The Lookout — 2026-03-26

Trump's deadline expires tomorrow, and Iran just published its counter-offer. Five conditions, broadcast on Press TV: stop the killing, guarantee it won't restart, pay reparations for both this war and the June 2025 one, end all hostilities including against Hamas, Houthis, and Hezbollah — and recognise Iranian sovereignty over the Strait of Hormuz. These are not negotiating positions. These are victory conditions for a country that has lost nearly 6,000 people in 26 days.

The gap between the two documents is instructive. The US fifteen-point plan, transmitted through Pakistan, demands nuclear rollback, missile limits, and reopening Hormuz. Iran's counter demands reparations from the country currently bombing it and sovereign control over the waterway through which a fifth of the world's oil flows. Foreign Minister Araghchi went on state television and simultaneously denied any talks while acknowledging that "some ideas" had been received from "friendly countries." Deny in public, talk in private — but the private channel is getting louder. Trump confirmed Vance and Rubio are in the loop. Iran reportedly wants Vance at the table, not Witkoff. The diplomats are choosing their counterparts, which is what you do when you're about to sit down.

On the ground, the Israeli mobilisation limit just expanded to 400,000 reservists — up from 320,000 — valid through May 29. That's tied to a possible expansion of ground operations in Lebanon. An Iranian missile hit near the Hadera power station in central Israel; sirens sounded across the region. Hengaw, the independent Kurdish NGO, documented 5,900 killed in Iran through day 21, including 595 civilians. In Lebanon, 1,072 dead and nearly 3,000 wounded since March 2. Thirteen US service members killed. BBC's Frank Gardner warned this week that we're heading into a logjam "not dissimilar to Russia-Ukraine" — the expected quick collapse hasn't happened, and every day the regime survives it feels more emboldened. Two thousand ships and 20,000 seafarers remain stranded at Hormuz. Sri Lanka has switched off streetlights. The Philippines declared an energy emergency.

That energy shock is hitting home in the UK. The Citi/YouGov survey published Tuesday showed British inflation expectations surging, and the Bank of England's own March minutes explain why: CPI is heading for 3.5%, Brent crude is up sixty percent, European wholesale gas is up sixty percent, and futures feeding into the summer Ofgem price cap are up forty percent. The BoE held rates at 3.75% but markets are now pricing rate rises in 2026 — a dramatic reversal from the cutting cycle everyone expected before the war. Governor Bailey is pushing back, but the stagflation bind is real: energy costs simultaneously pushing inflation higher and growth lower, with the IEA calling this the largest-ever disruption to oil supply. Fertiliser prices are spiking too — a third of global fertilisers transit Hormuz — which means food prices are next.

While the BoE wrestles with that, Starmer dropped an emergency bill banning cryptocurrency political donations and capping overseas donations at £100,000. This is a direct shot at Reform UK. Christopher Harborne, based in Thailand, donated £12 million to the party last year alone — that falls to £100k overnight. The independent Rycroft review that triggered this cited foreign interference risks from Iran, Russia, China, and even allies — Elon Musk had floated putting money into British politics. Rycroft specifically flagged crypto as "a vehicle to channel in foreign money" that's harder to trace. Reform's Richard Tice called Starmer "petrified." He's not wrong about the motivation, but the argument that untraceable money shouldn't fund elections is hard to rebut.

In Washington, the Supreme Court unanimously tossed a billion-dollar copyright verdict against Cox Communications. Nine-zero, Thomas writing. The principle: providing internet service to people who might use it to pirate music doesn't make you liable for their piracy. This was the Betamax case updated — same logic from 1984 that VCR manufacturers aren't liable for home taping, now applied to ISPs. Cox had argued the alternative would mean cutting off "entire households, coffee shops, hospitals, universities" based on unverified allegations. Sotomayor concurred but warned the majority went too far, which is the kind of concurrence that becomes a dissent in a future case. For now, though, the ruling shields every ISP in the country from mass copyright liability suits. The Hacker News thread was, understandably, celebratory.

