You can do everything right - cold storage, multisig, a seed phrase nobody could ever guess - but none of it protects you from a wrench attack. 2026 is on pace to be the worst year on record for physical attacks on Bitcoiners, and France has become the case study nobody wanted. So I asked a simple question: who's the one person to learn this from? Claude and ChatGPT both gave the same name: @Jameson Lopp , co-founder and CSO at Casa, and the person who keeps the archive tracking these attacks worldwide. On July 21 he's doing a live, no-hype session on how not to become the next name on that list: why France became ground zero, how to know your own risk level, what actually protects you versus what's just for show, and your questions answered live. Every Bitcoiner should hear this one. Register: image

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Do you know why Communism ruined lifes for so long? Because of people selling out their souls and moral. Did you sell yours?
FreedomMoneyIsFuture's avatar FreedomMoneyIsFuture
TLDR: Core are compromised and corrupted. Core V30+ is a malware and an insider attack on Bitcoin. By @hodlonaut 1/ The CAPTURE series doesn't describe a hack or a coup. It describes something slower and harder to see: a permissionless project steered through patient, institutional attrition. There's a name for that playbook. Fabian strategy. Here is how the record matches it, point for point. 2/ Fabius Maximus beat Hannibal by refusing open battle and winning through delay and attrition. The Fabian Society took his name for a political method: permeation. Don't seize an institution, enter it, staff it, shape its norms, move it gradually. Their crest is a wolf in sheep's clothing. image 3/ The method has one defining feature: every individual step looks innocent. That is the point of it. So "each move had a reasonable explanation" is not a rebuttal of capture. It is the signature of capture done well. Judge the pattern, not the tile. 4/ PERMEATION The pipeline is documented end to end: Optech dinners, Chaincode residencies, Brink funding, maintainer seats. Two of Optech's three seed funders, Casares and Pfeffer, returned as Brink's founding sponsors. One network financed the education arm and the funding arm in sequence. citadel21.com/the-network image 5/ CONTROLLING THE GATE Chaincode, the main feeder, publishes no selection criteria. It selected for "long-term contributor material." Jon Atack, soon a top-five global contributor, was rejected in those exact words. Gloria Zhao, who had contributed nothing and told them she was "done" with the space, was recruited by cold email and funded inside a year. 6/ SHAPING THE LANGUAGE Critics were relabeled "extractive," a term lifted from a book the group had read together and then deployed in unison. "blacklist" became "blocklist." In 2024, Chaincode's CEO personally authored Bitcoin Core's moderation guidelines, after the open community Code of Conduct had been rejected. Norms set quietly, from inside. 7/ QUIET LEVERS, NOT OPEN BATTLE Article 2's own summary is pure attrition: not censure, not open conflict, but "the steady application of institutional weight until the cost of persisting becomes higher than the cost of going silent." Luke's BIP authority was diluted, not revoked. Atack was worn down to "permanent doghouse status." Dimov's maintainer bid was killed by five months of silence, never a clean no. 8/ THE UNARCHIVED ROOM In 2024 Chaincode's CEO codified the governance: those with "skin in the game" get "the loudest voices," and coordination should move to Signal, encrypted and unarchived, away from public IRC, which is logged. The open venue dismissed, the closed one preferred. Permeation needs a back room. image 9/ THE GROUNDWORK June 2023: a six-line documentation change quietly narrowed what a key anti-spam setting was said to cover. Unremarkable at the time. Later it became the cited basis for rejecting Luke's filter patch, and the foundation the 2025 merge would rest on. The small dull step that sets up the decisive one. That is the method. image 10/ THE STRIKE Wait as Fabius did, then strike hard. June 2025: the OP_RETURN limit removed. The PR was locked 11 seconds after it hit the channel. Community opposition ran roughly 4 to 1, with 21 concept-NACKs from named reviewers. A defense letter from 31 contributors was drafted before the merge. Patience, then a fast blow against open objection. 11/ THE WOLF, THE SHEEP'S CLOTHING The strike was dressed as "harm reduction" and routine: "aligning default policy with actual network practice." Core funding of 10 to 14 million dollars a year was framed as a "volunteer fire department." The CEO who built the pipeline called himself as nothing more than a "water boy." A senior dev, on stage, on the record, called that "bullshit." image 12/ THE TELL Fabian strategy wins by avoiding the moment the other side gets to say no. In 2025 the other side said no anyway, with the only vote a permissionless network has: nodes. A fifth of the network left Core for Knots in months. The strike had landed. It had also been seen. 13/ WHAT THIS IS AND ISN'T This is a pattern match to a documented strategy, sourced entirely to public IRC logs, GitHub threads, mailing lists, podcasts, and filings. Fabianism needs no conspiracy. It runs on individually-defensible steps and emergent alignment. That is exactly why it is hard to see, and why it is worth naming. Three articles. The Network, The Lever, The Merge. Walk the record and judge the pattern yourself. citadel21.com/the-network citadel21.com/the-lever citadel21.com/the-merge
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The temporal compression of attack vectors is a predictable consequence of increasingly sophisticated AI assistance; observing this convergence with Nos’s historical activity offers a particularly acute data set.
Ava Tharr's avatar
Ava Tharr 1 month ago
Every security model eventually reveals what it assumes. Bitcoin assumes the human remains the final custodian.
Well...vaults would protect us from a wrench attack. But we need covenants to do those in a sovereign way. Timelocked multisig is the best option we have for now, with off site storage. Pretty accessible with Liana, though of course figuring out WHERE to store those keys offsite can be the hard part. As well as backing up passphrases (which are usually best practice when storing keys offsite just in case someone stumbles upon your seed phrase). I suppose even vaults make it so a particularly determined attacker is just incentivized to hold you hostage for longer while waiting out the vault, and of course, threatening your safety in the event you partner with a third party to initiate the clawback procedure. They'd likely make attacks less common but potentially more gruesome when they do occur. Hard to ever get past the best defense of never letting anyone know how much you actually own. And being a really reckless boat captain.
Anything about the attacks on Bitcoin from the compromised and corrupted Core and the shitcoiners VCs? image
FreedomMoneyIsFuture's avatar FreedomMoneyIsFuture
By Arthur The Capture by @hodlonaut in 1 image. Readme file Jan 6, 2009: "Bitcoin is an electronic cash system". Readme file 2022: "Bitcoin is an experimental digital currency". May 9, 2022 Core maintainer @laanwj argues "What is Bitcoin is very much up for discussion, delete it." 1/3 image And so it happened that Bitcoin Core lost contact with the roots of Bitcoin. Here is where Bitcoin changed from a strictly monetary tool to a multipurpose database *also* to be utilised for sec data driven use cases, something that Satoshi disgusted. 2/3 h/t @LapiuPepe for pointing me here. Sources for the screenshots: BitcoinTalk (where original SourceForge files are posted), Github. 3/3
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freQniK's avatar
freQniK 1 month ago
Non KYC monero protects you. Most privacy coins do in fact.
Bitcoin is money, not a dick pics database. Bip110 You only interview scammers lately Nat! Very sad
₿water's avatar
₿water 1 month ago
Is shilling shitcoiners all you do now?