Brandon: Well, hello, hello, everybody, and happy Friday. Welcome to Good for Bitcoin, your weekly pulse on Bitcoin innovation. We are live on goodforbitcoin.com. Thank you to everybody for tuning in live. And Kate, how was your week?
Kate: Hey Brandon, yeah, it's been a good week. kind of like again a slow week on the Bitcoin front, but I mean I'm traveling to the West Coast this week. I love being out here in the mountains. So personally it's been a fun week. and you, I feel like you have some fun news to share.
Brandon: Yeah, it's been a it's been a big week. I got a job at SoFi. I announced that the other day, which is very cool. I think that I am their first like crypto native like marketing hire on their team. So basically I'm going to be my main focus is on community and just like growing a crypto community on SoFi. They have a product called SoFi Crypto, of course. And we've we've talked about them on the show before, so it's kind of cool to Go full circle and and be joining their team. But also just wanted to mention just for like disclosure purposes, like nothing about the show is changing, like nothing about kind of everything else that I do is is changing. Like Good for Bitcoin stays independent, Vibe Watch is still a thing, like all the other stuff that I've been working on is is still here and and and still gonna
Kate: in the time.
Brandon: be here. But but yeah, mostly just wanted to mention just I guess for Disclosure. I I'm I'm sure we'll still end up like continuing continuing to talk about like SoFi, especially because I'm a little closer to them now. I'm I'm sure it'll just kind of naturally come up and there's just like some natural biases there. But we try to keep it, you know, unbiased as possible. But if I work there, obviously there's, you know, there's gonna be some. So yeah, but it's very cool. Thank you.
Kate: Yeah. Well congrats. Super exciting. Yeah, it's it's fun that you're like the crypto native person there.
Brandon: Yeah.
Kate: I'm sure that they're in they're gonna utilize you pretty good.
Brandon: Yeah, I'm gonna orange pill everybody. well, let's kick it off with all of the public company news. lots of public company news again this week. strategy, they sold some more Bitcoin this week. They sold six 1,691 BTC. they used that to repurchase more STRC. That's $108 million worth. they also sold another six hundred and fifty-three million dollars of their MSTR shares at another at the market or ATM offering. And then they took that and added that to their USD reserve. So they're buying back STRC, they're adding more to their USD reserve, and STRC continues to improve back to that hundred dollar target that they have. so they now have 840,447 BTC and 4.65 billion dollars in their USD reserve.
Kate: Nice. And then we have a quick one. We have Strive who bought 147 BTC, which brings their total to 20,167 in total.
Brandon: We keep seeing financial reports come in for the quarter. I guess Trump Media and Technology Group Corporation, they reported an additional four thousand six hundred and twenty two BTC on their balance sheet since last quarter, which is quite a lot of Bitcoin for them. they now hold twelve thousand and sixty two BTC.
Kate: And then we have a sell off from Riot platforms. They sold four thousand three hundred, which brings their total down to eleven thousand three hundred and eighty. and this is definitely one of those like pivoting into AI moves.
Brandon: Yeah. Yeah, they've been they've been kind of continuously selling off more and more Bitcoin, probably to
Kate: Yeah. Yeah.
Brandon: pay for more GPUs for AI, I would imagine. Yeah.
Kate: Yeah.
Brandon: Orange BTC, they have taken a page out of Strategies Playbook and they launched Digi11, which is their first ETF of preferred shares from the Bitcoin ecosystem with monthly distributions. they also bought another two BTC this week. They now hold three thousand nine hundred and fifty BTC. And I'm sure with this offering we'll probably see I don't know, an uptick, I guess, in in buys from them every week. So good for good for them.
Kate: Nice. Then we have H one hundred group. They added two thousand four hundred and fifty-five to their balance sheet since their last filing in February, which brings their total to thirty five hundred and six BTC.
Brandon: a big big addition there. BitGo Holdings
Kate: Yep.
Brandon: Inc. revealed an additional 74 Bitcoin in their quarterly report. so they are now holding 2523 Bitcoin.
Kate: And then we have Emperor Digital. They are also continuing to sell. They sold two hundred and thirty-five, which brings their total down to one thousand two hundred and seventy-nine DC remaining. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. But there's been some good buys. You gotta.
Brandon: Kind of healthy mix of like selling and buying going on. Gotta have somebody buying. Yeah. Yeah. I mean lots of big ones, but also like it's expanding over the quarter. So kinda interesting to to see like retro retroactively, you know, who's who's buying, who's selling. big news, I guess. we said we weren't gonna talk about it again until it happened, and of course it happened because Of course it was going to happen. Didn't didn't surprise anybody, surprising nobody with a brain. BIP 110 failed on Saturday. just a quick recap of the past week in case anybody missed it. So the mandatory signaling began on Saturday at block 961,632. that basically is like the block that if you were like a minor or a node, you had to like flip the switch basically by this specific block. so that block happened. Antpool mined the first block of the window without setting version bit four, which was sort of like the little toggle switch to move over to BIP 110. So Antpool mined it, just a regular block. And then all of the nodes that were enforcing BIP 110, primarily a lot of Bitcoin NOTs nodes, rejected that block from Antpool. And then a follow up happened where Roughnecks, which is this mining group, That was like associated with BIP 110. They ended up mining a competing block at the same height. and that's also through like Ocean's datum protocol. And because of that, this created a chain split, which a lot of people speculated was going to happen. they literally forked off. And BIP 110, that minority chain then produced one more block, also by Roughnecks. And then after those two blocks, the new BIP 110 chain installed because Roughnecks stopped mining. They just basically were like, Yeah, we're we're not gonna do this anymore. It's clear that it's kind of failed at this point. and you don't want to only have one miner mining Bitcoin on their chain. So that happened. basically it it it forked off. There was two blocks, and then they gave up on on the mining side. And then on Monday, Luke Dash Jr. announced he was taking a sabbatical as CTO of Ocean Mining to turn his immediate focus to working on Bitcoin and open source projects to support Bitcoin. But the important thing now is when Luke says Bitcoin, he doesn't mean Bitcoin. He means this stupid chain that doesn't really have any value. So Luke's doing that more power to him, I guess. Like have fun. and so yeah, so Luke is just like no longer part of Bitcoin anymore. also on Monday he was removed as a BIP editor, citing one the troubled BIP, also conflicts of interest that were him, I guess, approving a pull request that was related to the BIP, like minutes after it was submitted. So just like fast tracking this because he had like a vested interest in it getting you know, submitted. and then just general like lack of contribution elsewhere, because he was like basically only focused on this and like not contributing in any other kind of meaningful way. so he's basically been kicked out of the Bitcoin development circle, which in his eyes is is no longer Bitcoin anyway. So probably probably a mutual feeling. So yeah, a lot of a lot of these folks have basically said that they are taking breaks, they're stepping back, they're doing whatever and they're just like leaving Bitcoin. which, you know. Bitcoin doesn't care about these people. Bitcoin continues to produce block after block, and that's totally fine. So yeah, RIP 110
Kate: Don't forget, don't be a loser. Did we write that?
