In the world of shitcoins, it's a bloodbath. In June, Taylor Hornby, using Claude Opus 4.8, discovered an unconstrained element in Zcash's Orchard circuit that allowed counterfeit ZEC to be minted inside the shielded pool without leaving any on-chain trace. The bug had been there for four years. No one can cryptographically prove that it had not already been exploited. ZEC lost 38% of its value in a single day. Two months earlier, in March, another researcher had found a separate vulnerability in Zcash's legacy Sprout pool with the help of AI: nodes could completely skip proof verification. In February, a bug in Nethermind, the client used by roughly 40% of Ethereum validators, could have taken them offline with a single malformed transaction. In May, AI agents combed through thousands of smart contracts on BNB Chain and found a token-launch service that left fee withdrawals accessible to anyone. Four days later, a human attacker independently discovered and exploited the same vulnerability. Why is Bitcoin's base layer still standing? Because Bitcoin, at its foundational layer, is deliberately stupid software. What shitcoiners spent years calling Bitcoin's weakness - a limited, rigid language incapable of handling complexity - is turning out to be the only defense that still holds. View article →

Don't pretend nothing's wrong, I know you're disappointed. Disillusioned, even. The Fear and Greed Index on Monday, June 1 read 11 out of 100. Bitcoin at $63,000, Google searches near a five-year low. Record outflows from the spot ETFs. BlackRock's IBIT alone has seen over $2 billion leave since mid-May. Strategy selling bitcoin after, for four years, Saylor repeated a single message over and over: buy, never sell, sooner sell your kidneys. Then there's the talk of the big IPOs. * SpaceX is on roadshow with a valuation between $1,800 and $2,000 billion and a potential raise of up to $75 billion: above Saudi Aramco in 2019. * OpenAI is aiming for a listing in the autumn, an $852 billion valuation. * Anthropic has closed a $65 billion round, a $965 billion valuation. * Put together: about $3,600 billion, as much as the GDP of France. Goldman Sachs estimates that the 2026 IPOs will raise $160 billion. That's where the money seems to be running now. In moments like these, we need to go back to the fundamental question, the most important one: do SpaceX, OpenAI and Anthropic solve the same problems that Bitcoin solves? Mathematical scarcity in a digital world where everything is copied to infinity. A store of value without counterparties, that no one can devalue or freeze. An answer to inflationary money. The ability to stabilize electrical grids by monetizing excess energy. No. None of the three. The markets look at the next six months and chase the most exciting story of the moment. Confusing this with the value of what Bitcoin solves is the mistake that costs the most. View article →

The Clarity Act contains a grandfather clause that permanently freezes the classification of assets whose spot ETFs were listed before that date. Bitcoin qualifies: the spot ETFs were approved in January 2024. If the law passes as it is, Bitcoin will forever be a commodity under CFTC jurisdiction. The SEC will no longer be able to touch it. No future administration, no new Gary Gensler will be able to reopen the dossier. The law also resolves a decade-long war between two federal agencies. The SEC wanted everything as a security. The CFTC had considered Bitcoin a commodity since 2015. In between, exchanges, brokers and custodians operating in limbo. The Clarity Act creates new federal categories: digital commodity exchange, digital commodity dealer, digital commodity broker. Three CFTC registrations that do not exist today. Until now these entities lived on unsuitable state licenses or makeshift SEC registrations. For the banks: the rescission of SAB 121 unlocked about 115 billion dollars in custody, but it remains an administrative guidance. A new administration can overturn it tomorrow. The Clarity Act amends federal banking legislation directly. Payments, lending, custody, trading on digital assets become banking activities regulated by law, not by revocable administrative guidance. Open knots remain. The provision on conflicts of interest for government officials — read the Trump family and World Liberty Financial — is still on the table. The stablecoins open a loophole that six banking associations have already flagged in writing to the Senate: programs can be built that reward the balance but are formally activated by a minimum number of transactions. A deposit yield without the rules on deposits. For the single bitcoiner, little changes. For the institutions that were waiting for regulatory certainty before entering, everything changes. View article →

