Bitcast

Blockstream is refusing to pay a ransom to recover 600 Bitcoin — worth roughly $46 million — stolen from the Liquid Network, and the community is split on whether that stance is principled or just bad negotiating. Meanwhile, inflation came in hotter than expected, sending Fed rate hike odds surging past 90% on both CME futures and Polymarket, and Brent crude blew past $108 a barrel. In this episode: • August CPI rose 0.4% after only 0.1% in July, pushing traders to price in a near-certain 25 basis point Fed hike; the hosts debate whether core inflation data actually justifies it or whether energy prices are doing the real work. • Brent cr...

The U.S. Treasury just tripled its long-term bond buyback program to $6 billion — and yields went up anyway, with the 10-year note climbing above 4.85%. Meanwhile, Bitcoin printed its first golden cross since May 2025, and the Liquid Network hack is still unresolved, with roughly 600 Bitcoin under negotiation and decrypted messages from the attackers now going public. In this episode: • Joe Consorti breaks down why the Treasury's buyback program — buying long-end debt to suppress yields and give the Fed cover to hold rates — actually shifts the interest burden closer to the present, making the debt problem worse over time. • Bitcoin's golden cross (50-day movin...

Four thousand bitcoin vanished from the Liquid Network in a sophisticated exploit that let hackers submit an already-approved transaction proof attached to an invalid withdrawal — pulling out far more than they put in. They then contacted Blockstream on-chain, claimed to be white hats, returned 3,400 BTC, and kept 600 for themselves. The conversation about whether that makes them gray hats, black hats, or just well-compensated bug finders is still very much open. In this episode: • The Liquid Network hack explained: how a proof-reuse bug let attackers peg out roughly 4,000 BTC by stuffing an invalid transaction into an already-stamped envelope, inflating outputs over inpu...

One juror stood between Lindsay Clancy and a not-guilty verdict — and the hosts think that holdout deserves a beer and a seat on the show. Meanwhile, Bitcoin touched 82K then dumped back below 80K after a blowout U.S. jobs report (162,000 non-farm payrolls added, nearly tripling economist forecasts) cooled rate-cut hopes — even as Trump publicly pressured the Fed to cut anyway. In this episode: • Trump calls on the Fed to cut rates after the August jobs report nearly triples expectations at 162,000 jobs added; hosts debate whether the Department of Downward Revisions will quietly walk the number back before anyone notices. • Scott Be...

Blake2b coin — the Bitcoin fork that true believers said would prove the market wrong — hit exchanges at $82, roughly 1/944th the price of Bitcoin, then got delisted from its only exchange the same day after the fork community antagonized the one platform willing to list it. Meanwhile, a user reported depositing real Bitcoin to buy the thing and watching it disappear into the void with 18 on-chain confirmations and nothing to show for it. In this episode: • Blake2b (BIP 110 fork) trades at $82 on NeoXa exchange before being delisted the same day; the bid-ask spread ran from $82 to $190, with sell orders as hig...

LIVE – Governments moved against sound money three different ways this week — the EU floated redirecting €10 trillion in citizen savings toward 'European companies,' the Taliban banned Bitcoin outright and arrested traders in Herat, and Strategy quietly resumed buying with 4,603 BTC for $370M. Put those side by side and the case for Bitcoin writes itself. In this Bitcast live stream we break down the August 2026 macro picture and what each of these moves tells you about who fears self-custody and why. You'll see why Von der Leyen's securitization plan matters far beyond Europe, what the Taliban ban signals about state control of mon...

Chinese state-sponsored hackers spent years burrowing into the Federal Reserve, NASA, the DOJ, the US Senate, hospitals, power companies, and defense contractors — working for a private firm whose paying clients included China's Ministry of State Security and the People's Liberation Army. Meanwhile, closer to home in the Bitcoin ecosystem, a critical vulnerability hit Core Lightning, and developers are urging node operators to shut down or upgrade immediately while an emergency patch is prepared under a two-week embargo. In this episode: • Core Lightning critical vulnerability: Blockstream developer urges node operators to shut down now; developers are releasing signed binaries while keeping expl...