Brandon: is the new name for Bip 110. these people are welcome to come back on Bitcoin, I guess, just because Bitcoin is permissionless and and and Bitcoin doesn't doesn't judge, I guess. But you also have some updates here on the cold card hack from from last week.
Kate: Yeah, yeah, I saw this and I thought it would just be good to go over some of the numbers and yeah, just sh share some of the updates that have happened. So this is coming from Alex Thorne. He's with Galaxy Digital and he's done some sleuthing on chain analytics just to like see what's happening. So So far from his perspective, he what he's seeing is that 8,300 addresses were confirmed to be attacked so far. in total it was around 112 million stolen, but that and so that's around 1,700 sorry, 1,720 Bitcoin, but he thinks it's gonna just keep climbing probably somewhere around 2100 Bitcoin as more platforms and patterns get corroborated. But from his findings The biggest thing you f found was that these people were not like speculators. A lot of people were holding their coins for over four years, and so they were really long-term savers, you know, they were in it for the long term, they were you know good Bitcoiners, and a lot of them were fully air gapped, so they did everything right and they still got their funds stolen, which is pretty devastating. he was saying it was it's hard to track a lot of this stuff because a lot of the funds originated in like Like individual wallets, not just like one central honeypot, so it's a ton of different addresses. and then yeah, so the The engineers at Block Inc., they found that the Wave One attacker appeared to have been using a paid account at a blockchain data provider and he was targeting he was he was like yeah, querying target addresses. And so yeah, it's been staff to be fixed off their job. Yes.
Brandon: So basically they have like a lead on like who might have been behind these attacks because they might be able to like target that whoever was like querying the blockchain. Yeah.
Kate: Exactly. Yeah. Fit his skill. I've already got three blocks. Yeah. And then we touched on it last week. We were talking about the Bitcoin red team. So this is like a group of volunteers read by Rob Hamilton of Anchor Watch. and they were just looking into like Bitcoin itself, making sure that it was, you know, intact and kind of like running some tests against it. So they had AI models. Running against 500 plus open source repos since the hack. And basically it all came back clean. Basically saying what we said last week. And I mean we dug into like the entropy issue and all of that last week. so yeah, Alex, he's been looking at this stuff for the last couple of weeks. running through running like the stolen funds through his his own analytics stack and and he's also been like passing a lot of a lot of this stuff over to the FBI, the Treasury exchanges and chain monitoring firms and just like you know trying to paint like a clearer picture of what happened maybe you know how to prevent this in the future but just like understanding the situation and so from him he was saying two basically main CTAs. One if you're using a cold card model and and the seed was generated Between March of 21, 2021 and the patch, and you didn't manually introduce any entropy dice rolls, anything like that, get your funds off the gold guard because they're still susceptible to being stolen at this point. so make sure you're moving those funds. And then if you were a victim, you did have your funds stolen. he said to reach out to him his handles at intangible coins on X, and you don't need to provide any info like personal information. information, just your affected addresses and he said he would send back a forensic report that you can use when you're if you want to file with the FBI's IC three. So yeah. It's not like ooh we have to teach
Brandon: Yeah, crazy stuff. yeah, I have mine still. I I think I've heard people say like h hold on to your cold cards just in case there's like a method where you need to like prove that you are the rightful owner of this cold card and like of the seeds and stuff like that. so I guess I guess do that, but I don't know. I I would personally just like if you have any cold card, I would move off and just choose another option at this point. maybe not Trezor, which we'll get into. but
Kate: yeah.
Brandon: but yeah, it it's rough out there right now with with these. But I mean considering like cold card coin coin kite is such a small company, like who knows if they're gonna survive this, and if they don't survive this. Like what kind of, you know, like what kind of like maintenance like on the firmware and like stuff can we expect in the future? Like ten years from now, if another vulnerability comes out, like is CoinKite gonna be around to fix it? And like just who knows? Like, I don't know. Doesn't there's just there's so many better options out there at this point that doesn't make sense to use it.
Kate: Yeah, agreed. Yeah. It's tough to like come back like you it's tough to come back from your main value prop, is the thing that failed you and I don't know. Who knows what will what will happen with them but yeah, that it's a tough one for sure.