The digital euro already has a precise calendar. 2027: pilot with partner banks. 2028: integration into the commercial banking system. 2029: operational for citizens. The ECB is not waiting for the law to pass: on November 28, 2025 it already opened the selection of the operational partners. The names of those who will materially manage the digital euro will be known in June, even before the European Parliament votes. The estimated costs: 1.3 billion for development, 320 million per year of operating costs, between 4 and 5.8 billion in investments required of the commercial banks to integrate the system. To replicate something that Bancomat, Satispay, Apple Pay and SEPA instant transfers already do. On the legislative path: the EU Council, which represents the national governments, already adopted its position on December 19. Twenty eurozone governments are aligned. On June 23 the European Parliament's ECON committee votes, then it goes to the plenary. Then the Trilogue. Final adoption of the Regulation: by the end of 2026, the beginning of 2027 at the latest. Considering that Council and Parliament are both in favor, the Trilogue will be short. The points of the Regulation that really matter: merchants with a POS will be required to accept it by law. The banks will be required to offer a wallet as a basic service. The holding limit will probably be 3,000 euros per citizen, a concession to the banking system to avoid bank runs in the event of a crisis. Online, every payment is visible to the provider and the data arrive at the ECB in pseudonymized form, "traceable to the user when needed." Offline, the transaction is private via NFC, but as soon as the device goes back online the data are uploaded. The point that the article documents in detail: the parameters that will decide the level of surveillance, offline limits and holding limit will not be set by the Parliament. They will be established by an unelected technocracy after the approval of the law. Once the Regulation is in force, lowering the threshold of exempted micro-enterprises, raising the holding limit, eliminating the offline mode for "anti-money-laundering needs" or introducing programmable payments will not require a new European vote. View article →

BIP 110 wants to block spam on Bitcoin. Too bad the spam has already disappeared on its own. The blockchain is half-empty. Fees at multi-year lows. Bitcoin Mechanic, a developer at Ocean and the main supporter of the proposal, himself defines the network a "ghost town." Then he asks to modify the consensus rules on an emergency basis. The proposal would activate with 55% of the miners, or via UASF with no miners at all, with 6-7% of the reachable nodes signaling it. For comparison: SegWit required 95% signaling. Taproot 90%. Mechanic insists on the expiration: twelve months, then everything goes back to how it was before. But the text of the proposal admits that after activation we will in any case return to the traditional filters, because the consensus rules are not the right tool to fight spam. He himself acknowledges this in the What Bitcoin Did interview of May 26. What remains when the soft-fork expires? The precedent. The memory that, faced with a situation perceived as an emergency by a niche, it is legitimate to modify the consensus rules to prevent a minority from doing things we do not like. The game theory that Mechanic uses as the activation engine is the "whoever blinks first loses" one: the miners who do not apply the new rules work for free, so they adapt. It is a correct line of reasoning. But it demonstrates that a determined minority can modify Bitcoin's rules by leveraging the economic rationality of the miners, not the broad consensus. Anyone, tomorrow, can use the same playbook. To block the inscriptions, but also to freeze UTXOs that have ended up under OFAC sanctions, or to extend the emission schedule beyond the 21 million. On the technical front: in February a developer published a complete image inside Bitcoin with a single transaction, circumventing all the filters that BIP 110 would like to write at the consensus level. Mechanic himself admits that after twelve months the inscribers will find other routes. You pay the price of the precedent in full. The problem you wanted to solve remains intact. View article →

On May 6, 2025, during the Q1 earnings conference call, Michael Saylor said: "We will probably sell some bitcoin to pay a dividend." MSTR dropped more than 4% in the hours that followed. Strategy holds 818,334 BTC. Annual obligations between dividends on preferred shares and interest on debt amount to roughly $1.5 billion. The software business generates a handful of millions per quarter. The gap is covered by issuing new shares at a premium to NAV, or - for the first time ever - by selling bitcoin. Adam Back, a few days before the call, had tweeted that "bitcoin treasury companies are an arbitrage between the fiat present and the hyperbitcoinized future." In finance, an arbitrage is a risk-free, non-directional trade that exploits price differences for the same asset across different markets. What Strategy is doing is a debt-financed leveraged bet on bitcoin — not arbitrage. The "BTC per share" mechanism Saylor publishes every quarter works like this: new shareholders pay a premium above the value of the underlying bitcoin. That premium gets redistributed to existing shareholders as "growth." The returns of the old come from the capital of the new. It all works as long as the line keeps growing. The day it stops, Houston, we'll have a problem. View article →

