Tether Builds Behemoth 🧱, Solo Miners Keep Winning 🎲, Taiwan Tests Bitcoin Reserves 🇹🇼

🧱 Tether Builds A Bitcoin Behemoth

🎲 Solo Miners Hit Two More Blocks

🇹🇼 Taiwan's Bitcoin Reserve Fight Escalates

Hodlonaut, a pseudonymous Bitcoin advocate, presents part two of a four-part series investigating Bitcoin Core's alleged 'capture,' claiming an informal network around Brink co-founder John Newbery systematically marginalized contributors Dashjr, Atack, and Dimov through funding denial, social exclusion, and opaque maintainer gatekeeping (Apr 29 | 45 min read).

Nunchuk, a Bitcoin wallet provider, argues that abstracting away 'keys' from users is fundamentally wrong, advocating instead for treating users as capable of understanding public-key cryptography - a concept they believe will be as essential as literacy in an increasingly digital world (Apr 28 | 2 min read).

Michael Tanguma, CEO of Onramp, argues that STRC - Strategy's perpetual preferred equity marketed as a 'money-market-like' instrument backed by BTC paying 11.5% tax-free yield - is structurally flawed across five layers of risk, with 82% retail holders misled by language borrowed from safer instruments (Apr 28 | 10 min read).

Pavlenex of Stratum V2 and BTCPay Server explains that corporate funding of open-source software is a strategic investment - not philanthropy - offering upstream risk reduction, global talent access, and R&D leverage at a fraction of traditional hiring costs (Apr 28 | 3 min read).

Roman Sterlingov, Bitcoin Fog operator serving a 12.5-year sentence, writes from prison about systemic abuse, the erosion of privacy, and how unchecked institutional power mirrors the surveillance state threatening civil liberties for all of society (Apr 28 | 16 min read).

Sylvain Saurel, author of the In Bitcoin We Trust newsletter, argues that the Bitcoin 2026 Las Vegas conference signals a dangerous institutional co-option of the network, urging holders to reclaim the cypherpunk ethos through self-custody, node operation, and rejection of Wall Street's FIC wrappers (Apr 27 | 12 min read).

DavideBTC, a Bitcoin and Lightning node operator, provides a complete step-by-step guide to building a local monitoring stack using Node Exporter, Prometheus, lndmon, and Grafana to track channel health, routing fees, peer stability, and system resources in real time (Apr 27 | 12 min read).

Vladyslav Manzyuk, writing for Mises Wire, argues that monetary expansion by central banks corrupts the price system's information signal, producing malinvestment, Cantillon-effect redistribution, and boom-bust cycles that no amount of better policy management can prevent (Apr 25 | 5 min read).

Megaptera, in an article on Stacker News, warns that Bitcoin hard forks duplicate all UTXOs, and mishandling forked coins - such as combining them in a single transaction - can expose wallet ownership, undo CoinJoin privacy, and compromise BTC identity separation across both chains (Apr 25 | 2 min read).

Viktor Ihnatiuk, CEO of Utexo, argues that Lightning Network's native BTC/USDT routing via RGB-based USDT offers a genuinely non-custodial yield alternative, contrasting it with DeFi's recurring multi-layer exploit vulnerabilities that have cost over $600M in early 2026 (Apr 24 | 5 min read).

Max Hillebrand, a privacy advocate, in an article on Nostr, compares Reticulum and FIPS as two permissionless encrypted mesh protocols that share the goal of eliminating centralized network coordination but diverge sharply on routing design, cryptographic primitives, MTU requirements, and IP compatibility tradeoffs (Apr 24 | 15 min read).

Jackson, author of the Sound Money, Sound Life newsletter, argues that whether US equities crash or the dollar gets debased to prevent one, both paths lead to the same outcome - BTC wins as the scarcest, most effective inflation hedge in a system built on debasement (Apr 29 | 5 min read).

Harry Halpin, Co-founder and CEO of Nym, urges programmers to resist Palantir's surveillance-driven 'technofascism' by building privacy-first, decentralized tools that defend civil liberties, anonymity, and free expression against the expanding reach of corporate and state control (Apr 23 | 6 min read).

Bram Kanstein, host of the Bitcoin for Millennials podcast, argues that fiat money fractures the effort-reward link, causing widespread psychological suffering, while positioning Bitcoin as the permissionless exit that restores monetary sovereignty and real autonomy (Apr 20 | 12 min read).

White Noise, a Nostr client for secure and instant messaging, outlines five essential concepts (public keys, private keys, identity, clients, and relays) that new users must understand before joining Nostr to ensure a smooth, secure, and censorship-resistant onboarding experience (Apr 27 | 4 min read).

Jordi Visser, macro investor and market commentator, argues that stablecoin adoption by Stripe, Uber, DoorDash, and Morgan Stanley marks the death of the 'float' and the rise of programmable money that splits and distributes payments instantly at the moment of transaction (Apr 26 | 6 min read).