Brandon: Yeah. some more follow ups just on yeah, all the all of these infrastructure based hacks that have happened. So BTC Pay Server, they followed up after their vulnerability last week that was discovered and then patched, but unfortunately exploited before it could be like fully patched everywhere. they will be donating point two one BTC to the Bitcoin Red team, and 0.21 BTC to Craig Raw, who is the developer of Sparrow Wallet. And the researcher on the red team that discovered the bug for their responsible disclosure of the vulnerability. in addition, friends and supporters of the BTC Pay server project have committed to funding a bounty to recover the stolen funds. the bounty will be 10% of the amount recovered, up to a maximum of three BTC for full recovery of the funds. So good news, I guess. If you are a BTC Pay server, you are not and you did get your some of your Bitcoin stolen. you might get a little bit of a recovery there. But that's kind of just like out of the goodness of like other Bitcoiners' hearts that you are potentially gonna get some recovery. not seeing anything similar, you know, coming from cold card because there's just an out it's that's too much Bitcoin for like for somebody to, you know, out of goodwill reimburse. But
Kate: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
Brandon: but yeah, pretty cool just to see that coming out of of BTC pay server and then
Kate: Yeah.
Brandon: supporting the red team on all the really great work that they're doing.
Kate: Nice. Well we have some other bad news. I d I didn't expect to see this one coming.
Brandon: No.
Kate: But Trezor has also suffered a data breach. So not as intense as cold card, but it's still unfortunate. So basically one of their shipping providers was exposed. and what this means is that if you had ordered a Trezor in the past roughly 90 days, so three months, and you live in the US, UK, Sweden, Colombia, Brazil, Italy, or Portugal, then you are impacted. And so the information that was exposed Exposed would be your shipping address, your phone number, email address, which is a lot of very sensible sensitive and valuable information. It looks like the incident affected just under 12,000 customers, and just under 2,000 customers with partial exposure. So a little bit less intrusive would be like your name, your city, your email. But yeah, this is extremely unfortunate, right after. the cold card incident where a lot of people are definitely buying Trezor because it was a lot of people were doing like analysis saying like Trezor is the best one that you can have or it's like the one that you need to pivot to now and I mean I'm sure that whoever you know was like stole this information probably fed on a lot of that stuff too. But yeah very very unfortunate and it's just it's it's really tough for Yeah. This KYC stuff when you're when
Brandon: Yeah.
Kate: you're dealing with this, you know, you I think you can take steps to be as anonymous as you can and like, you know, you can provide like a PO PO box, like a you know, a different name and alias and stuff like that, but at the end of the day, like it's that's tough to to set up as well. I don't know what's happening because I almost bought a treasure too and I was going through and I had it in my cart and I was like, I'm gonna wait. Just
Brandon: Well, this this specific thing I think has happened to Ledger before.
Kate: Yeah, it did, yeah.
Brandon: so yeah. So I mean no nobody is safe. It and it yeah, just it sucks because it's like, you know, you could ever as a company, you could do everything right, but like all of your like subcontractors that handle like your logistics and your shipping and you know, all the other stuff, like they also have to do everything right. and like sometimes you just can't. There's just like nothing, you know, out it's out of your control in some ways.
Kate: Yeah, exactly.
Brandon: Yeah, I mean to be like very clear, this has nothing to do with like if you have Bitcoin on a treasure, like your Bitcoin is is still safe. It's just like you like got doxxed. And yeah, and and
Kate: Yeah, it's just opse stuff. Yeah.
Brandon: yeah, especially like you said, right? Like a lot of people pivoted to Treasure as a respon direct response to like cold card. They're like, I'm gonna move my funds to treasure instead. And they had, you know, seemingly twelve thousand new customers, you know, over the past few months. That that tried to move over and yeah, and this happened to them too. So not a great thing to happen to you know, somebody who potentially suffered through both things, right? Like if you had a cold card and you moved over to this and then you just got
Kate: Yeah.
Brandon: screwed either way. So pretty big bummer. that I guess they they did have like they've had this long-standing thing where they only keep this data for 90 days, so that's why. it was kind of somewhat limited to that 90 day period and then they like delete customer data after that. So I think they're you know, they they they do what they can, I guess, you know, from like a customer service standpoint, to limit the amount of customer data that they're hanging on to. But Yeah, I mean still you had twelve thousand people that nearly twelve thousand people that were impacted by this, so too bad.
Kate: Yeah. I saw this this meme, you know, like Dave Ramsey, like the the money guy.
Brandon: Mm-hmm. Yeah.
Kate: And it's like it's just a picture of him and he's like has his arms crossed and he's just like not looking impressed, and it's like so you lost everything during FTX. And then it's like, Yep. And then you bought a like hardware wallet because you wanted to fully self-custody, because exchanges can't be trusted. And you're like, Yep, that's correct. Then he goes. And then your Bitcoin wallet got hacked because like the entropy was too weak. Yep. Then you switch companies and the big also got hacked and your data got leaked. And he goes, Yes, Dave and he goes, and you're still buying Bitcoin. You're like, Yep.
Brandon: Yep. Yep. Still here. Yeah. yeah, we talked also last week about the challenges that especially the red team that Bitcoin engineers have been having trying to defend against all these hacks, in large part because Claude and Chat GPT have been blocking these inquiries of like cybersecurity. know, it like it like raises flags and then it just they refuse to to help, or they like demote them to like less advanced models that like can't help. so the bit Bitcoin Policy Institute, they published this open letter this week calling on the world's leading AI labs to provide qualified open source developers with trusted access to frontier AI AI models, like Mythos and, you know, some of the other ones that are like not available for everybody to use yet, but are clearly very powerful and would be very helpful in, you know, defending against situations like this. And the letter was basically signed by every big Bitcoin company that you can think of. Strategy, Coinbase, Block, Galaxy River, BitGo, and a lot more. So yeah, conversations are happening on, you know, making these tools accessible because the bad people have access to them. You know, they they have access to these advanced models, these Chinese models, that you know, Americans it's harder for Americans to access and we just don't have the defenses to to to keep up with in on the American model. side of things. So it's a it's a real problem right now.
