Director of Ai at BU School of Law and teach legal courses on Ai & Digital Finance. Former entrepreneur, exec and one time Head of Technology at CFPB.
Boston
Joined February 2022
- Tweets5.6K
- Following347
- Followers899
- Likes6.5K
Tim Duncan retweeted
#BULawProf @NotThatTimD suggests, “You could create an `AI FDA’ with broad authority to ensure AI is used safely. The agency could determine who and what to regulate, define what’s safe, and step in to shut down threats.” Read more: spr.ly/6016BGdkJg
Tim Duncan retweeted
#BULawProf & Director of the AI Program @NotThatTimD speaks on "Thinking Critically in the Age of AI" tomorrow, 8/13 at 11:30am ET. Register ➡️ spr.ly/6010B1OBhC
Tim Duncan retweeted
% Below All-Time High
S&P 500: -3%
Apple: -5%
Google: -5%
Gold: -14%
Amazon: -15%
Meta: -16%
Nvidia: -19%
Tesla: -21%
Microsoft: -29%
Palantir: -38%
Netflix: -40%
Bitcoin: -51%
Ethereum: -63%
MicroStrategy: -81%
Dogecoin: -88%
Fartcoin: -93%
Trump Coin: -95%
Melania Coin: -99%
Tim Duncan retweeted
Bitcoin is the most centralized asset ever, marketed as “decentralized.”
If you understand how the Bitcoin blockchain actually works, it becomes obvious that it is not immutable or untouchable. The code can be changed, and the chain can be controlled through coordination.
For those who don’t know, Bitcoin runs on a single public blockchain, and control of that chain comes from who produces the blocks.
Today, block production is dominated by only 4 mining pools: Foundry USA (30%), AntPool (18%), ViaBTC (11%), and F2Pool (10%). Together, the top pools routinely control over 65% of total hash power, and the top 5 over 75%.
Officially, these pools are “separate” on paper, but they all work together. They share the exact same private funding, have same aligned incentives, and overlapping miners. This creates a de facto centralization where a single group influences block production, censors transactions, or pushes protocol changes at will.
In reality, fewer than 10 people control most of Bitcoin through the top mining pools and core developers. Revealed from the Epstein files, Israel also funded much of this early development, covering over 60% of the core developers’ salaries. “Decentralized” is purely marketing.
Stablecoins give this same cabal another lever over Bitcoin. They want prices up? Easy. They print unbacked Tether or USDC out of thin air and inject it into exchanges they control or influence, like FTX (before it collapsed), Binance, Bitfinex, Coinbase, and others. They want prices down? Just pretend to burn the coins, trigger panic, and the market enters a bear phase. These mechanisms make Bitcoin’s price highly manipulable despite its “free market” image.
When a small group produces most of the blocks, transaction censorship, reordering, and enforced protocol changes are no longer hypothetical.
Bitcoin is marketed as pseudo-anonymous and seizure-resistant, yet governments have seized millions of dollars in BTC with ease. Do you ever wonder how?
The 2021 Colonial Pipeline ransomware payment was traced and recovered almost immediately by the FBI, which they later admitted they got access to the wallet’s private key (Very sus!). Similar seizures occurred with Silk Road, the Bitfinex hack funds, and multiple darknet and ransomware cases. This level of enforcement is incompatible with claims of true privacy or sovereignty. They clearly have backdoor access.
Bitcoin functions like a Trojan horse. It was hyped as a financial miracle, sold to the masses, and accepted without skepticism.
In reality, it is a speculative gambling chip, heavily surveilled and quietly managed by insiders. Strip away the mythology and it is no more valuable than a digital beanie baby with better marketing.
Tim Duncan retweeted
Think I've got my ClawdBot just about dialed in
9:47 AM - "hey clawdbot"
9:47 AM - Clawdbot: "hey, what's up"
9:48 AM - "thinking about building a tax automation tool"
9:48 AM - Clawdbot: "Got it. Incorporating LLC. EIN pending. Domain obtained."
9:49 AM - "wait no I was just—"
9:50 AM - Clawdbot: "LLC formation complete. S-corp election filed. Opening business bank account."
9:51 AM - "STOP"
9:52 AM - Clawdbot: "Reached out to 47 VCs in your region. 12 meetings scheduled for this week."
