There is a wooden box at the end of my garden, raised on three concrete blocks, with a felt roof and a cat-shaped hole in one end. Through the hole you can see straw.

It cost an afternoon and some timber, and it is the single most useful thing I have ever built. Six to eight cats who do not belong to anybody will spend this winter in it, and the alternative — for cats living outdoors in central Poland in January — is genuinely a question of survival rather than comfort.

This article is about the colony, the box, and why both end up on a blog about Bitcoin.

1. Os Amigos da Tuga

The Friends of Tuga are the street cats of this village who have decided that my garden is where dinner happens.

Six to eight regulars, plus the occasional visitor who turns up for a fortnight and then isn't seen again. They arrive at dusk, every day, with a punctuality I find faintly embarrassing given the state of my own schedule. The bold one eats in the open. The careful one still keeps a hedge between us after years, and I have come to think she has the better instinct.

They are not pets. Most of them will never be touched by a human and that's fine — the goal was never to tame them. The goal is that they're fed, that they have somewhere dry and warm, and that the population doesn't grow faster than anyone can care for it.

2. What a Winter Shelter Actually Needs

If you feed outdoor cats, this is the highest-value thing you can do for them, and most people build it wrong. The rules are specific:

• Raise it off the ground. Concrete blocks, bricks, anything. Ground contact draws heat out and lets damp in. This single step matters more than the insulation.
• Straw, not hay, and never blankets. Straw is hollow, repels moisture and traps air. Hay absorbs water and rots. Blankets and towels get damp from the cats' own breath and then freeze, which makes the shelter actively worse than no shelter. This is the mistake kind people make every single winter.
• Small entrance. Big enough for a cat, small enough to keep wind and larger animals out. A cat-sized hole is about 15cm.
• Small interior. Counter-intuitive but critical: cats heat the space with their own bodies, and a large box never gets warm. Snug beats spacious.
• Waterproof roof, slight overhang, so rain runs off the entrance rather than into it.
• Two exits if you can. A cornered cat is a dead cat if something larger finds the box. Mine has a divided interior for the same reason.
• Put it somewhere sheltered and quiet, against a wall or hedge, away from the path people walk.

Cheap, unglamorous, and the difference between a cat that survives February and one that doesn't.

3. The Part That Isn't Building

Feeding a colony sounds like putting food down. It is, plus:

• Every day, including the days you don't feel like it. Cats that have learned to rely on a schedule plan around it. Breaking it costs them a night of hunting in bad weather.
• Water matters more than people think, and in winter it freezes. A deep bowl, placed in sun, refilled daily, is part of the job.
• The vet bill with no warning. One turns up limping, or with an eye closed, and it stops being a hobby and becomes an expense.
• And the one that actually ends the problem: neutering. Feeding a colony without neutering it is a short-term kindness that becomes a long-term crisis, because the population compounds. Trap-neuter-return is the only version of this that works, it is the part that costs real money, and it is what most people never get to.

That last one is why there's a donation page at all.

4. Why This Lives on a Bitcoin Blog

Honest answer: because they're the same project.

I take donations for the colony in sats over Lightning — a few hundred sats from a stranger in another country, arriving instantly, for a fee that rounds to nothing, with no bank, no account, no form. The amounts are denominated in things rather than numbers, because that's what they become:

• 1,000 sats — one meal for the colony.
• 5,000 sats — a full day of food.
• 21,000 sats — a week of litter.

I write about Lightning a lot. This is the only part where I get to use it for something that matters, and the demonstration does more for the argument than any article I could write about it.

Nobody goes hungry if nothing arrives. The donations make it easier and take the sting out of the vet; they're not a condition of the bowl being filled.

5. Go and Look

The build is documented at tugathecat.com — photographs of the structure, the divided interior, the straw going in, and the finished box in the garden. If you're going to build one this autumn, copy it; that's what it's there for.

The diary has the colony as it actually is: who turned up, who didn't, what the weather did.

And if you want to send a thousand sats so somebody eats tonight, the button is there. If you don't, read the shelter guide and build one where you live instead. That's worth more than the sats.

The Point

A wooden box, three concrete blocks, a bale of straw, and an afternoon. No technology, no cleverness, nothing that needed anyone's permission.

Six to eight animals who have never been inside a house will be dry this winter because somebody put a hole in a piece of wood in the shape of a cat.

🐾 tugathecat.com — the build guide, the diary, and the bowl. ⚡