Cryptocurrency Trilogy
Code Was Never Law: BIP-361, Mythos, and the End of Bitcoin's Founding Promise
On April 15, 2026, Bitcoin developer Jameson Lopp proposed BIP-361 — a soft-fork mechanism to permanently freeze approximately 5.6 million dormant Bitcoin worth over $420 billion, including roughly 1.1 million BTC associated with Satoshi Nakamoto. On May 1, Paradigm's Dan Robinson countered with PACTs, a privacy-preserving alternative. The proposals bracket a structural inflection that Bitcoin has avoided for sixteen years: the question of whether 'your keys, your coins' is an unconditional promise or a contingent one. The CMP framework from Essay 6 anticipated exactly this moment. This is what it looks like when it arrives.