Pete Rizzo

David Canellis

Detailing Bitcoin’s rise from internet plaything worth less than a penny to global phenomenon disrupting money as we know it.

Supply Shock

In this episode, John Carvalho joins the show to discuss his unconventional view that Bitcoin’s real bottleneck isn’t technology but trust, challenging the assumptions behind Lightning, layer-two “scaling,” and even the broader cultural narratives about Bitcoin’s future. We also discuss why he believes layers don’t truly scale Bitcoin, how trust dynamics shape every payment system, and why Synonym is building a new framework for peer-to-peer coordination that goes beyond blockchains. Enjoy!
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Timestamps:
(00:00) Introduction
(01:31) Can Lightning Actually Scale?
(12:10) Why Trust Shapes All Bitcoin Scaling
(20:57) Why Trust Shapes All Bitcoin Scaling
(30:19) How Synonym Approaches Bitcoin Scaling
(34:56) Synonym’s Innovations, Tools &amp; Future Roadmap
(37:22) Data Control, Custom Algorithms &amp; Pubkey Protocol
(40:09) E-Commerce, Mobile Wallets &amp; Next-Gen Bitcoin UX
(42:03) Upgrading Nodes &amp; Reinventing the Payment Protocol
(47:19) Trust-Based Scaling: Pros &amp; Cons
(50:57) Rethinking Bitcoin Treasuries
(01:02:24) A Personal Bitcoin Strategy
(01:04:39) Final Thoughts
—
Disclaimer: Nothing said on Supply Shock is a recommendation to buy or sell securities or tokens. This podcast is for informational purposes only, and any views expressed by anyone on the show are opinions, not financial advice. Hosts and guests may hold positions in the companies, funds, or projects discussed.
 
#Bitcoin #Crypto #SupplyShock

Why Bitcoin Can’t Scale | John Carvalho

In this episode, Tim Enneking joins the show to discuss why Bitcoin’s recent drawdown isn’t a crash, why the old cycle models are breaking, and how shifting ownership and institutional behavior may be reshaping the entire market. He also digs into who might be selling, where the real catalysts could emerge next, and what long-term investors should keep an eye on. Enjoy!
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Supply Shock Telegram: https://t.me/+SpmLg6P_QcgxNDcx 
—
Timestamps:
(00:00) Introduction
(02:03) How Bitcoin’s Market Has Evolved
(07:20) Bulls, Bears &amp; the Next Big Move
(09:49) Institutional Flows Reshaping Crypto
(21:20) Is Bitcoin Correlated to Equities?
(23:18) Biggest Bitcoin Catalysts
(27:51) Market Structure &amp; Crypto Banks
(32:58) Strategy Lessons from Market History
(38:50) Final Thoughts
—
Disclaimer: Nothing said on Supply Shock is a recommendation to buy or sell securities or tokens. This podcast is for informational purposes only, and any views expressed by anyone on the show are opinions, not financial advice. Hosts and guests may hold positions in the companies, funds, or projects discussed.
 
#Bitcoin #Crypto #SupplyShock

Bitcoin’s Four-Year Cycle Is Breaking But Not Dead | Tim Enneking

In this episode, Bill Tai and George Kikvadze join the show to explore the untold, insider history of Bitcoin mining through the lens of BitFury’s founders, exploring their early struggles, near-death moments, regulatory battles, Silicon Valley skepticism, the birth of ASIC mining, the role of Necker Island gatherings in shaping the industry, and how those lessons inform Bitcoin’s present institutional era and future trajectory. Enjoy!
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Supply Shock Telegram: https://t.me/+SpmLg6P_QcgxNDcx 
—
Timestamps:
(00:00) Introduction
(03:07) New Book: And Then You Win
(05:31) Bill’s Bitcoin Backstory
(12:57) George’s Path Into Bitcoin
(15:43) FG Trailer
(16:56) The Birth of ASICs &amp; Industrial Mining
(25:58) BitFury’s Breakout Moment
(28:20) Mining Challenges &amp; Growing Pains
(30:49) Silicon Valley’s Big Miss
(34:17) Necker Island: Branson, Bitcoin &amp; Bold Ideas
(39:58) Blockchain Summits &amp; Their Industry Impact
(42:13) Today’s Bitcoin Market &amp; The Road Ahead
(47:37) Biggest Bitcoin Advice &amp; Surprises
(54:49) Final Thoughts
—
Disclaimer: Nothing said on Supply Shock is a recommendation to buy or sell securities or tokens. This podcast is for informational purposes only, and any views expressed by anyone on the show are opinions, not financial advice. Hosts and guests may hold positions in the companies, funds, or projects discussed.
 
#Bitcoin #Crypto #SupplyShock

The Billion-Dollar Arms Race That Started Over $10 Bitcoins | Bill Tai & George Kikvadze

This is a segment from the Supply Shock newsletter. To read full editions, <a href="https://blockworks.co/newsletter/supply-shock" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">subscribe</a>.



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When it comes to Bitcoin mantras, “not your keys, not your coins” is as pure as it gets.



But there are levels to it. Sure, you might be self-custodying, but you might still be required to trust a wallet explorer, for example, to tell you your BTC balance.



Run your own full node, however, and you’ll only ever need to trust your own copy of the Bitcoin ledger.



So here&#8217;s one of Bitcoin’s oldest cautionary tales about why the above still matters, a decade and a half later.



Picture this: It’s mid-2011, and there are two major exchanges to buy and sell bitcoin: Mt. Gox, operating out of Japan with about 80% global market share, followed by TradeHill, based in California.



Eastern Europe had its own primary venue: Bitomat from Poland.&nbsp;



Bitomat’s trading volume was small compared to Mt. Gox, only about 17,000 BTC per <a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20110604053716/http://bitcoincharts.com/markets/">month</a> — far below Mt. Gox’s 1 million BTC (worth $7.5 million at the time). But it was still enough for Bitomat to be considered the third-largest bitcoin trading platform in the world.



Until trouble struck.&nbsp;



On August 1, 2011, Bitomat’s admins disclosed the worst had happened: They had accidentally deleted the wallet.dat file for the platform’s hot wallet, immediately losing access to its users&#8217; bitcoin, which coincidentally amounted to 17,000 BTC.



The exchange itself had been paused for about a week by that point. Bitomat’s administrator, Bartek Szabat, had noticed that the main server — powered by an Amazon EC2 virtual machine — had been running at full capacity, and opted to boost its allocation of RAM.&nbsp;



That would’ve required the virtual machine instance to be rebooted.&nbsp;



But the admin had forgotten to enable persistent storage in the cloud server’s configuration settings. So, when the server was rebooted after adding more RAM, the local storage of the virtual-machine instance itself, which contained the exchange’s only wallet.dat file, was wiped, taking the private keys of Bitomat’s users along with it.&nbsp;



Amazon Web Services was unable to recover the file.



