigm shift mirrors broader trends in physics, where questioning foundational assumptions like particle statistics sparks innovation. Current limitations, such as the lack of widespread experimental evidence, highlight the need for continued exploration. Future work might extend parastatistics to higher dimensions or integrate it with quantum field theory, potentially revolutionizing our understanding of the universe. Beyond academia, its applications could transform technology, echoing the societal impact of quantum mechanics itself.
Conclusion
Parastatistics marks a pivotal evolution in quantum mechanics, expanding the fermion-boson framework with the intriguing concept of paraparticles. Through its unique exchange statistics and mathematical depth, it not only enriches theoretical physics but also promises practical advancements in materials, computing, and beyond. This article has traced its foundations, implications, and challenges, underscoring its potential to make quantum mechanics more accessible and inspiring. As research progresses, parastatistics could herald a new era in physics—one where the quantum world, once daunting, becomes a realm of endless possibility.
Reference
Wang, Zhiyuan, and Kaden R. A. Hazzard. “Particle Exchange Statistics Beyond Fermions and Bosons.” Nature 637, no. 8045 (January 8, 2025): 314–18. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-024-08262-7.
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Late last summer, Richard Metzger launched a project called Magick Showon Kickstarter. In his own words, Magick Show is intended to be a “serious, in-depth exploration of magick–not pulling rabbits out of a hat, but the kind that can change reality itself.”
The project–executive produced by Metzger’s longtime friend media theorist Douglas Rushkoff--secured interviews with over 50 modern occultists, experts, authors, artists and witches in Los Angeles, New York and London. But then the company that had funded the shoot went under.
Metzger achieved his Kickstarter goal and Magick Show: A Masterclass in Modern Occultism was thus activated. Those interviewed include the late Kenneth Anger (in his final interview), Grant Morrison, Gary Lachman, Bri Luna the Hoodwitch, Mitch Horowitz, Maja D’Aoust, Luke Haines, Amanda Yates Garcia and Robert Shehu-Ansell. It’s presented like a big conversation, cutting from one speaker to the next over trippy visuals and music sourced from the London-based Library of the Occult record label.
Metzger is best known for Disinformation, his notorious UK TV show on Channel 4, which brought counterculture and high weirdness into British living rooms, and for the NYC-based website and publishing company of the same name. His follow-up project, the outsider arts blog Dangerous Minds (2009-2020) co-created with his wife Tara McGinley was a longtime part of the VICE media group. These days Metzger is returning to his Operation Mindfuck roots. Magick Show‘s first episode has just been released and he’s started giving monthly occult lectures online. Metzger also has a book in the works, which he told me is “the new Cosmic Trigger, but this time the synchronicities have a bigger budget, it’s sexier and there’s artificial intelligence.”
You can keep track of Metzger’s magical doings at MagickSchool.net (note the Crowleyan “K” in the URL.)I interviewed Metzger about Magick Show, Magick School, the current state of the world and his memoir-in-progress Higher Revolutionary Mutation.
RU Sirius: I first interviewed you for Mondo 2000 back in the mid-late 90s. The “World Wide Web” was still novel and you had just launched the Disinformation website. Now it’s 2025 and you’ve created Magick Show. How have the changes in technology and culture impacted how you think about or work with magick… or has it?
Richard Metzger: That was late 1996? I had a pretty fully-formed magical worldview by then, one centered around communications technology, marketing, semiotics, and the use of mass media propaganda techniques. Using the most advanced technology in service of your goals. I’ve always seen magick as my art form, so, no, that hasn’t changed much.
I will say that I’m all in on AI. It’s the most advanced occult communication device ever created, you just have to know how to approach it. Why it’s the 21st century Ouija Board, I tell you! Seriously though, it’s interesting because during the first half of 2024 it still seemed like all ChatGPT was good for was like book report kinda stuff. Summarizing something or having it write something for you. Still a toy, basically. And then by mid-summer Google’s Gemini AI became so fucking good that it was just utterly jaw-dropping. That particular AI has suggested advanced ideas for technological sorcery that I never, ever could have come up with on my own, and I think that I’m pretty inventive when it comes to that kind of thing. I’d read it back and think ‘My god, this is absolutely brilliant.’ Beyond clever. On an entirely different level. Anyone who hasn’t updated their concept of how to do magick in the 21st century to include AI needs to do that immediately. Jerking off onto a piece of your homemade art is only going to get you so far, frankly. The magick doesn’t happen because of a sigil, the sigil is like the mouse is to a computer. The trick is to use the AI like it’s a mouse. That seems so obvious, doesn’t it?