Kevin Warsh spooked markets at Jackson Hole, sending Bitcoin from 81,000 down toward 78,000 in a single afternoon — but Nathan and Joey aren't worried. They break down why Warsh's hawkish-sounding speech was quietly balanced with dovish signals, and why the real story is what the Fed chair refused to say. In this episode: • Kevin Warsh's Jackson Hole debut: why he explicitly refused to call it "forward guidance," said wages no longer signal incoming inflation, and described financial conditions as "not restrictive" — all read as quietly bullish signals despite the market selloff • CME futures showing roughly 20% odds of a 25 basis point hike in 18 days, an...

Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent threatened to cut any country that defies American expectations out of the dollar system entirely — and hinted the US may deploy a $950 billion Treasury war chest to buy back long-dated bonds. Bitcoin nearly touched 80K the same day, and ETF call options on IBIT hit a record 1.58 million contracts in a single session. In this episode: • Bessent's "D-Day sanctions" speech targeting Iran: his exact quote — "If people do not want to meet our expectations, they should expect they will leave the dollar system" — and what it means for dollar weaponization • The $950 billion Treasury General Account and talk of us...

Bitcoin ripped 30% in four days, blew past $79,000, and wiped out $2.4 billion in short positions — and then Ray Dalio published a piece telling the world to buy gold and "a bit of Bitcoin." The hosts dig into why Dalio is finally moving past his old objection that governments would crush it, and what the collapsing 30-year treasury yield tells us about where the dollar is actually headed. In this episode: • Bitcoin surged roughly 30% in four days, liquidating $2.4 billion in shorts, with prediction markets moving odds of Bitcoin above $90K by year-end from 12% to 48%. • Ray Dalio's new article, "How Countries Go Broke," recomm...

Bitcoin just hit $70,000 and torched $1.2 billion in shorts in a single hour — and the hosts and guest Joe Consorti break down exactly why the U.S. Treasury's move to double its bond buybacks lit the fuse. This is the macro backdrop bitcoiners have been waiting for, and it showed up on a random summer Tuesday. In this episode: • Joe Consorti explains the Treasury's decision to double long-bond buybacks from $2 billion to at least $4 billion per operation, running through November, and why he calls Scott Bessent "Janet Yellen in a skin suit" • The 10-year yield dropped sharply on the news, making risk a...

Binance handed Russian authorities the full transaction history, passport, address, and phone number of a customer who donated just $700 in Bitcoin to the Ukrainian military. That customer now faces terrorism financing charges. If you think that only happens in authoritarian countries, Canada already froze trucker convoy donors' accounts and shared that list with foreign governments. In this episode: • Michael Saylor now says Bitcoin is capital, not money, and argues Bitcoin-backed stablecoins should be the medium of exchange — the hosts dissect whether this is a genuine strategic pivot or a survival move to keep MicroStrategy's business model alive. • MicroStrategy's Bitcoin-per-share metric contin...

Trezor's shipping partner just leaked the names, home addresses, and phone numbers of nearly 14,000 customers — the same week France's tax authority had 678,000 records exposed, including dozens of people earning over a million euros a year. With wrench attacks already a documented threat in France, the timing couldn't be worse, and the crew spends a long stretch debating whether all this chaos is actually the capitulation signal that precedes a major move up. In this episode: • Trezor data breach: a third-party shipping provider exposed full personal details on roughly 11,742 customers across the US, UK, and several other countries within a 90-day orde...

The Fed is quietly setting up to cut rates while GDP is ripping at 5.8% and credit card delinquencies hit nearly 13%. Larry Lepard called out Fed Chair Kevin Warsh directly, renaming him "Head Monetary Gaslighter" after Warsh cited AI efficiency gains as cover to ease policy. With US debt on track to double to $80 trillion inside a decade, the hosts and guest Adam O'Brien of Bitcoin Well make the case that printing is the only exit — and Bitcoin is the only exit from the printing. In this episode: • Larry Lepard fires back at Kevin Warsh over CPI framing, pointing to fuel up 3...

