What I’m Crunching — December 28, 2025

Book I'm Reading

TheGoldenCompass

The Golden Compass

This was a fast read, and generally enjoyable. A few things about it stood out:

  • Pullman uses a variety of lesser-seen words in his writing. I often long-pressed on words to see their definition in my Kindle app while reading. I enjoyed this; I love learning new words!
  • It’s another female-lead-character novel, which is fine, but I didn’t realize how this one would be geared more toward young adults. This meant that the characters were a bit more immature and the dialogue used expressions and idioms more connected to young people. This is acceptable if you’re a young adult, but it didn’t connect well with me.
  • I found myself not being surprised by the direction of the plot; in several cases, it was quite predictable.


I don’t expect I’ll continue on to the next book in the series. 

Podcast I'm Listening To

The All-In Podcast is always entertaining and I usually learn something. This week’s episode was no different.

On Bitcoin

There’s been a dramatic increase recently in online discussion around quantum computing and the risks it poses to Bitcoin.

Here are three takes I’ve seen that occupy each place on the spectrum from “pay attention, quantum will break Bitcoin” on one side, to “relax, Bitcoin will respond and adapt with plenty of time” on the other side:


It is notable that virtually everyone in the conversation agrees that quantum computing will match and overwhelm Bitcoin’s current security. Recent advances and the accelerating progress of quantum make that obvious.

Where folks differ is how much time the Bitcoin network has to prepare and what the best preparations actually are.

Tweets I'm Reading

 

 

 

 

If you have feedback for me, if something resonates and you want to see more of it, reply in the comments below. You can also tweet at me on Twitter @the_cody_hall.

I look forward to hearing from you!

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