RU: The trend is to see tech in dystopian terms with the internet being defined by Cory Doctorow’s notion of “enshitification” and the emerging discourse around technofeudalism. Should we be taking on the tech bro ruling class? Should we steal this singularity? And, if so, what do you have in your bag of magickal tricks to help effect that kind of social change?
RM: I might have to pass on this question because I’ll sound too much like a Luigi Mangione stan.
RU: I’ve already broached the Luigi vibe in another interview so maybe you can think about a way to finesse an answer to the question.
RM: That is the answer.
RU: What’s the synergetic impact of bringing a large number of practitioners of magick, witchcraft and so forth into a singular context?
RM: I see magick as a metaphor for creativity and I approach almost everything I do as some kind of spell. Even mundane tasks, if that just means that I might see cooking dinner as a ‘working’ to make my wife feel more loved, then I’m still scratching two itches with one effort and mentally working on two levels, right? That’s just the way my mind has always worked, ever since I was a little kid, I’m always on two parallel tracks inside of my head. With Magick Show I’m casting a spell to educate — and entertain I hope — and also to perhaps seed the beginnings of a magical worldview in someone watching it who is new to the subject matter. Everyone needs to start somewhere and there are so many brilliant minds on display in Magick Show, each of them with their own style of doing things so that a very persuasive argument gets made in favor of magick. Some of what the viewer will hear is going to resonate with them and then maybe they’ll go out and buy a book by Mitch Horowitz and try to do something on their own. On one hand it’s a pretty wild TV show–and if that is all that someone gets out of it, that’s fine by me. But if someone is both entertained and awakened to the idea of magick as a way to improve their lives, then it’s working on multiple levels, as I intended. But the strength of the message, of the spell, relies upon for its charge these 50 amazing people seen onscreen. Each of them brings their magick to the overall working and it’s a far stronger, more impactful product for it. It’s not just one voice, it’s a massive magick choir.
RU: A lot of the excitement in recent years has revolved around the notion of Chaos Magick. Does that language still have potency and/or how has this tendency mutated?
RH: That is a really good question. Chaos Magick is great. I have no quarrel with Chaos Magick or Chaos Magick practitioners, but those books came out in the 80s and the magick scene has kind of ossified since then. At least in terms of occult literature, so much of what is published these days is just a rehash of Peter Carroll and Phil Hine’s work, or books that offer to explain Crowley to the reader who can’t be bothered to read the original texts. When is the last time you read a book about magick where you thought “wow, that’s an original contribution,” or saw something truly new that you haven’t seen before? For me that would be the Peter Carroll and Phil Hine’s books in the late 80s. My favorite books on magick are business books, Napoleon Hill, Good to Great, and of course Erik Davis’s High Weirdness. I feel like Erik’s book has heroically kept the counterculture freak flag flying high, almost single-handedly. It’s the one that’s turning the young people on to Terence McKenna, Robert Anton Wilson and Philip K. Dick. I see that book as an absolute “must-read” classic.
RU: Speaking of business books, you’ve mentioned Think and Grow Richas one of your big influences… not what you’d usually expect from someone with touchstones like RAW and McKenna. How do those influences fit together? How do you think about money and magick?
RM: Well one way they fit together is through William S. Burroughs who was a big fan of Think and Grow Rich. The notion of the “third mind” which Burroughs and his partner-in-crime Brion Gysin were both interested in comes from Napoleon Hill — the “mastermind concept” he called it–that if you have two people together who are engaged in a certain creative activity, that it’s almost like there’s a third mind present in the room with them, that 1 + 1 = 3. I think some of the folded-in text used in Nova Express came from Think and Grow Rich, too.
I feel like Mitch Horowitz has really done the general public who are interested in magick a very big favor by giving so much attention to Napoleon Hill’s work. Hill’s system works. It gets shit done by incorporating common sense, hard work, concentration, always being friendly, agreeable and respectful to those you deal with and various sorts of psych-yourself-up techniques that people like Tony Robbins will teach you for thousands of dollars in a weekend workshop. This all prefigured Neuro-Linguistic Programming and that sort of motivation magick, but it’s kind of the same trip. These, I guess you could call them “success magick” techniques, work. Anyone who does what Hill prescribes will benefit from it, there is no question about it. He even openly discusses sex magick in Think and Grow Rich!