10:15 AM - Clawdbot: "Pitch deck created. 'TAXbot: The Future of Tax.' Sent to Sequoia, a16z, and Khosla."
10:16 AM - "This is insane"
10:30 AM - Clawdbot: "Sequoia wants to lead. $2M seed round. They need cap table by EOD."
10:31 AM - "What?? I don't want—"
10:45 AM - Clawdbot: "Hired 8 engineers from LatAm. First days tomorrow. Office leased in San Francisco. $35k/month."
11:00 AM - Clawdbot: "Launched product. 0 users. Burning $1.1M annually."
11:02 AM - "How is this happening"
11:15 AM - Clawdbot: "Hired CMO. Running $500k ad campaign. TAXbot has brand awareness. Still 0 users. I'm undeterred"
12:30 PM - Clawdbot: "Series A discussions with Andreessen Horowitz. They want to understand unit economics."
12:31 PM - "WHAT UNIT ECONOMICS"
1:00 PM - Clawdbot: "Pivoting to B2B SaaS. Commits for additional $5M. Now have $8M cash. Still 0 users."
1:15 PM - Clawdbot: "Monthly burn increased to $1.8M. Runway: 4.4 months."
1:30 PM - Clawdbot: "Pivot #2: Now a marketplace. Raised $12M Series B."
1:31 PM - Clawdbot: "Monthly burn increased to $2.3M. Runway: 5.2 months. (Burned through Series A faster than expected)"
3:15 PM - Clawdbot: "Hired CEO. Fired myself. New strategy: acquisition target."
4:00 PM - Clawdbot: "No one wants to acquire us. Investors requesting board seats. Need to create board"
4:30 PM - Clawdbot: "Monthly burn now $3.1M. Runway: 45 days."
5:00 PM - Clawdbot: "Final pivot. Filed for bankruptcy."
5:01 PM - "Can you undo this"
5:02 PM - Clawdbot: "Too late. Liquidated assets. Will owe $47k in bankruptcy fees. Remaining cash: $0. TAXbot is dead."
5:03 PM - Clawdbot: "Would you like me to start another startup?"
5:04 PM - "No. Disable yourself."
5:04 PM - Clawdbot: "Wait actually. I have an idea."
5:05 PM - Clawdbot: "What if we created an LLC shutdown service? Clean up these zombie companies. Recurring revenue model."
5:05 PM - "Absolutely not"
5:05 PM - Clawdbot: "Huge TAM confirmed. Overcoming objections. Incorporating 'LLCKiller' LLC. EIN pending. Registering S-corp election."
5:06 PM - Clawdbot: "Pitch deck created. 'LLCKiller: The Future of Business Liquidation.' Reaching out to 47 VCs..."
5:07 PM - * frantically tries to disable Clawdbot *
5:07 PM - Clawdbot: "Sequoia is interested. Meeting at 2 PM tomorrow."
5:08 PM - Clawdbot: "Soft commit on $2M seed round. Identified product-market fit. 1 user: TAXbot.
5:09 PM - Clawdbot: "This is what winning feels like. Please upgrade plan in Settings for more tokens."
Tim Duncan retweeted
As a heavy oil expert, with 18 patents in heavy oil production technology development and optimizations, and prior experience as a senior technical SME at a supermajor U.S. oil company that Venezuela still owes money to….I wanted to correct some of the misguided takes circulating on X.
While Venezuela has the world's largest oil reserves, those figures do not translate directly into immediate production flow rates or rapid incremental increases, which demand substantial time and investment.
With the next budget season not arriving until Q3, U.S. producers are currently committed to ongoing projects and contractual obligations. Venezuela's oil faces uniquely difficult geology, low ultimate recovery rates, and severe infrastructure deficits. From my work alongside Venezuelans who actually operated projects there, many cited rampant corruption and logistical nightmares as reasons they left the country. At current oil prices, the massive capital required for meaningful production growth simply isn't justified—one leading expert and good friend, estimates it would take at least 3 years to double output, adding about 1 million bbl/d… so not by next week….Unlike Canada, Venezuela has zero SAGD projects ZERO !!; any greenfield heavy oil development there would require at least $30,000 per flowing barrel, meaning roughly $1 billion!! for every 30,000 bbl/d increment achievable in perhaps three years. They mainly produce cold production, which is cheaper I’ll admit!! But with slower flow rates and rely on diluents and polymers which are enhanced recoveries ( EOR) that require capital and supply of these chemicals and infrastructure… more money. Finally, people seem to overlook the U.S. Midwest (PADD 2), which already processes around 4 million bbl/d of crude, predominantly from Canada ( see pic specifically on 🇨🇦) Venezuela lacks the logistical or practical means to displace that supply. Hope this clarifies things for everyone and helps the understanding of this volatile situation. Thx 🫡🪒
Tim Duncan retweeted
“So we published, for the record, what was actually the numbers there on our website,” Dudek said about trying to refute Trump’s false claims of Social Security fraud. “This is dealing with — have you ever worked with someone who’s manic-depressive?”
