15 entries tagged bitcoin. All writing.
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.