In an open letter to the Bitcoin community, Szabat asked for help in investigating the situation (the post has been automatically translated and edited for clarity):&nbsp;



“At the moment, I am unable to clearly determine the cause of crashes. I suppose that it is the result of actions of third parties, which are causing the server to crash to hide their illegal activities, or intentionally wanting the website to disappear,” he wrote.&nbsp;



“If my suspicions are confirmed, I will tell the police and prosecutors, [and] at the same time, take possible action through which it would be possible to recreate lost data. But I need to interact with the server&#8217;s owner [Amazon Web Services], and that, as I mentioned above, is difficult…&nbsp;



“At the same time, I am counting on your help in solving the problem. I realize that the situation is very difficult, and you fear for the fate of your BTC. We are constantly working on a solution to the crisis, and I&#8217;m open to your suggestions.”



<figure class="wp-block-image is-resized"><img decoding="async" src="https://lh7-rt.googleusercontent.com/docsz/AD_4nXeB6CCaazWIdtzRy4vveH17ALpny7F86E8JlkG3ChzCKRO6OnyDAKCdZEFr1nkZGWzVS6yhgTpkiSa9f9jt4EzDuY9BHxPv861xadQlLaPs4c1J2igSnqkxQG76oggIrhFyywZhqg?key=QW7c4J6OZHHxNOfUyB3E4A" alt="" style="width:700px;height:auto"/><figcaption class="wp-element-caption">Hacker News users had the right idea in July 2011 — only keep bitcoin in exchanges for as long as you need to.</figcaption></figure>



Szabat then offered to sell Bitomat the euro equivalent of 17,000 BTC ($220,000 then, $1.95 billion today), in an overt effort to make users whole.&nbsp;



“I wish to inform you that I had several conversations with potential investors from home and abroad,” he said, and directed anyone interested to reach out via email.



It was actually Mark Karpeles and Mt. Gox that answered the call. The deal meant Bitomat would shut down altogether and its domain would instead forward existing users to a Polish-language localized version of Mt. Gox, where they could log in as normal and trade bitcoin via a new Polish złoty pair.



“The acquisition of Bitomat.pl is a windfall for its users, especially in the wake of such a sudden and unsettling event. Also, for the first time ever on a bitcoin exchange, users are now able to access a substantially larger market with their local currency, so we think it’s a happy ending all around,” Karpeles <a href="https://siliconangle.com/2011/08/11/mtgox-acquires-bitomat-pl-in-bid-to-restore-confidence-in-bitcoin-market/#:~:text=Thursday%2C%20August%2011%20trading%20on,on%20the%20new%20site%20seamlessly">said</a> at the time.&nbsp;



Mt. Gox had only months earlier suffered through two of its many hacking incidents, one for 80,000 BTC ($~65,000) when a thief was able to copy the platform’s own wallet.dat file, and another for 300,000 BTC ($~1.5 million) two months later, with the hacker eventually returning all but 3,000 of the stolen coins.&nbsp;



Of course, Mt. Gox would go completely belly-up nearly three years later, potentially affecting any Bitomat users who had migrated over for a second time.&nbsp;



There’s no question that modern day crypto exchanges, at least the top-tier ones, are different beasts compared to the earliest platforms like Bitomat and Mt. Gox. But for all their assurances, we can never really know for sure how well exchanges are storing user bitcoin.&nbsp;



This is both the coolest and hardest part of using Bitcoin: It takes trust to trade bitcoin and significant operational security to store it yourself (although multi-sigs do help). Anything else is just managing exposure.&nbsp;



If it were easy, everyone would do it. Until then, in exchanges we trust.



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Bitcoin

The exchange that accidentally deleted its 17K Bitcoin wallet file

This is a segment from the Supply Shock newsletter. To read full editions, <a href="https://blockworks.co/newsletter/supplyshock" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">subscribe</a>.



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Six years is certainly a long time in crypto. But Libra (later Diem) might’ve felt right at home in the current agreeable atmosphere in the US.



Back then, Meta (still Facebook) had its own blockchain subsidiary, Calibra, that was pushing to launch a new type of cryptocurrency pegged to a basket of various fiat with a floating value.



The Calibra wallet was meant to be <a href="https://www.theverge.com/2019/6/20/18693521/facebook-libra-cryptocurrency-calibra-explainer-how-does-work-features">integrated</a> with WhatsApp and Messenger and promised to let users send money to each other with practically zero fees. Libra, the token, was also intended to be used for e-commerce on Facebook.



Libra was mostly styled as a crypto-powered competitor to PayPal — former PayPal President David Marcus was leading the effort — but rhetoric would often sneak in.



Bitcoin was supposedly “not a good medium of exchange … because [fiat] currency is actually very stable and bitcoin is volatile,” Marcus <a href="https://www.computerworld.com/article/1669080/facebook-is-going-into-the-banking-business-with-blockchain.html">told</a> Fox Business, which, to be fair, maps to what <a href="https://blockworks.co/news/peter-todd-permissionless-bitcoin-tether">Peter Todd told Pete Rizzo</a> at Permissionless IV last month.



Trustlessness still stands for something. While the so-called Libra Association intended to diversify responsibility away from Facebook and onto corporate backers including Mastercard, Visa, PayPal and Uber, the Senate Bank Committee had deep concerns.



Granted, longtime antagonist Sherrod Brown led the grilling on this day in 2019, and he’s no fan of Bitcoin, either. But the notion was that Facebook couldn’t be trusted to handle user bank accounts — their finances — in any capacity at all, particularly in light of the Cambridge Analytica scandal which had broken the previous year.



It took then-North Carolina Rep. Patrick McHenry to make it explicitly clear why Bitcoin was so innovative in the first place.



McHenry was averse to the way in which Facebook was railroaded into defending libra while it was still in a conceptual phase. But when asked about whether the US government may or may not allow alternative currencies — be it bitcoin, libra or stablecoins — to flourish without strict guardrails, McHenry had this to say on CNBC Squawk Box:



“Well, I think there is no capacity to kill Bitcoin. Even the Chinese with their firewall and their extreme intervention in their society could not kill Bitcoin…but the new iterations of this that are trying to mimic it, that are not fully distributed, that are not fully open, there are different mechanisms to kill it.”



<figure class="wp-block-embed is-type-video is-provider-youtube wp-block-embed-youtube wp-embed-aspect-16-9 wp-has-aspect-ratio"><div class="wp-block-embed__wrapper">
<iframe loading="lazy" title="Rep. Patrick McHenry: &#039;There&#039;s no capacity to kill Bitcoin&#039;" width="1024" height="576" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/xolYGw2wU6Y?feature=oembed" frameborder="0" allow="accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture; web-share" referrerpolicy="strict-origin-when-cross-origin" allowfullscreen></iframe>
</div></figure>



Six years (and a <a href="https://blockworks.co/news/donald-trump-nft-royalties-memecoin-taxes">few NFT drops</a>) later, Trump would change his tune about bitcoin and start accepting it for <a href="https://blockworks.co/news/donald-trump-accepts-crypto-donations-2024-election">campaign donations</a>, culminating in the executive ordering of an official US <a href="https://blockworks.co/news/us-crypto-reserve-management">strategic bitcoin reserve</a> in March.



