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News archive

News archive

Everything we have published, newest first. 48 stories, each one sourced to a primary document.

19 August 2026

Industry
Coldcard rebuilds how a seed gets its randomness
After July's entropy failure, Coinkite's unreleased changelog rewires seed generation to combine three hardware sources, adds checks that the random path reaches the hardware, and makes user-supplied entropy mandatory. None of it repairs a seed already made.
3 min read

17 August 2026

Protocol
Deriving a Nostr identity from your Bitcoin seed
BIP-85 now has a Nostr application, so a Nostr secret key can be derived from a seed phrase already written down rather than backed up separately. The design allows several unlinkable identities and key rotation within each.
3 min read
Industry
Where to report a flaw in a Bitcoin specification
The BIPs repository now carries a security policy. Its first instruction is not to use it: report to the implementations, because a specification has nothing to patch.
3 min read

13 August 2026

Protocol
Chain code delegation: signing without seeing the wallet
A multisig co-signer normally has to be handed an xpub, which shows them every address and every balance in the wallet. BIP-89 hands over a per-input tweak instead, and it has now been marked as deployed.
3 min read
Industry
LND bounds what one peer can make a node buffer
Two LND releases cap how many channel identifiers a peer can make a node accumulate while syncing the Lightning graph. No funds were at risk. What was at risk was the node staying up, which is not the same as nothing.
3 min read

9 August 2026

Protocol
BIP-110 split off its own chain, then stopped
A proposed soft fork to limit arbitrary data reached its mandatory signalling window, the nodes enforcing it left the main chain, and mining on the new chain stalled. The proposal was marked Closed a day later.
3 min read

25 June 2026

Mining Protocols
A miner picked the transactions in block 955,318
Block 955,318 is the first known block on the live network built with Stratum V2's Job Declaration Protocol. The miner assembled the template, the pool accepted it. For fourteen years the pool did that job.
3 min read

30 October 2025

Mining Economics
Riot puts the all-in cost of one bitcoin at $89,074
Riot Platforms reported its third-quarter cost to mine one bitcoin: $46,324 before depreciation, $89,074 with it. The filing names the cause, and it is not the electricity bill.
3 min read

9 June 2025

Relay Policy
Bitcoin Core uncaps the OP_RETURN relay default
A merged pull request raises the datacarrier limit that nodes apply by default. The mechanism worth understanding is that the limit was never a rule about what is valid, only about what a node passes on.
3 min read

10 April 2025

Tax Reporting
Congress repeals the DeFi broker rule
A joint resolution under the Congressional Review Act voids Treasury's reporting rule for DeFi front ends, and bars any rule substantially the same as it. Custodial broker reporting is untouched.
4 min read

6 March 2025

Executive Action
The Strategic Bitcoin Reserve executive order
Executive Order 14233 creates a reserve capitalised with forfeited bitcoin and directs that it not be sold. What it can do is set by what an executive order is: it directs how the government handles what it already holds.
3 min read

18 February 2025

Custody
FTX pays its first creditors, in petition-date dollars
The first FTX distribution goes out today to the Convenience Classes, at about 119 percent of their allowed claims. Those claims value bitcoin at 16,871.63 dollars, the price the court fixed as of the petition date.
4 min read

30 January 2025

Adoption
El Salvador amends the Bitcoin Law
Decree 199 was published on 30 January 2025. It keeps the words "curso legal" and removes what they did: the acceptance obligation, the tax channel and the state's convertibility guarantee.
3 min read

30 December 2024

EU Regulation
MiCA comes into application across the EU
From 30 December 2024 a firm needs an authorisation to provide crypto-asset services anywhere in the Union, and one authorisation covers all twenty-seven states. What the regulation attaches to, and what it cannot attach to, is the part worth reading.
3 min read

26 November 2024

Regulation
The Fifth Circuit vacates the Tornado Cash designation
On 26 November 2024 a US appeals court set aside OFAC's designation of the immutable Tornado Cash contracts, holding that code nobody can own is not property a sanction can block. It is a statutory ruling, not a constitutional one.
4 min read

17 September 2024

Grid Operations
ERCOT measured how flexible its flexible load really is
Texas pays large loads, mostly mining, to be interruptible. ERCOT measured 23 of them over six months and found the share of intervals they actually curtailed ranged from 20.8 to 99.3 percent, with the biggest sites the least responsive.
3 min read

