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Greetings Bitcoiner,
Welcome to Issue #618 of Bitcoin Breakdown, where we’re bringing you your end-of-week Bitcoin Digest featuring all the need-to-know Quick Bits snippets and Quick Media. But first, today’s Top Stories:
OpenSats is fast-tracking money to the volunteers hunting bugs in Bitcoin code as the Singularity looms and the Coldcard wallet exploit is still draining funds. European watchdogs warn that scammers are posing as regulators after the licensing deadline. Japan wants exchanges to delay withdrawals and register addresses, which hands custodians a clearer view of where your coins go.
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🚨 OpenSats Fast-Tracks Funding For Bitcoin Bug Hunters
OpenSats says it will prioritize red team applications for the foreseeable future and reimburse past model token costs through a dedicated track at opensats(dot)org/red. The move follows the Coldcard firmware flaw now under active exploitation, which Galaxy Research puts at about 1,600 bitcoin confirmed stolen from more than 7,300 addresses, with a suspected fourth wave pushing the total toward 2,000.
Why it matters: Free software has always relied on someone volunteering to look. Paying the compute bill turns that goodwill into a budget line, which is the first honest admission that auditing Bitcoin at this scale now costs real money. Read more→
Money is not the only thing being exploited...
🇪🇺 Scammers Pose As EU Regulators To Drain Wallets
France's Autorité des Marchés Financiers and the European Securities and Markets Authority warn that fraudsters are impersonating regulators and licensed firms, using falsified documents and stolen logos to move users onto fake websites. The French regulator has identified cases where suspects posed as its own staff and told customers to transfer assets.
Why it matters: A license is a filing cabinet, not a vault. The safest move during a shakeout like this is the one that needed no regulator in the first place, which is moving funds to an open source wallet you hold keys to. Read more→
Another regulator is offering protection with strings attached...
🇯🇵 Japan Asks Exchanges To Delay Your Withdrawals
Japan's Financial Services Agency and National Police Agency asked exchanges on Thursday to hold withdrawals for a set period after a fiat deposit or purchase, require pre-registered withdrawal addresses with a waiting period, and set per-customer limits. The requests are not binding rules, and the agency says each exchange should decide how to apply them based on its own services.
Why it matters: Every one of these controls is a surveillance feature wearing a safety jacket. Address registration and delayed withdrawals tell a custodian exactly where your coins go and when, which is the cost of not holding your own keys. Read more→
COLDCARD, Coinkite's Bitcoin hardware wallet, denies using a weak entropy fallback, saying a MicroPython bug mistakenly activated a non-cryptographic random number generator.
FTX claims broker Thomas Braziel, a disgraced former receiver ordered to repay $1.9M for fraud, solicits victims of the $130M Coldcard bitcoin wallet hack to join his legal action.
Giacomo Zucco of Plab B Network resigns from OCEAN mining’s board due to differences in principles while praising the innovative ideas the company brought to Bitcoin mining.
Capital B, a French Bitcoin treasury firm holding 3,140 BTC, lists on Cboe Europe, with trading volume doubling within two hours and surpassing its Euronext Paris listing.
Strategy, a Bitcoin treasury firm, pledges $250 annually to US employees' children's Trump Accounts, a new tax-advantaged federal savings program that may eventually integrate Bitcoin.
Hashdex, an investment firm, liquidates its spot bitcoin fund, marking the first US ETF closure as assets consolidate around dominant competitors.
US spot Bitcoin ETFs secure $244M in daily inflows, driving a three-day streak to $626M as bitcoin prices rise.
Bitcoin experiences its longest market capitulation, or investor sell-off phase, since the 2022 collapse of cryptocurrency exchange FTX, according to on-chain analytics platform Glassnode.
Taiwan's Financial Supervisory Commission, the country's financial regulator, plans to mandate the global 'Travel Rule' for domestic Bitcoin and crypto transfers starting October to strengthen anti-money laundering compliance.
Credit Unions can now directly custody and offer bitcoin services to members using existing core banking systems, thanks to Circuit and DaLand.
Former Los Angeles police reserve officer Eric Halem receives a life sentence for kidnapping and robbing a California teenager of a hard drive containing $350,000 in bitcoin.
SimpleX Chat, a decentralized private messaging network, launches a crowdfunding campaign after hitting 3M total downloads, offering public name perks for investments over $500 to fund secure communications.
Bitcoin's '500-day rule' halving strategy faces its biggest test as US spot exchange-traded funds and institutional investors now dominate market price action, according to CoinDesk reporter Olivier Acuna.
Presidio Bitcoin's PBJ Podcast explores how the COLDCARD firmware vulnerability highlights the urgent need for continuous AI-driven security audits to protect the Bitcoin network against increasingly sophisticated machine-led exploits (Aug 4 | 20:09 min watch).
Rob Hamilton, Co-founder of AnchorWatch, in an interview with Archie of Bitcoin Archive, details the red team auditing of 150+ Bitcoin repositories using Kimi K3 AI to secure Bitcoin software after a $100M Coldcard wallet exploit (Aug 5 | 21:09 min watch).
Matthew Kratter, a BIP110 proponent, outlines potential chain-split scenarios and security risks for bitcoin holders ahead of the upcoming BIP-110 soft fork mandatory signaling period on the Bitcoin network (Aug 5 | 14:52 min watch).
ForrestHODL, a Bitcoin content creator and consultant, explains how node runners can downgrade and reindex their Umbrel or Start9 nodes to prevent falling out of sync with the main Bitcoin network if the controversial BIP 110 soft fork fails (Aug 7 | 7:59 min watch).
Hodlonaut highlights the uncanny irony of developer NVK warning against government sabotage of Bitcoin through buggy, undocumented software in a June 2022 Citadel Dispatch podcast appearance, while NVK's own hardware wallet firmware ended up containing an undocumented, exploitable RNG bug (Aug 5 | 0:25 min watch).
Simple Steve, inventor of UTXOracle, in an interview with Guy Swann of Bitcoin Audible, suspects foul play and questions how a hardware wallet manufacturer could fail to run basic unit tests for five years, leaving firmware unable to pull entropy from its true random number generator and risking users' bitcoin (Aug 6 | 3:08 min watch).
