On May 6, 2025, during the Q1 earnings conference call, Michael Saylor said: "We will probably sell some bitcoin to pay a dividend." MSTR dropped more than 4% in the hours that followed.

Strategy holds 818,334 BTC. Annual obligations between dividends on preferred shares and interest on debt amount to roughly $1.5 billion. The software business generates a handful of millions per quarter. The gap is covered by issuing new shares at a premium to NAV, or - for the first time ever - by selling bitcoin.
Adam Back, a few days before the call, had tweeted that "bitcoin treasury companies are an arbitrage between the fiat present and the hyperbitcoinized future."

In finance, an arbitrage is a risk-free, non-directional trade that exploits price differences for the same asset across different markets. What Strategy is doing is a debt-financed leveraged bet on bitcoin — not arbitrage.

The "BTC per share" mechanism Saylor publishes every quarter works like this: new shareholders pay a premium above the value of the underlying bitcoin. That premium gets redistributed to existing shareholders as "growth." The returns of the old come from the capital of the new.

It all works as long as the line keeps growing. The day it stops, Houston, we'll have a problem.
naddr1qqsx...

The CEO of LayerTwo Labs Paul Sztorc has announced a Bitcoin hard fork called eCash, scheduled for August 2026 at block 964,000.
The detail that sparked the debate: roughly 500,000 of the BTC attributed to Satoshi Nakamoto will not be assigned to the original addresses on the new blockchain. They will be moved to new keys controlled by investors, developers, and backers of the project.

The attribution is based on the Patoshi pattern, a statistical heuristic identified by Sergio Lerner in 2013. Robust, reproduced, cited. It remains a heuristic. No one holds Satoshi’s digital signature on those outputs.
Sztorc hinted that the fork would be cancelled if Bitcoin Core activated BIP300 and BIP301 before August. The very drivechains he has been working on since 2015 and that Core has never adopted after ten years of debate.

Sztorc’s case is not an isolated one - it joins BIP-110 and BIP-361, all proposals that have surfaced in recent months and would entail a fork.

Since 2017, no fork has dented Bitcoin’s dominance. BCH, BSV, BTG, XEC: all listed, all irrelevant. Anyone who has watched Bitcoin for years knows that proposing a fork is a waste of time - unless failure is part of the calculation. Announcing a fork moves markets. Whoever knows when the announcement is coming can position themselves accordingly.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​
naddr1qqdk...

While at the Bitcoin Conference in Las Vegas, executives from US federal agencies promise not to prosecute developers, in reality code is in the dock.

Keonne Rodriguez has entered a US federal penitentiary. Five years. His crime: writing a non-custodial Bitcoin wallet with Whirlpool.

He never touched user funds. He didn't hold the keys. The code was open source. Yet the Department of Justice prosecuted him for "unlicensed money transmitting" under Section 1960 - a charge that requires no proof of intent, no complicity with crimes, no custody of others' funds. His associate William Lonergan Hill got four years.

Running parallel is Roman Storm, co-founder of Tornado Cash - a non-custodial mixer on Ethereum. Arrested in August 2023. A four-week trial in the Southern District of New York. Verdict on August 6, 2025: the jury failed to reach agreement on the two heavy counts (money laundering, violating North Korea sanctions), but convicted him on § 1960. Same charge, same pattern. If the motion for acquittal filed by the defense is denied, Storm faces a retrial in October 2026 with total exposure approaching forty-five years.

Too bad that back in 2019 FinCEN had explicitly written: anyone who develops non-custodial peer-to-peer software without controlling user funds is not a money transmitter. In April 2025, Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche issued an internal memo: stop regulatory prosecutions against developers of non-custodial software.

The verdict against Storm came in August 2025. Four months after the Blanche memo. Prosecutors in the Southern District of New York pushed for conviction anyway. In March 2026 they sought a new trial on the other two counts, with the opposite directive written in black and white by DOJ leadership.
If the interpretation of § 1960 applied to Storm holds up on appeal, the perimeter is this: any American developer of wallets, coinjoins, or Lightning Service Providers becomes a potential defendant. The menu is already written. Plead and take four or five years. Fight and risk forty-five.

Code is on trial, whatever the paid feds in Las Vegas may say.
naddr1qqsk...

BIP-361: Post Quantum Migration and Legacy Signature Sunset. The proposal: five years after activation, any bitcoin not migrated to quantum-resistant addresses gets frozen.

The numbers behind the proposal. As of March 1, 2026, more than 34% of all existing bitcoin had public keys exposed on-chain. According to @Jameson Lopp, one of the six signatories, the technically vulnerable bitcoin total 5.6 million. Roughly 28% of the circulating supply. That figure includes 1.1 million bitcoin untouched since 2010, probabilistically attributed to Satoshi Nakamoto.

The proponents’ thesis: if an attacker with a sufficiently powerful quantum computer unlocked those UTXOs and dumped them on the market, the sell-off would hurt every other holder. From the BIP text: “Lost coins make everyone else’s worth slightly more. Coins recovered by an attacker make everyone else’s worth less. Consider it theft from everyone.”
Lopp himself, however, in the hours after the debate blew up on X, stated: “At the moment, I don’t think any of this is necessary.”

The objections come from several directions. @MartyBent raised what he calls “the man in the coma” case: anyone who fails to execute the migration for five years loses all their money, frozen by consensus rules. @Adam Back at Paris Blockchain Week called today’s quantum computers “lab experiments” with “incremental” progress, and argued that Bitcoin can prepare itself through optional upgrades without imposing freezes.

The real point is something else. If consensus rules can freeze addresses based on type, a precedent exists. Governments will have it on the table: freezing sanctioned UTXOs, freezing addresses on OFAC lists, freezing the wallets of politically inconvenient people.

The proposal calls for freezing legitimately held bitcoin in the name of the collective good. Bitcoin exists because no one can block anyone else’s funds. BIP-361 asks the protocol to do exactly that, by design.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​
naddr1qqjk...