Cryptocurrency Trilogy
Code Was Never Law: BIP-361, Mythos, and the End of Bitcoin's Founding Promise
In April 2026, Bitcoin developer Jameson Lopp and five co-authors published BIP-361 — a soft-fork mechanism that would sunset legacy signature types covering the more than 34% of all bitcoin whose public keys are already exposed on-chain, 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 seventeen 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.