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Greetings Bitcoiner,
Welcome to Issue #701 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:
An index giant is dropping Strategy under a rule that never mentions bitcoin, so tracking funds must sell. Bitcoin Core disclosed long-patched flaws, including one that made thousands of nodes trust strangers on Tor. And Marathon mined its first Stratum V2 block, on a protocol that lets miners select their own transactions.
How AI-Era Pricing Is Reshaping Finance Operations
Usage-based and hybrid pricing models are changing how B2B companies generate revenue — and creating new headaches for the finance teams behind them.
Tabs co-founder Rebecca Schwartz and PwC Partner Amit Dhir sat down to unpack exactly what that means in practice: how pricing model decisions ripple into revenue recognition, forecasting, and financial ops — and what it takes to scale without piling on manual work.
Watch the on-demand recording to get practical frameworks, real-world examples, and a clear path to operationalizing usage-based revenue — including a forward-looking take on how AI will reshape financial workflows. If your team is navigating pricing complexity heading into the back half of the year, this is worth an hour.
📉 Morgan Stanley Capital International Cuts Strategy
Morgan Stanley Capital International (MSCI) will remove Strategy, the largest corporate bitcoin holder, from its United States index at the Nov. 30 close after a new screen classified it as a non-operating issuer. The rule never mentions bitcoin, yet it tests whether operating assets equal at least 50% of total assets, and tracking funds must sell by the close.
Why it matters: Forced selling shows how index gatekeepers can cut passive demand for a bitcoin treasury company without naming the asset. Strategy warned MSCI its neutrality was at stake, but sats in self-custody answer to no benchmark committee. Read more→
From index committees, the trust problem moves to nodes...
🛡️ Bitcoin Core Bug Made Nodes Trust Strangers on Tor
Bitcoin Core published advisories for three vulnerabilities, all fixed in releases from October 2025, and the advisory reports no attacks. One flaw left thousands of nodes using the non-default whitelist setting trusting all incoming Tor connections, while a high-severity bug could stop a mining node creating valid block templates after a reorg.
Why it matters: A Bitcoin node exists so you can verify without trusting anyone, and this flaw handed strangers trusted status. Running current Bitcoin Core releases and alerting on zero blocks, not uptime, keeps your sovereignty real. Read more→
From node software, the fight shifts to mining pools...
⛏️ Marathon Mines Its First Stratum V2 Block
Bitcoin miner Marathon has mined its first Stratum V2 block, and its foundation says the protocol lets miners select their own transactions rather than relying on pools. Bitcoin developer Peter Todd said Stratum V2 helps even private pools like Marathon's because block templates can be created physically closer to hash power, reducing latency.
Why it matters: Pools that pick transactions are the gatekeeper any censor would pressure first, so miner choice strengthens Bitcoin's censorship resistance. Marathon adopting Stratum V2 signals the incentive now favors miners who keep control of their own blocks. Read more→
Casa, the Bitcoin custody firm co-founded by Jameson Lopp, argues that FTX's $10B repayment of customer claims at November 2022's $16,871 bitcoin price - in dollars, never in actual bitcoin - proves that self-custody via hardware wallets and multisig vaults beats trusting exchanges (Nov 12 | 5 min read).
The Bitcoin Security Consortium, an industry research group, in a collaboration with Presidio Bitcoin, examines quantum computing threats to Bitcoin's ECDSA signature scheme and outlines mitigation strategies including address migration, post-quantum signature schemes like SHRINCS, and consensus on handling vulnerable P2PK coins (Nov 11 | 8 min read).
Adam Gibson, Bitcoin developer and creator of the Lichen project, in an article for Bitcoin++ Insider Edition, argues that Bitcoin's revolutionary spirit now lives in cryptography rather than protocol change, urging builders to skip reactionary forks and incremental tweaks in favor of subversive zero-knowledge tools like BitVM (Nov 11 | 7 min read).
