Greetings Bitcoiner,

Welcome to Issue #427 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:

• 🎢 Bitcoin Dips Below $90K Despite Fed Rate Cut

• 👻 Silk Road Wallets Wake Up After a Decade

• ⚡ Blockstream Enables Lightning-Liquid Swaps via Boltz 

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Dec 11, 2025

TODAY’S TOP STORIES

🎢 Bitcoin Dips Below $90K Despite Fed Rate Cut

Bitcoin dropped below $90,000 despite the Federal Reserve cutting rates by 25 basis points to 3.25%, as traders reacted to mixed signals about future monetary policy. The Fed suggested only one more rate cut in 2026, disappointing expectations for two to three cuts, while internal divisions emerged with six members opposing the latest cut. The Fed's $40B Treasury bill purchase program is liquidity management, not the aggressive quantitative easing that fueled 2020-21 risk-taking. CoinDesk

👻 Silk Road Wallets Wake Up After a Decade

After more than ten years of silence, 312 Silk Road-linked wallets suddenly transferred $3.14M in bitcoin to an unknown address on Tuesday. The wallets still hold roughly $41.3M in BTC, according to Arkham Intelligence. The movement comes after Ross Ulbricht, Silk Road's creator, received a full pardon from President Trump earlier this year. While the reason for the transfers remains unclear, the dormant wallets' reawakening has naturally sparked curiosity across the Bitcoin community. The Block

⚡ Blockstream Enables Lightning-Liquid Swaps via Boltz

Blockstream's latest app update introduces trustless atomic swaps between Lightning and Liquid networks, letting users pay Lightning invoices directly from their Liquid bitcoin balances without managing channels or liquidity. The self-custodial feature uses cryptographic hash locks to ensure secure transactions, appealing to those wanting fast payments with enhanced privacy. Future updates will add on-chain swap support and hardware wallet integration, advancing interoperability across Bitcoin's growing second-layer ecosystem while keeping users in control of their keys. CoinDesk

POLL #427

PREVIOUS POLL RESULTS

OPINION & ANALYSIS

• Shanaka Anslem Perera, author of 'The Ascent Begins', argues that Bitcoin's four-year halving cycle lacks statistical proof as a price driver, contending that global liquidity conditions (not supply cuts) determine BTC's value, while the network's unresolved transition from subsidy-based to fee-based security poses the real existential threat (Dec 11 | 11 min read).

• Kudzai Kutukwa, author of the 'Exit The Matrix' newsletter, writes that the digital euro represents monetary tyranny and surveillance rather than progress, contending it threatens European freedom while Bitcoin offers true monetary independence through decentralization and mathematical scarcity instead of political control (Dec 11 | 9 min read).

• Juan Galt of Bitcoin Magazine argues that the Samourai Wallet trial threatens developer freedoms and financial privacy protections in the US, as prosecutors challenge whether privacy software constitutes protected speech under the First Amendment while the Trump administration's promises to defend self-custody rights face a critical test (Dec 10 | 12 min read).

• BitMEX Research explores how 64-byte Bitcoin transactions can exploit a Merkle tree vulnerability to trick SPV clients into accepting fake payments, examining the moderate security risk and proposing a softfork solution in BIP 54 to ban such transactions entirely (Dec 10 | 7 min read).

• Sam Baker of River Financial explores how bitcoin investors can navigate custody options between exchanges and self-custody, examining security risks, best practices, and the evolution of Bitcoin's storage landscape as over 3M BTC have been lost to hacks and poor key management (Dec 9 | 38 min read).

• Blockstream Research cryptographers Mikhail Kudinov and Jonas Nick examine hash-based signature schemes as Bitcoin's post-quantum alternative, proposing optimized SPHINCS+ variants that achieve 3-4KB signatures while maintaining 128-bit security through modifications like WOTS+C and PORS+FP (Dec 9 | 93 min read).

• Nunchuk explores how Bitcoin holders can navigate the 'sovereignty paradox' of inheritance planning by evaluating solutions from custodial to autonomous on-chain approaches, arguing that collaborative custody with blockchain-enforced timelocks offers the optimal balance of security, accessibility, and trust-minimization for transferring generational wealth (Dec 9 | 10 min read).

• Liam 'Akiba' Wright of CryptoSlate explores how Bitcoin's Taproot and Discreet Log Contracts enable 'self-bribe' commitment wallets that automatically transfer locked funds to anti-charities if oracles detect broken promises, creating programmable stakes for New Year's resolutions, corporate clawbacks, and behavioral contracts (Dec 9 | 6 min read).

• Nick Reichert of 'Bitcoin Fortress' explores why early Bitcoin holders with massive positions eventually sell their BTC, arguing that whale selling stems from rational factors like concentration risk, life events, tax optimization, security concerns, and ecosystem stewardship rather than lost conviction, and represents healthy market maturation (Dec 4 | 6 min read).

