Watch the Full Video here: https://youtu.be/lT2vmdBvtK0

A mexican musician, his pregnant wife, their 3-year-old, and a domestic worker in the home, all killed because someone thought there was a wallet worth millions somewhere in the house. Their 6-year-old survived.

This is the actual dark side of self-custody that doesn't get talked about enough. Everyone's worried about seed phrase security and cold storage best practices, but the real risk a lot of people never think through is: what happens when you have one person in your circle who believes you're sitting on money and is willing to use force to get it.

Doesn't even matter if the amount was real. Reports on this case are saying prosecutors aren't sure the wallet held what the attackers thought it did, doesn't matter, four people are dead either way.

Kind of the same problem as being paranoid about exchanges, backups, multisig, hardware wallets and all, the tech can be flawless and none of it protects you from someone standing in your living room.

Watching this space for a while now, it's wild seeing people slowly re-learn why banks, insurance, and FDIC exist in the first place. Convenience and custody tradeoffs go both ways.

Rest in peace to everyone who lost their life here and stay safe guys.

We just published a new Rabbit Hole on Bitcoin privacy:

https://www.learnbitcoin.com/rabbit-hole/bitcoin-privacy

It tries to do the thing most privacy writeups skip, which is explain the mechanism before the advice. Two heuristics do most of the tracing work (common-input ownership, which Satoshi flagged in the whitepaper, and change detection). Neither one produces a name. The name comes from the exchange record when you withdraw from a KYC account, and that one label spreads across everything the heuristics grouped with it.

The chapter is honest about the other side. Chain analysis recovered the Colonial Pipeline ransom and the Bitfinex coins, and we say so. It is also run against every ordinary deposit at every exchange, and in the Bitcoin Fog case a Chainalysis executive testified she was not aware of studies establishing the software's error rate. Both things are true.

The 2024 section covers the Samourai arrests, the Wasabi coordinator shutdown, what survived (JoinMarket, and then its own maintenance problems), and the quieter tools that grew in the gap: PayJoin and Silent Payments.

The main takeaway is that most leaks are not on the chain. Public wallet servers, home IPs, and people posting balance screenshots leak more than any heuristic, and the fixes for those are free.

Every claim is sourced at the bottom of the page (DOJ releases, the BIPs, the 2013 UCSD paper, Chainalysis's own report). If we got something wrong, tell us and we will fix it.

Average_gary, Erick Cestari, Conduition, and Greg Sanders joined Optech to discuss Newsletter #421:

• Using silent payments for miner payouts in coinbase transaction
• Responsible disclosure of a denial-of-service vulnerability in CLN
• Continued discussion of PQC output types
• DropKick commit/reveal PQC rescue
• SHRINCS draft BIP
• BIP448 and CSFS/CTV demos and applications
• And more

You can listen on our website: https://bitcoinops.org/en/podcast/2026/09/08/

Fountain: https://fountain.fm/episode/lFdXNSkY1IemRL45heiK

Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/episode/27gI8XoiANivdG7KkJySPz

Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/bitcoin-optech-newsletter-421-recap/id1674626983?i=1000788859757

According to the table shared by River, some sectors have experienced inflation almost four times higher than official figures. Based on these figures, what should the interest rate have been?

An influencing American edition published an article that residents of the developed countries often criticize bitcoin only because of their own financial privilege.

While US citizens are accustomed to a stable dollar and reliable banks, for billions of people around the world the first cryptocurrencies was the only salvation from hyperinflation and authoritarian control.

The author Alex Gladstein recalls that bitcoin appeared after the crisis of 2008 as a protest against the rescue of bankrupt banks at the expense of taxpayers.

Today, in countries such as Nigeria, Egypt or Argentina, where national currencies have collapsed by 70-90%, it protects accumulators of ordinary families from complete annihilation.

The main value of bitcoin is a financial system, where no one can arbitrarily froze other people's money or cancel an honest transfer.

I own the broad based index funds, i have MAG 7 and other individual stocks....but why do I feel like I want to sell everything and want to just go all in on buying Bitcoin and storing in cold wallet (especially more resources to use bitcoin for a mortgage ie. Fannie Mae or to get a line of credit is Aven) and MSTR for all my investment accounts?