5 July 2024

Custody
Mt. Gox begins repaying creditors, a decade later
The Mt. Gox trustee started distributing bitcoin and bitcoin cash to creditors on 5 July 2024, roughly ten years after the exchange failed. The interval is the part worth understanding.
3 min read

3 July 2024

Disclosure
Bitcoin Core adopts a disclosure policy and opens the archive
The project published a severity scale and disclosure timeline, then released ten advisories for bugs fixed years earlier. The mechanism worth understanding is that nobody can be made to upgrade.
3 min read

8 June 2024

Cryptography
A proposal to take the public key out of a Taproot output
A draft posted to the developer mailing list proposes an output type with no key path spend. The mechanism worth understanding is that a hash keeps a public key secret until it you spend, and Taproot gave that up.
3 min read

20 April 2024

Monetary Policy
The fourth halving cuts the subsidy to 3.125 bitcoin
Block 840,000 arrived at 00:09 UTC on 20 April 2024 and the block subsidy halved. Nobody scheduled it, nobody could delay it, and every node would have rejected a block that ignored it.
3 min read
UTXO Set
Runes activates at block 840,000, in an output nodes can discard
A second token protocol went live in the halving block. Its interesting choice is where it puts its data: an OP_RETURN output, which no node has to remember.
3 min read

23 January 2024

Administrative Law
Federal Court rules the Emergencies Act invocation unreasonable
The Federal Court holds that the 2022 invocation was unreasonable and that freezing bank accounts with no objective standard breached section 8 of the Charter. The Act itself is not struck down: the case is about how it was applied.
5 min read

10 January 2024

Market Structure
The SEC approves spot bitcoin ETFs
After a decade of denials, the SEC approved eleven spot bitcoin exchange-traded products on 10 January 2024. What a share in one is, and what it is not, is worth being precise about.
4 min read

13 December 2023

Accounting Standards
Fair value accounting arrives for corporate bitcoin
FASB has replaced impairment-only accounting for crypto assets with fair value through net income. The old rule let a balance sheet record every fall in price and no recovery, and the gap it produced is on public record.
3 min read

21 November 2023

Regulation
Binance pleads guilty and keeps operating
Binance and its founder pleaded guilty on 21 November 2023, with penalties above 4.3 billion dollars, a five-year monitorship and a change of chief executive. The exchange was not shut down, and that was the point.
3 min read

31 August 2023

Energy
Cambridge cuts its Bitcoin electricity estimate by 15 TWh
On 31 August 2023 the Cambridge Centre for Alternative Finance changed how it models Bitcoin's electricity use and restated 2021 from 104.0 to 89.0 TWh. Nothing on the network changed. The assumption about which machines are running did.
3 min read

29 August 2023

Administrative Law
Grayscale v SEC: like cases must be treated alike
The DC Circuit set aside the SEC's refusal to list a spot bitcoin product. Not because the refusal was wrong, but because the agency never explained why it treated two similar products differently.
3 min read

15 June 2023

Market Structure
BlackRock files for a spot bitcoin trust
A registration statement for the iShares Bitcoin Trust was filed on 15 June 2023. A registration is not an approval, and the standard the SEC has used to refuse these for years has not moved.
3 min read

7 May 2023

Fee Market
Fees pass the block subsidy as token minting fills the mempool
Block 788,695 paid its miner more in fees than in new bitcoin, and Binance stopped withdrawals twice. The mechanism worth understanding is that block space is sold at auction, and an auction has no queue.
3 min read

12 March 2023

Banking Rails
Three banks close and a dollar token stops being worth a dollar
Silvergate wound down, Silicon Valley Bank and Signature were closed, and USDC traded below a dollar because 3.3 billion of its reserves sat in one of them. The plumbing was the story.
3 min read

20 January 2023

Block Space
Ordinals ships inscriptions, and data finds the witness
The ord software released inscription support on 20 January 2023. The mechanism worth understanding is not ordinal numbering. It is that a byte in the witness costs a quarter of a byte anywhere else.
3 min read

4 January 2023

Custody
Earn deposits belong to Celsius, the bankruptcy court rules
On 4 January 2023 the court held that Celsius's Terms of Use transferred title to Earn deposits on the way in, making Earn customers unsecured creditors. The contract decided it, not the balance on the screen.
4 min read

