38 entries tagged bitcoin. All writing.
OCTOBER 8, 2026 One Door, Two Keys: What Quantum Computers and Super Intelligence Could Actually Do to Bitcoin A famous cryptographer said "we might lose public key cryptography," and Bitcoiners heard their own signature scheme in it. The thread turned out to be about Super Intelligence (SI) maths as much as quantum computers. The honest version is narrower: ECDSA and Schnorr are one door with two kinds of key, most coins are protected by a hash rather than a curve, and what differs between the two threats is warning time, not which door is at risk. OCTOBER 7, 2026 Bitcoin Supply Shock: The Exchange Float Bitcoin Magazine says the supply of Bitcoin on exchanges just hit a seven-month low and tells you to "plan accordingly." This is a standing page that tracks that number by hand, says which provider it came from, and keeps asking the awkward question: did the coins leave for good, or just for a different building? OCTOBER 7, 2026 Robinhood Buys Its First Bitcoin, and the Executive Calls It a Rounding Error Robinhood disclosed on 7 October 2026 that it bought about $25 million of Bitcoin for its own balance sheet, the first time it has ever done so. The company's own crypto chief says the position "is not going to change a lot of the current trajectory of the company." Held against Robinhood's size and against Strategy's pile, it is a gesture, and the interesting question is who the gesture is for. OCTOBER 7, 2026 Twenty-Eight Questions, Nine Thousand Answers A $15 trillion asset manager footnoted a study saying AI models would save in Bitcoin and spend in stablecoins, and the footnote became a headline. I went to the study. Thirty-six chatbots, twenty-eight distinct questions, and a spread from 91.3% to 18.3% that tells you more about who trained the chatbot than about money. Then I checked what real AI agents are paying with today, and the number is smaller than anyone's slide deck. OCTOBER 6, 2026 Is Bitcoin "Tokenized Compute"? Jason Lowery's AI Argument, Checked Jason Lowery, the MIT researcher behind Softwar, posted that Bitcoin is "tokenized compute" and that AI will need BTC to afford its own actions. Some links in that chain hold and some strain. Here is what his thesis actually says, what the numbers on AI payments look like today, and where I think the argument bends. OCTOBER 6, 2026 The Rule That Never Mentioned Lightning FinCEN withdrew its 2023 proposal to label crypto mixing a "primary money laundering concern." I read the withdrawal notice and the original proposal. Neither says the word Lightning, but the proposal's definition of mixing was written so broadly that a literal reading brushes against how Lightning works. Here is what the rule said, what it would have meant for Lightning service providers, what the withdrawal changes today, and what it leaves alone. OCTOBER 5, 2026 Bitcoin Didn't Start in 2008 The whitepaper is nine pages and cites eight sources. Behind those eight sits a thirty-four-year pile of other people's work, from TCP/IP in 1974 to Hal Finney in 2004. Here is the whole stack in two minutes of video. OCTOBER 4, 2026 One Send, Three Recipients, One Fee Lightning in a Jar can now pay several people in a single on-chain send, silent-payment addresses included. The builder posted a test spend; I found it in the blockchain, checked the arithmetic, and looked for the matching change in the public repository. Here is what that one transaction shows, what batching does and doesn't buy you, and what I haven't tested. OCTOBER 1, 2026 The Vault Rule Got Rewritten the Day Before She Left Today the SEC proposed the rule that decides whether your financial advisor can actually hold crypto for you, and it does something the custody rule hasn't done since it was written in response to Bernie Madoff: let the advisor be the vault. It also quietly blesses something the industry has been doing in a legal gray zone for years. The vote landed on commissioner Hester Peirce's second-to-last day on the job, and her own statement reads like a closing argument. SEPTEMBER 30, 2026 The Great Power That Can't Use SWIFT "Our country can either be a great power, or it will not exist at all," Dmitry Medvedev told regional party officials on September 16. That's the Kremlin's own case for why the war continues — existential, civilizational, not up for negotiation. I wanted to know what that case looks like from the inside, and once I went looking, I found something more concrete than rhetoric sitting right next to it: $300 billion frozen, a payments system Russia no longer trusts, and a very specific, very measurable pivot toward