SC Blocks CBDCs 🇺🇸, Tether Takes Control 🧭, SpaceX Files Bitcoin 🚀

🇺🇸 South Carolina Blocks the CBDC Lane

🧭 Tether Takes Twenty One's Wheel Now

🚀 SpaceX Puts Bitcoin in the Filing

Gigi of OpenSats argues that on-chain zaps are a dangerous privacy threat, permanently linking nostr identities to Bitcoin addresses, exposing users' full financial history, enabling surveillance and physical attacks, and harming broader Bitcoin network privacy through forced address reuse (May 21 | 16 min read).

L0la L33tz of The Rage analyzes Trump's Executive Order expanding the Bank Secrecy Act, arguing it disproportionately impacts naturalized citizens and low-income households, while increasing banking costs and failing to effectively combat financial crime (May 20 | 4 min read).

Zachary Addair, writing for Bitcoin Well, argues that Apollo's shift to daily private credit pricing and KKR's $300M fund bailout expose the $2T shadow banking system's decade-long opacity, making Bitcoin's transparent, apolar monetary standard the only credible alternative (May 20 | 7 min read).

Colin Harper of Blockspace discusses the transformative changes in Bitcoin mining, emphasizing a shift towards AI integration, the challenges posed by decreasing block subsidies, and the declining hashprice, which could reshape the future of the mining industry (May 20 | 9 min read).

Nick Neuman, CEO and Co-Founder of Casa, argues that Bitcoin is misclassified as merely an inflation hedge, emphasizing its potential as a geopolitical risk hedge, especially as global tensions rise and the need for censorship-resistant assets becomes crucial (May 20 | 6 min read).

Sipa, aka Pieter Wuille, a Bitcoin developer, shares a new cryptographic scheme from EuroCrypt 2026 that combines Schnorr and post-quantum signatures into a single tamper-proof hybrid signature, offering stronger security guarantees than simply concatenating the two (May 19 | 2 min read).

Congressman Lance Gooden, a representative from Texas, writes that the US must lead in the digital asset race against China to maintain its global financial dominance and security, emphasizing Bitcoin's critical role in shaping future power dynamics and national strategy (May 19 | 3 min read).

Tuma of Bitcoin++ Insider Edition highlights a hybrid approach to post-quantum signatures with SHRINCS, which combines stateful and stateless schemes to enhance security while minimizing signature size (May 19 | 9 min read).

Daniel Batten, a Bitcoin advocate, emphasizes that Bitcoin's role in stabilizing energy grids across multiple nations may pave the way for mainstream acceptance, shifting the narrative from Bitcoin-as-money to Bitcoin-as-energy as a critical use case in the West (May 18 | 3 min read).

Buck Perley, a Bitcoin developer, writes that Bitcoin's mempool policy functions as an informal 'administrative state,' where opaque, developer-driven changes increasingly bypass the transparent, community-ratified soft fork process, risking governance capture and long-term network fragility (May 17 | 11 min read).

Annabelle Huang, co-founder and CEO of Altius Labs, writes that the recent conflict involving Iran highlights the urgent need for 24/7 trading markets, as traditional financial systems struggle to keep pace with the rapid flow of information (May 15 | 4 min read).

Kudzai Kutukwa, a Bitcoin advocate, writes that the UK's Digital ID rollout (backed by King Charles despite 3M citizen signatures opposing it) combined with CBDC infrastructure, converts individual rights into state-revocable licenses, with self-custodied BTC as the last instrument of financial sovereignty (May 16 | 15 min read).

Philip Charter, a freedom tech writer and author, in an article for White Noise on Nostr, draws parallels between Orwell's 'Nineteen Eighty-Four' and modern surveillance capitalism, arguing that Big Tech's data mapping, facial recognition, and algorithmic control have surpassed Orwellian dystopia in scope and reach (May 16 | 10 min read).

Pacharo Nyirenda, Malawian Bitcoin educator, recounts Bitcoin Boma's merchant onboarding seminar in Mulanje, where local traders learned Lightning payments, self-custody, and Bitcoin's role as censorship-resistant freedom money (May 16 | 7 min read).

