Greetings Bitcoiner,

Welcome to Issue #292 of the daily Bitcoin Breakdown, where we have some excellent Opinion & Analysis pieces and Tools & Projects for you today!

But first, today’s Top Stories:

• 🧐 Thiel & Fellow Tech Billionaires Launch New Crypto Bank

• 🤫 Musk's Silent Bitcoin Signal Sparks Speculation

• 🍫 Belgian Bank Bolero (Also) Bets on Bitcoin

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Jul 3, 2025

TODAY’S TOP STORIES

🧐 Thiel & Fellow Tech Billionaires Launch New Crypto Bank

PayPal co-founder Peter Thiel and fellow tech billionaires are launching Erebor, a new bank designed to serve Bitcoin and cryptocurrency startups abandoned after Silicon Valley Bank's 2023 collapse. Named after the Tolkien fortress, Erebor will offer traditional banking plus Bitcoin and crypto services for businesses underserved by existing financial institutions. The bank plans to focus on artificial intelligence, defense, manufacturing, and digital assets while providing crucial credit access to innovative companies. The Daily Hodl

🤫 Musk's Silent Bitcoin Signal Sparks Speculation

Elon Musk may be quietly accumulating Bitcoin again, mirroring Tesla's 2021 strategy. The tech billionaire liked a comment on 𝕏 suggesting he's 'stacking quietly' without offering any denial or correction. This subtle social media trolling interaction has sparked speculation that Musk could be following the same playbook that led to Tesla's massive Bitcoin purchase three years ago. Fiat Archive

🍫 Belgian Bank Bolero (Also) Bets on Bitcoin

KBC, Belgium's top universal bank is prepping its Bolero investment app to let everyday savers snap up BTC by year end once it wins Crypto Asset Service Provider approval. The move would make KBC the first big Belgian bank to open the orange door, cutting reliance on foreign exchanges and echoing similar Bitcoin forays announced this week by banking giants Deutsche Bank, Sparkassen and BBVA. Education, security and strict compliance sit at the heart of KBC’s Bitcoin playbook. Cointelegraph

POLL #292

PREVIOUS POLL RESULTS

OPINION & ANALYSIS

• Martina Granatiero, Head of Legal at Relai, argues that Wallet of Satoshi's return to the US as a non custodial solution with the help of Spark and the ongoing Samourai Wallet case represent a critical battle for financial privacy and self custody rights against regulatory overreach threatening Bitcoin's ecosystem (Jul 2 | 11 min read).

• Scoresby, a pseudonymous Stacker News user, explains that Spark is a statechain protocol allowing users to share bitcoin UTXOs and transfer funds off chain and questions whether Wallet of Satoshi's new Spark based wallet truly qualifies as 'self custodial' given required trust assumptions (Jul 2 | 4 min read).

• My First Bitcoin, a nonprofit education organization, reports achieving 86% Bitcoin-only operational payments in 2024 while maintaining 100% Bitcoin reserves, demonstrating how organizations can successfully implement Bitcoin-first policies despite challenges with operational expenses (Jul 2 | 6 min read).

• David Plotz, General Manager of Public Utility District of Lewis County, Washington, writes that bitcoin mining's unique load profile enables utilities to build new generation capacity ahead of traditional demand, creating immediate revenue streams that avoid subsidizing costs to existing customers while supporting critical energy infrastructure expansion (Jul 2 | 3 min read).

• Will Owens, Research Analyst at Galaxy Digital, explains why bitcoin treasury companies like Strategy and Metaplanet trade at premiums up to 384% above their BTC net asset values, pointing out that its driven by leverage access and capital market strategies that amplify exposure (Jul 1 | 5 min read).

• BBC journalist Robyn Wilson explores how the quiet surf town of El Zonte became 'Bitcoin Beach,' a grassroots experiment that inspired El Salvador's national Bitcoin policy and now attracts tourists seeking to experience the world's first Bitcoin-based local economy firsthand (Jul 1 | 7 min read).

• Greg Cipolaro, Global Head of Research at NYDIG, examines the recent 7% drop in Bitcoin's hash rate, attributing it primarily to extreme summer heat in the US that forces miners to curtail operations due to elevated electricity costs, marking a shift from China's hydro-driven seasonal mining patterns (Jun 30 | 7 min read).

• Sree Duggirala, Research Analyst Intern at DCG, argues that ‘crypto’ is pure arbitrage masquerading as an investment market where 'HODLing' fails because the system systematically transfers wealth from public buyers to private sellers through token overproduction (Jun 30 | 5 min read).

• Tristan Bietsch, Founder of BitEscrow founder, chronicles his 4-month solo journey building a Bitcoin wallet from scratch, revealing how systems thinking, AI usage, and relentless focus on core functionality over feature creep taught him more about engineering than any tutorial could provide (Jun 28 | 7 min read).

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TOOLS & PROJECTS

• New on Geyser: Lucas Bitman, Indonesian-based filmmaker and Bitcoin educator, launches an open-source documentary platform to enable global communities to translate Bitcoin educational content into local languages for free distribution worldwide.

• New on Geyser: Hack4Freedom aims to empower Nigerian women to build tools using Bitcoin, Lightning, Nostr, and eCash through a 2 week hackathon combining intensive in person learning with remote collaborative development.

• Baltic Honeybadger, organized by Hodl Hodl team, returns to Riga for its seventh Bitcoin only conference edition, scheduled to take place on August 9 to 10 in Riga, Latvia.

• What's The Problem?, the viral documentary by Joe Bryan, becomes available as a free eBook with a foreword by Jeff Booth and contributions from Lawrence Lepard and Steve Baker.

• Orange Pill App now supports voice calls on their app to communicate with Bitcoiners without phone numbers.

• Presidio Bitcoin hosts the Quantum Bitcoin Summit, a 1.5-day technical event scheduled to take place on July 17-18 in San Francisco, bringing together researchers and bitcoin developers to explore quantum computing's impact on Bitcoin cryptography and mining decentralization.

• Zap Dashboard is a real-time analytics platform for managing zaps on Nostr with Nostr Wallet Connect integration, featuring privacy-first local storage and comprehensive wallet management tools.

• Sixty Nuts is a lightweight NIP-60 Cashu wallet featuring stateless design, multi-mint support, and Lightning integration.

• BTCRecover is an open-source password and seed recovery tool that helps users recover lost or forgotten Bitcoin wallet passphrases and mnemonic seed phrases, if they have a reasonable idea about what their password or phrase might be.

• Apple forces Nostr client Damus to remove their Zaps feature, again.

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