Mark A. Hall retweeted
Live your life in term (4-6 years)
The life I live now is a reflection of the work I put in 2020.
The life I’ll live in 2032 will be a direct reflection of the work I’m putting in now.
You better not be in the same spot by the end of your term.
Mark A. Hall retweeted
Good evening.
Hundreds of millions of people are going to wish they had considered and studied bitcoin instead of simply dismissing it.
Have a great night.
Mark A. Hall retweeted
We believe there are very few things standing in the way of larger-scale institutional adoption of Bitcoin. The longstanding concerns around quantum computing being able to crack private keys are one of them.
There are numerous efforts underway, led by qualified and technical Bitcoiners, that suggest we can arrive at a viable solution before the threat becomes real.
Some of our clients, partners, and industry colleagues have asked us how this will be implemented. The honest answer is that we don’t know for sure yet. Nobody does.
However, we have a hypothesis. Read it in our new whitepaper: 'Preparing Bitcoin for the Quantum Era - A TBRC Research Report.'
drive.google.com/file/d/13TN…
Mark A. Hall retweeted
From our view, the recent Bitcoin price increase can be attributed to 3 things: 1) market reaction to the Treasury Department actions, 2) a short-squeeze that caught short sellers by surprise & 3) an overall exhaustion of sellers as demand increases. What did we miss?
This thread is definitely worth a read. At what point does a 'pattern/trend' become obvious? The prior 9 downturns tell us something about the future.
This is so well said @JayW132!
"Every technology follows the same curve... all obvious in hindsight"
Mark A. Hall retweeted
Re: Cold Card Hack
Hello fellow Bitcoiners,
It’s been nearly one week since my wallet was drained.
I lost my entire bitcoin stack, presumably the most in the entire attack - an amount I’m more than embarrassed and ashamed to even admit publicly. This was not only my life savings but my time, energy, hardcore conviction and identity after 13 years in this space.
I am posting pseudonymously as I’ve always preferred to stay out of the spotlight - and privacy (inspired by Satoshi) is something I value. I debated whether or not I should say anything at all, but after much deliberation I decided it may be beneficial for other victims who are struggling.
While this incident certainly forced upon me the darkest days of my life so far - I have now accepted it and will slowly put together my life again. I came from nothing and did everything right (except rolling the damn dice apparently 😅). I stayed away from trading, exchanges, shitcoins, ICOs, NFTs, false prophets, etc and quietly and consistently built up over the years through all the ups and downs - never spending frivolously on material goods but instead using bitcoin as my sense of freedom and security - with the hopes to pass it on to my future children.
Even though that peace, freedom and security is now gone - I am beyond grateful for the journey and life that bitcoin enabled me to have.
To all the other victims, as cliche as it is to say “it’s only money” - true wealth, as I’ve learned over and over again is in health, family, and friendships. I’d be lying if I told you I’m not afraid of the uncertainty ahead, but I know by taking one step at a time it will be possible to rebuild. Trust me if I can come to these realizations, you can too! The hardest challenges in life make us stronger and turn us into the best versions of ourselves - don’t give in to the hopelessness. By being in this community you are apart of something special that the majority of the world still hasn’t realized yet. It’s still early!
Thanks to all the wonderful people in the community I’ve been DMing over the past week - your kind words of support mean the world to me and helped me start to believe in myself again.
To the hacker: you still can do the right thing here and come clean - you have prompted a serious wake-up call that has brought the community together which will bring more resilience for the future. Doing the noble thing now will prevent a lifelong hunt.
To all the amazing bitcoiners who have jumped to action from the very beginning to support each other and mitigate further damage - it’s been a beautiful thing to watch.
To the @blocks team and especially @intangiblecoins, your efforts are inspiring and provide me with hope. Believe me when I say that IF I ever get my coins back you will all be taken care of very well, along with massive donations to the open source community.
For now I will withhold any judgement towards @nvk and the @Coinkite team - while I’m still processing this loss and dealing with the gravity of building my life up from the ruins - I have 0 anger or resentment. Bitcoin security is a tough job, mistakes are made, and lessons are learned by all. I made mistakes by trusting and not verifying as well as not having a more robust security solution so the responsibility must be shared, hindsight is 20/20 and even though it’s tough: I’m okay admitting that. Bitcoin humbles all.