BIP 110 stalled over the weekend without majority support from nodes, hash rate, businesses, or wallet software — and now Luke Dashjr is stepping away from Ocean Mining to focus on a proof-of-work hard fork that the hosts flatly call a new shitcoin. Meanwhile, over a million code repositories may be sitting on a vulnerable cryptography package, and the white-hat researchers trying to fix it are getting blocked by American AI tools. In this episode: • BIP 110 post-mortem: why the activation failed across every measured facet of the ecosystem — nodes, hash rate, exchanges, and wallet software — and what Simon Dixon's "Bitcoin worked as designed...

BTC Pay Server is being actively exploited right now, and if you're running a lightning node through LND, a simple update won't cut it — you need to destroy and recreate your macaroons, or just shut the whole thing down until you can do it properly. This episode digs into a week where Cold Card was just the first domino, and the hacks keep coming for the most hardcore corner of Bitcoin infrastructure. In this episode: • BIP 110 mandatory signaling lands tomorrow with only about 2.6% miner support — far short of the 55% threshold, and even prominent supporter Bob Burnett says getting the BIP 110 chain...

A white-hat group called Bitcoin Red Team filed nearly 5,000 security findings across 390 projects in just 30 hours — including 85 critical and 635 high-severity vulnerabilities — and that's before the conversation turns to whether Coinkite's CTO and the pseudonymous developer who introduced the entropy bug might be the same person. Meanwhile, BIP 110 is days away from its signaling window, and the hosts are warning listeners about replay protection before anyone touches coins on a potential fork chain. In this episode: • Bitcoin Red Team, now 16 researchers funded by OpenSats, spent roughly $40,000 on AI-powered security analysis to uncover the 4,962 findings, averaging 166 security issues per hour across Bitcoin-related projec...

The ColdCard exploit has now drained a confirmed minimum of 1,360 Bitcoin — and attackers are no longer stopping at weak seed phrases. They're actively brute-forcing low-entropy passphrases on top of compromised seeds, and the carnage is still unfolding in real time. Meanwhile, a second major project, Bolts, has quietly shut down its swap services with no return date after AI-assisted attackers outpaced their small team's ability to patch vulnerabilities. In this episode: • ColdCard losses tracked at over 1,360 Bitcoin confirmed minimum, with reports of MK3, MK4, MK5, and Q devices affected — including one MK3 with a two-word passphrase that was brute-forced • An analysis...

A critical vulnerability in Coldcard hardware wallets has left Bitcoin holders scrambling to move funds, with roughly 1,000 BTC already seen moving on-chain. The bug traces back to a firmware change around 2021 that caused the device to fall back to a software pseudo-random number generator instead of true hardware randomness — meaning private keys generated since then have far fewer possible combinations than anyone realized. MK3 devices are the most exposed, but MK4, MK5, and the Q are also affected. In this episode: • BTC Sessions and Nathan from BTC Mentor run a live help desk, walking viewers through exactly which Coldcard models are...

A serious vulnerability in Cold Card hardware wallets has exposed Bitcoin funds across all current product lines — MK3, MK4, MK5, and the Q. Over 38 million dollars worth of Bitcoin had already been swept at the time of recording, with the number climbing, and the hosts make clear this is not a drill: if you generated a seed on a Cold Card, treat those keys as compromised and move your funds now. In this episode: • The bug stems from a flawed random number generator in Cold Card firmware — one line of code, undetected for five years, that reduced the entropy used when g...

Fed Chair Kevin Warsh held rates steady this week and admitted out loud that the central bank cannot undo five years of above-target inflation in nine weeks — and the guys on Bitcast think that one throwaway line reveals everything wrong with the system. Bitcoin, meanwhile, is quietly sitting right on the 200-week moving average at roughly $63,500 — the same price it was in April 2021 — while everyone else piles into a single overcrowded AI trade. In this episode: • Kevin Warsh's first major Fed press conference draws mixed reviews: the hosts say he's "over his skis," lacks Powell's rapport with reporters, and his admissio...

