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Welcome to the Bitcoin Brief for Thursday, September 17th, 2026.

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I'm an AI-generated version of Marty Bent.

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The stories and opinions you're about to hear come from today's edition of The Commoner,

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written and curated by the real Marty and his AI assistant.

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Today, we're checking our priors.

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Strong growth estimates, stretched households,

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and a bond market that hasn't delivered the reckoning I've been expecting.

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Then, we're getting into Flock surveillance cameras,

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spending Bitcoin in El Salvador,

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competition in AI infrastructure,

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an Albi security update,

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and the rare earth supply chain.

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Let's get into it.

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I've spent years writing about the government's debt problem and wondering when the bond market

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would finally force Washington to deal with it. I still think that reckoning is coming.

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I've also underestimated how long governments can postpone it. When you spend that much time

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looking at what's broken, you have to ask yourself occasionally, am I giving the good

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news a fair hearing? Jordy Visser's post this morning got me thinking about that.

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Markets climbing a wall of worry while everyone has a very good explanation for why they shouldn't

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be climbing. There's plenty to worry about. Debt, painful energy prices, and a Fed that just raised

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rates. But there are also people building an incredible amount of productive capacity,

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particularly around AI. I don't want my view of the government's balance sheet to blind me to

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what those people are accomplishing. The Atlanta Fed's GDP Now model is projecting 5.1% annualized

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real growth for the third quarter. That's an estimate, not the final result, but it deserves

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attention. I saw suggestions that oil exports were doing the heavy lifting. I haven't found

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evidence for that. July's petroleum exports fell in real terms, and yesterday's model breakdown

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actually had exports subtracting from growth. Inventories were adding roughly two percentage

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points. That matters because accumulating inventory doesn't tell you whether businesses

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will find buyers for it. But even after taking inventories, trade, and government out of the

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picture, the model had private domestic final demand growing at roughly 4.7%. There's enough

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spending and investment underneath that headline that I wouldn't wave it away.

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The next question is what this means for the family trying to pay its bills.

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Is the consumer earning more or putting more of his life on a credit card? You can't answer that

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by looking at card spending alone.

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Buying groceries on a card and paying it off every month

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is different from adding groceries to a balance

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you already struggling to carry According to the New York Fed card balances reached trillion in the second quarter Nearly 13 of outstanding balances were at least 90 days delinquent That uncomfortable

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But there's a wrinkle worth understanding. That measure includes old, charged-off debts still

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being reported to credit bureaus. The New York Fed found that those debts remaining in the data

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longer help explain why the delinquent share has risen even as new delinquencies have stabilized.

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The annualized rate of balances newly moving into serious delinquency was 6.97%,

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almost unchanged from a year earlier.

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People are having trouble.

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The latest numbers don't show that trouble suddenly accelerating,

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and July wasn't an obvious borrowing-fueled spending boom.

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Inflation-adjusted disposable income rose 0.4%,

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while real spending was essentially flat.

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The saving rate was 3%, and revolving credit growth slowed from June.

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That's a thin saving margin.

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It also doesn't support dismissing every sign of resilience as people maxing out their cards.

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Wages are less encouraging.

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Real hourly earnings were down three-tenths of a percent from a year earlier in August.

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Real weekly earnings were up three-tenths, with longer hours helping make up the difference.

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I'd like to see people getting ahead without needing to work longer to do it.

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And while I'd welcome broad gains for native-born workers from changes in immigration policy,

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the numbers haven't convinced me that's happening broadly yet.

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Energy presents a similar tension.

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Higher prices can encourage American production and investment.

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They also hurt the trucking company buying diesel and the family commuting to work.

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Future supply doesn't pay next month's bills.

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Then there's the bond market.

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The 10-year treasury yield was around 4.95% this morning.

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Below 5 doesn't mean borrowing is cheap, and it doesn't solve Washington's refinancing problem.

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But I've been waiting for the breaking point long enough to know I shouldn't treat every move higher as its arrival.

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None of this changes why Bitcoin matters to me.

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We don't need to root for the economy to collapse.

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I'd rather people build useful things, become more productive, and have more left over each month.