Having said all that… I’M NOT FUCKING LEAVING!!! I will start building a new stack from the ground up like all the other plebs as my conviction in Bitcoin is even stronger today then when I got my first coins in 2013.
This was never about the money - it was always about the revolution, and that can’t be stopped. We will win.
Let’s keep our heads high.
The march continues.
It’s time to rebuild.
PS: Thanks for everything Satoshi ❤️
-M
Mark A. Hall retweeted
If you’re even slightly interested in Bitcoin, AI, cybersecurity, or the adversarial future we’re entering -
This is by far the most interesting thing you’ll read today.👇
Red Team Update
In the final hours before @callebtc resumes his role as chief clank officer and wartime general of red team, I wanted to give some kind of update about today.
We are accelerating.
Not only in the expanse of repositories covered (over 300) and our spend (almost $40k), but in the efficiency to quickly identify where parts of the codebases will break.
Seeing dozens vulnerability reports in an hour will do that to you.
Another fascinating thing is how different members of the team are able to get entirely different outcomes based on our own applied knowledge.
An example was when I scanned a repo and found some middling concerns. I showed the results to another member of the team, and with 1-2 sentences and maybe a block of code, they were able to upgrade to high or even critical vulnerabilities.
That happened twice.
Its almost like the agent can smell out something is wrong, but hasn't been trained enough yet to clearly verbalize it, so the slightest nudge of good knowledge/context will send it all on another recursive flurry deeper.
I think there is some deeper lesson there about AI's productivity gains further accelerates the division of labor, but I'm too tired to get so abstract.
The Red Team harness I mentioned yesterday was quickly thrown together over 20-30 minutes laying out conceptually, who I someone who has no security research, would think this would work.
I now have multiple responses to disclosures telling me it was very well written, but I'm wondering if the bar is so low because they think it'll be llm slop. Maybe because its written in a way an LLM can pick right up and give exact feedback.
Upon receiving a disclosure, one developer critically read through the whole report and gave a lot of very strong constructive feedback (you know who you are, thank you).
I asked if they could give it as a lesson to my clanker, to which they returned to me a 50 kb markdown file. After which, I interviewed it for 30 minutes, integrating behaviors I wanted to focus on into the harness behaviors into the model, and quickly found even stronger success as a result.
Seeing how impactful that feedback session was, I'm making a point tomorrow to NOT be scanning repos (as much).
My focus primarily will be working on the harness and systems itself. I have a lot of ideas, maybe I'll come back tomorrow with lessons learned.
Outside the harness, I want to focus more on operations. Every step of the process is chaotic right now. I accidentally nuked the repo this morning by not paying attention to Calle's new style guide and frantically had to unwind it.
Another delay was at one point I walked away from my computer at the wrong time and the balance on @opencode spiked down to -$1000. It killed dozens of ongoing agents/subagents, and got frantic pings about scans going down.
20 minutes later, I noticed that none of my credit cards worked anymore. I then got the error "try debit card", and that failed too!
I watched the balance tick to under $100, knowing I was close to stalling everyones jobs again when suddenly it worked (thx @jayair for quick support it worked out).
I also want to focus on triaging all of our disclosures. We should be able to turn these around a lot faster now, and cleanly sort what has and has not been shared yet.
In other news...
To be blunt, I'm still numb over the death of the cold card.
I have not heard of many stories about the lives ruined, and that is probably on purpose because I've made @AnchorWatch and the Red Teaming my sole focus.
I have blocked out the thought of even starting to process the catastrophic harm that has been caused to my friends and their families.
There is a tragic irony that is not lost on me that good people wanting to store their wealth, their time, their future dreams in a more honest and fair system were exploited by the thing they took refuge in.
I truly believe these events have been a spiritual attack on bitcoin, and I mean that in the literal senses of the words.
While things are not easy right now. I have the highest conviction ever in my life that the idea and technology of Bitcoin is worth fighting for.
To that end. There is no Bitcoin without self custody. This is non negotiable.