Jamie Dimon <a href="https://www.forbes.com/sites/digital-assets/2024/07/17/hes-changed-his-tune-trump-reveals-jpmorgan-ceos-sudden-bitcoin-and-crypto-flip-amid-huge-price-surge/">softening his anti-bitcoin stance</a> around the same time might’ve had something to do with it. So too a realization that Bitcoiners were drastically underserved by the Biden administration. 



But maybe, McHenry’s comments set the tone — an “a-ha” moment for outsiders to finally understand why Bitcoin.



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Bitcoin political winds shifted as Facebook’s crypto crumbled

This is a segment from the Supply Shock newsletter. To read full editions, <a href="https://blockworks.co/newsletter/supplyshock" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">subscribe</a>.



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Bitcoin at $120,000 is a win for everyone on the left and right sides of the infamous bell curve meme.



<figure class="wp-block-image size-full is-resized"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" width="828" height="608" src="https://blockworks-co.imgix.net/wp-content/uploads/2025/07/image-2.png" alt="" class="wp-image-105141" style="width:700px;height:auto" srcset="https://blockworks-co.imgix.net/wp-content/uploads/2025/07/image-2.png?w=828 828w, https://blockworks-co.imgix.net/wp-content/uploads/2025/07/image-2.png?w=300 300w, https://blockworks-co.imgix.net/wp-content/uploads/2025/07/image-2.png?w=768 768w, https://blockworks-co.imgix.net/wp-content/uploads/2025/07/image-2.png?w=350 350w, https://blockworks-co.imgix.net/wp-content/uploads/2025/07/image-2.png?w=355 355w, https://blockworks-co.imgix.net/wp-content/uploads/2025/07/image-2.png?w=298 298w, https://blockworks-co.imgix.net/wp-content/uploads/2025/07/image-2.png?w=80 80w" sizes="auto, (max-width: 828px) 100vw, 828px" /></figure>



Mid-curving is almost never the optimal strategy. Except for, perhaps, very specific points in a cycle — particularly in deep bear markets, when vibes and narratives are less powerful.



Right now, the extreme ends of the bell curve are both screaming one thing: There’s not enough bitcoin for everyone.



For example, the left-curve take on bitcoin scarcity goes something like this:



Bitcoin is currently only programmed to release 21 million BTC. Most of it has already been mined.



In fact, mining proceeds are now a tiny drop in the bucket compared to the trading activity across Binance and Coinbase, equivalent to less than 1% of their combined daily volume.



Now subtract the coins that are believed to have been lost — up to an <a href="https://fortune.com/crypto/2017/11/25/lost-bitcoins/">estimated</a> 4 million coins, or almost 20% of the entire intended supply.&nbsp;



We’re left with 15.9 million BTC in circulation right now. At the same time, there are more than 58 million USD <a href="https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2024/7/27/where-are-the-worlds-millionaires-and-how-is-wealth-divided-globally">millionaires</a> around the world. That puts the millionaire-to-bitcoin ratio at 3.6-to-1.



If you think the smart money (millionaires) will increasingly want to buy bitcoin over time — at size — then there’s only one way the price can go. Up. It’s simple supply and demand.



<figure class="wp-block-image"><img decoding="async" src="https://lh7-rt.googleusercontent.com/docsz/AD_4nXcrNs6HoHcp9wGlUtv4WST9OaWZy3R-lqpOz-3x4smL9FjoYaY8g2nowymvQ4qcAaDV0igmGwUPCxqLGjvke5Ake4OdHvyNXsp-HI_NQvKXieyvW0WWc_4A-C5rdFsX4wVU-MfQag?key=0Q_GFmsl9vtW1sltV96VdA" alt=""/><figcaption class="wp-element-caption">The orange line (BTC/USD) has never been higher, unlike the gold line (bitcoin’s gold ratio).</figcaption></figure>



Mid-curvers would point out that bitcoin is divisible by eight decimal places. So while whole bitcoin is scarce, individual satoshis are obviously anything but.&nbsp;



For neatness’ sake, we’ll say the current circulating supply of sats, minus the ones supposedly lost forever, is 1,590,000,000,000,000. That’s one quadrillion, five hundred ninety trillion sats — 190,000x larger than the total human population.&nbsp;



So, an even distribution of the current sat supply to every person on Earth would equate to 190,000 sats.&nbsp;



A common rebuttal to this logic has historically been, fittingly, about pizza. Imagine you have a delicious cheese pizza, and you need to feed a village with it. Except it’s nowhere near big enough.&nbsp;



Does cutting it into infinitely smaller slices help? Of course not, you’re left with the same amount of pizza. 1 pizza = 1 pizza; 1 BTC = 1 BTC.



<figure class="wp-block-image"><img decoding="async" src="https://lh7-rt.googleusercontent.com/docsz/AD_4nXfprQRJpHYTU4bKk8c42uRNfgejuYpQpyeU7tWegJe5oZQanzlybb0DYKlkpe_qPKU_tFX642RoMnUaR5FDcNHGXyIhgJb5P8cA1vtU0-T1qky0MqFdfwgxdSdL7RmWPmnG4-7rEQ?key=0Q_GFmsl9vtW1sltV96VdA" alt=""/><figcaption class="wp-element-caption">A rare occurrence: BTC dominance is going up alongside its market cap. Usually they’re inversely correlated.</figcaption></figure>



Clearly, the pizza rebuttal has a flaw: Imagine that each one of those tiny slices can grow into a giant pizza, like adding water to one of those toys that rapidly expand when wet. Suddenly, the whole village can be easily fed, and perhaps even the neighbouring villages, too.



Along the same lines, consensus is forming that bitcoin is destined to reach $1 million per coin. Bloomberg Terminal just began <a href="https://x.com/jacqmelinek/status/1943373069063786953?s=46">denominating</a> BTC in millions (current price: $0.122 million).&nbsp;



Now let’s take it to the extreme.&nbsp;



If hyperbitcoinization really happens and bitcoin becomes worth, say, $500 million apiece, then each satoshi would be equal to about $5. At that point, perhaps we would be marveling at the price of individual sats instead of whole bitcoins.&nbsp;&nbsp;



And besides, it’s technically possible to add even more decimal points to bitcoin, somewhere down the line, where whole coins are impossibly expensive. Lightning even tracks so-called “millisatoshis,” miniscule units that are 1/1000 of a sat.



But remember, this is no time for mid-curving. If you fancy yourself on the right-hand side of the curve, then the sentiment is exactly the same as the left: there’s not enough BTC for everyone, as proven by its recent repeated all-time highs.



It’s simple supply and demand.