• DarthCoin, a Lightning Network advocate and guide writer, explains how to properly use three types of private LN channels (Just-in-Time, Purchase-in-Advance, and Your-own-Funds) to help beginners avoid costly mistakes and optimize their self-custodial Bitcoin Lightning wallet management (Dec 4 | 15 min read).

• Shanaka Anslem Perera also writes that Bitcoin's $2T network faces an unprecedented security crisis as transaction fees currently provide only 1.25% of miner revenue, requiring a hundredfold increase to maintain security when block subsidies vanish - a transition no proof-of-work cryptocurrency has ever successfully achieved despite declining energy costs (Dec 11 | 14 min read).

• Shanaka Anslem Perera also argues the Fed's December 10, 2025 rate cut marks a historic fracture in monetary policy consensus, as simultaneous opposing dissents reveal deep institutional divisions over inflation, data reliability, political independence, and the unknowable neutral rate amid mounting economic uncertainty (Dec 11 | 13 min read).

• John Laurenson, BBC Business reporter, explores how Lugano, Switzerland has become a bitcoin-friendly city where 350 shops accept BTC for payments, examining both the enthusiasm from Bitcoin advocates and the skepticism from economists who warn about volatility, reputational risks, and the challenges faced by similar initiatives (Dec 10 | 6 min read).

• Igor Korsakov, CTO of BlueWallet, in an interview with Conor Chepenik of Bitcoin News, explains how he built a Bitcoin-first open-source wallet in 2017 to address missing protocol features like SegWit and replace-by-fee, now integrating the ARK protocol and Lightning Network to scale his wallet's functionalities (Dec 10 | 7 min read).

• Erik, a Bitcoin product designer working on Cashu, reflects on the grassroots effort to promote integrating Cashu-based bitcoin payments into Signal as a privacy-preserving alternative to MobileCoin, emphasizing how strategic design and working prototypes drove widespread community support (Dec 10 | 5 min read).

• Gino Matos of CryptoSlate examines how China's $71B Treasury reduction and BRICS diversification, while real, coincide with rising total foreign holdings and are largely driven by currency effects rather than coordinated de-dollarization, testing whether Bitcoin can capture official-sector hedging demand that currently favors gold (Dec 9 | 3 min read).

• Oluwapelumi Adejumo of CryptoSlate examines how Strategy and BitMine's 'infinite money glitch' collapses as their premium-to-NAV ratios fall near 1.15, threatening the $60B treasury model that relied on issuing overvalued equity to buy Bitcoin and crypto at market prices (Dec 9 | 5 min read).

• Aaron Wood of Cointelegraph explores how prediction markets like Polymarket and Kalshi, despite generating over $1B in weekly volume, face mounting concerns over insider trading manipulation, wash trading comprising 25% of activity, and potential credit risks that could pressure loan defaults and require adapted underwriting models (Dec 9 | 4 min read).

• Juraj Bednar, author of 'Cryptocurrencies – Hack Your Way To A Better Life' argues that hardware attestation technologies like Secure Enclave and Play Integrity API are fundamentally undermining the open internet by forcing users into Google and Apple's controlled ecosystems, preventing alternative operating systems and modified apps from functioning, and transforming personal devices into restricted platforms that users no longer truly control (Dec 8 | 12 min read).

• Scoresby, a Bitcoin commentator, traces the term 'toxic Bitcoin maximalism' back to Vitalik Buterin's 2014 coinage while arguing that all subsequent explanations of what toxic maximalism actually means (from prominent figures like Lopp, Carter, and Zucco) fundamentally misunderstand its true tactless, unpolished nature (Dec 5 | 10 min read).

• AJC of Messari argues that alternative Layer-1 blockchains are losing their monetary premium to BTC as eight of ten major L1s have underperformed bitcoin since 2022, with valuations increasingly disconnected from declining revenues and ecosystem growth failing to justify market caps (Dec 4 | 5 min read).

• Nostrshire organizers recount the UK's first full-scale Nostr conference at Bitfest 2025 in Manchester, where 120-150 attendees gathered for talks on protocol development, privacy, and the creator economy, marking a grassroots milestone for Britain's Bitcoin and Nostr communities (Dec 4 | 4 min read).

• Ilias Abousalim of Elipticc provides a comprehensive technical guide explaining how Bitcoin's cryptographic foundations, UTXO model, proof-of-work consensus, and peer-to-peer network function, while warning that quantum computing poses a serious long-term threat to the protocol's elliptic-curve security that will require future migration to post-quantum cryptography (Dec 3 | 26 min read).

• Deadmanoz, Co-author of Chaincode’s Quantum Computing x Bitcoin report, analyzes 2.4M Pay-to-Multisig UTXOs revealing 99.98% serve data carriage rather than legitimate multisig, with Bitcoin Stamps' 74% unspendable outputs dominating since 2023, arguing Bitcoin Core v30's OP_RETURN unbounding eliminates justification for P2MS data embedding in part 1 and part 2 of a series of articles (Dec 3 | 63 min read).