That does not mean everyone must self custody, but the option to is necessary for a free and prosperous society which respects property rights.
I think one of the biggest lessons from all of this is one of risk management.
There was a latent Risk of Ruin in how many people held their bitcoin, and unfortunately what many thought to be impossible, came to pass.
I will find time to grieve, but today isn't the day.
The awesome work from @Rob1Ham and team is a great example of the quote I just heard from the @_checkonchain newsletter:
“The airline disasters of the past are the reason flying is so safe today.”
It takes decisive actions from the community (note: everyone) to make this thing stronger tomorrow than it is today.
I have spent over $10,000 scanning 100+ bitcoin ecosystem related libraries looking for vulnerabilities with Kimi K3 running as quarterback.
Myself and a small "Red Team" have found multiple serious vulnerabilities impacting the ecosystem. They vary in scope severity, but this is a call to action.
For any critical tier vulnerability that was identified if I was able to immediately demonstrate a POC (proof of concept), I have already responsibly disclosed to the maintainers.
HERE IS HOW YOU CAN HELP ME
IF YOU ARE NOT TECHNICAL:
- please share with me any repository that is on github that I can scan, we want to cast a wide net. It takes a few moments for you to link github accounts, we'll take it from there
- if that project does not have a SECURITY.md make an issue asking the dev to list one
IF YOU ARE TECHNICAL:
- If you are a maintainer or contributor to a project, I may have already scanned your repo, hit me up I'll share the results, if not I'll add your project to the list.
- If I can trust you to do larger review to start looking through this stuff to give me more eyes let me know.
AI Has forever changed software development. Tomorrow marks 1 week of Kimi k3 being live in open weights.
We are going to accelerate.
Bitcoin will emerge better and stronger coming out the other side of this Coldcard vulnerability.
I am urging engineers who are in the Bitcoin ecosystem, use @OpenRouter or @opencode to use @Kimi_Moonshot K3 on any software you run which interacts with bitcoin in any way internally and any public repos you use.
Other models CAN find issues, but K3 will one shot full vulnerability reports to get an extra set of eyes for security checks.
Some of it will be slop/overstated/wrong, but I've been scanning open source repos and finding things I'll be passing along to maintainers.
Kimi K3 came out as open weights on Monday, and I don't think that is a coincidence as it relates to the COLDCARD issues unfolding.
For those self-custody bitcoiners who are also scrambling amid this Coldcard issue, you can take some comfort in knowing the larger community is working together quickly to find solutions.
In the last few hours, @V4BTC, @_Checkmatey_, @Rob1Ham and so many more have put out detailed videos on how you can improve your situation.
Times like these are VERY tough but it's good to see everyone putting company loyalties aside to help fellow bitcoiners. We will grow from this. Onward!
I’ve been quiet here for a while. With the new algo rollout, I thought it was worth a reintroduction. I've been heads-down on bitcoin for a long time, focusing on growing the space through research, education and real world applications. Previously did venture capital and big tech before that. If you are a fellow builder, let’s connect.
Mark A. Hall retweeted
There are officially less than 1,000,000 BTC left to be mined.
The vast majority of the supply is already out there and most people still have zero bitcoin.
Mark A. Hall retweeted
Replying to @Bryan_Courchesn
@Bryan_Courchesn sits down with @MrMarkHall to talk about Bitcoin's great return even in a bear market. The problem with conferences. USA's true verified total count of units of BTC held in the Strategic Reserve. And Wall Street's next problem. Watch it here.
youtu.be/iBUzOFYCXik?si=Lu4f…
Mark A. Hall retweeted
17 years after the white paper, the Bitcoin network is still operational and more resilient than ever. Bitcoin never shuts down.
@SenateDems could learn something from that.
Mark A. Hall retweeted
A million seconds ago was October 11th
A billion seconds ago was 1993
A trillion seconds ago was 30,000 B.C.
The US national debt is now rising by $1 Trillion every ~180 days.
Gradually, then suddenly
Global Central Banks, including the Federal Reserve, will own Bitcoin $BTC by 2030 says Deutsche Bank


