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Both ends of the curve agree — there’s not enough bitcoin for everyone

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If you won the lottery, how would you spend it?



A new house, maybe, or a car. A warm summer holiday to a sunny beach, at least.



I’d bet good money, however, that using it to attack Bitcoin would be low on the list.



Well, ten years ago, someone burned good money doing just that.



<h2 class="wp-block-heading">On This Day: 2015</h2>



You would already know that the <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ae_V0upRlGk">debate over transaction filtering</a> has been going on for years. More than a decade, even.



It was around this time in 2015 that a mysterious user, or group of users, decided to take matters into their own hands.



An entity going by CoinWallet.eu had begun executing what it <a href="https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1094865.0;all">described</a> as the “Ultimate Bitcoin Stress Test.” They were going to systematically spam the chain with dust transactions and fill each block to the brim, driving fees sky high in the process while drastically increasing wait times for legitimate users.



CoinWallet.eu hoped to demonstrate that Bitcoin’s 1MB block size limit was too small, and ultimately convince the community to raise it. After all, if spammers could cheaply overload Bitcoin’s blocks as they were, then so could anyone else at any time.



<figure class="wp-block-image is-resized"><img decoding="async" src="https://lh7-rt.googleusercontent.com/docsz/AD_4nXe3ygB_RZOuzI6CYVbUWaKHsAnM0jY5nm2jQmdkVp1IaPeV3OaJNbq5_NJ-yQPRYFGlntAHzGA_A-d6F3noeqeLHb-j80-4Cl7PPrhR2DZ8BIASTD5qRFoIdloM4C1vgxeVi869?key=i8o9LS5veR-8RvED07BMPg" alt="" style="width:758px;height:auto"/><figcaption class="wp-element-caption">The campaign caused havoc for the network, with the line showing the number of unconfirmed transactions. (<a href="https://damonmccoy.com/papers/bitcoin16-final22.pdf?ref=blog.lopp.net">Source</a>)</figcaption></figure>



In a recent <a href="https://blog.bitmex.com/the-2015-spam-attacks/">blog post</a>, BitMEX Research wrote:



“The logic was that at a fixed fee rate, filling up an 8MB block with spam would cost a lot more than filling up a 1MB block. The small blocker retort to this argument was that the larger blockers had it backwards, if there is spam, letting it all go onchain quickly and cheaply wasn’t stopping the spammer, but letting the spammer win.”



“Besides, if the blocksize limit was increased, fees would decline, making the spam cheaper. However, a key metric to the large blockers was how much money it would cost in fees to fill a block. This number was considered far too low for Bitcoin to be secure and raising the blocksize limit would help increase this value, making Bitcoin more resilient, in their view.”



CoinWallet.eu waged its campaign across four attacks between June and September 2015.



The first actually failed. It was supposed to generate 1MB worth of transaction data every five minutes, causing a backlog of transactions 241 blocks long (1.67 days). The mempool would contain 241MB unconfirmed transactions by that point.&nbsp;



But after spending 2 BTC ($500 then, $235,800 now), their servers began to crash under the weight of a mempool that was just 12MB.



The second came five days later and was more effective, and even managed to seemingly convince one user that the big blockers could have a point.



<figure class="wp-block-image"><img decoding="async" src="https://lh7-rt.googleusercontent.com/docsz/AD_4nXd9gtmJ1zP2jiPlvDvRkYPB2c4kw5zCwhk9MsBr7vCG6rWTnXfRe9FYqG4iQIVfdjRoYSUz6rFVeFGXp8dsf_yeoJonta0QwcrJA5tkMS-H1T3rkYQDvbD8O_Pfi3Tmo4_4Jr1N?key=i8o9LS5veR-8RvED07BMPg" alt=""/><figcaption class="wp-element-caption">Marecek666 was not happy about the spam campaign.</figcaption></figure>



CoinWallet.eu never explicitly took responsibility for the third wave, but it’s assumed the group was responsible.&nbsp;



The attack, between July 7 and 11, resulted in a backlog of between 27,000 and 80,000 transactions, with many of the dust transactions (0.00001 BTC) sent to well-known wallets like WikiLeaks and Voat, as well as generic public key addresses generated from simple key phrases, like “cat” or “dog.”



Motherboard calculated that the attackers in total spent 30 BTC to flood the network for that third wave, worth $8,000 then but more than $3.5 million right now. Undoing the backlog meant F2Pool would need to consolidate the bulk of the spam outputs with a number of 1MB transactions.



CoinWallet.eu’s fourth attack arrived months later, in September, when it posted thousands of private keys to Bitcointalk, each one lining up with an address containing a slice of 200 BTC.&nbsp;



<figure class="wp-block-image is-resized"><img decoding="async" src="https://lh7-rt.googleusercontent.com/docsz/AD_4nXdememZQIHnSSfNyK0C365l4WEemdsC5e3YdtTTLUpsNWNVpIcxdYTrs6oWF8GaFf4VvEZeUpKJKZJRrhys8LwGIHa13isrQPxvGrmeEAQO1GDZ3-xRc6UzVr3TIO4kNVRLwVc_eQ?key=i8o9LS5veR-8RvED07BMPg" alt="" style="width:756px;height:auto"/></figure>



Users rushed to collect the free coins, submitting 90,000 transactions. Many of them related to the same bitcoin, so they could easily be discarded by miners, reducing the attack’s effectiveness.&nbsp;



CoinWallet.eu gave up after that, with the actions of miners, pools and key players, including <a href="https://x.com/pete_rizzo_/status/1878079505052413965">Gregory Maxwell</a>, largely mitigating any adverse effects over a short enough time.&nbsp;



As BitMEX pointed out, the situation closely rhymes with the <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s4Ckiw4nI_E">modern-day discussion</a> over the role of node runners in filtering out certain types of transactions, with Luke Dashjr at the time pushing for widespread usage of filters to suppress CoinWallet.eu’s spam.&nbsp;



It’s still unknown who was behind CoinWallet.eu, with theories including Gerald Cotten and big blocker Craig Wright. In any case, an academic <a href="https://damonmccoy.com/papers/bitcoin16-final22.pdf?ref=blog.lopp.net">study</a> concluded that a little less than a quarter of transactions across a 10-day period at the peak of the campaign were spam (385,256 out of 1.65 million). It increased fees by 51% (45 to 68 sats/byte) and processing delay by 7x(about 20 minutes to 2 hours and 45 minutes).



“This shows that an adversary who is willing to expand modest amounts of bitcoin (at least $49,000 USD), to pay higher fees, can DoS Bitcoin,” the authors found.



And there’s the kicker. The four attacks indeed cost only about $49,000 worth of bitcoin to execute — in 2015.&nbsp;



Today, with bitcoin at all-time highs, those 201 BTC would fetch almost $24 million, equivalent to a jackpot lottery prize and enough to buy a house, a car and multiple vacations to far-off exotic beaches. Oops.