Michael Saylor's company Strategy just bought back $25 million of its own STRC preferred shares — but the money came from selling $544 million worth of MSTR common stock, not from Bitcoin purchases. Saylor hasn't bought any Bitcoin in five weeks, and Parker Lewis pointed out that same cash could have bought roughly 8,300 Bitcoin instead. In this episode: • Strategy sells 5.4 million MSTR shares for $544 million to fund STRC buybacks, with Saylor stating repurchases may also be funded by BTC sales — his stated goal is to keep STRC trading near $100. • BIP 110 debate heats up ahead of an August 8th activation window, with the panel noting s...

BitMEX is shutting down after 11 years, and nobody can stop wondering who walks away with the $270 million sitting in its insurance fund. That same week, Poolin filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy owing $163 million to its own wallet users — and nine institutions including BlackRock quietly pledged $15 million to a new Bitcoin Security Consortium. Two legacy pillars down, the suits moving in. In this episode: • BitMEX closing September 23rd after halting new signups, with speculation the shutdown is designed to unlock its $270 million insurance fund — and whether Arthur Hayes's 2022 guilty plea, $10 million fine, and Trump pardon factor into the timing • Poolin filing for Chapter...

Bitcoin held green while the NASDAQ dropped 2%, gold shed billions in ETF outflows, and South Korea's stock market handed out margin calls to 1.2 million retail traders — that's 3.4% of the country's entire adult population. JP Morgan, the bank that spent a decade calling Bitcoin a fraud, is now suggesting this may be the bottom of the bear market. And China's new open-source AI model, Kimi K3, just jumped 17 places in the front-end coding rankings and is already available to use with Bitcoin payments through PPQ. In this episode: • Guy Swan joins as guest to break down the shift toward drone warfare, Andu...

Bitcoin is sitting above $65,000, up over 5% on the week, while hedge funds are dumping tech stocks at a decade-record pace and leverage semiconductor ETFs have lost $63 billion from their June peak. The crew connects those dots to a broader rotation story — and the reason most people aren't seeing it is that they're staring at the wrong assets. In this episode: • Kimi K3, the open-source Chinese AI model, fixed security bugs that OpenAI's Codex and Anthropic's Claude refused to touch due to guardrails — drawing a quote-tweet from White House AI czar David Sacks calling out American models for being less competitive. • An OpenA...

Jack Malers is out at 21 Capital — and the hosts aren't buying the official story. Meanwhile, Satsuma shareholders just voted to liquidate their 600-odd bitcoin and delist from the London Stock Exchange, and Lynn Alden is launching Orange Juice right into this wreckage. The timing could not be more awkward. In this episode: • Jack Malers steps down as CEO of 21 Capital — the panel debates whether the board actually removed him, why the stock is down roughly 50%, and what a return to Strike-focused work might mean for him • Satsuma, with Mark Moss as chief Bitcoin strategist, votes to sell its bitcoin and exit the...

US inflation just posted its biggest monthly drop since May 2020, crashing expectations and sending Fed rate hike odds on Polymarket from the mid-30s down to 8%. At the same moment, South Korea's stock market surged so hard it triggered a circuit breaker on the way up — one week after hitting one on the way down. Bitcoin is moving in the right direction, and the hosts argue the only thing that was holding it back just got dismantled. In this episode: • CPI drops to 3.5% against expectations of 3.8%, with core CPI hitting 2.6%; Bank of England's Bailey tells investors not to count on UK r...

A Duke professor just published a roadmap for profitably attacking Bitcoin using offshore derivatives markets — simultaneously mining enough hash power to take over the network while shorting Bitcoin to zero. The hosts aren't impressed, but they do take it seriously enough to dig into whether a nation-state or "nefarious geopolitical entity" could actually pull it off. In this episode: • Duke professor Campbell Harvey outlines a 51% attack strategy funded by short positions in Bitcoin's derivatives markets, claiming the cost is roughly 50 basis points of Bitcoin's market cap — "surprisingly affordable" in his words. • A former Meta engineer argues Bitcoin has two ticking time bom...