The IRC Legal Business Brief

The things that lock you in rarely announce themselves. They show up as a vendor contract you signed too fast, a token limit you hit too early, or an ecosystem you bought into a decade ago. By the time you notice, the exit is already expensive.

Every deal I've worked on involves a review of the target company's material contracts. Vendor agreements, SaaS subscriptions, service providers. It's one of the first things a buyer or investor looks at, and it's one of the most common places where problems surface.

Here's what kills deals: a company built its operation around a vendor, signed whatever was put in front of them to move fast, and now the contract is either non-assignable, auto-renews with no out, or has pricing terms that escalate without a cap. The buyer sees that and starts doing math on what it costs to unwind. Sometimes the math doesn't work. Sometimes it just scares them enough to walk.

But it's not just a deal problem. I've seen it hurt companies operationally long before a transaction is on the table. A vendor knows you're locked in and starts acting like it. Service degrades. Pricing creeps. You complain, they point to the contract, and they're right. You signed it.

No matter how badly you want to work with a vendor or how fast you think you need to move, take the extra few days to get the deal right. You are paying them. That means you should have clean termination clauses, the right to assign the agreement, pricing locked in for a defined period, and volume or loyalty discounts where they make sense. These aren't aggressive asks. They're the baseline of a fair commercial relationship.

The most basic and important aspects of an agreement are the ones that get missed when companies move without counsel who has actually seen what happens two or three years down the road. I have, hundreds of times.

The contract you sign today becomes the contract a buyer reads tomorrow. Make sure it holds up.

LLM usage limits have been tightening. Absurd money is being spent to bring data centers online that will power AI and the demand expected to come online over the next several years. There are questions about whether companies will be able to meet this demand.

While you can use LLMs for free or obtain paid subscriptions with better models and higher usage limits, the models are already pumping the brakes on power users. While I still use multiple models (and different models from the same companies), it is becoming critical to learn how to preserve tokens.

Often, you need to keep hammering the model to get the outcome you are actually seeking. But doing this, especially with Claude which has become my daily driver, I’m finding myself frequently out of tokens in my four-hour session. I’m now starting to use other models (e.g., Gemini, Grok) to frame up my Claude requests. The result is a tighter prompt that gets me where I need to be faster. Of course you can also feed Claude markdown and skill files that also save tokens and avoid the need to start each new conversation from scratch.

People won’t only be judged on how well they use AI. They will also be evaluated on how efficiently they use tokens. Token frugality is becoming a professional skill.  

Bitcoin’s difficulty adjustment is the primary mechanism by which Bitcoin stays predictable and functioning as a unit of time. But that depends on miners being able to find blocks every 10 minutes on average. Blocks are found by solving math problems. A block isn’t simply found because someone was looking for it at the 10 minute mark.

Enter the difficulty adjustment. Every 2,016 blocks (which should equal exactly two weeks), Bitcoin automatically recalculates the difficulty of solving the math problems to find blocks. If those 2,016 blocks took less than two weeks, the network increases in difficulty to slow the blocks down. If it took longer than two weeks, the network decreases the difficulty. This is done automatically without any human intervention.

As Bitcoin hashrate increases and more miners compete to find blocks (and win the block reward), the more resources are being dedicated to solving for X. The more resources dedicated, the easier it becomes to solve the problems.

The difficulty adjustment is Bitcoin's anti-lock-in mechanism. No miner, no pool, no government can capture the network's cadence. It locks itself in so no one else can.

Now imagine if Bitcoin didn’t have a built in difficulty adjustment. Blocks could be found in rapid succession. The entire predictable plan of finding blocks every 10 minutes for the next 100 plus years would be speedrun. The main benefits of Bitcoin wouldn’t exist.

It Ain't Easy Being Green. 

I have an Android. I've had one for years and I’m now questioning if it is holding me back in life. Before that, I had a BlackBerry. Before that, a flip phone. I grew up texting with a number pad. T9 was a skill. I was proficient. 

I got a BlackBerry late. By the time I had one, the thing was already dying, but BBM was great for a few minutes. The keyboard felt good. The era was over. That pretty much set the pattern.

When everyone moved to iPhone, I didn't. Part of it was the Apple moat. The lock-in, the ecosystem, the way they make leaving feel expensive and irrational. I don't like being managed into a decision. I'd rather choose my prison consciously. Part of it was that Android phones were genuinely good, and they still are.

But there's a cost. I've been in situations where I could feel the green bubble judgment. And I don’t particularly care other than it might actually be costing me business.

My wife has an iPhone. My kids will probably have iPhones. My clients mostly have iPhones. The conference rooms I've sat in for seventeen years were full of iPhones. This isn't really about preference anymore. It's about whether I'm optimizing for stubbornness or for function.

And yet.

I'm not sure I'm ready to hand it over. Not because Android is objectively better: the gap has closed on most metrics and opened on some others in Apple's favor. But because buying into Apple's ecosystem is a commitment, and I've spent a long time watching what happens when you let a closed system make decisions for you. I've seen it in deals. I've seen it in regulation. I see it in the way people use their phones.

What do you think? Is my Android phone holding me back? 

Worth your time:

I’ll catch you at the next block.

-Ian R. Cohen

Principal Attorney - IRC Legal

Originally Published Block No. 947025