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How Bitcoin survived a DoS attack now worth $24M

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Adoption does not follow a straight line.



At least, not at the local level. But definitely, if you <a href="https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/ict-adoption">amalgamate</a> the world’s adoption rate for mobile phone subscriptions and the internet, the line will indeed go straight up.&nbsp;



Zoom into individual countries, though, and you’ll soon see that the road to widespread usage can be rocky — but the result is still the same.



Greece in July 2015 was in the midst of an all-out banking crisis.



The European Central Bank had declined to further prop up Greek banks with emergency debt. By this point, Greece was only just <a href="https://www.dw.com/en/greece-meets-imf-payment-deadline/a-18371436">scraping</a> together repayments for a 1.6 billion euro ($1.9 billion) loan from the IMF which had fallen into arrears at the end of June.



Greece’s government scrambled to secure alternative financing but failed. Having judged the terms of the ECB’s deal as politically <a href="https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-31055069">toxic</a>, the then-prime minister instead called a snap referendum over whether to accept.



Initial deal <a href="https://content.fortune.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/07/draft16h.pdf">terms</a> ranged from indefinite austerity to further cuts to pensions to forced pre-approval of domestic laws to the placing of 50 billion euro ($58.5 billion) in national assets into a fund supervised by EU representatives.



Greeks <a href="https://www.pbs.org/newshour/world/third-greek-atms-empty-saturday-tsipras-declares-referendum">rushed</a> to ATMs to withdraw cash as soon as the referendum was called, resulting in an <a href="https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-33305019">emergency</a> bank holiday and capital controls. Withdrawals were restricted to just 60 euros ($70) per day, international transfers were mostly barred and the local stock exchange was closed.



Three days later, Greece became the first developed country to ever default on an IMF loan obligation. This effectively isolated Greece financially until votes were counted.



<figure class="wp-block-embed is-type-rich is-provider-twitter wp-block-embed-twitter"><div class="wp-block-embed__wrapper">
<blockquote class="twitter-tweet" data-width="550" data-dnt="true">Greece almost left the euro at 6am this morning <a href="http://t.co/xDCYXouFaZ">http://t.co/xDCYXouFaZ</a> <a href="http://t.co/BiQsArYs1d">pic.twitter.com/BiQsArYs1d</a>&mdash; Matt O&#39;Brien (@ObsoleteDogma) <a href="https://twitter.com/ObsoleteDogma/status/620565071039627264?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">July 13, 2015</a></blockquote><script async src="https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js" charset="utf-8"></script>
</div></figure>



Citizens <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/business/2015/jul/05/greek-referendum-no-vote-signals-huge-challenge-to-eurozone-leaders">voted</a> against the deal (61.3%), plunging the Eurozone into another two weeks of deliberations, which almost resulted in Greece leaving the eurozone altogether, as shown above. The government eventually approved austerity measures later in July. The situation would continue to play out for the rest of the year.



When we talk of Bitcoin’s true value proposition — the one underneath the price talk and financial tinkering — it’s hard to find one better than this precise example: Banks and the stock market have effectively locked you out of your value, and even when they can access it, you can only ever get less than $100 cash at a time.



Bitcoin obviously fixes this. If Satoshi had launched Bitcoin in 2015 instead of 2009, perhaps they would’ve buried a headline about the Greek debt crisis in the genesis block instead of one about the UK.



And certainly, people in Greece did turn to Bitcoin. One exchange <a href="https://www.ekathimerini.com/news/198934/fearing-return-to-drachma-some-greeks-use-bitcoin-to-dodge-capital-controls/#:~:text=New%20customers%20depositing%20at%20least,quadrupled%20to%20around%20700%20euros">reported</a> thousands of new users and locals shared tips on how to buy bitcoin on Reddit and the Greek-language <a href="https://bravenewcoin.com/insights/bitcoin-in-greece#:~:text=Nevertheless%2C%20signs%20of%20Bitcoin%20adoption,lately%2C%20coinciding%20with%20recent%20events">version</a> of Bitcointalk.&nbsp;



Their efforts were frustratingly hamstrung by capital controls — banks blocked most transfers, including potential deposits to crypto exchanges for buying bitcoin.



<figure class="wp-block-embed is-type-rich is-provider-twitter wp-block-embed-twitter"><div class="wp-block-embed__wrapper">
<blockquote class="twitter-tweet" data-width="550" data-dnt="true">Nothing like capital controls to focus the mind! First Bitcoin Meetup in Greece <a href="https://t.co/fFiYKxpFtR">https://t.co/fFiYKxpFtR</a> v/<a href="https://twitter.com/RedditBTC?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">@RedditBTC</a> <a href="http://t.co/ly3aRQJfnX">pic.twitter.com/ly3aRQJfnX</a>&mdash; Jon Matonis (@jonmatonis) <a href="https://twitter.com/jonmatonis/status/621346504280829952?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">July 15, 2015</a></blockquote><script async src="https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js" charset="utf-8"></script>
</div></figure>



“If Greeks already have cash in hand, bitcoin is unnecessary. If they don’t, then bitcoin is unattainable. It’s a bank liquidity crisis,” Andreas Antonopoulos <a href="https://x.com/aantonop/status/615571506630905856">tweeted</a> as local banks were closing.



Still, the price of bitcoin did rise somewhat during the ordeal, but it would only really start to take off toward the end of the year, when the worst of it was over.



The Greek debt crisis showed the world what happens when the fiat system fails a population. But when push comes to shove, it’s clear that Bitcoin as a safety net works best when you’ve planned ahead.



After all, it’s tough to build a doomsday bunker on the day after doomsday.



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Euro

What the Greek debt crisis taught us about Bitcoin, 10 years on

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Fifteen years ago exactly, Satoshi released Bitcoin v0.3. Well, it was really yesterday, but it was in the evening, so it counts.



The version was Satoshi’s sixth going by <a href="https://www.bitcoin.com/satoshi-archive/emails/bitcoin-list/">this archive</a> of the official bitcoin mailing list. It was bundled with a Mac OS X version built by <a href="https://blockworks.co/news/3-piping-hot-pizza-day-facts-for-bitcoin-connoisseurs">Laszlo Hanycez</a> and extra features including control of the nodes via the command line and a “hashmeter” performance display for mining, which was still being done with CPUs across the board.



The update notably came with 20% faster hashing. But whatever competitive edge was quickly dulled by the arrival of the first GPU miners on the network less than two weeks later.&nbsp;



GPUs were capable of much more than 20% — but that’s for another time.



In any case, you could tell Satoshi was excited. Their announcement <a href="https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=238.0">post</a> had two exclamation points, and there was even an extra one in the title: “Bitcoin 0.3 released!” It also featured arguably the most appealing tagline in Bitcoin history:



“Escape the arbitrary inflation risk of centrally managed currencies!”