L0la L33tz and Pedro Solimano, in an article on The Rage, breaks down how the US Digital Asset Market Clarity Act expands PATRIOT Act surveillance powers and BSA obligations over Bitcoin and crypto while leaving developer protections and DeFi definitions dangerously vague (May 15 | 7 min read).

Shane, Founder of Bitcoin Timber, points out that Bitcoin's key numbers - its 10-minute block time, 4-year halving cycle, and 21M supply cap - when converted into light frequencies using the same math that defines musical octaves, each land precisely on colors Bitcoin already uses as its visual identity (May 15 | 2 min read).

Juan Galt, a Bitcoin-focused journalist, visits El Salvador's BINAES library in San Salvador, exploring its seven floors of family amenities, Bitcoin educational displays, 9M digital books, 3D printers, and gaming areas, all open to the public free of charge 24/7 (May 14 | 5 min read).

Brian Fagioli, technology journalist and founder of NERDS(dot)xyz, writes that Ditto, an open source social platform built on Nostr, revives the personal, customizable internet of the past by prioritizing user identity ownership, cross-platform interoperability, and playful design over algorithmic feeds and sterile uniformity (May 14 | 3 min read).

Tony Nakomoto, a Bitcoin educator and self-custody advocate, in a post for Hodl Hodl's blog, explains Arkade - an open-source protocol built on Ark and Bitcoin's Taproot upgrade - detailing how VTXOs, preconfirmations, and non-custodial batch swaps enable fast, scalable BTC transactions, and how Hodl Hodl plans to leverage it for P2P Lightning trading (May 13 | 7 min read).

Martti Malmi, an early Bitcoin developer from 2009 to 2011, releases a new version of Nostr VPN featuring native multiplatform interfaces, Nostr-based multihop routing, and improved network management.

Seed Tool, a self-contained offline Bitcoin seed generation and verification tool, releases v2.3.0 adding PSBT inspection, miniscript analysis, Lightning decoding, and Silent Payments support.

Bsymbol(dot)org is a website dedicated to promoting the use of the ₿ symbol for representing bitcoin quantities, providing resources, guidelines, and updates on its adoption across wallets and applications.

Lightning Network developers merge a specification update to the Bolts repository enabling zero-fee commitment transactions using v3 Bitcoin transactions, eliminating fee disputes and reducing forced channel closures.

LearnBitcoin(dot)com, a free and open-source Bitcoin education site, relaunches with six beginner chapters, 428 glossary entries, and a strict no-altcoin, no-bullshit approach to onboarding new users to Bitcoin.

QCAP, a proposed protocol, uses a weaker elliptic curve address to serve as an early warning signal if quantum computers become powerful enough to break Bitcoin's cryptography.

Alby, a Lightning infrastructure company, releases version 1.22 of Alby Hub adding Core Lightning support, on-chain wallet functionality, and a dedicated AI agents payments page.

Boltz Exchange, a non-custodial Bitcoin swap protocol, releases backend version 3.13.0 adding Arkade swap support, EVM commitment lockups, and multi-LND node functionality.

BitGo adds Lightning Network support to its Crypto-as-a-Service platform, enabling businesses to embed fast, low-cost bitcoin payments into their products.

Node NBO, a new Bitcoin hub in Nairobi, Kenya, opens as a co-working space for Bitcoin, energy, and compute organizations across Africa, powered entirely by solar energy.

Radicle, an open-source peer-to-peer code collaboration platform built on Git, offers a decentralized alternative to GitHub with no central authority, using cryptographic signing and gossip protocols for repository sync.

LN Markets, a Bitcoin derivatives trading platform, launches a WebSocket stream API using JSON-RPC 2.0, letting developers receive real-time market and account data without polling REST endpoints.

Amethyst, an open-source Nostr client for Android, releases version 1.09.0 with major features including voice and video calls, encrypted group chats, local AI tools, and a new command-line client.

DirectHash is a no-account Bitcoin cloud mining service where users pay via Lightning or on-chain BTC and receive pool or solo mining rewards directly to their own address.

Bitcoin Sports Network and Satstreet bring The Bitcoin Open, a golf and poker tournament, to Glen Abbey Golf Club in Oakville, Ontario on June 8, 2026.

BTC Sessions brings back the Sat Market for its 7th edition on June 26, offering Calgary, Alberta locals a free peer-to-peer venue to buy and sell goods using bitcoin and cash.