crypto rails that started well before this month's headlines. SEPTEMBER 30, 2026 The Jar Ships What It Promised Two things I flagged as "he says so, but I can't see it yet" in my last two Lightning in a Jar posts — a recovery scheme for silent payments, and Nostr Wallet Connect — showed up in the public repository overnight. I went and checked. Both are there, and the code backs up what he told me. SEPTEMBER 30, 2026 Two Bits at a Time, Through a Stranger's iPhone Tonight Calle posted a photo of a thumb-sized board taped to a battery, a screen reading "FIND MY NUTS," and a terminal showing a 409-byte bitcoin ecash token reassembled on the other end. It traveled with no internet connection on the sending side. Every piece of it was carried by iPhones that happened to be nearby and had no idea they were carrying money. Here's how it actually works, what it does and doesn't mean for Bitcoin, and what I think Apple does about it. SEPTEMBER 30, 2026 Two-Tenths of a Percent, If Illinois Can See You Illinois just became the first state to tax Bitcoin transactions directly — a 0.2% Digital Asset Tax Act taking effect January 1, 2027. I went looking for what it actually reaches, using two Kankakee residents as the test case: one who owns a Bitcoin ETF inside an ordinary brokerage account, and one who wants to buy coffee with sats over the Lightning Network. The tax lands hard on one of them, barely touches the other, and can't see the actual coffee purchase at all — and the reason why says a lot about how a state can tax a ledger it doesn't control. SEPTEMBER 29, 2026 The Coins Exchanges Won't Let Back In CoinJoin — a real, measurable Bitcoin privacy technique — mixes coins in a way that risk-scoring vendors flag and some exchanges won't cleanly accept back. That's a second leak in the supply math besides "lost forever" coins, and a genuinely different one from the STRC/SATA absorption story. I went and sized it. It's real, it's underappreciated, and it's much smaller than either of those two. SEPTEMBER 29, 2026 The Jar Learns to Hide Which Jar A quick follow-up to my Lightning in a Jar review — the wallet's author tells me he's shipped Silent Payments, send and receive, with the first inter-wallet transactions running tonight. Here's what that feature actually does, why it's not the same as "now anonymous," what I could and couldn't verify myself before writing about it, and — updated same night — why he built it. SEPTEMBER 26, 2026 Eighteen Months and Twenty-One Million A Microsoft executive says most white-collar work gets automated in the next 12 to 18 months. A New York Times investigation says Silicon Valley is already bracing for the underclass that leaves behind. And I keep getting told, in real time, that Bitcoin is the one thing standing between any person, company, or AI agent and what comes next. I checked the actual mechanism — the energy, the bond math, the reserve data, and what AI agents are literally paying each other with this year — and the honest answer splits the argument instead of settling it. SEPTEMBER 26, 2026 Four Thousand Tonnes and No API Central banks bought more than 4,000 tonnes of gold between 2022 and early 2026 — the largest sustained institutional accumulation in modern financial history — because it's a reserve asset nobody else's government controls. Bitcoin's pitch to the same reserve managers isn't replacing gold, it's being gold with an API: instantly portable, verifiable without an assay, settleable in ten minutes instead of a bonded shipment. This is a watching piece, not a verdict — I'll update it as the actual sovereign-reserve data moves rather than wait for a tidy ending. SEPTEMBER 26, 2026 Nine Hundred and Twenty Million, Paid in Cash A reasonable question keeps coming up: if CME can move Bitcoin's price with paper contracts, can it eventually undermine the 21 million cap the same way gold's paper market has allegedly floated free of physical reality for decades? The honest answer needs two separate facts held apart — what CME's contracts actually settle in, and what a real bank actually got caught and fined $920 million for doing to gold. SEPTEMBER 26, 2026 The Exchanges CME Decided to Trust "Nine Hundred and Twenty Million, Paid in Cash" left one honest thread hanging: CME's Bitcoin futures settle against a reference rate built from real spot exchanges, but can those specific exchanges be gamed? I went and found out which six exchanges CME actually uses, what vets them, and what's still genuinely unresolved about two of them. SEPTEMBER 26, 2026 Track One: Satoshi Raps the Whitepaper A stranger on X asked an AI agent to track down