Korbinian Kettnaker, in an article on Cointelegraph, details how Bitcoin's MATT framework and the proposed OP_CHECKCONTRACTVERIFY opcode create stateful smart contracts by committing contract state into Taproot output keys, enforcing valid on-chain state transitions and enabling compact fraud proofs (Nov 11 | 5 min read).
Bob Lima, in an article for the Mises Institute, argues that conflating 2026's oil price surge with 'inflation' hides the true cause of eroding purchasing power - money printing - while fueling misguided US monetary policy and misinforming the public (Nov 11 | 3 min read).
Bennett, a Bitcoin educator, breaks down how BIP39 mnemonics turn 128 to 256 bits of entropy into self-validating word lists, why weak randomness drains wallets like what happened with the 1300 BTC Coldcard incident, and how passphrases spawn hidden wallets (Nov 11 | 12 min read).
Sylvain Saurel, author of the 'In Bitcoin We Trust' newsletter, examines a decade of failed forks and hard-won upgrades on Bitcoin - from Bitcoin XT and SegWit2x to BIP-110 - arguing that Bitcoin’s greatest defense is that nobody holds a permanent license to change your money (Nov 11 | 10 min read).
Onramp, a bitcoin financial services provider built on multi-institution custody, argues that the US midterm election Democratic sweep leaves the $40.5T debt trajectory and stablecoin-funded deficit of the 'Uniparty' intact, strengthening bitcoin's case as neutral, finite money outside a fiat credit system no election can change (Nov 6 | 7 min read).
Matt Howard of Solo Satoshi compares nine bitcoin solo and lottery miners by hashrate, power, noise and price, breaking down annual block-finding odds from 1 in 16,949 for the Bitaxe Gamma 602 to 1 in 226 for the 90 TH/s Avalon Q (Nov 2 | 16 min read).
TFTC, a Bitcoin media outlet, details how the BIP 443 proposal by Salvatore Ingala embeds contract state into Taproot output keys via OP_CHECKCONTRACTVERIFY, enforcing valid state transitions on-chain to enable stateful Bitcoin smart contracts without trusted intermediaries as signet testing approaches under BIN-2026-0002 (Nov 11 | 5 min read).
Jeffery L. Degner, AIER research fellow and former high school history teacher, argues that World War 1's slaughter was prolonged by government borrowing and money printing that masked its true costs, warning that today's leaders use the same inflationary tactics to fund endless wars (Nov 11 | 6 min read).
Luc Lelièvre, a Quebec-based independent researcher in sociology and critical anthropology, warns that automated license-plate readers in the US generate false matches, gunpoint stops, personal tracking, and 5M out-of-state searches whose confirmation bias hardens suspicion into presumed fact, requiring verification, audits, and appeals (Nov 10 | 6 min read).
Matt Howard of Solo Satoshi walks readers through the Heatbit Bitair setup, covering 2.4 GHz Wi-Fi pairing, app permissions, adding a Bitcoin receiving address, selecting solo or pool mining, and verifying accepted work so users avoid common configuration mistakes (Nov 9 | 11 min read).
Joey Garcia of Xapo Bank, the Gibraltar-based bitcoin bank and regulated custodian, argues that the $6.36B Binance hack exposes concentration risk, urging holders to diversify counterparties, scrutinize security architecture, legal segregation and governance, and never let one institution become a single point of failure (Nov 9 | 10 min read).
Nomainvest, in an article on Stacker News, recounts the Lugano Plan B Forum 2026, and shares their thoughts on what makes the event a must-attend for every Bitcoiner (Nov 8 | 4 min read).
Tho Bishop, Director of Outreach at the Mises Institute, argues that compliant central bankers and open-border immigration have made the West ungovernable, fueling inflation, debt bubbles, and populist revolts from the US midterms to French riots, requiring structural reform rather than mere partisan turnover (Nov 7 | 4 min read).
Francisco Rodrigues, writing for CoinDesk explains what TraderTraitor is, the North Korean hacking squad the FBI links to the record $6.3B Binance heist, detailing how it uses fake recruiters and compromised suppliers to steal and launder funds for Pyongyang (Nov 5 | 5 min read).