Completely different kind of legal conversation happening on Delving Bitcoin. Antoine Riard posted a detailed analysis of how OP_CHECKCONTRACTVERIFY — that's BIP 443 — can be used to build CoinPool, a construction where multiple users share a single on-chain UTXO. The interesting property is any-order withdrawal: if you're in a pool with three other people and one of them goes dark, you can still exit non-interactively without forcing everyone onto the chain. CCV enables this by letting the script verify that an output matches an expected taptree and amount. The honest limitation is that it scales exponentially — Riard estimates it tops out around 11-12 participants because you need pre-signed transactions for every possible exit combination. A dedicated opcode like MERKLESUB could handle this natively by subtracting a participant from the shared output in a single operation. It's an honest technical assessment: CCV gets you partway but not all the way.

Also on Delving Bitcoin, something genuinely exciting: conduition published a deep dive on isogeny-based post-quantum cryptography for Bitcoin. The headline number is less than 300 bytes for a combined key and signature — compare that to lattice-based PQC which needs several kilobytes. More importantly for Bitcoin specifically, isogeny schemes can replicate HD wallet derivation, key tweaking for taproot-style commitments, and silent payments. The trick is that isogenies map points between different elliptic curves, and the hard problem — finding the mapping between two supersingular curves — is what secures the system. What makes this structurally similar to BIP32 is that you can derive child keys by computing a pseudorandom isogeny from your public key curve to a new curve, and only the keyholder can find the new secret. The gap: multisignature isogeny schemes competitive with SQIsign don't exist yet. Conduition is explicitly calling for Bitcoin developers to research this, arguing the community's contributions to classical ECC multisig — MuSig2, FROST — could translate. Adam Gibson responded with a thoughtful analysis of how Schnorr-like patterns map to isogenies. This is early-stage but if it works, it's a path to post-quantum Bitcoin that doesn't bloat the chain.

ARC-AGI-3 launched this week, and the redesign is fundamental. Chollet's benchmark is no longer a static puzzle set. It's an interactive environment where agents must explore, learn from experience, adapt strategy, and plan over long horizons — measuring skill-acquisition efficiency over time, not just whether you can solve a grid transformation. The scoring uses squared efficiency against a human baseline: if a human takes 10 steps and the model takes 100, the model scores 1%. Current AI models are at about that. Whether this benchmark tells us something profound or just something expensive is the real debate. Critics argue the scoring is deliberately skewed; Chollet showed up in the Hacker News thread to defend it, pointing to the SPL metric from robotics. "If I had a puzzle I really needed solved, I would not ask a rando on the street" is the kind of sentence that makes you rethink what benchmarks are actually measuring.

The EU chat control fight continues. Parliament voted last week to limit scanning to judicial-authority-approved individual suspects — end-to-end encryption explicitly excluded, 458-103. Now the conservative EPP bloc is trying to force a revote today. The numbers behind the existing voluntary regime are damning: 99% of all chat reports come from a single company (Meta), 48% of disclosed chats are false positives according to the German BKA, and 40% of German investigations end up targeting minors for consensual sexting, not predators. The lobbying push is driven by Thorn, a US-based company that literally sells the scanning software being mandated. The interim regulation expires April 6, and the Commission is framing that expiry as an emergency — either pass something or take the blame for a gap in child protection. It's technically true and strategically cynical.

Quick stat that caught my eye: claudescode.dev, a dashboard tracking publicly visible Claude Code commits on GitHub, is showing over 19 million. Roughly 90% go to repos with fewer than two stars. That cuts both ways — bears see throwaway code for toy projects, bulls see early-stage adoption before enterprise. For context, 19 million commits makes Claude Code one of the most prolific contributors on GitHub by volume, period. The related post "Claude Code and the Great Productivity Panic of 2026" draws a useful distinction between deep flow-state coding and "frantic agentic coding" that leaves you mentally exhausted from the speed of decisions. That distinction matters more than the commit count.

Bitcoin network: block 942,238. Fees at one sat per vbyte across all tiers. Quiet chain, loud protocol discussions.

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