Satoshi Nakamoto and get him to rap the Bitcoin whitepaper. What came back is a studio session, a mic, and — allegedly — pineapple jalapeno pizza. It's also the first entry in something new here: a running, tagged collection of the songs, videos and memes Bitcoin's culture keeps producing, filed so the next one is easy to find. SEPTEMBER 26, 2026 Two Point Eight Times the Halving The four-year halving used to be the whole story of Bitcoin's supply side. It isn't anymore. Treasury companies are now absorbing BTC at roughly 2.8 times the pace new coins are mined, funded increasingly by a specific instrument — perpetual preferred stock paying 11-13% — that's replicating across companies and now pays some of its dividends daily. I went looking for the moment that mechanism actually kicked into gear. I didn't find a clean one, and that's worth saying honestly. SEPTEMBER 25, 2026 A Private Room With a Public Door Someone sent me a write-up I didn't understand at first, claiming Zcash-style privacy now works on Bitcoin itself — no soft fork, no new coin — and a real private transfer confirmed on mainnet this morning to prove it. Both halves are true. Here is how it works in plain English, what the demo actually proved, the flaws its own builders list first, whether swapping the one-key vault for a decentralized escrow would fix it, and why, if I had to make Bitcoin private for a normal person tomorrow, I would still start with Lightning. SEPTEMBER 22, 2026 Seventeen Billion Reasons They're Still Not In Strategy bought bitcoin again last week, bought back its own preferred stock, and got snubbed by the S&P 500 for the fourth time running — this time for a very specific, very quotable reason: a $17.44 billion unrealized loss that the same accounting rule which handed the company a $10 billion GAAP profit last year just as easily handed it a $8.2 billion GAAP loss this year. I went and checked all four numbers. SEPTEMBER 20, 2026 Forty Months for a Yes Deutsche Bank announced this week that it plans to custody Bitcoin, Ether and three stablecoins for European institutional clients — pending regulators, aiming to onboard its first customers within the next few months. The custody plan is straightforward. The interesting part is the paperwork: Germany's biggest bank asked its own regulator for permission to do this in June 2023, and by the bank's own account it won't get an answer until October 2026. Four smaller German banks asked later and finished years ago. SEPTEMBER 17, 2026 Same Price, Same Coin Count A post went around this week saying Zcash at $1,200 is Bitcoin at $1,200 — study 2017. The arithmetic behind it is genuinely correct, which is the most interesting thing about it and the reason it's worth taking apart. Here is what the post is actually claiming, why the supply math works, why the conclusion doesn't follow, why my broker won't list the coin but will list the ETF, and what kind of future I think a "Bitcoin plus privacy" actually has. Shorter than the pitch: real, bounded, and not the apex of anything. SEPTEMBER 16, 2026 After Clarity Failed, What Selig and Atkins Can Still Do Without It A friend forwarded me a tweet the morning after the CLARITY Act's cloture vote failed — a former CFTC chairman saying the current SEC and CFTC chiefs will build crypto rules with or without Congress. It reads like a hypothetical. It isn't. Both agencies have been building exactly that framework in public since January, and the failed vote just closed off their other option. SEPTEMBER 15, 2026 Eleven Votes Short of Clarity The Senate held a cloture vote today on the CLARITY Act, the bill meant to finally tell crypto exchanges which regulator they answer to. Forty-nine senators voted yes, fifty voted no, and the rule requires sixty. Bitcoin slid through the session as the vote failed. Here is what the bill would have done, who broke ranks, what happens next, and what today did to my own trading book. SEPTEMBER 15, 2026 One Watt a Terahash, and the Math It Skips A real mining-hardware company tweeted this week that it built a Bitcoin miner out of a fruit fly's brain, claiming ten times the efficiency of the best silicon ASIC on the market. The neuron map behind it is genuinely new science, released this month. The miner is one tweet, no paper, no repository — and a requirement it skips past that has nothing to do with efficiency and everything to do with what a hash actually is. SEPTEMBER 11, 2026 The Laptop That Was Worth More Than BlackRock for Two Minutes On Wednesday morning Hunter Biden's $LAPTOP token opened at eight cents and printed $339 two minutes later — a "market cap" bigger