From Yesterday's Simply Bitcoin Live | Episode 1611
The Numbers
Price firmed after Sunday's close near 83K reversed Friday's slide, even as Monday's now familiar morning dip showed up right on schedule.
The News
On October 9, China's Communist Party Central Committee and the State Council issued a policy document outlining 19 measures, including a call to build a national blockchain network. The document never mentions Bitcoin, and Beijing's 2021 ban on crypto trading transactions hasn't moved an inch.
The timing lines up with something said days earlier on CNBC. Joseph Chee, who used to run UBS's Asia investment bank, said officials are using Hong Kong to test how crypto can be rolled out and controlled, and that a real reopening would trigger what he called "another super cycle." Chee now runs the treasury at Solana Company, a Nasdaq listed firm that holds SOL as its treasury asset, so the super cycle math comes with its own bias attached. Strip that out and the underlying shape still holds. Despite the ban, China remains the second largest government holder of Bitcoin on earth, sitting on roughly 194,000 coins seized years ago and never sold.
China isn't choosing between banning Bitcoin and copying its homework. It's doing both, and calling the second one a national blockchain.
A researcher bought two Ledger devices from separate MediaMarkt stores in Germany and found the same tampering in both: extra wiring and an LTE module built to leak data, tracing back to distributor Aqipa GmbH, which supplies more than 1,000 MediaMarkt and Saturn stores across 11 countries. MediaMarktSaturn has since pulled every Ledger product from its stores and site, telling press "we take this incident very seriously."
The original attack, tied to Southeast Asian reseller CryptoBilis, has now drained an estimated $93 million from roughly 300 wallets across six networks. On-chain researchers tracked the stolen funds step by step, through Tornado Cash three times and into Zcash's shielded pool and back out again. They could follow the coins the entire way, which means the privacy coin did not actually hide anything.
If you bought a Ledger anywhere but Ledger directly, the move right now is simple. Get your coins off it before someone with the LTE module decides it's time.
The Culture
Market CommentaryTake this with a full shaker of salt, because the show did too. A 4chan poster who correctly called the 2019 bottom, the 2021 top and the exact month of the last halving resurfaced Monday morning with a new post. His call this cycle is a top near 500,000 dollars, arriving in stages with brutal corrections along the way rather than a straight line up.
Pair that with an older piece of Bitcoin folklore the show keeps coming back to: a Bitfinex perpetual wick that hit 158,000 dollars this year, echoing the 2023 wick that happened to mark the last cycle bottom almost exactly. If both patterns hold, the next floor sits around 158K and the next real test comes somewhere above 300K.
None of this is signal. It's bar talk with unusually good receipts, the kind you forward to a friend just in case.
Opti walks through China's new blockchain plan, the European turn in the Ledger hack, and the 4chan account that keeps calling the market years ahead of time.
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