Greetings Bitcoiner,

Welcome to Issue #302 of Bitcoin Breakdown, where every Tuesday and Thursday, we bring you the latest must-read Bitcoin thought leadership articles and the newest tools and projects you should know about.

But first, today’s Top Stories:

• 🏦 Fed Agencies Give Banks Go-Ahead for Bitcoin Custody

• 🤡 :unitAnti Bitcoin Vanguard Accidentally Becomes MSTR's Biggest Shareholder

• 🇬🇧 StanChart Becomes First Major Bank to Offer Bitcoin Spot Trading

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Jul 15, 2025

TODAY’S TOP STORIES

🏦 Fed Agencies Give Banks Go Ahead for Bitcoin Custody

Federal banking regulators just clarified that banks can custody bitcoin for customers using existing risk management rules, not new restrictions, marking another pro Bitcoin win since Trump took office. The joint statement from the Federal Reserve, Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, and Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC) emphasizes cybersecurity and proper key management without creating additional regulatory hurdles. This follows the OCC allowing banks to trade crypto and crypto friendly Jonathan Gould's confirmation as OCC chief. The Block

🤡 Anti-Bitcoin Vanguard Accidentally Becomes MSTR's Biggest Shareholder

The $10T asset manager Vanguard just became (Micro)Strategy's largest shareholder with 20M shares, representing 8% of Michael Saylor's Bitcoin buying machine. This is hilariously ironic since Vanguard calls Bitcoin an 'immature asset class' unsuitable for long term investors. The exposure comes through passive index funds that automatically include MSTR when it meets criteria. Despite owning billions in a Bitcoin focused company, Vanguard maintains its anti Bitcoin stance, refusing to offer spot BTC ETFs to clients. Atlas21

🇬🇧 StanChart Becomes First Major Bank to Offer Bitcoin Spot Trading

Standard Chartered just made history as the first global systemically important bank to launch bitcoin spot trading for institutional clients through its UK branch. The move caters to surging demand from corporates, investors, and asset managers who can now trade digital assets via familiar foreign exchange interfaces. CEO Bill Winters emphasized providing clients a safe, efficient, and regulated pathway to manage digital asset risk within compliance requirements. Reuters

POLL #302

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OPINION & ANALYSIS

• Atlas21, another top-notch Bitcoin publication, compares three Bitcoin privacy tools - Wasabi Wallet, Whirlpool, and JoinMarket - analyzing their CoinJoin implementations, operational models, decentralization levels, costs, and usability to help users choose the best UTXO mixing solution (Jul 15 | 6 min read).

• Martin Matejka, writing for Bitcoin Magazine, argues that Bitcoin's superior qualities as collateral - including instant transferability, global recognition, and cryptographic security - will inevitably drain the monetary premium from real estate, causing a massive capital rotation from the world's largest $400T asset class into BTC (Jul 14 | 3 min read).

• Shinobi of Bitcoin Magazine argues that Bitcoin's blockspace operates as a Darwinian market where different use cases compete for limited resources, with means of exchange having evolutionary advantages over inscriptions due to superior density and scalability potential (Jul 14 | 9 min read).

• Marcel Deer, writing for Cointelegraph, details how 19-year-old Veer Chetal and two accomplices used social engineering tactics to steal $243M in bitcoin from a single victim, only to expose their identities through livestreamed celebrations and careless mistakes that led to their arrest (Jul 12 | 5 min read).

• Jamie Redman, News Lead at Bitcoin dot com News, debunks the persistent conspiracy theory that the NSA created Bitcoin by systematically comparing the agency's 1996 centralized electronic cash research paper with Bitcoin's revolutionary decentralized, trustless blockchain architecture and finding no credible evidence linking them (Jul 12 | 5 min read).

• BitMEX Research analyzes how Bitcoin challenges the IMF's influence over developing countries, examining El Salvador's strategic Bitcoin adoption despite IMF loan conditions and highlighting Bhutan's successful Bitcoin mining operations as a path to financial independence from traditional international lending institutions (Jul 12 | 12 min read).

• Joshua Mawhorter, assistant editor of Mises dot org, argues that Revolutionary War monetary inflation through Continental paper money created a hidden tax that threatened American independence rather than facilitating it, causing massive depreciation and economic instability (Jul 11 | 8 min read).

• Bc1984adam, a Bitcoin developer and researcher, analyzes Ashigaru Whirlpool's RSA blinding implementation and finds that while it fixes per-client key differentiation attacks, the hardcoded key approach creates cross-round linkability vulnerabilities that could enable long-term user deanonymization (Jul 11 | 8 min read).

• Olde Salt of Operation Bitcoin argues that the federal government should partner with Bitcoin mining companies rather than mine directly, proposing to provide free electrical power from nuclear aircraft carriers and submarines to create America's Bitcoin superpower status (Jul 10 | 4 min read).

• Niftynei of Bitcoin++ explains how F2Pool and MARA are now mining Taproot Annexes, which are unlimited data storage spaces in Bitcoin transactions that offer witness discount pricing but carry risks of permanent fund loss from future softforks (Jul 10 | 3 min read).

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TOOLS & PROJECTS

• New on Geyser: Bitcoin: 21 Voices. 21 Paths is a book that features 21 personal interviews with Bitcoiners to explore motivations and stories behind the Bitcoin revolution.

• New on Geyser: Aaron Koenig, an experienced artist and Bitcoiner, launches a crowdfunding campaign to produce 'Bitcoin Bull Run', an album featuring 12 original Bitcoin songs.

• Timechain Arcade offers immersive Bitcoin video games in your browser, teaching real Bitcoin mechanics through no‑install gameplay.

• Shakespeare is an AI-powered website-builder running on Nostr protocol that creates websites through conversational prompts without installation, coding, or subscriptions.

• GLOK.ME offers a free Physical Security Checklist that audits home security, digital privacy, and self-defense readiness, guiding families to spot vulnerabilities, prioritize fixes, and prepare for counter-kidnapping scenarios.

• Bitcoin Transcripts is a searchable FOSS archive, unlocking previously hidden Bitcoin tech knowledge from meetups, conferences, and podcasts for developers, educators, and researchers.

• Klk, a pseudonymous Stacker News user, shares an automated bash script for sweeping Coinos Lightning wallet balances to personal LND nodes, featuring configurable reserves and cron automation for enhanced self-custody.

• LND Gotify Notifier connects Lightning Network Daemon nodes to Gotify servers for real-time notifications on channel events, invoice settlements, and payment forwards with Docker support.

• LNP/BP Standards Association releases RGB v0.12, the final production-ready consensus layer for Bitcoin smart contracts featuring zk-STARK compatibility, simplified protocol architecture, and enhanced performance for mainnet deployment.

• Nostrdon is an open-source bridge that automatically cross-posts Nostr notes to Mastodon.

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