⚙️ Nostr Devs Ship a Mesh Network That Kills DNS Control

🏦 Emirates NBD Eyes a 1% Bitcoin Allocation From Its $16B Book

🧵 The Jane Street Bitcoin Manipulation Theory Doesn't Hold Up

Matt Corallo, Bitcoin Core contributor and Spiral engineer, argues that open source AI agents must urgently adopt Bitcoin as their default payment rail to avoid being locked out of agentic commerce by proprietary systems pushed by Google, OpenAI, and Coinbase (Feb 25 | 6 min read).

Tuma, open source reporter at Bitcoin++ insider edition, covers the wave of new Bitcoin Improvement Proposals published in February 2026, highlighting BIPs addressing quantum resistance, silent payments, covenant opcodes, and multisig privacy enhancements as the expanded BIP editor team accelerates proposal reviews (Feb 25 | 4 min read).

Sam Baker, research analyst at River, examines key Bitcoin adoption trends in 2025, showing that despite price declines, institutional and nation-state demand accelerated, with businesses adding $54B in BTC, 23 governments now holding bitcoin, and Lightning Network volume surging 300% (Feb 24 | 30 min read).

Bram Kanstein, host of the Bitcoin For Millennials podcast, argues that selling BTC for any other asset class - stocks, gold, real estate, bonds, or fiat - is irrational, as Bitcoin's absolute scarcity, self-custody, and superior monetary properties make it the world's best store of value (Feb 24 | 13 min read).

Damien Theillier of Plan B Network argues that Bitcoin transcends the left-right political divide, contending that its cypherpunk roots make it a neutral yet powerful tool for individual freedom, privacy, and self-ownership beyond state coercion (Feb 19 | 3 min read).

Raw Avocado, a Bitcoin-focused writer, recounts the full story of Mt. Gox's 2014 collapse - from transaction malleability claims and 850,000 BTC lost, to years of hot wallet theft, Mark Karpelès' conviction, and creditor repayments still ongoing as of 2026 (Feb 25 | 9 min read).

Bitcoin News, reporting on the Bitcoin Association of Slovenia's efforts, details how the country's proposed 25% flat tax on digital asset gains - ZDDOKS - was opposed and temporarily blocked, preserving the nation's bitcoin-friendly status for occasional investors under existing ZDoh-2 rules (Feb 25 | 5 min read).

Saifedean Ammous, in the 2nd chapter of his book 'The Gold Standard', presents a fiction-framed yet historically grounded account of how pre-WWI gold standard stability fostered Anglo-German friendship before overconfident European powers sleepwalked into catastrophic, senseless war (Feb 25 | 10 min read).

Niklas Gögge, a Bitcoin Core contributor, examines how the project safeguards its $2T+ network through a formalized vulnerability disclosure policy, extensive fuzzing infrastructure logging over 1M CPU hours annually, and layered testing methodologies designed to catch critical bugs before they reach production (Feb 24 | 10 min read).

Joakim Book, writing for The Rage, argues that the J5 alliance's February 2026 crypto reports rely on speculative language and misrepresent SAR data to justify expanding a $60B-per-year AML regime that yields fewer than 400 criminal investigations annually (Feb 24 | 5 min read).

Jesse Shrader, co-founder and CEO of Amboss, draws a sweeping historical parallel between the transcontinental railroad and the Lightning Network, arguing that Bitcoin's second layer is replicating the same infrastructure build-out that unified America's economy, with protocol engineers, liquidity providers, and intelligence layers driving the next global monetary revolution (Feb 20 | 20 min read).

Solomonsatoshi argues that Stacker News is failing due to state regulatory pressure and a hybrid BTC/Cowboy Credit token model that introduced friction and killed economic sustainability (Feb 25 | 4 min read).

0xbitcoiner reviews ShockWallet as a custodial Lightning PWA, praising its quick setup, intuitive interface, reasonable fees, and seamless Stacker News integration, while suggesting improvements like identity deletion and editable automation rule names (Feb 25 | 2 min read).

Aishwary Gupta of Polygon Labs warns that stablecoins - projected to reach $1.9T–$4T by 2030 - risk reinventing financial intermediaries through closed ecosystems, arguing that open, interoperable infrastructure is essential to keep stablecoins functioning as truly borderless, programmable money ...you know, like Bitcoin (Feb 24 | 4 min read).

Dr Merav Ozair, founder of Emerging Technologies Mastery, argues that Bitcoin's core message is emancipation through self-sovereignty and financial freedom rather than mere decentralization, offering the unbanked capital mobility and serving as an antidote to centralized AI and government control (Feb 23 | 7 min read).

