From Yesterday's Simply Bitcoin Live | Episode 1618
The Numbers
Price clawed back above $84,000 this week after tech earnings jitters had briefly knocked it under $82,000.
The News
Simply Bitcoin's YouTube channel got pulled mid livestream for the second time, minutes after a segment that brought up Jamie Dimon's past comments calling Bitcoin a tool for criminals and terrorists. The only explanation YouTube gave was a generic "harmful and dangerous" policy violation, with no further detail.
The hosts pointed out the obvious double standard on air: Dimon's own videos calling Bitcoiners terrorists are still up. Quoting the banker got removed. The banker's insult never did. Bitcoin Magazine's conference channel was also nuked that same day and restored by morning, which the hosts read as a sign the sweep went wider than just one show.
The channel came back. The policy explaining why it left in the first place did not.
Mark Karpeles, the former Mt. Gox CEO, bought a Ledger from a third party reseller instead of Ledger directly. He took it apart and found a hidden antenna, a 4G broadcaster, and a soldered in SIM card that radioed the seed phrase home the moment it was typed in.
Tampered units turned up first at legitimate electronics retailers in Southeast Asia, then in Europe, which means a wholesaler somewhere in the supply chain got compromised, not just one shady website. Combined with the Cold Card entropy bug from three months back, the two incidents have pushed self custody losses this year toward $236 million. Rob Hamilton of Anchor Watch said on the show it could have been double that.
Buy the hardware wallet from the manufacturer. Not the reseller.
After the BIP 110 fork split off miners who rejected Ocean's neutral stance, the pool lost a chunk of hashrate overnight. It has since rebuilt back to roughly 45 exahash in four to five weeks, according to Ocean's Nacho, who says the company's target is 100 exahash by December.
The bigger threat to mining decentralization isn't forks, it's AI. Data centers are buying up the cheap power sites miners depend on because AI operators will pay far more for the same land and energy, pushing miners to chase cheaper, more remote power just to stay competitive.
Nacho says he has no holidays until he hits that number.
The Culture
Guest SegmentAnchor Watch, the Bitcoin insurance and custody company run by Rob Hamilton, became a qualified custodian in the state of Nevada this week. It now holds a state chartered trust and can offer policies up to $370 million per entity to large publicly traded companies.
Hamilton's pitch is risk distribution. Over two million Bitcoin sits at Coinbase largely because the SEC tied ETF approval to using it as custodian, and most of that exposure carries nowhere near full insurance coverage relative to the assets held there.
Same Bitcoin, spread across fewer single points of failure.
Rob Hamilton breaks down the Ledger supply chain hack, what the AI powered security red team actually found across 650 Bitcoin repos, and why he thinks Wall Street buying in is the point, not the problem.
Watch on YouTube →