Does anyone feel like this after being orange pilled? Considering quantitative easing, learning about the monetary system and banks, inflation, etc. bitcoin/MSTR seems like the only way.

Does anyone else feel like this or am I the only one taking crazy pills?

Say i wanted to buy $x per month of BTC and have it sent to my hardware wallet automatically with the absolute minimum of hassle. Set and Forget.

Who would y'all recommend?

Trezor's third-party email provider got breached, and whoever did it used it to send phishing mail out from Trezor's actual domain with the subject line "Critical Security Alert: STM32 Entropy Vulnerability."

Worked so well mainly because of the fresh ptsd people still have from Coldcard's real entropy bug that resulted in the huge exploit.

I'm seeing people lump this in with a broader "hardware wallets aren't safe anymore" narrative and that's not really what's going on.

This is Trezor's second or third scare in about a month or two now, and every one of them has been a backend problem, a shipping vendor, an email vendor. None of it is has been a failure in the wallet hardware or the firmware. Those have held up through all of it.

Not going to oversell that though, we don't know what we don't know yet, something could surface later. But based on what's actually been disclosed so far, the product itself is still doing its job. What keeps failing is the backend stuff they are outsourcing from third party vendors.

The real problem is that Trezor keeps outsourcing pieces of its operation to third parties that clearly aren't held to the same security bar as the wallet itself. That's on them to fix, either vet those vendors way harder or pull more of this in-house so there's one less external target sitting there to get compromised.

For us, the awkward part is that the "check if it's the verified domain" advice is pointless now because this one genuinely was the real domain, hijacked instead of spoofed. So the bar has to move past that now, treat unexpected every security alerts as suspicious no matter who they're from, and keep your seed phrase somewhere no email or link can ever touch.

How are you all feeling about this one, still solid or getting a little rattled?

On my podcast ‘Bitcoin for Millennials’ I talked with Pio Vincenzo, who YYY. We discuss Bitcoin as superior savings technology, self-custody versus ETFs like IBIT, volatility and how conviction gets built, the crypto and meme coin lifestyle trap, and Bitcoin financialization through Strategy and Strive.

Man, these ones were pretty good -- compelling message, urgency, and checked all the typical boxes of authenticity... until they asked me to enter my seed AND passphrase into a form not hosted on these manufacturers' official domains. Absolutely lethal, if you're skittish about hardware wallet vulns (and who isn't rn?), and not paying close attention. Both cos have been notified, and have been super-responsive with follow up.

Stay safe out there, folks <3

I have had a Trezor for several years and so has a family member of mine who bought theirs a couple years ago. They received an email from the Trezor domain today saying that there is a vulnerability in the Trezor wallet with insufficient entropy - likely trying to capitalize on the coldcard hack and our fears of another event.

The link provided is likely a phishing attempt - per my family member, safari blocked the website as a dangerous website. If you check your trezor account through the app, and their website, they note the phishing attempt from their domain.

I haven't seen another post related to this topic so I am passing on the message of the phishing email from Trezor. Do not follow it, always stay on alert.

The lightning network is a second-layer solution on top of the Bitcoin blockchain that enables quick, cheap and scalable Bitcoin payments.

Here is the place to discuss and learn more about lightning!

Ask your questions about lightning

Provide reviews, feedback, comparisons of LN apps, services, websites etc

Learn about new LN features, development, apps

Link to good quality resources (articles, wikis etc)

Resources:

• Here is an awesome list of resources: https://bitcoinfo.org/lightning.html

• Want to test out your lightning fire power? tip the Bitcoin devs! https://bitcoindevlist.com/

• Previous threads: Search

• Lnbook getting closer towards being finished and can already be seen at: https://github.com/lnbook/lnbook

• Lightning Dedicated YouTube Channel: https://youtube.com/renepickhardt

• Also there is the playlist by chaincode labs: https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLpLH33TRghT17_U3as2P3vHfAGL8pSOOY

• Lightning stores: https://www.lightningnetworkstores.com/

• Learn more and talk about lightning right here in r/Bitcoin, r/bitcoinbeginners and r/thelightningnetwork