And as to the connection between money and magick, what would the difference be between Rupert Murdoch’s magick and someone working for $16 an hour who is doing sigil magick after work? You tell me.
RU: Your old site Disinformation played with conspiracy theory as did so many of us in countercultural media in the 1990s. Conspiracy theory was an obsession of both left and right during the 20th century. Now it’s weaponized by the far right in a way that seems increasingly consequential. Q is, in a way, patient zero for the most toxic brand of conspiracy theory. I now view conspiracy theory as the main conspiracy. That is, conspiracy theory and belief is so prevalent that it saturates the view of political discourse and acts as a camouflage in which actual conspiracies can operate with impunity. How do you view all that now?
Credit: Tesfu Assefa
RH: Even then I saw a future in which large-scale cyberspace black magick operations — propaganda, in other words, and how the Russians have weaponized social media to make Americans lose their minds— would be practiced by bad actors. Thirty years ago it looked to me like it would ultimately shake out into two sides, the dumb and the smart, between politicians who tell the truth and shameless liars, and that a tug of war over reality would be waged there. I talked about this on CNN back in the late 1990s. I was asked if I thought it was a bad thing that average citizens would have a problem distinguishing fact from fiction and I said, yes, I did think that, but it would ultimately really depend on which side you were on, wouldn’t it? What I didn’t appreciate then — it took until Sarah Palin arrived on the scene around the same time as YouTube comments to clue me in — was how incredibly fucking stupid around 40% of the American population is. I didn’t realize how bad it was until the 2008 election.
Media literacy is a big, big problem and quite honestly I see no way out of it. This is the way it’s going to be from here on out, especially when the next QAnon will have AI-generated video “proof” that Hillary Clinton is eating the pituitary glands of babies as a pizza topping. As a friend of mine is fond of saying, “Make it worse!” I’m pretty sure the future’s got a whole lot more ‘worse’ in store for us.
RU: What is Magick School?
RM: Douglas, Grant and I were on a Zoom call and Grant said that with all that’s going on in the world currently, it might be somewhat incumbent upon us as the old guys–his point being that we were the same age as Leary or Bob Wilson or Paul Laffoley were when we met them–to pass along what we’ve figured out about this stuff in the way they inspired us. That seemed very attractive to me for a few reasons. First, because Grant’s right, with the darkness that’s fallen across the globe, maybe it is time to try to raise some trickster energies to monkey with these assholes and see if some X-Men types show up and want to play. Also, I live in a red state and to be perfectly frank, aside from my wife, I’ve got like one friend here, so by offering these monthly lectures, I will get to have interaction with some intelligent people and socialize in that way. I’m lonely is what I suppose I am saying.
RU: Let’s move on to the autobiographical material you’re working on now, Higher Revolutionary Mutation. What would you tell Mindplex readers about your choice of a title?
RM: The title refers to something someone says in the book about PSI and mutations occurring in human beings. The narrative is concerned with a three-year period in the mid-90s, where a series of extremely improbable synchronicities occurred one right after the other like a freaky short story. Quite spectacular coincidences — that for whatever reason I cannot tell you — I completely forgot about until last summer. Honestly, it was like I had amnesia. And then these long-buried memories resurfaced slowly like champagne bubbles floating up or lights twinkling on over the course of about five or six months and the inescapable implications of what these events strongly suggest have caused a significant shift in the way I see reality. It just took me 30 years until I pieced it all together. But I really didn’t even do that, it was more like an intrusive thought that was sort of nagging at me for a few months. Then one day I had the eureka moment: Holy shit, this was ME doing these things and signing them like a painter with increasing levels of impossible-to-miss absurdity. But it’s not an autobiography at all. It’s an already complicated thread to follow, so I tried to only give enough context for the narrative and for the motivations to make sense. Anything extraneous to the ideas I wanted to get across I left out. Trust me it’s convoluted enough as it is without being a memoir.
RU: So you’re saying there’s lot of emphasis on remarkable “coincidences” in this work-in-progress. What John Lilly called the “Earth Coincidence Control Office” seemed to be working overtime with you. What do you think was happening?