Fedi, the bitcoin custody company behind Fedimint-based community custody, outlines seven questions bitcoin holders should ask about key control, backups, custodian failure, and fault tolerance to determine whether self-custody, custodial services, or community custody best fits their security needs (Oct 26 | 6 min read).
Amboss, a Bitcoin infrastructure firm, launches Hosted Checkout, letting merchants accept payments via the Lightning Network or Cash App and settle in bitcoin or USDT with no chargebacks.
Onramp, an Austin-based Bitcoin custody firm, launches Onramp Business, a free company account with named users, role-based permissions and two-person withdrawal approvals as physical attacks on bitcoin holders climb.
Cashu Postcard, a tool built on Cashu, private ecash for Bitcoin, hides bitcoin in photo pixels after a Lightning payment so friends can claim funds if sent uncompressed.
Bitcoin Safe, an open-source multisignature wallet from developer Andreas Griffin, ships version 2.3.0 adding scheduled recurring payouts, multi-channel alerts, and more resilient transaction broadcasting across peers.
Developer Aljaz Ceru forks Ark Labs's explorer for Arkade, a Bitcoin layer 2 protocol, adding expiry monitoring for virtual transaction outputs, watchlists and the Atlas overview interface.
Cheddar(dot)chat, a tool for livestreamers, features text-to-speech donation alerts that route bitcoin tips from live chat straight to streamers' own Lightning Network wallets for a flat subscription.
LND, the leading Lightning Network node implementation for Bitcoin, releases v0.22.0 with BOLT 12 offer codecs, an experimental peer reputation subsystem, outbound remote signing, and blinded path fee fixes.
Markus Schofnegger of Alloc Init reveals at bitcoin++ Seoul that PIPES witness encryption ciphertexts, encrypted data shielding transactions, has been shrunk to 1TB from 333TB, nearing practical private Bitcoin payments.
Mialuna, an open-source photo-first social network built on Nostr, launches for Android with Stories, Reels, Lightning zaps, encrypted messaging, and metadata-stripped uploads, inviting contributors to build iOS support.
Fedimint, a Bitcoin ecash protocol, releases v0.13.0 and its first stable software development kit, SDK 0.1.0, unifying Rust, Android, React Native, and Web ecash clients.
Solo Satoshi, a Bitcoin hardware vendor, details Nerd*OS v1.1.2, firmware for NerdAxe miners that restores certificate trust after the eMudhra certificate authority compromise, fixing Discord alerts and encrypted pool connections.
Zaprana, a wellness community platform, lets creators share sessions and experiences with peer-to-peer bitcoin payments while supporting local meditation groups and Bitcoin wellness retreats.
Skot9000 of Bitaxe reports a possible compromise of Hive On, Bitcoin mining management software, after hosting customers find pool settings changed without consent, risking diverted hashrate and payouts.
Daniel Batten's crowdfunding campaign for a full-page New York Times ad on Bitcoin mining capturing landfill methane draws 73% of donations from Nostr users.
White Noise, an end-to-end encrypted messenger on the Nostr protocol, arrives in Apple's App Store after a two-month review, requiring no phone number and letting AI agents join chats.
Bitcoin(dot)ar, an Argentine Bitcoin community group, unveils 'The Genesis of Satoshi Nakamoto,' a 2.4-meter Buenos Aires monument honoring Bitcoin's anonymous creator through five faces explaining the network's core principles.
Bitcoin Magazine Books opens a third anniversary campaign for The Genesis Book by former editor-in-chief Aaron van Wirdum, offering 333 hand-signed collector editions tracing digital money's pre-Bitcoin history.
Stratum V2, the open-source Bitcoin mining protocol reference implementation, releases protocol libraries v1.13, apps v0.9, and UI v0.8, adding Bitcoin Core v32 support and security hardening from Project Loupe audits.
