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Greetings Bitcoiner,
Welcome to Issue #665 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:
The Dutch cabinet scraps its unrealized gains tax for a capital gains tax on realized profits, a privacy threat for Bitcoin users. A CNBC investigation shows how secret FOMC data made ex-Fed adviser John Rogers a target for Chinese intelligence. And the Fed's preferred inflation gauge hit 3.4% in August, 66 straight months above target.
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🇳🇱 Dutch Cabinet Scraps Its Unrealized Gains Tax
The Dutch cabinet told the House of Representatives it is abandoning its prior plan to tax unrealized investment gains annually. It will instead introduce a capital gains tax on realized profits, covering most financial instruments from 2028 and the rest from 2030, though the letter does not state whether bitcoin falls under the 2028 or 2030 phase.
Why it matters: Any tax on bitcoin gains, realized or unrealized, is a coercive measure that hinders bitcoin's adoption as money. Enforcing a tax on bitcoin means mass surveillance and data collection, which privacy advocates should also oppose. Read more→
🕵️ Ex-Fed Adviser's Spy Case Exposes FOMC Secrecy
A CNBC investigation published September 30 details how former senior Fed adviser John Harold Rogers, who had access to restricted FOMC information, was cultivated for over a decade by Jin Chuan, whom officials identify as a Chinese intelligence officer. Rogers was acquitted of the economic espionage conspiracy charge but convicted of making false statements and sentenced in July 2026 to 38 months.
Why it matters: Secret FOMC deliberations made insiders like Rogers valuable espionage targets. Bitcoin's open-source code and fixed, verifiable monetary policy leave no closed-door rate decisions to steal and no insiders to cultivate. Read more→
🔥 Fed Misses Its 2% Inflation Target for 66 Months
The Fed's preferred inflation gauge, the headline PCE price index, rose 3.4% year-over-year in August 2026, while core PCE rose 3.0%. The Mises Institute says that marks Sixty-six consecutive months above the Fed's 2% target, with the last reading below 2% in February 2021.
Why it matters: Sixty-six months above target reflects the central bank buying Treasuries and mortgage-backed securities with newly created money, producing falling real wages. Bitcoin is the best exit from central banks that are never held accountable for failure. Read more→
Andrew M. Bailey of the Bitcoin Policy Institute argues that open-weight AI must adopt bitcoin's lessons like self-custody, cryptographic verification, and organized institutional defense to resist state and corporate control, declaring 'not your weights, not your mind' (Oct 1 | 4 min read).
Nicolas Dorier of BTCPay Server details how Japanese bank SMBC demands four branch visits and 60 pages of paper documentation to send a $4,000 USD wire from his LLC, exposing compliance hurdles around Bitcoin-related transactions (Oct 1 | 2 min read).
Clara Shikhelman and the [[alloc] init] team, in an FAQ with Nifty of Bitcoin++ Insider Edition, defend their Shielded Bitcoin and PIPEs proposals, explaining how witness encryption could deliver private bitcoin transfers and programmable vaults without a soft fork while addressing 10 TB ciphertexts and security risks (Sep 30 | 13 min read).
Sam Baker, a researcher at bitcoin services firm River, argues that inflation is a hidden $800B tax costing US households $6,000 yearly, driven by government money printing since 1971, and urges readers to opt out by holding unprintable assets like bitcoin (Sep 30 | 4 min read).
Conner Brown, Executive Director at Bitcoin Policy Institute, writes that private index providers like MSCI, which guide $21T in benchmarked assets, wield unregulated power to exclude lawful companies such as Strategy from broad-market indexes, demanding transparent, sector-neutral rules (Sep 30 | 36 min read).
Cory Klippsten, CEO of Swan, argues that the AI agent Bitcoin thesis is backwards, and that agents won't drive bitcoin payments adoption but Bitcoin's store-of-value dominance and censorship resistance will make agents and humans save in bitcoin (Sep 29 | 6 min read).
Carel van Wyk, CEO of MoneyBadger, urges the South African Reserve Bank to preserve private Bitcoin wallet payments for everyday essentials, warning that the local draft exchange-control rules banning non-custodial transfers would block local bitcoin-to-rand purchases and harm financial inclusion (Sep 29 | 3 min read).
Vinteum researchers Edil Medeiros and Lucas Ferreira argue that Bitcoin privacy is fragile, showing how chain analysis heuristics like common-input ownership and change detection erode CoinJoin, Payjoin, and CoinSwap protections over time, urging wallets to preserve ambiguity automatically (Sep 29 | 17 min read).
Frank Shostak of the Mises Institute argues that Fed Chairman Kevin Warsh's interest rate hikes cannot slow inflation because true inflation is money supply expansion, not rising prices, and that only curbing monetary growth can restore economic health (Sep 28 | 5 min read).
Wumbolover of Lightning News finds that the 18th of each month has been the best day for dollar-cost averaging into bitcoin based on over 11 months of Kraken data, but stresses that fees, automation, and self-custody matter far more than DCA timing (Sep 29 | 3 min read).