Kate: Yeah. Yeah. Well that's cool. It's always like like when you see big names like that get together around something, you know that it's definitely something worth paying attention to. That's for sure.
Brandon: Yeah, it's growing pains, but in the end it's gonna be good for Bitcoin, like we've been talking about. Like, yeah, like these these things will get solved, they'll get figured out, and Bitcoin will be stronger and and more secure for it. So it'll be good in the future.
Kate: Alright, well let's get into some quick headlines then to take us home.
Brandon: do it. the French tax authority apparently has been hacked and six hundred and six hundred and seventy eight thousand records were leaked. I saw this tweet from from Jamison Lop talking about it. And I mean that alone, you know, on its own sucks. but when you combine it with things like this treasure hack, right? being able to connect the dots and being like, this person has millions of dollars. I can extract that from their taxes. And I can see that they have, you know, a treasure that was mailed to their mailing address. I mean, I I don't think France specifically was added on here, but you can see going back to like your point about like just the the dangers of KYC. you can see how like connecting a few of these dots can make it just really, really easy for somebody to find you. And we've seen, you know, a lot of stories already. I think we just covered it just a few weeks ago in France. of you know people getting getting found and like getting extorted you know for for their bitcoin like threats of physical violence like people getting kidnapped like I feel like it happens in France a lot but yeah just not not great news there if you are a French Bitcoiner just be
Kate: Okay, cool.
Brandon: careful I guess out there I don't know what else to say
Kate: and then we have I saw this this morning. Netflix is releasing a series about the rise and collapse of FTX. It's coming out in November, I think on November nineteenth. It's called The Altrists and yeah, it's gonna go dive into all of the SBF drama that happened. It'll be interesting. It's always like you never know what kind of tone they're gonna take, like what it's gonna you know what will come out in In
Brandon: Yeah.
Kate: on Netflix and stuff like that, but that'll could be an interesting one.
Brandon: I will definitely be watching that. That'll be interesting. thought this was also interesting. Robbie Mitchnik, who is at BlackRock, he was on Bloomberg TV this week and he said that iBit is now allowing in-kind exchanges of Bitcoin for iBit for as little as one million dollars, which is down from 25 million dollars previously. So basically this allows Bitcoiners to convert their self-custody BTC into iBit, BlackRock's ETF. tax free. So you can just like convert it from from BTC to IBIT. You don't have to pay taxes on it. And then you just have like all of the safeguards that you know an ETF would have. And obviously that means that you are you know no longer in control of your Bitcoin and you are trusting BlackRock. And for some Bitcoiners that's like completely off the table. But for other Bitcoiners that you know just want to not worry about their you know custodying their Bitcoin, especially with everything that's been going on lately with with self custody, it might make sense for certain Bitcoiners to to want to do that. So you know, one million dollars still out of reach for a lot of us, but down from from twenty five million, that that certainly opens the door for a lot more folks.
Kate: Yeah, nice. we have an update from the dot bitcoin news. So Wiz from mempool.space shared that the ICANN TLD community evaluation for dot bitcoin was submitted and there was over fifty letters of endorsement. But because of how slow ICANN is, we probably will not be seeing any progress on this for years, and so it's potentially launching in twenty thirty.
Brandon: Yeah, that's a long time. yeah, we have kind of heard about a lot of these processes from like our work at at Trust Machines, supporting like Orange Domains and hearing about how centralized of an organization ICANN is. There's so much bureaucracy and just like so much centralization at ICANN. that yeah, dealing with them and and you know, expecting like change of any kind from them. takes like literal years. So yeah, twenty thirty, Bitcoin, who knows what the price of Bitcoin is gonna be in twenty thirty. but it's a long time to wait, I guess, for for your dot Bitcoin handle. this one was cool. Tether completed its largest financial audit in history with KPMG, which is one of the big four audit firms. I think historically you've never seen any of the big four audit firms touch crypto at all. So this is really big news. One, just for the entire crypto industry, like a big firm like KPMG is, you know, taking on a customer like Tether. but it's also really big for Tether because there historically has been so much FUD. on them not actually having the re the reserves to like back up you know all of their just how big of a a stable coin they are so pretty interesting stuff i guess kpmg issued an unqualified audit opinion on their 2025 financial statements which happens to be the most positive form of opinion that an independent auditor can issue so tether seems to have the funds that they say they do which Good news for everybody.
Kate: Yeah. Yeah. okay, and then our last one, do we think this is good for Bitcoin? So the US government officially posted their largest July budget deficit in history with a deficit of four hundred and thirty-two billion due to an acceleration in federal spending. So as a result of this, their expenses on interest have officially surpassed both the national defense budget and the Medicare spending. So basically the US government is now spending more money on just interest than it does to fund the entire US military and to provide health care for seniors, which I just it's hard to fathom those numbers because I mean they're obviously like the US spends the most out of any country on the on their military and that's an insane
Brandon: Yeah.
Kate: amount. And so they're spending more just on interest. This is actually wild.
Brandon: Yeah. It is it is pretty crazy. It's good for Bitcoin, but like I mean, there's who knows what's gonna be left, I guess, after you know, after all this, if if we're gonna even need Bitcoin or if we're gonna even have computers or
Kate: Yeah.
Brandon: I don't even know. yeah, crazy stuff. I think I think that wraps it up for the week. yeah, just a lot of a lot more like aftermath with just all the crazy stuff that's been going over the past couple weeks. Hopefully we'll have some more kind of more positive news next week. But thank you everybody for tuning in. We will see you next week. we stream again every Friday at two PM Eastern. Catch us at goodforbitcoin dot com and have a good weekend.