Fernando Nikolić of Perception argues that institutions follow a predictable pattern of 'deny, fight, absorb, rebrand' when disrupted, and Bitcoin is now experiencing the same cycle as traditional finance wraps itself around Bitcoin rather than dying (Feb 21 | 1 min read).

Kudzai Kutukwa argues that the Epstein files reveal power operates through resilient networks rather than institutions, and contends that decentralized counter-networks like Bitcoin and Nostr offer the only viable path for ordinary people to challenge entrenched elite coordination systems (Feb 21 | 12 min read).

M. K. Fain of Soapbox compares three decentralized social protocols - Fediverse (ActivityPub), Bluesky (AtProto), and Nostr - arguing that Nostr's cryptographic key-based identity and relay model make it the most censorship-resistant and truly decentralized option for users seeking freedom from corporate gatekeepers (Feb 18 | 4 min read).

Arthur Hayes, Chief Investment Officer at Maelstrom, argues that AI-driven white-collar job losses will trigger a banking crisis as knowledge workers default on $557B in consumer credit and mortgages, forcing the Fed to print money massively and propelling Bitcoin to new highs (Feb 18 | 14 min read).

Lightning News also argues that European payment processors are killing Bitcoin Lightning adoption by demanding excessive personal data for sub-$10 transactions through regulatory over-compliance, creating friction that no EU law actually requires while strangling payment innovation with compliance theater (Feb 16 | 5 min read).

Maali Marvin Kenneth of Bitcoin High School argues that if central banks move gold reserves to space via rockets, Bitcoin can inherit gold's cultural legacy on Earth by building tactile wallet interfaces that make sending BTC feel like physically handing over golden coins rather than updating database numbers (Feb 14 | 7 min read).

Antoine Poinsot, a Bitcoin Core contributor, argues that the Bitcoin Core should deprecate its GUI due to insufficient development and review resources, while questioning whether the costs of maintaining it outweigh benefits and calling for realistic discussion about quality thresholds for shipped software (Feb 13 | 4 min read).

New on Geyser: ZapWatch Monitor is an open-source Bitcoin Lightning node device featuring real-time Nostr zap alerts, OLED display, web UI, and live celebration animations for desktop monitoring.

New on Geyser: Geyser launches Impact Funds, a recurring Bitcoin adoption funding mechanism targeting education, culture, circular economies, and Latin America through vetted grassroots project sponsorships.

Forkalicious visualizes BIP110 Bitcoin soft fork outcomes, showing how node operators - ignoring, enforcing, or rejecting the upgrade - experience diverging blockchain forks differently.

Binohash enables covenant-like Bitcoin transaction introspection without softforks or consensus changes.

Mastering Taproot delivers an open-access, testnet-verified developer guide to Bitcoin's Taproot upgrade, covering Schnorr signatures, Merkle trees, Ordinals, and Silent Payments across 12 comprehensive chapters.

Boltz, a non-custodial Bitcoin bridge, launches its Partner Dashboard, allowing eligible integrations to track swap stats, visualize growth, and qualify for monthly BTC payouts.

BTCPay Server's Stripe plugin enables merchants to accept fiat card payments, Apple Pay, and Google Pay alongside bitcoin.

Numo, a free open-source Android point-of-sale app, enables Bitcoin tap-to-pay via Cashu ecash, auto-sweeps funds to Lightning addresses, and charges zero platform fees.

Divine, a decentralized short-form video platform reminiscent of Vine and built on the Nostr protocol, launches on Zapstore through open-source collaboration and community partnerships.

Breez SDK Spark adds support for HODL invoices to make it easy to implement cross-chain atomic swaps.

LN-history is an open-source tool that lets developers explore, compare, and analyze Lightning Network gossip messages through a free API or self-hosted database.

Bark Bitcoin SDK enables Flutter and Dart developers to integrate instant, low-cost, self-custodial Bitcoin payments using the Ark protocol with support for Lightning Network and on-chain transactions without channel management.

Wallet of Satoshi launches 'Login with Lightning' for self-custodial users, leveraging the LNURL-auth protocol to enable access to supported Bitcoin services.

Dakar, an open-source blockchain forensics application built with Go and Vue 3, analyzes CoinJoin transactions through heuristics, clustering algorithms, and transaction similarity measures.

Hourglass V2 proposes limiting P2PK bitcoin spends to one per block with a 1 BTC maximum to mitigate quantum computing threats to 1.7M vulnerable coins while avoiding confiscation and preventing catastrophic market supply shocks.

Akasha, a Bitcoin-focused platform enabling global spending and connectivity, empowers users to embrace a borderless, self-sovereign lifestyle through Bitcoin payments and community engagement.