Michael Saylor explains how Strategy engineers 'Digital Credit' from Bitcoin capital, using MSTR equity for amplified bitcoin exposure and STRC preferred stock to strip volatility, compress duration and deliver USD yield (Sep 29 | 8 min read).
Mononaut, a Bitcoin developer and mempool analyst, breaks down what's in Bitcoin's mempool right now as he sees it, revealing 98,948 pending transactions totaling 48.3M vbytes - about 49 blocks' worth - where rune mints make up 81% of transactions but just 25% of space, while 462 inscriptions fill 42% (Sep 30 | 2 min read).
Fedi, a Bitcoin ecash wallet and app platform, in a blog post, explains how collaborative custody and community custody use multisig and Federations to eliminate single points of failure, shifting key responsibility from individuals to trusted Guardians (Sep 30 | 3 min read).
Solomon Eze, a Bitcoin developer, in an article for Btrust, traces his path from frontend design work into Bitcoin open source, where he now builds Coco, a TypeScript toolkit for Cashu ecash wallets, writing that curiosity, learning in public, and small contributions turn builders into open-source contributors (Sep 29 | 5 min read).
Cfunk of OpenSats profiles Dan Conway, an OpenSats-funded developer who built ngit and GRASP to bring GitHub-style code collaboration onto nostr, letting projects mirror repositories and resist censorship, platform bans, and centralized control (Sep 28 | 12 min read).
Wumbolover of Lightning News guides freelancers through accepting bitcoin via on-chain addresses, Lightning wallets and invoicing platforms, highlighting lower fees, instant global settlement, financial sovereignty and practical solutions for volatility and taxes (Sep 21 | 4 min read).
Bitcoin Roots, a new full-node project from Plan ₿ Foundation Scientific Director Jaromil, applies Bitcoin Knots' operator controls as a patch on Bitcoin Core while rejecting BIP-110 and Knots' protocol changes to preserve consensus.
BTCNow lets customers buy bitcoin at today's price with no down payment and pay over 60 monthly installments, while BitGo holds the coins in trust until paid in full.
Zaptrain is a Lightning invoicing service for freelancers and merchants that lets customers pay branded invoices by QR code, with funds settling in seconds into self-custodial Lexe wallets for a flat 1% fee.
Shhark is an experimental self-hosted Ark wallet forked from Second's bark-web, adding Tor-only messaging, signed contact cards, post-quantum encryption, and direct peer-to-peer Payjoin.
Lightning Payment Proof is a free and open-source browser tool that turns an invoice and preimage into a shareable page proving a Lightning payment.
Calle, creator of the Cashu ecash protocol, unveils 'Federated Cashu' at Bitcoin++, a mint design using threshold blind BLS signatures where any 4 of 5 members keep the federation running.
Strategy, the largest corporate Bitcoin holder and issuer of preferred securities like STRC and STRF, launches a Credit Pricing Calculator comparing market prices with derived values based on modeled bitcoin credit spreads.
Lightning Pay Kit is an open-source React component that helps users pay Lightning Network invoices by matching them with verified wallets and services.
Predyx, a prediction market platform, unveils a September release featuring a redesigned interface, five color themes, a rebuilt leaderboard with monthly rewards, and improved trading reliability.
Find-my-nuts is a proof-of-concept ESP32 microcontroller wallet that broadcasts Cashu ecash tokens through Apple's Find My network.
Minibits, an ecash and Lightning wallet app, releases an over-the-air update fixing an iOS memory bug that killed large wallets mid-transaction, and adds automatic restart recovery after any failure on iOS and Android.
Club Orange, a social networking app for Bitcoin users to connect with nearby people, adds multiple account support, letting users add accounts by long pressing Nearby and switch between them with one tap.
White Noise, an encrypted messaging app built on Nostr and Marmot protocols, releases group polls for iOS and Android, plus improved message sending, sturdier large groups, and new disappearing-message and photo controls.
Cashr, a macOS menu bar app, combines a Cashu wallet with a Nostr signer, enabling Lightning payments, zaps, and encrypted key storage.
Matt Morehouse, a Bitcoin researcher, details a patched vulnerability on Eclair, a Lightning Network node implementation, where unbounded zlib decompression let attackers crash nodes via memory exhaustion.
Alpen Labs, a ZK rollup platform on Bitcoin, partners with Circle to bring USDC stablecoin liquidity directly onto Bitcoin using native Cross-Chain Transfer Protocol technology for borrowing and lending.
Coconut, a self-custodial wallet and vault app, releases updates raising minimum iOS requirement to 15 and adding themes, animated QR codes, and enhanced transaction verification.
Nunchuk, a non-custodial Bitcoin multisig wallet provider, now lets users pick Ledger, Trezor, BitBox, Jade, Keystone, Passport or Krux hardware wallets as inheritance keys in its off-chain timelock protocol.