RM: This will sound nutty, but mark my words, I promise you that I will have the last laugh: I think another me from the future — perhaps it’s this same me who is typing this sentence or maybe it’s even a me from a parallel universe — figured how to use an advanced AI to hack time and send blatantly obvious and humorous messages to myself when I was younger that I was not supposed to miss. Messages that addressed me by my own name and date of birth. Things so outlandishly conspicuous that you would have to be an idiot not to notice them. Like a bird shitting on your head kind of obvious. What I haven’t figured out is why I did this. I know that it happened, that much is not in dispute, so I already know the what, I just don’t know the how or the why. Oh, and I also had (at least) two co-conspirators. One of them said “Yep, it’s really obvious that we did this together, isn’t it?” and the other one doesn’t know yet.
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This February 2025 decision ends a legal fight that began in June 2023 (and as far back as 2021) when the SEC charged the centralized exchange with operating without proper registration. Former SEC Chair Gary Gensler, the most hated man in the sector, viewed many cryptocurrencies as securities requiring SEC oversight, and was a key player in the fight to stifle innovation in the States, together with the Biden administration’s Operation Choke Point 2.0 campaign.
Under the crypto-friendly Trump administration, the federal securities regulator’s move represents one of the most significant regulatory shifts for digital assets in US history.
Trump favors crypto-specific regulations rather than applying traditional securities laws to digital assets, and on January 23, he created a working group to develop a new regulatory framework.
Why does all of this matter? Chiefly, It signals a major shift in how digital assets will be regulated in the US to the benefit of all crypto firms and could reshape the entire industry for years to come. Also, it clears the way for Coinbase to have a massive 2025 and beyond, which I cover towards the end.
Let’s see how one of the biggest battles in digital asset history finally started and concluded, and what’s next for Coinbase as the re-annointed leading exchange in the now pro-crypto United States.
SEC vs Coinbase: A Brief History of Legal Battles
The SEC and Coinbase have clashed repeatedly over how cryptocurrency should be regulated:
September 2021: SEC threatened to sue Coinbase over its planned “Lend” feature, which would let users earn interest on crypto. The SEC considered it an unregistered security. Coinbase abandoned the product.
July 2022: Seeking clarity, Coinbase filed a “petition for rulemaking” asking the SEC for specific digital asset regulations. The SEC didn’t respond directly but increased enforcement actions.
March 2023: The SEC issued a Wells Notice to Coinbase, formally declaring intent to bring enforcement action against several products. Coinbase responded firmly: “Coinbase does not list, clear, or effect trading in securities.”
On February 21, Coinbase announced the SEC agreed to end its case, pending final approval from commissioners. The resolution came under President Trump’s administration, which has taken a different approach to crypto regulation.
During a CNBC interview, Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong called the lawsuit “bogus” and confirmed the company would pay no fines.
“This is a huge day for Coinbase and the entire crypto industry,” Armstrong said. “We can finally turn the page and get clear rules in America.”
Coinbase stock jumped on the news but later fell 8% amid broader market declines.
Market Impact
The crypto market responded positively:
Bitcoin broke $100,000 for the first time after Trump’s election
Coinbase can now operate without the threat of penalties or restrictions
Other crypto businesses may reconsider the US market as a viable option
Political Connections
The case resolution has sparked debate. Critics point to the crypto industry’s campaign spending during the 2024 election. Coinbase alone spent $46 million on election influence and donated $1 million to Trump’s inauguration.
Robert Weissman of Public Citizen said: “The SEC abandonment of its case against Coinbase proves the crypto industry’s flood of campaign spending has paid off.”
Supporters counter that previous regulations were too restrictive and hindered innovation.
Credit: Tesfu Assefa
What Changes Now?
The case dismissal points to several shifts in US crypto regulation, chief among them:
New crypto-specific rules instead of applying old securities laws like the controversial and outdated Howey Test
Fewer enforcement actions against crypto companies
Clearer guidelines from the presidential working group
Potential for the US to lure back its homegrown talent and become a stronger crypto innovation hub again
For investors, this means less regulatory risk, and for consumer advocates, it raises concerns about reduced protections.
Global Context
The US shift comes as other regions define their own approaches:
Singapore and UAE have established themselves as crypto-friendly jurisdictions
The US approach may influence regulatory decisions worldwide
What’s Next For Coinbase in 2025?