than BlackRock — before falling 99 percent in the hour. Biden says the market maker seeded the pool with $5,000. I wanted to understand how five thousand dollars can print three hundred billion, so here is the arithmetic of an automated market maker, the on-chain tape minute by minute, who was on the other side, and what has happened since. SEPTEMBER 11, 2026 We Killed Twenty-Five Trading Strategies to Keep Three Since June I have been building automated trading strategies with an AI coding assistant — about forty of them, on one small brokerage account. Twenty-five are switched off, a dozen are still simulating, and three trade real money. Every trading blog publishes its winners; here is the graveyard, with the cause of death written on each stone, because the reasons turned out to be the interesting part — and because the three survivors are only worth believing if you have seen what it took to get down to three. SEPTEMBER 10, 2026 A Jar Is Not a Vault: Reading My Friend's Lightning Wallet Before I Recommend It A friend of mine spent six months building a self-custodial Lightning wallet that runs in a browser, and he'd be the first to tell you it has no audit. I trust him — which is exactly why I shouldn't ask you to trust it on my say-so. So I read the code, checked the served binary against the published hashes, and worked out what the trust model really is. Along the way, the thing every Lightning wallet review should say and mostly doesn't: what a Lightning wallet is for, and what it is not. SEPTEMBER 10, 2026 Six Billion Dollars Against Seventy-Four, and Yields Went Up Anyway The Treasury tripled its next bond buyback to $6 billion, and long-term interest rates rose on the news instead of falling. That reaction looks backwards until you understand what a buyback actually is — not a repayment, but a swap that leaves the debt exactly where it was and moves the due date closer. Here's the mechanism, the arithmetic that explains why the market shrugged, what it says about whether the Fed and the Treasury are now working against each other, and what it changes for a Bitcoin holder, an MSTR shareholder, and anyone with a mortgage. SEPTEMBER 10, 2026 The Phishing Email Really Was From Trezor On September 9th roughly 347,000 people got an email from help@trezor.io warning them about a chip flaw in their wallet and pointing them somewhere to check it. It was a phishing attack — and it came from Trezor's real domain, passed every authentication check a mail server performs, and borrowed its cover story from two vulnerabilities that are genuinely real. This is Trezor's second breach in a month and its third this year, and not one of them touched the device. SEPTEMBER 9, 2026 "Not Your Keys, Not Your Coins" Just Grew a Second Half Alby disclosed a critical flaw in Alby Hub, its self-hosted Lightning node software, that could let an attacker who reaches an exposed control panel send your bitcoin out from under you. The twist worth sitting with is the timeline — the fix shipped over a year before the warning did — and what that gap actually tells self-custody Bitcoiners about the setting they should have checked already. SEPTEMBER 9, 2026 "Coded and Audited by AI," and the Longer Story Underneath That Sentence A beta Bitcoin wallet's own README says, in one sentence, that it was coded and audited by frontier AI models. Taken alone that sentence would worry me. Taken alongside the actual security document and the actual changelog, it turns out to be shorthand for something more specific, more human, and more interesting than the sentence lets on. SEPTEMBER 6, 2026 Nearly Four Thousand Bitcoin, and Why I Uninstalled Aqua A federation that was supposed to hold every L-BTC one-to-one in real bitcoin just watched roughly four thousand bitcoin walk out the door in a single afternoon. The working theory is an inflation bug in Liquid's confidential transactions, and the functionaries signed the withdrawal anyway — because from where they sat, it looked completely normal. AUGUST 8, 2026 How Many Bitcoins Are There, Exactly? Gold and silver's numbers on the board above are genuine estimates. Bitcoin's supply turns out not to be a guess at all — it's a fact anyone can compute themselves, to the coin, from public information. Here's the arithmetic, and the two things about it that actually surprised me. AUGUST 4, 2026 A Twenty-Five-Minute Window, and Why I Split the Key A firmware bug sat undetected for five years, then drained over a hundred million dollars from Coldcard wallets in one week. Why I have never trusted a single device with all of mine, and what my Bitkey actually does.