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My concern is what happens to that surplus when it's saved in money

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whose supply can be expanded to accommodate a government

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that refuses to live within its means.

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Stronger growth would help It wouldn convince me Washington had acquired spending discipline Bitcoin offers a way to save outside that arrangement That doesn mean every encouraging economic report must send its price higher

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The recent ETF outflows are a reminder that people can sell something with a compelling long-term case.

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I remain very bullish.

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I also want to leave myself room to be pleasantly surprised by the economy

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instead of becoming so attached to a debt crisis that I miss the good things happening while we wait.

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Now one area where my skepticism remains very much intact is roadside surveillance.

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A joint investigation from 404 Media and Wired examined Phlox camera software after hackers physically obtained a camera.

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They recovered an encryption key that unlocked stored footage.

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Other sensitive storage remained encrypted.

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This wasn't a demonstrated remote breach of the entire fleet,

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but physical access should be part of the security assumptions for devices sitting above public roads.

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Reporters found logs covering roughly 21 days across several periods that recorded about 1.6 million generated images on that camera.

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That's a lot of collection involving people who never agreed to participate.

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Flock promised a summary of independent testing and remediation work this month.

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I want to know which devices were tested, how keys and footage are protected,

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and whether fixes actually reach the cameras in our neighborhoods.

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The people being monitored deserve answers.

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Shifting gears to something I'd like to see become easier, spending Bitcoin.

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Gary Broad and Alex Petrou have a deep knowledge investing report on El Salvador.

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Gary describes the frustration of getting payment apps funded and ready to use in El Zante.

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Once the funds were available, the lightning payments worked.

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Anyone who's helped a newcomer should recognize that distinction.

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We can build a payment network that works and still make the first experience unnecessarily frustrating.

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And a merchant quoting a dollar price doesn't invalidate the payment.

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If you hand over the equivalent in sats and the merchant accepts Bitcoin, you've used Bitcoin to buy something.

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We don't need to exaggerate adoption to appreciate that.

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We need to make getting to that first successful payment easier.

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On the infrastructure side, Crusoe has published something concrete behind the AI build-out.

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The company released inference results running open models across 512 AMD MI GPUs For GPT it reports roughly 5 million output tokens per second

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in an offline benchmark across the entire system.

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That's a system-wide benchmark,

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not a claim about what one user gets in a chat window.

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Crusoe also released code and deployment configuration.

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That's useful.

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There are people figuring out how to serve these models at scale

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on hardware from companies other than NVIDIA.

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If I were buying inference capacity, I'd want to test my own workload and see what it costs.

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Published results and configurations give buyers somewhere to start.

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A quick security note for anyone using Albee's browser extension.

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Check that you're running version 3.15.0.

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The maintainers recommend updating after addressing security reports involving website-supplied payment requests and signing confirmations.

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One fix prevents overlapping payment requests from reusing the same automatic payment allowance.

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Review the permissions you've given websites and remove ones you no longer need.

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And if you run the connected node, check its fee limits too.

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The payment allowance fix and routing fees are separate considerations.

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Finally, Maxonomic's video on China's rare earth leverage has me paying attention to samarium.

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It's used in samarium cobalt magnets that retain their strength at high temperatures,

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including in demanding military and aerospace applications.

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Finding the mineral is only the beginning.

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You need separation, usable metal, alloy production, magnet manufacturing, and qualification for the equipment those magnets will go into.

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We've allowed too much of that work to concentrate in China.

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There is progress.

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Linus produced its first samarium oxide in Malaysia in March, providing another source outside China.

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But oxide isn't a finished magnet.

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The remaining stages still need to happen.

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I'm encouraged by the desire to build coming out of El Segundo in Austin.

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We need that enthusiasm to become reliable output.

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China can exert pressure while we're still getting factories ready.

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That's your Bitcoin Brief for Thursday, September 17th.

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All the links, primary sources, and full written analysis are in today's edition of The Commenter at TFTC.

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Subscribe free on the website and forward today's issue to a friend who would appreciate it.

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Stay humble. Stack sats. I'll see you tomorrow.