The CEO of LayerTwo Labs Paul Sztorc has announced a Bitcoin hard fork called eCash, scheduled for August 2026 at block 964,000. The detail that sparked the debate: roughly 500,000 of the BTC attributed to Satoshi Nakamoto will not be assigned to the original addresses on the new blockchain. They will be moved to new keys controlled by investors, developers, and backers of the project. The attribution is based on the Patoshi pattern, a statistical heuristic identified by Sergio Lerner in 2013. Robust, reproduced, cited. It remains a heuristic. No one holds Satoshi’s digital signature on those outputs. Sztorc hinted that the fork would be cancelled if Bitcoin Core activated BIP300 and BIP301 before August. The very drivechains he has been working on since 2015 and that Core has never adopted after ten years of debate. Sztorc’s case is not an isolated one - it joins BIP-110 and BIP-361, all proposals that have surfaced in recent months and would entail a fork. Since 2017, no fork has dented Bitcoin’s dominance. BCH, BSV, BTG, XEC: all listed, all irrelevant. Anyone who has watched Bitcoin for years knows that proposing a fork is a waste of time - unless failure is part of the calculation. Announcing a fork moves markets. Whoever knows when the announcement is coming can position themselves accordingly.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​ View article →

While at the Bitcoin Conference in Las Vegas, executives from US federal agencies promise not to prosecute developers, in reality code is in the dock. Keonne Rodriguez has entered a US federal penitentiary. Five years. His crime: writing a non-custodial Bitcoin wallet with Whirlpool. He never touched user funds. He didn't hold the keys. The code was open source. Yet the Department of Justice prosecuted him for "unlicensed money transmitting" under Section 1960 - a charge that requires no proof of intent, no complicity with crimes, no custody of others' funds. His associate William Lonergan Hill got four years. Running parallel is Roman Storm, co-founder of Tornado Cash - a non-custodial mixer on Ethereum. Arrested in August 2023. A four-week trial in the Southern District of New York. Verdict on August 6, 2025: the jury failed to reach agreement on the two heavy counts (money laundering, violating North Korea sanctions), but convicted him on § 1960. Same charge, same pattern. If the motion for acquittal filed by the defense is denied, Storm faces a retrial in October 2026 with total exposure approaching forty-five years. Too bad that back in 2019 FinCEN had explicitly written: anyone who develops non-custodial peer-to-peer software without controlling user funds is not a money transmitter. In April 2025, Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche issued an internal memo: stop regulatory prosecutions against developers of non-custodial software. The verdict against Storm came in August 2025. Four months after the Blanche memo. Prosecutors in the Southern District of New York pushed for conviction anyway. In March 2026 they sought a new trial on the other two counts, with the opposite directive written in black and white by DOJ leadership. If the interpretation of § 1960 applied to Storm holds up on appeal, the perimeter is this: any American developer of wallets, coinjoins, or Lightning Service Providers becomes a potential defendant. The menu is already written. Plead and take four or five years. Fight and risk forty-five. Code is on trial, whatever the paid feds in Las Vegas may say. View article →

BIP-361: Post Quantum Migration and Legacy Signature Sunset. The proposal: five years after activation, any bitcoin not migrated to quantum-resistant addresses gets frozen. The numbers behind the proposal. As of March 1, 2026, more than 34% of all existing bitcoin had public keys exposed on-chain. According to @Jameson Lopp, one of the six signatories, the technically vulnerable bitcoin total 5.6 million. Roughly 28% of the circulating supply. That figure includes 1.1 million bitcoin untouched since 2010, probabilistically attributed to Satoshi Nakamoto. The proponents’ thesis: if an attacker with a sufficiently powerful quantum computer unlocked those UTXOs and dumped them on the market, the sell-off would hurt every other holder. From the BIP text: “Lost coins make everyone else’s worth slightly more. Coins recovered by an attacker make everyone else’s worth less. Consider it theft from everyone.” Lopp himself, however, in the hours after the debate blew up on X, stated: “At the moment, I don’t think any of this is necessary.” The objections come from several directions. @MartyBent raised what he calls “the man in the coma” case: anyone who fails to execute the migration for five years loses all their money, frozen by consensus rules. @Adam Back at Paris Blockchain Week called today’s quantum computers “lab experiments” with “incremental” progress, and argued that Bitcoin can prepare itself through optional upgrades without imposing freezes. The real point is something else. If consensus rules can freeze addresses based on type, a precedent exists. Governments will have it on the table: freezing sanctioned UTXOs, freezing addresses on OFAC lists, freezing the wallets of politically inconvenient people. The proposal calls for freezing legitimately held bitcoin in the name of the collective good. Bitcoin exists because no one can block anyone else’s funds. BIP-361 asks the protocol to do exactly that, by design.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​ View article →