• Kamal Gaur of Chain Policy presents a three-part strategic briefing arguing that India must develop clear Bitcoin policy to protect monetary sovereignty, economic competitiveness, and geopolitical leverage as global monetary architecture shifts away from traditional fiat systems toward neutral ones (Dec 3 | 21 min read).

TOOLS & PROJECTS

• New on Geyser: Sabi Wallet, a non-custodial Bitcoin wallet for Nigerians, integrates Breez SDK Nodeless on Spark to enable instant micropayments, offline receiving, and self-custody.

• New on Geyser: CDK Spark Payment Processor integrates Breez SDK Spark with Cashu mints to enable nodeless Lightning payments, transparent proof of reserves via sparkscan.io, and enhanced privacy through the Cashu protocol.

• Satoshi Nakamoto Institute requests tax-deductible donations to build institutional-grade archival infrastructure preserving bitcoin's intellectual heritage, from Austrian economics to cypherpunk philosophy, for future generations.

• Power Mining, a Latvian Bitcoin mining manufacturer, ships portable datacenter containers to Scandinavian towns to heat 2,000 homes using waste heat from mining operations while achieving 95% energy efficiency.

• Aggeus is an open protocol developed by Super Testnet that enables permissionless Bitcoin prediction markets through Discreet Log Contracts, Lightning Network, and Partially Signed Bitcoin Transaction auctions, allowing pseudonymous trading without custodians or external blockchains.

• Proof-of-Work Maze combines Bitcoin education with competitive gameplay, allowing players to earn BTC via Lightning Network while navigating increasingly challenging mazes that grow with each successfully mined block.

• Koerier, a self-hosted lightning address server for LND nodes written in Rust, enables non-interactive bitcoin payments through email-like identifiers by implementing the LUD06 specification as middleware between lightning wallets and Bitcoin's Lightning Network.

• BitTasker, a Bitcoin-powered task marketplace built on Nostr, connects global workers with opportunities through Lightning payments, enabling censorship-resistant earning without KYC requirements or traditional banking barriers.

• Coinjoiner, a zero-fee WabiSabi coordinator for Bitcoin privacy, funds development through leftover coinjoin dust while aiming to create trustless, censorship-resistant privacy solutions independent of any single entity.

• 1clickBTCTreasury, a satirical demo platform, offers institutional-grade tools for launching bitcoin treasury companies with automated DCA scheduling, multi-sig custody integrations, EDGAR-ready filings, and investor relations portals starting at $9,900 annually.

• Club Orange, a Bitcoin-focused social platform formerly known as Orange Pill App, launches a video messaging feature allowing users to record and share personal messages.

• Halseth, a NYDIG researcher, introduces a prototype vault scheme using blinded Musig2 co-signers and zero-knowledge proofs to secure Bitcoin transactions with minimal information leakage, featuring a 4-minute proving time per transaction on Apple M1 Max.

• Nostr-multimedia is an open-source Node.js tool that fetches and displays Nostr protocol content through JSON RPC, plaintext, Markdown, HTML, and base64 file formats without requiring WebSocket connections.

• Nostr-publisher-cli is an open-source command-line tool for Nostr that enables users to fetch and publish decentralized social media notes, articles, HTML pages, and files without JavaScript or WebSockets requirements.

• Molon Labe Holdings, a sovereign Bitcoin and Nostr technology innovator, builds decentralized infrastructure including satellite communications, energy independence systems, advanced thermal solutions for ASIC miners, and censorship-resistant tools that operate outside traditional constraints.

• Cold Root Identity is a security framework that enables offline root keys with deterministic epoch key rotation for Nostr.

• NostrYears analyzes users' 2025 Nostr activity including posts, reactions, images, and interactions.

• Ledger partners with luxury automaker Lamborghini to launch a custom-branded Stax hardware wallet with exclusive packaging, set to release in early 2026.

• Moodring, an analytics platform, integrates with TradingView to transform live market data into emotional signals, enabling users to experience real-time market sentiment through a novel 'markets you can feel' interface.

• Human Rights Foundation launches Hack4Freedom, the first AI hackathon led by human rights defenders from authoritarian regimes, set for January 17-18 at Bitcoin Park in Austin, Texas.

• Predyx, a Bitcoin-based prediction market platform, launches in-app support system, AI-powered market creation tools, redesigned notifications, video tutorial library, and enhanced resolution workflows to improve user experience.

• Zaprite, a bitcoin payment processing platform, launches custom checkout fields feature allowing merchants to configure additional customer information fields including labels, types, descriptions, and required status for payment links.

• Layer3.press, a decentralized publishing platform built on Nostr, enables creators to publish censorship-resistant content across web and mobile while monetizing through Bitcoin's Lightning Network and credit card subscriptions.

• NoAlt is a community-driven initiative that promotes decentralized alternatives to big tech platforms like X, YouTube, Reddit, Instagram and Twitch.

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