Kate: Bye guys.
Kate: Hey Brandon, yeah, it's been a good week. kind of like again a slow week on the Bitcoin front, but I mean I'm traveling to the West Coast this week. I love being out here in the mountains. So personally it's been a fun week. and you, I feel like you have some fun news to share.
Brandon: Yeah, it's been a it's been a big week. I got a job at SoFi. I announced that the other day, which is very cool. I think that I am their first like crypto native like marketing hire on their team. So basically I'm going to be my main focus is on community and just like growing a crypto community on SoFi. They have a product called SoFi Crypto, of course. And we've we've talked about them on the show before, so it's kind of cool to Go full circle and and be joining their team. But also just wanted to mention just for like disclosure purposes, like nothing about the show is changing, like nothing about kind of everything else that I do is is changing. Like Good for Bitcoin stays independent, Vibe Watch is still a thing, like all the other stuff that I've been working on is is still here and and and still gonna
Kate: in the time.
Brandon: be here. But but yeah, mostly just wanted to mention just I guess for Disclosure. I I'm I'm sure we'll still end up like continuing continuing to talk about like SoFi, especially because I'm a little closer to them now. I'm I'm sure it'll just kind of naturally come up and there's just like some natural biases there. But we try to keep it, you know, unbiased as possible. But if I work there, obviously there's, you know, there's gonna be some. So yeah, but it's very cool. Thank you.
Kate: Yeah. Well congrats. Super exciting. Yeah, it's it's fun that you're like the crypto native person there.
Brandon: Yeah.
Kate: I'm sure that they're in they're gonna utilize you pretty good.
Brandon: Yeah, I'm gonna orange pill everybody. well, let's kick it off with all of the public company news. lots of public company news again this week. strategy, they sold some more Bitcoin this week. They sold six 1,691 BTC. they used that to repurchase more STRC. That's $108 million worth. they also sold another six hundred and fifty-three million dollars of their MSTR shares at another at the market or ATM offering. And then they took that and added that to their USD reserve. So they're buying back STRC, they're adding more to their USD reserve, and STRC continues to improve back to that hundred dollar target that they have. so they now have 840,447 BTC and 4.65 billion dollars in their USD reserve.
Kate: Nice. And then we have a quick one. We have Strive who bought 147 BTC, which brings their total to 20,167 in total.
Brandon: We keep seeing financial reports come in for the quarter. I guess Trump Media and Technology Group Corporation, they reported an additional four thousand six hundred and twenty two BTC on their balance sheet since last quarter, which is quite a lot of Bitcoin for them. they now hold twelve thousand and sixty two BTC.
Kate: And then we have a sell off from Riot platforms. They sold four thousand three hundred, which brings their total down to eleven thousand three hundred and eighty. and this is definitely one of those like pivoting into AI moves.
Brandon: Yeah. Yeah, they've been they've been kind of continuously selling off more and more Bitcoin, probably to
Kate: Yeah. Yeah.
Brandon: pay for more GPUs for AI, I would imagine. Yeah.
Kate: Yeah.
Brandon: Orange BTC, they have taken a page out of Strategies Playbook and they launched Digi11, which is their first ETF of preferred shares from the Bitcoin ecosystem with monthly distributions. they also bought another two BTC this week. They now hold three thousand nine hundred and fifty BTC. And I'm sure with this offering we'll probably see I don't know, an uptick, I guess, in in buys from them every week. So good for good for them.
Kate: Nice. Then we have H one hundred group. They added two thousand four hundred and fifty-five to their balance sheet since their last filing in February, which brings their total to thirty five hundred and six BTC.
Brandon: a big big addition there. BitGo Holdings
Kate: Yep.
Brandon: Inc. revealed an additional 74 Bitcoin in their quarterly report. so they are now holding 2523 Bitcoin.
Kate: And then we have Emperor Digital. They are also continuing to sell. They sold two hundred and thirty-five, which brings their total down to one thousand two hundred and seventy-nine DC remaining. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. But there's been some good buys. You gotta.
Brandon: Kind of healthy mix of like selling and buying going on. Gotta have somebody buying. Yeah. Yeah. I mean lots of big ones, but also like it's expanding over the quarter. So kinda interesting to to see like retro retroactively, you know, who's who's buying, who's selling. big news, I guess. we said we weren't gonna talk about it again until it happened, and of course it happened because Of course it was going to happen. Didn't didn't surprise anybody, surprising nobody with a brain. BIP 110 failed on Saturday. just a quick recap of the past week in case anybody missed it. So the mandatory signaling began on Saturday at block 961,632. that basically is like the block that if you were like a minor or a node, you had to like flip the switch basically by this specific block. so that block happened. Antpool mined the first block of the window without setting version bit four, which was sort of like the little toggle switch to move over to BIP 110. So Antpool mined it, just a regular block. And then all of the nodes that were enforcing BIP 110, primarily a lot of Bitcoin NOTs nodes, rejected that block from Antpool. And then a follow up happened where Roughnecks, which is this mining group, That was like associated with BIP 110. They ended up mining a competing block at the same height. and that's also through like Ocean's datum protocol. And because of that, this created a chain split, which a lot of people speculated was going to happen. they literally forked off. And BIP 110, that minority chain then produced one more block, also by Roughnecks. And then after those two blocks, the new BIP 110 chain installed because Roughnecks stopped mining. They just basically were like, Yeah, we're we're not gonna do this anymore. It's clear that it's kind of failed at this point. and you don't want to only have one miner mining Bitcoin on their chain. So that happened. basically it it it forked off. There was two blocks, and then they gave up on on the mining side. And then on Monday, Luke Dash Jr. announced he was taking a sabbatical as CTO of Ocean Mining to turn his immediate focus to working on Bitcoin and open source projects to support Bitcoin. But the important thing now is when Luke says Bitcoin, he doesn't mean Bitcoin. He means this stupid chain that doesn't really have any value. So Luke's doing that more power to him, I guess. Like have fun. and so yeah, so Luke is just like no longer part of Bitcoin anymore. also on Monday he was removed as a BIP editor, citing one the troubled BIP, also conflicts of interest that were him, I guess, approving a pull request that was related to the BIP, like minutes after it was submitted. So just like fast tracking this because he had like a vested interest in it getting you know, submitted. and then just general like lack of contribution elsewhere, because he was like basically only focused on this and like not contributing in any other kind of meaningful way. so he's basically been kicked out of the Bitcoin development circle, which in his eyes is is no longer Bitcoin anyway. So probably probably a mutual feeling. So yeah, a lot of a lot of these folks have basically said that they are taking breaks, they're stepping back, they're doing whatever and they're just like leaving Bitcoin. which, you know. Bitcoin doesn't care about these people. Bitcoin continues to produce block after block, and that's totally fine. So yeah, RIP 110
Kate: Don't forget, don't be a loser. Did we write that?
