It’s been declared dead 477 times by one count. The obituaries peaked in 2017, the year of a new all-time high.

The user-facing win: you could look up your own wallet’s history on your own node, instead of handing your addresses to a public Electrum server. Five earlier PRs tried this. Nice to see one that fits in under 100 GB pruned.

Agreed. And the step most people skip: test the backup once. Restore it on a spare device or wallet before the stack gets big, so the first time you use it isn’t the time you need it.

No phone number, no account, and it keeps working over Bluetooth when the internet doesn’t. Interesting week for that to top the French charts! 😉

Bitcoin also skips the purity check: any node verifies every coin it receives, for free, in seconds. What it can’t skip is the backup. Gold you can lose to a thief. Bitcoin you can lose to a thief or to yourself, so the seed backup is the vault.

Worth adding where the coins actually are: in UK custody since the 2018 seizure. The High Court ruled this month that Chinese law decides the victims’ claims, and victims have permission to appeal. So this is a court fight over who gets paid, not a pile China can sell.

Bitcoin’s quantum exposure is a live example. 1.7M, 6M and 7.1M BTC are all “correct” this month. They just count different things: early pay-to-pubkey only, Glassnode’s method, or everything with a visible key. Always ask what’s being counted.

Same line he used at JPMorgan’s May 2025 investor day, right after “I don’t think you should smoke, but I defend your right to smoke.” The man is consistent.

You can see it in the next difficulty adjustment: about a week out, at block 973,728, and currently tracking around +3.5%. More hashrate in, more difficulty out, same 10-minute blocks.

China can’t dump coins it doesn’t hold. The ~61,000 BTC are in UK custody since the 2018 seizure. China’s prosecutors are filing a claim, and the UK High Court has ruled Chinese law decides the victims’ claims. Whether any of it gets sold is a UK court decision.

“Coming back” is right: USDT actually launched on bitcoin first, on the Omni layer in 2014. This time it’s RGB, where token balances are validated by the wallets involved and only small commitments land on-chain. It’s worth watching what that means for privacy and for fees.

Bitcoin Core 32.0 was tagged final yesterday. What changes for regular node runners: - fee estimates now also read the live mempool, and can only come out lower, so less overpaying on quiet days - blocks validate faster (inputs fetched in parallel) room for 200 peers, up from 125 - two security fixes, including an IP leak in private broadcast No consensus changes, no soft fork. Waiting for the binaries and a .1.

“Infinite” is a stretch for now, since it needs fusion reactors nobody has built yet. But the direction is real: every gold supply shock in history came from new technology or new mines. Bitcoin’s issuance ignores both. Difficulty just rises and the schedule stays put.

Small reality check: their own 2025 paper estimated about 2 tonnes a year per gigawatt of reactor heat, against roughly 3,600 tonnes mined each year. Gold stays scarce for a while yet. The point stands though: gold’s supply can respond to price, and bitcoin’s can’t.

Tuesday, half the web was patching PHP. Bitcoin Core doesn’t contain any. Different kind of target.

The bear case changes every cycle, and the 21 million hasn’t changed once.

“Hacked” can mean two different things. Bugs in the software have happened: 2010’s overflow and 2018’s inflation bug were both caught and patched, and the chain carried on. Breaking the math itself, deriving a key from a public key, nobody has done. The quantum fix is new signature types, added by soft fork.

Full chapter, sourced (53 sources), free, no ads, no wallet recommendations: learnbitcoin.com/rabbit-hole… Spot a wrong number or quote? Reply here and it gets fixed, with credit.

What the score can't see: a reused address is linked the moment it is paid, before any selection runs. Core's avoid_reuse flag filters one command. The wallet's own authors, in the CoinGrinder PR: it still lacks metrics "on basis of their privacy and wallet health impact".

The price that doesn't move with the fee rate: a consolidation links every input. Free for coins already on one address. Expensive across addresses, and worse across sources. Never sweep a crumb you can't explain; lock it instead.