Still, there wasn’t much initial fanfare. The Bitcointalk thread only received four replies, the same amount seen on the Bitcoin.org <a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20110522084201/http://forum.bitcoin.org/index.php?board=1.1800">forum</a> (that version of the thread gathered about 500 views in total).&nbsp;



We can infer from the post below that Satoshi intended v0.3 to be Bitcoin’s first official version, under v1.0. Early adopter <a href="https://blockworks.co/news/happy-bitcoin-mmo-day-tale-in-the-desert">Andrew “teppy” Tepper</a> had crowdsourced feedback on his proposed <a href="https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=234">submission</a> to Slashdot in the days leading up to the version’s release, but Satoshi walked back Bitcoin’s graduation from beta status in a reply:



<figure class="wp-block-image"><img decoding="async" src="https://lh7-rt.googleusercontent.com/docsz/AD_4nXdJfcVL13YUn_nnIb7GdKDpaJI7FxMWC2WklBqSN-aP0lwQm1q8jOck8sqgQnAQwB81uxEKn7fvXcGUTBhHjAd8Wv88O12Ha8fHtIByqd7qg1q9KUbQ52J4PsKi79eZqzexKUsH?key=qEqpfBJAQzbDA0OyTOO60w" alt=""/><figcaption class="wp-element-caption">Satoshi wasn’t a big fan of teppy’s first draft</figcaption></figure>



It worked. Slashdot featured teppy’s submission on its front page on July 11, 2010 — widely regarded as the first instance of a major media platform publicizing Bitcoin (it’s even in Slashdot’s Wiki entry). Bitcoins were trading for about $0.05 at the time.



&#8220;How&#8217;s this for a disruptive technology? <a href="http://www.bitcoin.org/">Bitcoin</a> is a peer-to-peer, network-based digital currency with no central bank, and no transaction fees. Using a proof-of-work concept, nodes burn CPU cycles searching for bundles of coins, broadcasting their findings to the network.”&nbsp;



“Analysis of energy usage indicates that the market value of Bitcoins is already above the value of the energy needed to generate them, indicating healthy demand. The community is hopeful the currency will remain outside the reach of any government.&#8221;



<figure class="wp-block-image"><img decoding="async" src="https://lh7-rt.googleusercontent.com/docsz/AD_4nXdcY7HE43F1qGY7_nX7Ga_UCZrBke2l0Ns5-WEWCNi73wK-nJnThxAlt__noPF1zrafqGXzSNDxo0HlMbKiaLQDmZaKnyoQloknLIqnp-1m9Q-aUVkB29YV4dnw236qGJ8Km-9cPA?key=qEqpfBJAQzbDA0OyTOO60w" alt=""/><figcaption class="wp-element-caption">This was Bitcoin’s equivalent of Nirvana releasing Nevermind in 1991, feat. Smells Like Teen Spirit. It would quickly make the band a household name.</figcaption></figure>



Bitcoin’s price began its first major bull run about three months following the Slashdot post, in October 2010, and would reach dollar parity by February 2011. 



Slashdot also celebrated that milestone with another front-page <a href="https://news.slashdot.org/story/11/02/10/189246/online-only-currency-bitcoin-reaches-dollar-parity">feature</a>, which when played back-to-back showed just how important Bitcoin’s first few fans really were.



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Bitcoin’s journey to the mainstream started 15 years ago

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You might know that the US dollar has been pummeled this year.&nbsp;



The DXY index — which prices the greenback against a basket of currencies — is down 12% since mid-January, practically erasing all of its gains over the past five years.



Granted, DXY has its <a href="https://www.euromoney.com/article/27bjsstsqxhkmh0p48qj1/foreign-exchange/dxy-index-is-flawed-measure-of-us-dollar-strength-research-shows/">problems</a>. It’s heavily skewed toward the dollar’s exchange rate in Europe, with more than half of its weight assigned to the euro, as well as 20% or so spread unevenly across the British pound, Swedish krona and Swiss franc.&nbsp;



The Japanese yen is the only featured currency from Asia, with about 14%. The renminbi is excluded altogether, and the US dollar is down only about 2.5% against the yuan since mid-January.



<figure class="wp-block-image"><img decoding="async" src="https://lh7-rt.googleusercontent.com/docsz/AD_4nXcGbG1DfoYf_-pSf-gayNuis61QqeDEraXqIHEPcjQMSw-pdHqIVG5DrL057f7u5pQxcwrVOba5y2B7tWiDSPJ9hI-bHYP5n5voeP-ytKEGW9E1U-iwvrdDS1MKQVWC29pPWPIb4Q?key=387mJDC11feaOriI2otZEg" alt=""/><figcaption class="wp-element-caption">The orange line is BTC/USD, the purple line is BTC/USD adjusted for DXY’s volatility starting one year ago, and the blue line is DXY.</figcaption></figure>



As you can see, this quickly gets messy. Bitcoin is up almost 12% in the past six months, while the DXY is down by almost the same percentage. Does that mean bitcoin is about even?



Well, whether it’s over five years, three or one, BTC/USD is vastly outperforming major assets and benchmarks.&nbsp;



Bitcoin (priced in US dollars) is beating crude oil, gold, the S&amp;P 500 and the Nasdaq 100.&nbsp;



<figure class="wp-block-image"><img decoding="async" src="https://lh7-rt.googleusercontent.com/docsz/AD_4nXcUc88vgBJcOm8KhEnTEX_HaLvKce5SKk0Ieu-nT9-ZkRBFo0qRqcDm2GUlJH4CGNGwRgBvKnZzXh4q1td5dI5fz-KYQpP0dpXpuXOBCkcG9JctNDcISDoPD3uFUrJBPjgcQUjapA?key=387mJDC11feaOriI2otZEg" alt=""/><figcaption class="wp-element-caption">Not shown: bitcoin trailing Nvidia stock over the three-year and five-year horizons.</figcaption></figure>



Let’s instead see the price of bitcoin, denominated in each of those majors. It’s similar to how we’d measure the price of ETH in BTC terms with the <a href="https://blockworks.co/news/sol-speedrunning-eth-btc-ratio">ETH/BTC ratio</a>.



Bitcoin’s ratio with the S&amp;P 500, Nasdaq 100 and crude oil topped out in late May, and we’re still just shy of all three.



That’s in line with bitcoin’s current standing against the US dollar (in raw dollar terms, not DXY), only 2% short of a new price record.



<figure class="wp-block-image"><img decoding="async" src="https://lh7-rt.googleusercontent.com/docsz/AD_4nXe1WoFSy6MY1kuWe5jKDU-7ELXNCtHvUQQTyoHO_hwvVHgjSLyHoazo7UiFNKDE8T_QgaeXqEzrMUEMmadQGtEsv8nnN1MDd1B55SYG4KF1uP6iwV89zhzAqSAyUR0pbscnIGeXJQ?key=387mJDC11feaOriI2otZEg" alt=""/><figcaption class="wp-element-caption">Luckily, there are many different kinds of all-time highs.</figcaption></figure>



The gold/bitcoin ratio, however, is almost 20% below its all-time high from a week before Christmas 2024.