Finn of What Is Bitcoin? writes that Bitcoin mining serves as the missing economic link for renewable energy by acting as a 'buyer of last resort' for surplus power, eliminating curtailment, replacing expensive grid storage, and making renewable projects profitable without government subsidies (Apr 24 | 7 min read).

James Van Straten of CoinDesk argues that quantum computing's threat to Bitcoin's ~1.7M vulnerable BTC, worth ~$145B, is manageable, as markets have historically absorbed comparable sell pressure within months, making governance rather market collapse the real concern (Apr 23 | 2 min read).

Sydney of Abundant Mines examines BIP-110, the proposed soft fork aimed at restricting non-monetary data embeddings like ordinals and inscriptions, outlining its technical mechanics, activation risks, potential chain split concerns, and arguments both for and against its implementation (Apr 23 | 12 min read).

Michael Tanguma, founder and CEO of Onramp and General Partner at Early Riders, argues that bitcoin, like gold, is true 'outside money' with zero counterparty risk, while every other financial instrument is merely credit, urging investors to hold BTC directly rather than through intermediaries (Apr 17 | 13 min read).

Bitshala, a Bitcoin education and open-source development organization, recaps its 5-day BOSS Summit Summer 2026 in Dharamshala, India where developers, designers, and educators gathered to collaborate on Bitcoin privacy, scalability, mining decentralization, and open-source tooling (Apr 13 | 9 min read).

Strike CEO Jack Mallers unveils lending proof-of-reserves, volatility-proof bitcoin-backed loans built with Tether, and a $2.1B credit facility, while backing a proposed three-way merger with Twenty-One Capital and bitcoin miner Elektron Energy.

Tether launches Mining Development Kit (MDK), an open-source framework giving Bitcoin mining operators unified, vendor-free control over their full infrastructure stack.

Tether also launches a promotional Bitcoin faucet via its wallet app to teach users self-custody, offering small BTC amounts over the Lightning Network.

Divine, a reboot of the beloved short-video app Vine, launches publicly with 500,000 restored videos, AI-free content policies, and backing from Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey.

Proto by Block, a Bitcoin mining hardware company, adopts the open-source asic-rs Rust library to power Proto Fleet, its free application-specific integrated circuit (ASIC) miner fleet management software.

Fountain, a Bitcoin-native podcast and music app, launches version 1.5 featuring a revamped trending feed that ranks content by zaps, engagement, and recency.

Developer Antoine Riard shares a 2026 roadmap for Bitcoin Backbone, an alternative Bitcoin implementation, prioritizing test coverage and quality assurance over new feature development.

Satstreamr, an open-source peer-to-peer live video tutoring platform, enables viewers to pay tutors directly in Cashu e-cash micropayments over WebRTC data channels with no payment processor required.

Stashu, an open-source privacy-first file marketplace, lets sellers encrypt files client-side and accept bitcoin payments via Lightning or Cashu ecash with no platform accounts required.

Bitcoinproducts(dot)xyz is an open archive that catalogues 492 bitcoin hackathon products across 118 events since 2012, plus 35 forward-looking ideas.

Whale's Exchange, a new open-source non-custodial web interface, launches its public beta enabling Lightning Network users to swap off-chain bitcoin for on-chain BTC via the Electrum Swap protocol without running a wallet.

Leon Wankum, a real estate developer and Bitcoin advocate, releases 'Digital Real Estate,' exploring how bitcoin challenges real estate's traditional monetary role and reshapes capital allocation strategies.

Bitkey, a hardware wallet by Block, launches a new device featuring a screen that verifies transactions and critical security settings like recovery paths and inheritance.

BTC Inc. confirms that the Bitcoin 2027 conference will return to Nashville, Tennessee on July 15-17, 2027, after two years in Las Vegas.

BTC Sessions, a Bitcoin educator on YouTube, launches Sovereign Sessions, a new channel focused on privacy, AI, and self-hosted freedom tech tools.

Tether partners with Canaan Inc. and ACME Swisstech to build modular, immersion-cooled Bitcoin mining systems while aiming to offer independent component upgrades and greater efficiency at scale.

Nostr Compass, a technical newsletter tracking the Nostr ecosystem, reports that its project index has grown to 752 listed tools and applications available for public discovery.

Filmmaker Parker Worthington is producing 'This Time Is Different,' a documentary following Bitcoin's four-year market cycle and Nakamoto Inc. CEO David Bailey's journey building a public BTC company.

RoadFlare is an iOS rideshare rider app built on the Nostr protocol with Bitcoin payments enabled.

Zeus releases version 13.0.0 of its self-custodial Lightning wallet, introducing an improved onboarding experience, a new LDK Node engine, and seamless device migration with channels intact.

Paystand, a Bitcoin-powered B2B payments network, launches USDb, a USD-backed stablecoin built on Bitcoin layers for commercial finance.

Aven launches a bitcoin-backed Visa card offering up to $1M credit lines at 7.99% APR without requiring users to sell their holdings.