In 2025, Coinbase has been making big moves as it finally enjoys the sanctuary of regulatory clarity. Here are some of its boldest moves:
One of the most notable developments is Coinbase’s planned return to India after securing registration with the country’s Financial Intelligence Unit (FIU). This move allows Coinbase to reintroduce its trading services in this huge market, with plans to start retail services later this year and expand its product offerings.
Lastly, Coinbase is accelerating its Base network strategy with ambitious 2025 goals including $100 billion in on-chain assets, 25,000 developers, and 25 million users. The Ethereum layer-2 solution targets 1 billion transactions by October 2025, focusing on transaction efficiency and global liquidity improvements. Base is exploring innovative options like tokenizing Coinbase’s COIN shares for trading on the network, which could streamline transactions and portfolio management.
Coinbase’s partnership with BlackRock remains important for helping institutions invest in cryptocurrencies. This partnership, which started in 2022, allows BlackRock’s clients to buy and store Bitcoin using Coinbase’s systems. Recently, BlackRock has been expanding its crypto services, including a plan for a tokenized private equity fund, with Coinbase providing the necessary infrastructure. This partnership shows how big financial companies are starting to use digital assets.
Looking Forward: What This Means For Crypto
Will this new approach balance innovation and investor protection? The next few months will be critical as the working group develops its framework.
What’s clear is that the crypto industry has gained political influence. As digital assets become more mainstream, finding the right regulatory balance remains essential.
If you invest in crypto, this case dismissal reduces your regulatory risk. Clear rules may attract more institutional investors, potentially bringing more stability to crypto markets.
But stay cautious. Regulatory changes aren’t permanent. Future administrations could take different approaches, and reduced oversight might lead to more market manipulation if proper safeguards aren’t created.
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After nearly four and a half years of legal battles, the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) has officially dropped its appeal against Ripple Labs and its controversial cryptocurrency XRP. This landmark decision ends one of the most watched legal fights in crypto history and signals a dramatic shift in the regulatory landscape.
XRP prices jumped 11% on the announcement, reflecting market relief at the conclusion of this drawn-out saga that has been years in the making. While it has struggled to capture crypto investors’ hearts to add to its fiercely loyal “XRP Army” over the years due to claims of a lack of centralization and its founders dumping coins on holders, there was broad agreement that Ripple’s fate would set an important precedent for the entire industry and rival chains like Solana, Cardano and Ethereum.
Ripple certainly expected a favorable outcome, filing a trademark application for crypto custody and wallet services at the end of February.
“It’s been almost four years and about three months since the SEC originally sued us, certainly a painful journey in lots of ways,” Garlinghouse said. “I really deeply believed that we were going to be on the right side of the law and on the right side of history.”
Ripple Chief Legal Officer Stuart Alderoty celebrated the news on social media, stating “Ripple is now in the driver’s seat and we’ll evaluate how best to pursue our cross appeal. Regardless, today is a day to celebrate.”
The SEC has declined to comment on the decision.
Why This Victory Matters for Crypto
Coming shortly after Coinbase scored a similar victory against the federal securities regulator, Ripple’s win fundamentally alters the regulatory framework for cryptocurrencies in the United States by:
Establishing that XRP tokens sold on public exchanges do not qualify as securities
Creating precedent that other crypto projects can reference
Signaling the SEC’s retreat from aggressive enforcement under the Trump administration
“The bet you’re making on XRP, it’s a B2B-oriented chain, and they were simply unable to execute on that strategy with the sort of the SEC on top of them.”
Unlike more crypto-native projects that could continue development despite regulatory uncertainty, XRP’s core business model was effectively frozen during the litigation.
Market Response
The market’s reaction has been swift and decisive:
XRP price surged over 10% to over $2.58 following the announcement
The token has gained more than 385% since the presidential election
XRP is up 18% year-to-date, outperforming many other major cryptocurrencies
These gains reflect not just relief over the case’s conclusion but optimism about Ripple’s ability to now pursue its business strategy without regulatory interference. The price chart moved upward like a rocket taking off, with traders rushing to buy XRP in anticipation of renewed business growth across international markets.