But what would this newsletter be without something to celebrate?



When bitcoin hit $110,500 earlier this morning, on Coinbase, that was actually an all-time high against DXY — 1139.58 — around 2% higher than the previous peak in late May.&nbsp;



A minor victory, considering the DXY’s flaws. But a win is a win.



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Bitcoin already sets all-time high against the US dollar index

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Bitcoin news (and crypto news more broadly) has clearly defined tropes. But they aren’t static.&nbsp;



Tropey headlines tend to play on our base instincts. Fraud stories were historically a go-to for legacy and mainstream outlets looking for a quick hit about crypto — “Bitcoin Thief Allegedly Bought Royalty Rights to Rap Songs, Has Middling Taste” from <a href="https://www.vice.com/en/article/bitcoin-thief-allegedly-bought-royalty-rights-to-rap-songs-has-middling-taste/">VICE</a> in 2019 is a prime example.&nbsp;



That story, and others like it, had <a href="https://blockworks.co/news/crypto-fraud-financial-scam">less to do with Bitcoin</a> and more to do with crime, but the crime itself wasn’t particularly interesting. Bitcoin brought the novelty factor to an otherwise-dull low-level crime. Consider your click harvested!



Over time, those types of stories have given way to a trope more relevant to bitcoin holders: “Old whale moves coins for the first time in ages.”



The most recent iteration has played out this month. Across two weeks, an address dormant since 2011 transferred a total of 80,009 BTC ($9.3 billion) to Galaxy Digital.&nbsp;



Come this morning, Galaxy had directed more than 10,000 BTC ($1.2 billion) to a number of exchanges across an eight-hour period.&nbsp;



The price of bitcoin slid nearly 2.5%, from about $118,000 to under $115,300, before recovering slightly.



<figure class="wp-block-embed is-type-rich is-provider-twitter wp-block-embed-twitter"><div class="wp-block-embed__wrapper">
<blockquote class="twitter-tweet" data-width="550" data-dnt="true">Update:<a href="https://twitter.com/hashtag/GalaxyDigital?src=hash&amp;ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">#GalaxyDigital</a> has transferred nearly 30,000 <a href="https://twitter.com/search?q=%24BTC&amp;src=ctag&amp;ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">$BTC</a>($3.5B) out today, most of which went directly to exchanges and were sold. Then <a href="https://twitter.com/hashtag/GalaxyDigital?src=hash&amp;ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">#GalaxyDigital</a> withdrew 1.15B <a href="https://twitter.com/search?q=%24USDT&amp;src=ctag&amp;ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">$USDT</a> from exchanges.<a href="https://twitter.com/hashtag/GalaxyDigital?src=hash&amp;ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">#GalaxyDigital</a> still holds 18,504 <a href="https://twitter.com/search?q=%24BTC&amp;src=ctag&amp;ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">$BTC</a>($2.14B).<a href="https://t.co/bVtNwP2iXI">https://t.co/bVtNwP2iXI</a> <a href="https://t.co/Wv1cD3aHbf">pic.twitter.com/Wv1cD3aHbf</a>&mdash; Lookonchain (@lookonchain) <a href="https://twitter.com/lookonchain/status/1948665986573631687?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">July 25, 2025</a></blockquote><script async src="https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js" charset="utf-8"></script>
</div></figure>



Around the same time, a separate whale awoke to <a href="https://news.bitcoin.com/2011-bitcoin-whale-wakes-after-14-years-moves-470m-but-why-now/">move</a> almost 3,963 BTC ($462.5 million) between addresses, although at this point it doesn’t appear to have made it to any exchanges.



We don’t usually get any closure when these types of transfers happen. In the past five years or so, there have been at least a dozen other instances of dormant Bitcoiners awakening to shuffle coins amounting to over 195,400 BTC ($22.8 billion) when combined, by my very quick count.



Of that dozen, only three are believed to have led to coins actually being sold on exchanges, including this morning’s situation with Galaxy. The possibility does exist that each of the others were peer-to-peer, over-the-counter sales, but we’ll never know for sure.



Still, the “dormant whale moves bitcoin” trope is the perfect blend of feel-good and abject terror.&nbsp;



We’ve all heard the horror stories about <a href="https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c74zel3ng1vo">lost private keys</a> to bitcoin fortunes, and maybe even lived a few of them ourselves. Hearing about old coins being accessed for the first time in a&nbsp; decade is the great antidote.



Meanwhile, the notion that the 30% of all coins which haven’t <a href="https://cryptoquant.com/asset/btc/chart/network-indicator/utxo-age-bands-percent?window=DAY&amp;priceScale=log&amp;metricScale=linear">moved</a> in at least five years — almost six million BTC, worth $696 billion — might one day be suddenly sold is a little scary, depending on how heavy one’s bags are.



Which makes for perfect clickbait, no matter how scant the details.



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Bitcoin whales are waking up — it’s perfect clickbait

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A few years back at Bitcoin Amsterdam, I <a href="https://www.youtube.com/live/SSVajSFE14Q?feature=shared&amp;t=14160">watched</a> Core contributor Sjors Provoost make a point about the right to financial privacy in today’s digital world.



“I go to the bathroom at the train station right now. If I pay with my debit card, these records are kept for at least a decade. So the bank can actually look up, 10 years from now, exactly at what time I went to the bathroom. I think that is ridiculous, and I think everybody would agree that&#8217;s ridiculous.



“I think we should change the financial system to [stop doing] that.”



The panel featuring Provoost was about how the Financial Action Task Force (FATF) threatens Bitcoin privacy.



Which, to be fair, is something the intergovernmental agency has absolutely done over the past decade or so. FATF’s anti-money-laundering policies directly influence how worldwide regulators treat Bitcoin mixers and other privacy protocols built around more trustless implementations like CoinJoin.&nbsp;



Surprise, they really don’t like them.



It was on this day in 2017 that BitMixer, then considered the largest Bitcoin mixer by volume, bowed out altogether amid rolling raids on darknet marketplaces across the world.



<figure class="wp-block-image"><img decoding="async" src="https://lh7-rt.googleusercontent.com/docsz/AD_4nXcmYMqecVq-gcQkiSW0YZahYx_Gt2YobG_RNx1M8va3ZzvqYnsdzXMR0ETxK9DYvZef7Tab2myFecHTrkx3me3Dv236R8mFAUZDh8-YQIMOWuAc0SjKkXgBMCnU44hZYBUtiRUP?key=5Mb2084A0KY4WJoOqHZcdQ" alt=""/><figcaption class="wp-element-caption">In the comments, the OP was adamant that they were not shutting down due to any interaction with authorities.</figcaption></figure>







BitMixer was the quintessential centralized mixing service. Users would enter some parameters onto a website and send bitcoin to an address, after which they would receive the same amount of coins back, minus a fee. The bitcoin received was made of entirely different UXTOs, which helped to break any blockchain analysis that might link them to the original sender.