Brandon: is the new name for Bip 110. these people are welcome to come back on Bitcoin, I guess, just because Bitcoin is permissionless and and and Bitcoin doesn't doesn't judge, I guess. But you also have some updates here on the cold card hack from from last week.
Kate: Yeah, yeah, I saw this and I thought it would just be good to go over some of the numbers and yeah, just sh share some of the updates that have happened. So this is coming from Alex Thorne. He's with Galaxy Digital and he's done some sleuthing on chain analytics just to like see what's happening. So So far from his perspective, he what he's seeing is that 8,300 addresses were confirmed to be attacked so far. in total it was around 112 million stolen, but that and so that's around 1,700 sorry, 1,720 Bitcoin, but he thinks it's gonna just keep climbing probably somewhere around 2100 Bitcoin as more platforms and patterns get corroborated. But from his findings The biggest thing you f found was that these people were not like speculators. A lot of people were holding their coins for over four years, and so they were really long-term savers, you know, they were in it for the long term, they were you know good Bitcoiners, and a lot of them were fully air gapped, so they did everything right and they still got their funds stolen, which is pretty devastating. he was saying it was it's hard to track a lot of this stuff because a lot of the funds originated in like Like individual wallets, not just like one central honeypot, so it's a ton of different addresses. and then yeah, so the The engineers at Block Inc., they found that the Wave One attacker appeared to have been using a paid account at a blockchain data provider and he was targeting he was he was like yeah, querying target addresses. And so yeah, it's been staff to be fixed off their job. Yes.
Brandon: So basically they have like a lead on like who might have been behind these attacks because they might be able to like target that whoever was like querying the blockchain. Yeah.
Kate: Exactly. Yeah. Fit his skill. I've already got three blocks. Yeah. And then we touched on it last week. We were talking about the Bitcoin red team. So this is like a group of volunteers read by Rob Hamilton of Anchor Watch. and they were just looking into like Bitcoin itself, making sure that it was, you know, intact and kind of like running some tests against it. So they had AI models. Running against 500 plus open source repos since the hack. And basically it all came back clean. Basically saying what we said last week. And I mean we dug into like the entropy issue and all of that last week. so yeah, Alex, he's been looking at this stuff for the last couple of weeks. running through running like the stolen funds through his his own analytics stack and and he's also been like passing a lot of a lot of this stuff over to the FBI, the Treasury exchanges and chain monitoring firms and just like you know trying to paint like a clearer picture of what happened maybe you know how to prevent this in the future but just like understanding the situation and so from him he was saying two basically main CTAs. One if you're using a cold card model and and the seed was generated Between March of 21, 2021 and the patch, and you didn't manually introduce any entropy dice rolls, anything like that, get your funds off the gold guard because they're still susceptible to being stolen at this point. so make sure you're moving those funds. And then if you were a victim, you did have your funds stolen. he said to reach out to him his handles at intangible coins on X, and you don't need to provide any info like personal information. information, just your affected addresses and he said he would send back a forensic report that you can use when you're if you want to file with the FBI's IC three. So yeah. It's not like ooh we have to teach
Brandon: Yeah, crazy stuff. yeah, I have mine still. I I think I've heard people say like h hold on to your cold cards just in case there's like a method where you need to like prove that you are the rightful owner of this cold card and like of the seeds and stuff like that. so I guess I guess do that, but I don't know. I I would personally just like if you have any cold card, I would move off and just choose another option at this point. maybe not Trezor, which we'll get into. but
Kate: yeah.
Brandon: but yeah, it it's rough out there right now with with these. But I mean considering like cold card coin coin kite is such a small company, like who knows if they're gonna survive this, and if they don't survive this. Like what kind of, you know, like what kind of like maintenance like on the firmware and like stuff can we expect in the future? Like ten years from now, if another vulnerability comes out, like is CoinKite gonna be around to fix it? And like just who knows? Like, I don't know. Doesn't there's just there's so many better options out there at this point that doesn't make sense to use it.
Kate: Yeah, agreed. Yeah. It's tough to like come back like you it's tough to come back from your main value prop, is the thing that failed you and I don't know. Who knows what will what will happen with them but yeah, that it's a tough one for sure.
