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Greetings Bitcoiner,
Welcome to Issue #615 of Bitcoin Breakdown, where every Tuesday and Thursday, we bring you the latest must-read Bitcoin thought leadership articles and the newest tools and projects you should know about. But first, today’s Top Stories:
Boltz pulled its swap services offline after AI-assisted attackers began iterating faster than a small open source team could patch. Strategy sold Bitcoin below its own cost basis while Saylor insisted he has never sold a satoshi of his own. And a solo miner took block 960,804 anyway.
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⚡ Boltz Pulls Its Swap Services Offline Indefinitely
Boltz, the non-custodial swap provider that routes Lightning and Liquid payments for wallets including BULL and AQUA, disabled its swap services until further notice on Monday. The team said months of automated, AI-assisted probing produced several contained exploits before accelerating sharply in recent days, and that attackers now iterate faster than a company its size can patch. No user funds were at risk, and the losses landed entirely on the bootstrapped company itself.
Why it matters: Non-custodial design did exactly its job here: the infrastructure broke, the money didn't. The harder question is whether small open source teams can outpace automated attackers, and Boltz just answered it honestly. Read more→
Infrastructure wasn't the only thing being drawn down...
✂️ Strategy Sells 1,638 BTC Below Its Own Cost Basis
Strategy sold 1,638 bitcoin for $104.7M between July 27 and August 2, at an average of $63,957 per coin against an aggregate cost basis of $75,419. The proceeds covered $52.4M in preferred dividends and $52.3M of STRC buybacks, and the company added $250M to a USD reserve now standing at $4 billion. It still holds 842,138 bitcoin.
Why it matters: Saylor drew the line publicly: he hasn't sold a satoshi of his own, while the public company he chairs sells at a loss to service preferred dividends. Corporate balance sheets and personal conviction are not the same asset. Read more→
While treasuries shrink, the network's edges keep working...
⛏️ Solo Miner Takes Block 960,804 As Giants Chase AI
A solo miner solved block 960,804 through solo.ckpool.org early Monday, taking roughly 3.16 bitcoin in subsidy and fees, worth about $200,000. CKPool's operator logged it as the 317th solo block found on the pool, mined on wildly variable hashrate that peaked near 100 petahash and appeared to be rented. It arrived a day after Braiins Forge flagged the largest miners converting warehouses into artificial intelligence (AI) data centers.
Why it matters: Rented hashrate winning a solo block isn't quite the home-rack romance, but the point holds: the lottery stays open to anyone who shows up. As industrial miners chase AI revenue, the hashrate they leave behind gets redistributed. Read more→
AMBOSS, a Lightning Network infrastructure platform, clarifies that individual node closures like Boltz, Zeus, and LNBIG stem from security exploits and reallocation rather than a broader Bitcoin Lightning Network capacity or trust collapse (Aug 4 | 2 min read).
Max Hillebrand, a privacy advocate and Bitcoin commentator, analyzes how Coldcard's 2021 relicensing intended to block Foundation's Passport competition, led it to replace shared GPL cryptography code, introducing an undetected seed-entropy flaw that exposed users' private keys to theft (Aug 3 | 4 min read).
Zach Herbert, Co-founder and CEO of Foundation, analyzes years-long attacks by Coldcard's NVK on Passport, SeedSigner, and researchers, arguing that epistemic capture let unchecked authority become the substitute for verification until the RNG failure exposed the pattern (Aug 3 | 10 min read).
Bennet, a Bitcoin writer, argues that Coinkite's negligence, not AI or self-custody itself, caused Coldcard's RNG flaw, leaving seeds guessable, while urging affected users to migrate funds immediately (Aug 3 | 9 min read).
Rare, author of the Living on Bitcoin newsletter, comes out of hiatus to argue that Bitcoin's true purpose is capture-resistant sovereignty for nations, institutions and individuals facing currency debasement, not everyday payments, challenging Peter McCormack's claim that Bitcoin can't scale for mass adoption (Aug 3 | 4 min read).
Shanaka Anslem Perera, author of 'The Ascent Begins', examines Coldcard's firmware bug that exposed 1,367 BTC worth $86M, questioning whether Coinkite's liability disclaimers hold up legally (Aug 2 | 2 min read).
Nick Percoco of Kraken argues that Coldcard's five-year entropy failure, which cut seed randomness to roughly 40-72 bits despite certified secure elements, proves that hardware wallets need NIST-style independent lab validation and public registries like PCI PTS (Aug 2 | 3 min read).
Kevin Loaec, CEO of Wizardsardine, publishes a thorough blog post detailing the recent Coldcard hacks with technical details on what happened, who is affected and what to do going forward (Aug 1 | 32 min read).
Dusty Daemon, a Bitcoin developer, traces COLDCARD's entropy bug to a sloppy commit with the single comment 'runs' that disabled hardware RNG while silencing a compiler error, exposing wallets to weak, predictable Yasmarang-based seed generation (Aug 1 | 6 min read).
Block's Bitcoin Engineering and Security team, collaborating with anonymous researchers, details how Coldcard's firmware used a predictable Yasmarang RNG fallback and limited 32-bit secure-element reseed, exposing wallets across Mk2 through Mk5 devices to theft (Jul 30 | 12 min read).
ICYMI: Parman shares a hands-on DIY tutorial teaching readers how to manually generate a 24-word BIP 39 mnemonic seed using dice rolls, SHA-256 checksums, and binary-to-decimal conversion for educational, offline private key creation (Jun 13 2022 | 13 min read).
NVK(dot)wtf compiles screenshots of statements by NVK of Coldcard, spanning 2020 to 2026, as people are noticing deletion of posts.
Buzzdir, an open-source community directory, curates 42 public and invite-only 'hives' on the Buzz platform by Block Inc, including Bitcoin-focused groups.
ZEUS disables its Boltz atomic swaps instance, while clarifying that other services remain online and users should have no problems sending or receiving payments using their wallets.
BitMEX Research, the exchange's analysis arm, announces its shutdown as BitMEX winds down by September 2026, ending nearly ten years of influential Bitcoin market commentary and reporting.
MARA Foundation, linked to bitcoin miner Marathon, opens Slipstream, a tool for submitting large or non-standard bitcoin transactions directly to its mempool, without additional charges beyond transaction fees.
Presidio Bitcoin, a Bay Area hub for builders in bitcoin, AI, and freedom tech, launches the PB Index, a searchable archive of 17+ months of talks and panels, featuring an 'Ask PB' AI query tool and 840 topic cards linking to source material.
Bitle, an open-source ESP32 relay node for BitChat's Bluetooth mesh, adds a solar-powered LoRa backhaul enabling kilometer-scale, phone-free node-to-node message relay.
Seedpicker, an open source project, offers a guide explaining how users create secure 24 word BIP39 seed phrases using raffle tickets, dice, and offline computers.
Satisfied, a new Bitcoin-native food logger built on Nostr, lets users track meals via AI photo analysis while paying per use with Lightning micropayments, keeping health data encrypted and user-owned.
Foundation, the hardware wallet maker behind Passport devices, warns users about phishing emails impersonating the company after a recent Coldcard security incident, urging verification through official channels only.
Granola is an open-source, testnet proof-of-concept that lets two people trustlessly swap Cashu ecash tokens (potentially across different mints) by using Nostr to find each other and coordinate, while Bitcoin-style hash-locked contracts ensure the trade is all-or-nothing.
