Greetings Bitcoiner,

Welcome to Issue #381 of the daily Bitcoin Breakdown, where we have some excellent Opinion & Analysis pieces and Tools & Projects for you today!

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Now for today’s Top Stories:

• 🚨 Bitcoin Devs Eyeing GitHub’s Centralization Trap

• 💸 Paxos Accidentally Mints More Coins Than Exist on Earth

• 🇬🇧 UK Offers Bitcoin Fraud Victims Crumbs While Keeping the Cake

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Oct 16, 2025

TODAY’S TOP STORIES

🚨 Bitcoin Devs Eyeing GitHub’s Centralization Trap

Bitcoin developers are sounding the alarm after Microsoft’s GitHub briefly suspended a key contributor, underscoring how one corporate decision might disrupt the network’s global, pseudonymous coding process. While alternatives like GitLab and BitBucket exist, migration hurdles remain high. Add in bot spam headaches, and the community’s calls for decentralizing development tools are growing louder to safeguard Bitcoin’s independence and resilience. Protos

💸 Paxos Accidentally Mints More Currency Than Exist on Earth

Stablecoin issuer Paxos experienced an epic technical glitch Wednesday, mistakenly minting 300T PYUSD tokens – worth more than US national debt and global GDP combined. The company quickly identified the error within 30 min and burned the excess tokens, reassuring users that customer funds remained safe. While the episode serves as a reminder that only Bitcoin is truly decentralized and thus has an immutably fixed supply, crypto pundits say it shows how ‘blockchain’ offers a level of transparency that banks can’t offer. The Block

🇬🇧 UK Offers Bitcoin Fraud Victims Crumbs While Keeping the Cake

The United KingdomFiefdom is proposing a compensation scheme for 130,000 Chinese investment fraud victims while seeking to retain most of a $7.2B Bitcoin haul seized in 2018. The 61,000 BTC, originally worth $1.8B, has quadrupled in value since seizure. Fraudster Zhimin Qian converted $6B in investor funds to Bitcoin before fleeing to the UK, where she and an associate pleaded guilty to money laundering charges last month. Cryptonews

POLL #381

PREVIOUS POLL RESULTS

OPINION & ANALYSIS

• Greg Maxwell, former Bitcoin Core developer, Co-Founder and former Chief Technology Officer of Blockstream, in a fairly combative post on Bitcoin Talk, argues that Bitcoin should remain an economically-secured open system rather than succumb to populist demands for transaction censorship when referring to Knots, defending the principle that wasteful traffic is the acceptable cost of maintaining Bitcoin's foundational freedom and resistance to human influence (Oct 16 | 3 min read).

• Velas Commerce explores six Bitcoin test networks, comparing Regtest, Simnet, Signet, Testnet3, Testnet4, and MutinyNet to help developers choose the ideal testing environment for their applications amid Testnet3's recent instability and rising fees (Oct 16 | 8 min read).

• Sylvian Saurel, author of the In Bitcoin We Trust newsletter, argues that Bitcoin represents a fundamentally different category from 'crypto,' serving as a decentralized foundation of time and truth rather than speculative technology, distinguishing it from the venture-backed crypto industry that replicates centralized systems Bitcoin was designed to replace (Oct 15 | 9 min read).

• Villawolf, a Bitcoiner who writes about Bitcoin tools on Stacker News, explores how Sparrow Wallet's BIP 353 Silent Payments implementation surpasses the PayNym system by offering universal, permissionless, and truly private Bitcoin transactions without requiring prior coordination between users (Oct 15 | 2 min read).

• Bobby Shell, VP of Marketing at Voltage, argues in a piece for CoinDesk that Bitcoin treasury companies should shift from passive holding to actively participating in the Lightning Network, earning native yield through routing fees and liquidity provision while supporting Bitcoin's payments infrastructure (Oct 15 | 5 min read).

• HeidE, a privacy advocate writing for Bitcoin Magazine, argues that effective cypherpunks must expand beyond coding to include advocacy, education, legal defense, and public outreach, emphasizing that privacy requires broad social cooperation and public consensus rather than technical solutions alone (Oct 14 | 4 min read).

• Charles Chong, a core contributor to Fractal Bitcoin, writing for The Miner Mag, argues that US tech companies like Block can challenge Asia's Bitcoin mining hardware monopoly by prioritizing modular, repairable designs over raw efficiency, potentially strengthening the entire Bitcoin ecosystem through increased competition (Oct 14 | 4 min read).