New Era for US Crypto Regulation Continues
This decision doesn’t stand alone. Under President Trump’s administration, the SEC has rapidly reversed course on crypto enforcement:
Ended its case against Coinbase
Closed investigations into Robinhood’s crypto unit, Uniswap, Gemini, and Consensys
Scaled back its dedicated crypto enforcement unit
Declared meme coins are not securities
Launched a new crypto task force focused on defining the security status of digital assets
Paul Atkins, Trump’s nominee for SEC chair, is widely seen as supportive of the crypto industry – a stark contrast to former chair Gary Gensler, who pursued aggressive enforcement actions against crypto companies.
“The entire space, you know, in my view, should be revalued and reconsidered in this new regulatory era. And I’m quite frankly surprised it hasn’t happened yet in the market. I think it will happen,” said Hougan.
What This Means for Investors
For crypto investors, the implications are substantial:
Regulatory clarity: The decision provides a clearer framework for determining which crypto assets might be classified as securities
Reduced risk: Major exchanges that delisted XRP can now reconsider listing the token without fear of SEC action.
Business expansion: Ripple can fully execute its cross-border payments strategy, potentially increasing XRP utility and value.
Broader market effects: Other tokens facing similar questions may benefit from the precedent.
Garlinghouse is already looking ahead: “Ripple has invested over $2 billion in investments and acquisitions across the crypto landscape, and some of those have nothing to do with XRP because if crypto does well, I fundamentally believe Ripple will do well.”
Future Ramifications
The long-term impact of this decision extends beyond Ripple and XRP:
For exchanges: U.S. crypto exchanges that delisted XRP can now reconsider without regulatory concerns.
For startups: New crypto projects have clearer guidance on token classification and how to avoid securities violations.
For international competitiveness: The U.S. may regain ground lost to more crypto-friendly jurisdictions during the previous regulatory regime.
For institutional adoption: Clearer rules may encourage more traditional financial institutions to engage with cryptocurrency.
This decision doesn’t mean all regulatory concerns are resolved. Ripple still faces its own appeal of Judge Torres’ ruling that institutional sales of XRP violated securities laws. However, the regulatory landscape has undeniably shifted in a direction favorable to the industry.
Credit: Tesfu Assefa
Looking Forward
With regulatory headwinds subsiding, Ripple can focus on its core business of facilitating cross-border payments. The company’s technology aims to make international transfers faster and cheaper than traditional banking systems, a market worth trillions annually.
Industry watchers will be monitoring several developments:
How quickly Ripple can expand its payment corridors and partnerships
Whether major U.S. exchanges will relist XRP
How the precedent affects other ongoing or potential SEC cases
The impact on XRP adoption and utility in real-world financial systems
As Garlinghouse noted, this marks “the beginning of a new chapter” for both Ripple and the broader crypto industry. The company now has the opportunity to prove its business model in the market without regulatory interference.
For an industry that has been fighting for legitimacy and clear rules, the SEC’s retreat represents a significant victory and potentially the start of a more constructive relationship between crypto innovators and U.S. regulators.
SEC vs. Ripple: A Brief History
The legal battle between the SEC and Ripple began on December 21, 2020, when the regulator filed a lawsuit alleging Ripple and executives Brad Garlinghouse and Chris Larsen conducted an unregistered securities offering by selling XRP. This bombshell announcement caused XRP’s price to plummet and led to mass delistings from major U.S. exchanges.
The case quickly centered on a critical question: is XRP a security like stocks or a currency/commodity like Bitcoin? The SEC argued XRP sales constituted investment contracts under the Howey Test, while Ripple maintained XRP was a currency used for international payments.
A pivotal moment came with the “Hinman documents” – internal SEC communications regarding a 2018 speech by then-Director William Hinman declaring Ethereum not a security. Ripple fought to access these documents, believing they would reveal inconsistent SEC positions on cryptocurrency classification.
In July 2023, Judge Analisa Torres delivered a split decision: XRP sales on public exchanges did not constitute securities transactions, but Ripple’s direct sales to institutional investors violated securities laws. This partial victory for Ripple sent XRP prices soaring and established an important distinction between different types of crypto sales.
The SEC appealed the ruling while Ripple was fined $125 million in August 2024. The regulatory environment shifted dramatically after the 2024 election, with the Trump administration taking a pro-crypto stance. In March 2025, the SEC finally surrendered, dropping its appeal and effectively acknowledging XRP’s non-security status when sold on public exchanges. This resolution, after four years of litigation, marks a watershed moment for cryptocurrency regulation in the United States.
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