All standard for most Bitcoin mixers, including its predecessor <a href="https://blockworks.co/news/bitcoin-fog-founder-convicted-by-jury">Bitcoin Fog</a>. Where BitMixer stood out was its reliability and speed, particularly for large orders, having accepted up to 2,000 BTC at a time ($5.4 million when it shut down and almost $236 million today), with operations backed by a larger liquidity pool than its competitors.&nbsp;



In November 2015, BitMixer had <a href="https://themerkle.com/interview-with-the-owner-of-bitmixer-io-a-high-volume-bitcoin-mixer/">reported</a> processing around 65,000 BTC in one month (around $44 million back then).



BitMixer’s owner also promised that the servers were out of reach of regulators. (“Our servers are located in a country where US authorities can’t get access to the server without a local court order. Bitcoin is not considered as money here, so we can’t be a money-laundering service.”)



They added that they use encrypted disks and delete all order data after 24 hours, including erasing used bitcoin addresses from the official wallet after mixed coins were distributed. “Even if the server is seized, they will find nothing,” the owner was <a href="https://themerkle.com/interview-with-the-owner-of-bitmixer-io-a-high-volume-bitcoin-mixer/">quoted</a> as saying.&nbsp;



Users could additionally generate a letter of guarantee signed by BitMixer’s PGP key that would represent an obligation to send the mixed coins, so that any shortchanging could be cryptographically verified.



It was no <a href="https://static.googleusercontent.com/media/research.google.com/en//pubs/archive/46785.pdf#:~:text=five%20ransomware%20families%2C%20the%20top,given%20family%20Cerber%20CryptXXX%20CryptoDefense">secret</a> that BitMixer was relied upon by users of darknet marketplaces and ransomware hackers. And the service’s retirement post came only days after a multi-national sting on AlphaBay, which ran outgoing user transactions through unnamed tumbling and mixing services to provide users with privacy.



Over the following years and until today, a number of high-profile mixing services would either shut down voluntarily or be forced to close by authorities, including Helix (with the owner later indicted and sentenced), BitBlender, Bestmixer, Blender.io, ChipMixer, Sinbad.io and Bitcoin Fog. Darknet markets followed a similar trend.



<figure class="wp-block-image"><img decoding="async" src="https://lh7-rt.googleusercontent.com/docsz/AD_4nXdFRRPWqN6DfQvbvDE_IJZ3oErO-tgZLelSHnwTd88ZlRACW9Fu4HZKiwIB2PqKMAHoH2VW81EQ1c7wPkTcH1-vIodpW-GC4pZi8xPItocfq2EQYOOSBWn8uO-7QeElJIDeE2BpOw?key=5Mb2084A0KY4WJoOqHZcdQ" alt=""/><figcaption class="wp-element-caption">A helpful explainer on the philosophy behind BitMixer was <a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20150314222329/https://bitmixer.io/why.html">posted</a> to its website. (NB: Take caution in interacting with any service using the same domain or name today.)</figcaption></figure>







Of course, regulators eventually came for decentralized alternatives through the <a href="https://blockworks.co/news/samourai-wallet-matters-memecoins-privacy">case against Samourai Wallet</a>, which is still pending pre-trial motions set for later this year.&nbsp;



Meanwhile on Ethereum, smart contracts and their developers have been under fire via the <a href="https://blockworks.co/news/roman-storm-trial-opening-statements">Tornado Cash case</a>, which has seen one co-founder given a 64-month prison sentence, now under appeal, while the other continues to face up to 45 years in prison.&nbsp;



So, where does that leave Sjors’ quest to keep our bathroom trips at European train stations private?&nbsp;



Frustrating as it may be, while these cases shake out, it might be safer to simply hold it until you get home.



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Why Bitcoin’s biggest mixer walked away from ‘huge profits’

This is a segment from the Supply Shock newsletter. To read full editions, <a href="https://blockworks.co/newsletter/supplyshock" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">subscribe</a>.



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Today’s topic is a touchy subject for anyone who’s been in Bitcoin for the past decade.



Eight years ago exactly, a key voting threshold was met that would lead to the official adoption of Segregated Witness (<a href="https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Segregated_Witness">SegWit</a>), a backwards-compatible scaling upgrade that had been in the pipeline since late 2015.



SegWit would make it technically possible to fit up to 4MB of transaction data within Bitcoin blocks by separating out related witness data into a different construct. A neat workaround to spiritually stretch the block-size limit beyond the Satoshi-imposed 1MB.



Miners had been required to signal their support for SegWit adoption following its original proposal, BIP141, in November 2016. Voting “yes” on the initial proposal meant mining “bit 1” blocks — blocks that had a special variable in their headers.&nbsp;



But after around 18 months, less than 40% of blocks were signaling support. In May 2017, Bitcoin Core contributor James Hilliard submitted a supplementary proposal, BIP91, which added an element of time pressure.&nbsp;



Miners had to signal their support for BIP91 above the threshold by midnight Nov. 15, 2017, or else SegWit would be dropped for good. BIP91 reduced the mark for miner support from 95% to 80% over a period of around 2.33 days (269 blocks out of a 336-block epoch).



On July 21, 2017, enough pro-SegWit blocks had been mined to kickstart the soft fork, to be fully activated by Aug. 24, about a month after the threshold was met.&nbsp;



And this is where things get <a href="https://bitcoincore.org/en/2017/08/18/btc1-misleading-statements/">messy</a>. On a technical level, support for SegWit was cut and dry. Miners either supported it or they didn’t.&nbsp;



It was much muddier at the social layer. The infamous New York Agreement <a href="https://blog.bitmex.com/the-segwit2x-hardfork-part-1-the-supporters-and-opponents/">signatories</a> — which included most mining pools, Coinbase, Circle, ShapeShift and a large portion of Digital Currency Group portfolio companies — pushed for an additional hard fork if BIP91 would activate.&nbsp;



The hard fork, SegWit2x, would effectively double the impact of SegWit, allowing for up to 8MB of transaction data to fit in each block rather than 4MB. SegWit2x was ultimately cancelled months after the launch of Bitcoin Cash which features 8MB blocks.



There have been literal <a href="https://blog.bitmex.com/the-blocksize-war/">books</a> written about the Blocksize War, so I’ll leave it to you to pick those up for more detail about what happened in between the acceptance of BIP91 and the failure of SegWit2x.



Whatever your view of the matter, it’s clear that the definition of Bitcoin for many operators shifted around this time. A notable contingency sought to explore Bitcoin’s “money” properties on a separate chain in Bitcoin Cash, which never really took off.



Did that make Bitcoin — the one with persistent consensus — less “money” as a result?&nbsp;



Obviously not, but considering how the ever-rising price has put a dampener on that particular use case, it’s sometimes hard to tell.



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