• Kyle Santiogo, Co-Founder and CTO of Privkey, warns that Bitcoin Core v30's expansion of data storage capacity from 80 to 100,000 bytes threatens Bitcoin's identity as peer-to-peer electronic cash by enabling NFT-like inscriptions and smart contracts, urging users to switch to Bitcoin Knots as a form of peaceful protest against this transformation (Oct 14 | 8 min read).

• Juraj Bednar, host of the Option Plus Podcast, demonstrates how to create permissionless websites using Nostr as a backend infrastructure, showcasing a contact form microproject that enables anonymous web interactions without requiring domains, emails, or KYC verification while maintaining privacy in an increasingly surveilled internet landscape (Oct 11 | 4 min read).

• Schmidty of Bitcoin Brink and Bitcoin Optech examines the 577 pull requests merged in Bitcoin Core v30, revealing that most changes focus on testing, build systems, and documentation rather than controversial policy updates like the OP_RETURN limit modification (Oct 10 | 4 min read).

• Max Musumeci, a Lightning Network developer and researcher, argues that tightening regulatory frameworks and enhanced KYC requirements on centralized exchanges are driving users toward peer-to-peer platforms as the primary method for acquiring bitcoin while preserving financial privacy and sovereignty (Oct 10 | 8 min read).

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TOOLS & PROJECTS

• New on Geyser: Bitcoin Ukambani, an education program in Kenya's Ukambani region, bridges traditional Kamba heritage with Bitcoin financial literacy to empower over 3.5M people through culturally-rooted workshops, youth innovation hubs, and community-led initiatives across Kitui, Machakos, and Makueni counties.

• New on Geyser: Bitcoin Research launches a Bitcoin education initiative in Bolivia for visually impaired, deaf, and orphaned youth communities through accessible materials including braille White Paper translations.

• Adopting Bitcoin hosts Bitcoin Circular Economy World's Fair at El Salvador conference November 14-15, celebrating real Bitcoin adoption with global communities, merchants, builders showcasing peer-to-peer circular economies.

• Onramp launches Onramp Business, an institutional-grade bitcoin custody platform designed for corporate treasurers and CFOs who want direct bitcoin exposure.

• Nutoff Wallet is an open-source, command-line interface and MCP server that implements a Cashu wallet built with TypeScript, enabling users to mint, send, receive tokens and pay Lightning invoices with Nostr Wallet Connect API support.

• Asanoha, a Bitcoin artist, launches the Bitcoin Art Magazine, the world's first periodical of its kind, featuring over 50 artists and 150 pages of physical Bitcoin artwork.

• Bringin launches its self-custodial Lightning wallet powered by Breez SDK, enabling instant Bitcoin transactions, vIBAN for fiat transfers, and Visa card spending across Europe without compromising key ownership.

• Compass Coffee, a coffee shop in Washington DC, deploys the first Square terminal accepting bitcoin payments, with the help of Bitcoin District, a local grassroots Bitcoin initiative.

• Aqua Wallet announces the end of the waitlist period for its Dolphin Card and makes it available for free for a limited time.

• Softwarm LLC showcases a Bitcoin mining boiler system using older s19j Pro miners that consumes 18kW/hr, produces 60k BTU/hr heating, and generates $900 monthly revenue while replacing traditional heating methods.

• Blockstream announces new Liquid Developer Bootcamps in Mexico City and São Paulo, offering hands-on Bitcoin layer-2 development training with protocols like Lightning and Liquid networks.

• African Bitcoiners, an African grassroots Bitcoin initiative, showcases Africa’s growing Bitcoin ecosystem in Q4 2025, mapping communities, projects, and initiatives driving adoption, education, and freedom across the continent.

• Abdel of Starkware proposes OP_STARK_VERIFY opcode for native STARK proof verification in Bitcoin Script, enabling zero-knowledge applications like validity rollups and post-quantum signatures without complex off-chain mechanisms.

• Dana Wallet introduces permissionless bitcoin transactions using the Silent Payment protocol for enhanced privacy and address reuse without compromising security through Blindbit oracle backend technology.

• TU Wien researchers introduce BitPriv, a privacy-preserving protocol enabling secure two-party computations for decentralized finance applications on Bitcoin through BitVM fraud proofs and garbled circuits.

• Orange Pill App launches video calling feature for Bitcoin community, enabling users to connect face-to-face with fellow Bitcoiners through a simple four-step process.

• White Paper Books offers a curated selection of Bitcoin, anarcho-capitalist, and philosophy titles priced in satoshis, targeting cypherpunks and freedom-minded readers.

• Christopher Allen, founder of Blockchain Commons, demonstrates FROST's integration with Bitcoin Development Kit through two CLI demos showcasing Schnorr-based signatures and Distributed Key Generation for signing bitcoin PSBTs, advancing secure multi-signature implementations for the Bitcoin network.

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