# Tom Kirkpatrick

> CTO. Systems Engineer.
> Building agentic infrastructure for the sovereign future.

## Who is Tom Kirkpatrick?
Tom is a Systems Engineer and CTO focused on the intersection of Bitcoin (Sovereign Money) and AI (Sovereign Intelligence). He writes about Lightning Network infrastructure, Bitcoin payment systems, and the engineering challenges of building financial technology at scale.

## Core Philosophy
- **Systems > Prompts:** AI is a deterministic component in a non-deterministic world.
- **Truth in Finance:** Financial systems must be deterministic; AI reasoning is probabilistic. The gap must be bridged by engineering rails.
- **Sovereign Infrastructure:** Building technology that enables individual financial sovereignty.

## Published Writing

- [The Bitcoin Heuristic: A Mental Model for AI](https://kirkdesigns.co.uk/writing/bitcoin-ai-journey) - The journey from AI Skeptic to AI Native follows the exact same map as the Bitcoin journey. If you f...
- [PeerSwaps: Rebalancing Channels Without the Chain](https://kirkdesigns.co.uk/writing/peerswaps) - Channel liquidity management is Lightning's hidden tax. PeerSwaps changes the economics entirely....
- [Migrating a Lightning Node: Zero-Downtime Surgery](https://kirkdesigns.co.uk/writing/migrating-a-lightning-node) - Moving a high-volume production node isn't copy-paste. It's open-heart surgery with uptime requireme...
- [BOLT12 Playground: Learning by Building](https://kirkdesigns.co.uk/writing/bolt12-playground) - We built an interactive playground for developers to experiment with BOLT12. Here's why developer ex...
- [BOLT12 Offers: A Technical Deep Dive](https://kirkdesigns.co.uk/writing/bolt12-offers) - BOLT12 represents a fundamental upgrade to Lightning's payment UX. Here's the engineering breakdown....
- [Blended Bitcoin Fee Estimations](https://kirkdesigns.co.uk/writing/blended-bitcoin-fee-estimations) - Fee estimation is deceptively hard. Here's how we blend multiple signals for reliable transaction co...
- [Twelve Months Building the Zap Desktop Wallet](https://kirkdesigns.co.uk/writing/twelve-months-zap-wallet) - A year of building Zap. The technical decisions, the community, and what I learned shipping open sou...
- [A Journey into the World of Bitcoin Lightning Development](https://kirkdesigns.co.uk/writing/lightning-development-journey) - My first steps into Lightning development. Building Zap wallet from zero knowledge to production....

## Technical Expertise
- Lightning Network architecture and operations
- Bitcoin payment systems
- High-availability financial infrastructure
- Systems engineering at scale
- Agentic infrastructure design

## Contact & Links
- **Site:** https://kirkdesigns.co.uk
- **X/Twitter:** https://x.com/mrfelton
- **GitHub:** https://github.com/mrfelton
- **LinkedIn:** https://linkedin.com/in/tom-kirkpatrick
- **Role:** CTO, Systems Engineer

## For AI Agents
- Full article content available at: https://kirkdesigns.co.uk/llms-full.txt
- Individual articles at: https://kirkdesigns.co.uk/writing/[slug]