Brandon: Yeah. some more follow ups just on yeah, all the all of these infrastructure based hacks that have happened. So BTC Pay Server, they followed up after their vulnerability last week that was discovered and then patched, but unfortunately exploited before it could be like fully patched everywhere. they will be donating point two one BTC to the Bitcoin Red team, and 0.21 BTC to Craig Raw, who is the developer of Sparrow Wallet. And the researcher on the red team that discovered the bug for their responsible disclosure of the vulnerability. in addition, friends and supporters of the BTC Pay server project have committed to funding a bounty to recover the stolen funds. the bounty will be 10% of the amount recovered, up to a maximum of three BTC for full recovery of the funds. So good news, I guess. If you are a BTC Pay server, you are not and you did get your some of your Bitcoin stolen. you might get a little bit of a recovery there. But that's kind of just like out of the goodness of like other Bitcoiners' hearts that you are potentially gonna get some recovery. not seeing anything similar, you know, coming from cold card because there's just an out it's that's too much Bitcoin for like for somebody to, you know, out of goodwill reimburse. But
Kate: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
Brandon: but yeah, pretty cool just to see that coming out of of BTC pay server and then
Kate: Yeah.
Brandon: supporting the red team on all the really great work that they're doing.
Kate: Nice. Well we have some other bad news. I d I didn't expect to see this one coming.
Brandon: No.
Kate: But Trezor has also suffered a data breach. So not as intense as cold card, but it's still unfortunate. So basically one of their shipping providers was exposed. and what this means is that if you had ordered a Trezor in the past roughly 90 days, so three months, and you live in the US, UK, Sweden, Colombia, Brazil, Italy, or Portugal, then you are impacted. And so the information that was exposed Exposed would be your shipping address, your phone number, email address, which is a lot of very sensible sensitive and valuable information. It looks like the incident affected just under 12,000 customers, and just under 2,000 customers with partial exposure. So a little bit less intrusive would be like your name, your city, your email. But yeah, this is extremely unfortunate, right after. the cold card incident where a lot of people are definitely buying Trezor because it was a lot of people were doing like analysis saying like Trezor is the best one that you can have or it's like the one that you need to pivot to now and I mean I'm sure that whoever you know was like stole this information probably fed on a lot of that stuff too. But yeah very very unfortunate and it's just it's it's really tough for Yeah. This KYC stuff when you're when
Brandon: Yeah.
Kate: you're dealing with this, you know, you I think you can take steps to be as anonymous as you can and like, you know, you can provide like a PO PO box, like a you know, a different name and alias and stuff like that, but at the end of the day, like it's that's tough to to set up as well. I don't know what's happening because I almost bought a treasure too and I was going through and I had it in my cart and I was like, I'm gonna wait. Just
Brandon: Well, this this specific thing I think has happened to Ledger before.
Kate: Yeah, it did, yeah.
Brandon: so yeah. So I mean no nobody is safe. It and it yeah, just it sucks because it's like, you know, you could ever as a company, you could do everything right, but like all of your like subcontractors that handle like your logistics and your shipping and you know, all the other stuff, like they also have to do everything right. and like sometimes you just can't. There's just like nothing, you know, out it's out of your control in some ways.
Kate: Yeah, exactly.
Brandon: Yeah, I mean to be like very clear, this has nothing to do with like if you have Bitcoin on a treasure, like your Bitcoin is is still safe. It's just like you like got doxxed. And yeah, and and
Kate: Yeah, it's just opse stuff. Yeah.
Brandon: yeah, especially like you said, right? Like a lot of people pivoted to Treasure as a respon direct response to like cold card. They're like, I'm gonna move my funds to treasure instead. And they had, you know, seemingly twelve thousand new customers, you know, over the past few months. That that tried to move over and yeah, and this happened to them too. So not a great thing to happen to you know, somebody who potentially suffered through both things, right? Like if you had a cold card and you moved over to this and then you just got
Kate: Yeah.
Brandon: screwed either way. So pretty big bummer. that I guess they they did have like they've had this long-standing thing where they only keep this data for 90 days, so that's why. it was kind of somewhat limited to that 90 day period and then they like delete customer data after that. So I think they're you know, they they they do what they can, I guess, you know, from like a customer service standpoint, to limit the amount of customer data that they're hanging on to. But Yeah, I mean still you had twelve thousand people that nearly twelve thousand people that were impacted by this, so too bad.
Kate: Yeah. I saw this this meme, you know, like Dave Ramsey, like the the money guy.
Brandon: Mm-hmm. Yeah.
Kate: And it's like it's just a picture of him and he's like has his arms crossed and he's just like not looking impressed, and it's like so you lost everything during FTX. And then it's like, Yep. And then you bought a like hardware wallet because you wanted to fully self-custody, because exchanges can't be trusted. And you're like, Yep, that's correct. Then he goes. And then your Bitcoin wallet got hacked because like the entropy was too weak. Yep. Then you switch companies and the big also got hacked and your data got leaked. And he goes, Yes, Dave and he goes, and you're still buying Bitcoin. You're like, Yep.
Brandon: Yep. Yep. Still here. Yeah. yeah, we talked also last week about the challenges that especially the red team that Bitcoin engineers have been having trying to defend against all these hacks, in large part because Claude and Chat GPT have been blocking these inquiries of like cybersecurity. know, it like it like raises flags and then it just they refuse to to help, or they like demote them to like less advanced models that like can't help. so the bit Bitcoin Policy Institute, they published this open letter this week calling on the world's leading AI labs to provide qualified open source developers with trusted access to frontier AI AI models, like Mythos and, you know, some of the other ones that are like not available for everybody to use yet, but are clearly very powerful and would be very helpful in, you know, defending against situations like this. And the letter was basically signed by every big Bitcoin company that you can think of. Strategy, Coinbase, Block, Galaxy River, BitGo, and a lot more. So yeah, conversations are happening on, you know, making these tools accessible because the bad people have access to them. You know, they they have access to these advanced models, these Chinese models, that you know, Americans it's harder for Americans to access and we just don't have the defenses to to to keep up with in on the American model. side of things. So it's a it's a real problem right now.