16 December 2022

Bank Capital
Basel puts a capital price on bank bitcoin exposure
The Basel Committee's cryptoasset standard assigns unbacked assets a 1250 percent risk weight and caps them at 2 percent of Tier 1 capital. The Committee has no legal authority over anyone, which is the mechanism worth understanding.
3 min read

11 November 2022

Custody
FTX files for bankruptcy, and a balance turns out to be a claim
FTX and around 130 affiliated entities filed for Chapter 11 on 11 November 2022. The mechanism worth understanding is not the fraud. It is what a number on an exchange screen legally is once the exchange stops paying.
3 min read

26 September 2022

Mining Pools
Poolin froze its wallet and its hashrate left
Poolin suspended wallet withdrawals on 5 September 2022 citing liquidity problems. Within a week its share of blocks found had halved. A pool does not own the hashrate it points at the chain, and this is what that looks like.
3 min read

8 August 2022

Regulation
OFAC sanctions a smart contract, and a court says it cannot
The US Treasury added Tornado Cash addresses to the sanctions list on 8 August 2022. A designation attaches to a party who can comply or refuse, and immutable code is neither.
3 min read

27 June 2022

Market Structure
Three Arrows Capital is ordered into liquidation
A court in the British Virgin Islands ordered 3AC into liquidation on 27 June 2022. The same day, Voyager issued a default notice on a loan worth more than 665 million dollars. The lesson is about how leverage travels.
3 min read

12 June 2022

Custody
Celsius stops withdrawals, and the yield question answers itself
Celsius froze withdrawals, swaps and transfers on 12 June 2022, citing extreme market conditions. The advertised return had always implied where the deposits went.
3 min read

15 February 2022

Custody
Canada freezes accounts without a court order
Invoking the Emergencies Act directs Canadian banks to freeze accounts connected to the protests, with no court order first. The sequence is the part that matters: names went from the RCMP to the banks, and the banks acted.
3 min read

15 November 2021

Tax Reporting
How an infrastructure bill redefined "broker"
Section 80603 of the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act adds digital assets to the tax code's definition of a broker. The words are short, and they reach further than the exchanges they were aimed at.
3 min read

14 November 2021

Protocol
Taproot activates at block 709,632
Bitcoin's first consensus change since 2017 took effect on 14 November 2021. Its central idea is that a complicated spending arrangement should be able to look exactly like a simple one.
3 min read

22 October 2021

Energy Policy
Kazakhstan puts miners first in line to be switched off
Kazakhstan's grid operator says digital mining now draws over 1,000 MW from a system consuming more than it generates. A ministerial order gives the operator the power to cut miners specifically when capacity runs short.
3 min read

19 October 2021

Exchange-Traded Products
The first US bitcoin ETF does not hold any bitcoin
ProShares' BITO began trading on 19 October 2021 as the first US bitcoin-linked ETF. It holds CME futures rather than coins, and its own prospectus explains what that costs.
3 min read

7 September 2021

Adoption
El Salvador makes bitcoin legal tender
The Bitcoin Law took effect on 7 September 2021, making El Salvador the first country to give bitcoin legal tender status. What that phrase meant in the text was narrower and stranger than the headlines suggested.
3 min read

3 July 2021

Mining
Bitcoin lost half its hashrate and kept producing blocks
China ordered its miners to stop in May 2021. Roughly half the network's computing power went dark within weeks. On 3 July the difficulty fell 27.94 percent, the largest downward adjustment in Bitcoin's history, and the network carried on.
3 min read

14 April 2021

Public Markets
Coinbase lists on Nasdaq without selling a share
Coinbase went public on 14 April 2021 through a direct listing, not an offering. No new shares, no underwriter, no money raised, and a reference price that Nasdaq took care to say was not a price anyone paid.
3 min read

19 February 2021

Corporate Finance
MicroStrategy borrows at zero percent to buy bitcoin
MicroStrategy closed a 1.05 billion dollar convertible note offering on 19 February 2021 carrying no interest at all. Understanding why anyone lends at zero explains the whole structure.
3 min read

8 February 2021

Corporate Treasury
Tesla puts 1.5 billion dollars of bitcoin on its balance sheet
Tesla's annual report discloses an aggregate 1.50 billion dollar bitcoin purchase. The same filing spells out the accounting rule that will govern the holding, and that rule only moves in one direction.
3 min read