A proposal published on September 24 aims to transfer bitcoin while hiding amounts, recipients, and links between payments, without a soft fork and without changing Bitcoin's consensus rules.

It's called Shielded Bitcoin. The authors are Clara Shikhelman, Mikhail Komarov, and Aleksei Moskvin of Alloc Init. The system borrows Zcash's structure, but reconstructs its own state from Bitcoin's history: a "metaprotocol" applied to data already published on the chain.

Value circulates in the form of "notes." A note contains satoshis and data that lets the recipient recognize and spend it.

To prevent double-spending, each spent note produces a nullifier. This is a cryptographic marker published only once. If it reappears, the transaction is rejected. An observer sees the nullifier but cannot directly link it back to the note it derives from.

Compared to CoinJoin, PayJoin, and Silent Payments, here even the amounts are meant to stay hidden.

The project also separates spending keys from viewing keys. A reviewer can be given visibility into payments without handing over the funds. But a viewing key doesn't prove the balance, nor does it prove that the entire history has been shown.

The hardest part remains: getting real bitcoin in and out of the private system. Alloc Init points to PIPEs v2 and witness encryption. A UTXO's key would only be recovered by presenting a valid proof; spending would then happen with a normal Schnorr signature.
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An AI container operating at just 4% utilization can generate, according to Gridless, the same revenue as a Bitcoin mining container with the same power capacity running continuously. Each kWh sold to AI compute would be worth 15 to 25 times more than one used for hashrate.

In sub-Saharan Africa, more than 560 million people live without access to the grid, while rural demand grows slowly. The average revenue generated by a power plant is between $2 and $2.50 per customer per month. Including commercial users, it rises to $3.16.

But a power plant has to be financed upfront.

Gridless has used Bitcoin as a buyer of last resort. Over four years, the company says it has deployed six sites across three countries, bringing electricity to an additional 30,000 people.

Africa is home to almost one-fifth of the world’s population, yet accounts for just 0.6% of global data center capacity.
Gridless is focusing on small, distributed sites that can be financed individually: solar in the DRC, hydropower in Kenya, and demonstration racks in Nairobi.

Bitcoin builds the bridge in places where AI will only arrive once there is sufficient demand, fiber connectivity, and contractual infrastructure.
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Liquid requires eleven out of fifteen signatures to move the BTC reserve that backs the 1:1 peg with L-BTC tokens.

On September 6, 83 inputs collected the eleven signatures required by the standard spending path. 4,000 BTC left the federation.

CertiK reconstructs the exploit as follows: the attackers reused a successful result and bypassed the verification step that should have rejected the inflationary issuance.

Side Swap says it installed, on August 13, a security build that had been privately distributed to Liquid members. That build accepted the transaction. SideSwap also admits that it had left the Peg-out Authorization Key online, automated forwarding, and implemented no controls on withdrawal amounts or frequency.
The attackers wrote on Bitcoin: “We are white hats. Contact us on-chain.” They returned 3,400 BTC. They kept roughly 598.5 BTC and demanded a 10% bounty, threatening a 15% loss for L-BTC holders. Blockstream refused.

A reserve can be replenished. The trust required by a federation, by privately distributed updates, and by automated custody processes cannot be restored with a patch.

The rest of the protocols designed to make Bitcoin easier to spend are not doing much better: we are looking at a Layer 2 apocalypse.
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Spark presents itself as self-custodial: instant payments, offline receiving, no Lightning channels to open, and keys held by the user.

However, the mainnet configuration published in the SDKs lists three operators - Lightspark, Breez, and Flashnet - and only two of them are needed to produce the aggregate signature controlling each deposit.

Every Spark deposit funds a Taproot output. The key combines two components: one held by the user and one held by the operators. The operators cannot spend on their own. But the user cannot transact without interacting with them.

Spark repeatedly uses the phrase “only one honest operator is needed.” Yet the published configuration is 2-of-3: two old shares being retained are enough to reconstruct the aggregate component and sign a conflicting spend together with a former owner. The third operator can refuse to participate without preventing anything. Bitcoin Layers classifies this as the protocol’s primary finality risk.

A unilateral exit formally exists in the protocol. But many popular wallets still depend on the operators to obtain the data required to construct it.

Meanwhile, Spark is scaling: Wallet of Satoshi, Primal, Blink, Blitz, Cake Wallet. Freedomia, a no-KYC Visa card, also uses it for Lightning deposits following the suspension of Boltz services.
Spark’s self-custody is therefore heavily conditional: the unilateral exit exists on paper, provided the operators cooperate in giving you the data you need.
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The total haul from the Coldcard hack: 1,816 bitcoin, over $116 million, from more than 5,200 addresses.

On July 26, Moonshot AI released Kimi K3, 2.8 trillion parameters, the largest open-weights model ever published. It can run on custom hardware, not just on the manufacturers' servers, without the guardrails of Anthropic and OpenAI.

The bill came due immediately: after Coldcard, Boltz suspended all swaps, taking with it the Lightning Network functionality of many widely-used wallets. Then Blixt halted operations, not to mention the bug in BTCPay Server and the data theft at Trezor's logistics partner.

Calle and Rob Hamilton responded with a sixteen-person Red Team. The time between a latent bug and its exploitation has almost vanished. The only place this logic doesn't touch remains the barest: an on-chain UTXO, a key, a signature.
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Donald Trump and Elizabeth Warren have gone at each other for a decade over tariffs, taxes, the Fed, immigration. There's just one thing they agree on: abolishing America's debt ceiling.

The ceiling was created in 1917 to simplify borrowing. Since 1960, Congress has raised, suspended, or redefined it about 80 times.

Why does it always blow up? Arithmetic. Fiscal year 2025: a $1.775 trillion hole. The last federal budget in surplus was in 2001. On interest on the debt alone, the government paid $1.22 trillion in 2025, nearly a quarter of federal revenue.

To pay it, more debt. Yesterday's creditors repaid with tomorrow's creditors' money.

A pyramid scheme by definition, with two differences: participation is mandatory, and the manager prints the currency it repays with. It never defaults explicitly; it does so gradually, by diluting the purchasing power of the dollars in circulation.

The expansion of the money supply is neither right-wing nor left-wing: it's the one thing the right and the left agree on.
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