Kate: Yeah. Yeah. Well that's cool. It's always like like when you see big names like that get together around something, you know that it's definitely something worth paying attention to. That's for sure.
Brandon: Yeah, it's growing pains, but in the end it's gonna be good for Bitcoin, like we've been talking about. Like, yeah, like these these things will get solved, they'll get figured out, and Bitcoin will be stronger and and more secure for it. So it'll be good in the future.
Kate: Alright, well let's get into some quick headlines then to take us home.
Brandon: do it. the French tax authority apparently has been hacked and six hundred and six hundred and seventy eight thousand records were leaked. I saw this tweet from from Jamison Lop talking about it. And I mean that alone, you know, on its own sucks. but when you combine it with things like this treasure hack, right? being able to connect the dots and being like, this person has millions of dollars. I can extract that from their taxes. And I can see that they have, you know, a treasure that was mailed to their mailing address. I mean, I I don't think France specifically was added on here, but you can see going back to like your point about like just the the dangers of KYC. you can see how like connecting a few of these dots can make it just really, really easy for somebody to find you. And we've seen, you know, a lot of stories already. I think we just covered it just a few weeks ago in France. of you know people getting getting found and like getting extorted you know for for their bitcoin like threats of physical violence like people getting kidnapped like I feel like it happens in France a lot but yeah just not not great news there if you are a French Bitcoiner just be
Kate: Okay, cool.
Brandon: careful I guess out there I don't know what else to say
Kate: and then we have I saw this this morning. Netflix is releasing a series about the rise and collapse of FTX. It's coming out in November, I think on November nineteenth. It's called The Altrists and yeah, it's gonna go dive into all of the SBF drama that happened. It'll be interesting. It's always like you never know what kind of tone they're gonna take, like what it's gonna you know what will come out in In
Brandon: Yeah.
Kate: on Netflix and stuff like that, but that'll could be an interesting one.
Brandon: I will definitely be watching that. That'll be interesting. thought this was also interesting. Robbie Mitchnik, who is at BlackRock, he was on Bloomberg TV this week and he said that iBit is now allowing in-kind exchanges of Bitcoin for iBit for as little as one million dollars, which is down from 25 million dollars previously. So basically this allows Bitcoiners to convert their self-custody BTC into iBit, BlackRock's ETF. tax free. So you can just like convert it from from BTC to IBIT. You don't have to pay taxes on it. And then you just have like all of the safeguards that you know an ETF would have. And obviously that means that you are you know no longer in control of your Bitcoin and you are trusting BlackRock. And for some Bitcoiners that's like completely off the table. But for other Bitcoiners that you know just want to not worry about their you know custodying their Bitcoin, especially with everything that's been going on lately with with self custody, it might make sense for certain Bitcoiners to to want to do that. So you know, one million dollars still out of reach for a lot of us, but down from from twenty five million, that that certainly opens the door for a lot more folks.
Kate: Yeah, nice. we have an update from the dot bitcoin news. So Wiz from mempool.space shared that the ICANN TLD community evaluation for dot bitcoin was submitted and there was over fifty letters of endorsement. But because of how slow ICANN is, we probably will not be seeing any progress on this for years, and so it's potentially launching in twenty thirty.
Brandon: Yeah, that's a long time. yeah, we have kind of heard about a lot of these processes from like our work at at Trust Machines, supporting like Orange Domains and hearing about how centralized of an organization ICANN is. There's so much bureaucracy and just like so much centralization at ICANN. that yeah, dealing with them and and you know, expecting like change of any kind from them. takes like literal years. So yeah, twenty thirty, Bitcoin, who knows what the price of Bitcoin is gonna be in twenty thirty. but it's a long time to wait, I guess, for for your dot Bitcoin handle. this one was cool. Tether completed its largest financial audit in history with KPMG, which is one of the big four audit firms. I think historically you've never seen any of the big four audit firms touch crypto at all. So this is really big news. One, just for the entire crypto industry, like a big firm like KPMG is, you know, taking on a customer like Tether. but it's also really big for Tether because there historically has been so much FUD. on them not actually having the re the reserves to like back up you know all of their just how big of a a stable coin they are so pretty interesting stuff i guess kpmg issued an unqualified audit opinion on their 2025 financial statements which happens to be the most positive form of opinion that an independent auditor can issue so tether seems to have the funds that they say they do which Good news for everybody.
Kate: Yeah. Yeah. okay, and then our last one, do we think this is good for Bitcoin? So the US government officially posted their largest July budget deficit in history with a deficit of four hundred and thirty-two billion due to an acceleration in federal spending. So as a result of this, their expenses on interest have officially surpassed both the national defense budget and the Medicare spending. So basically the US government is now spending more money on just interest than it does to fund the entire US military and to provide health care for seniors, which I just it's hard to fathom those numbers because I mean they're obviously like the US spends the most out of any country on the on their military and that's an insane
Brandon: Yeah.
Kate: amount. And so they're spending more just on interest. This is actually wild.
Brandon: Yeah. It is it is pretty crazy. It's good for Bitcoin, but like I mean, there's who knows what's gonna be left, I guess, after you know, after all this, if if we're gonna even need Bitcoin or if we're gonna even have computers or
Kate: Yeah.
Brandon: I don't even know. yeah, crazy stuff. I think I think that wraps it up for the week. yeah, just a lot of a lot more like aftermath with just all the crazy stuff that's been going over the past couple weeks. Hopefully we'll have some more kind of more positive news next week. But thank you everybody for tuning in. We will see you next week. we stream again every Friday at two PM Eastern. Catch us at goodforbitcoin dot com and have a good weekend.
Kate: Bye guys.