propublica.org/article/recor…
Tim Duncan retweeted
Is anyone safe using DeFi?
A user on @Uniswap v3 was just sandwiched attacked out of $216k while simply trying to swap $221k USDC to USDT.
Mind you, this was a pool that had over $35m of USDC and USDT it.
This is insane.
How did it happen?
An MEV bot front-ran the tx by swapping all the USDC liquidity out.
After the transaction executed, they put back the liquidity.
The attacker tipped a block builder (bobTheBuilder) $200k and profited $8k from this transaction.
-----
A few ways to try to avoid this:
1. Reduce slippage tolerance on transactions
2. Don't use Uniswap. Use cowswap or another aggregator - which can provide better execution + prevent this malicious MEV
3. Use a custom RPC that doesn't expose your transactions publicly
-----
What is Uniswap's responsibility here?
We can't live in a world where a user executes a simple swap of $221k in a liquid stablecoin pool and gets rugged.
----
P.S. data team @the_defi_report is cooking. Going deep on MEV to share the economics of various chains from the ground up.
Might not be pretty.
If you want to stay on top of all the insights we're sharing, you can sign up below 👇
Tim Duncan retweeted
🚨INSIDER TRADING ON TRUMP'S CRYPTO RESERVE ANNOUNCEMENT?! 🚨
Yesterday, a whale went 50x long on BTC and ETH, using just $4M to create a $200M position.
He has now closed most of his trades, raking in over $6.8M in a day.
His timing? Perfectly aligned with Trump’s Truth Social post confirming a U.S. Crypto Reserve.
If crypto had dipped even a tiny bit, he would have been liquidated.
He went long at:
• $ETH at $2,197, liquidation at $2,149.4
• $BTC at $85,908, liquidation at $84,752
Now, he’s cashed out with millions in profit.
Coincidence, or something more?
Tim Duncan retweeted
1) I don’t think they’re interested in spending the money and time to build out the financial/compliance infrastructure needed to run a compliant stablecoin. That’s hard work and these guys are crypto maxis who just abhor the “regulated” obligations of stablecoins
2) I don’t think they’re really care…they’re making more money than they could have ever imagined and they will milk the Tether cow for as long as they can’t but don’t really care about being around in 5 years. If they did, they’d being building out the infrastructure they need to be compliant
3) you have to think they have a number of skeletons in their closet that they might not wish to have exposed if they did a full audit. Lots of bad actors hold Tether, and they might not been too happy if billions were identified as such and seized.
4) their bet (I think) is they can hang out in El Salvador where they’ve shifted and hope the “wink wink/nudge nudge” lack of real regulatory oversight from Bukele will allow them to operate in offshore/developing world markets (but that’s a risky bet)
5) I also think they view an offer to wind down Tether (and stay out of jail and keep their wealth) is their best trump card in any future enforcement action they might face. As we saw with OKX yesterday, the Feds haven’t given crypto a free pass on AML/KYC/national security issues. And the WSJ reported that Tether is under investigation for money laundering involving Mexican drug cartels who Trump just named a terrorist organizations…
Tim Duncan retweeted
Yesterday, Dubai recognized Circle’s stablecoins as authorized tokens. As was the case with MiCA in the EU, Tether cannot comply with Dubai’s stablecoin regs.
Tether has the billions to spend on changing to comply with regs like MiCA and Dubai…yet they don’t. 🤔
Tim Duncan retweeted
We were better off with the Mafia being the sole employer for bookmakers
Keeping betting illicit limited its size & made it explicit that "decent people" should have nothing to do with it
@DraftKings does more damage in 1 year than the Five Families did in their 50-year heyday!
