Rabbit Hole Recap: Week of 2020.09.21
9/24/2020 · 95 min · transcript via mlx
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Key topics
— Lightning Network griefing attack: JOST Yager from Lightning Labs released Circuit Breaker, a tool to mitigate HTLC congestion attacks where malicious actors can lock up routing capacity on nodes by sending 483+ simultaneous payments without completing them, costing attackers little to nothing.
— Iran mining expansion: Iranian power plants announced they will sell electricity to Bitcoin miners from three stations with 5,485 MW capacity; the country claims 4% of global Bitcoin mining output, up from 2% in September 2019.
— Bitmain's decline: Hashrate published a comprehensive timeline of Bitmain's internal struggles, highlighting failed Bitcoin Cash bets, covert ASIC boost exploitation, and strategic missteps that squandered early dominance in mining hardware.
— Regulatory crackdowns: Russia proposes mandatory disclosure of crypto wallet addresses holding over $1,300 worth of assets, with up to 3 years imprisonment for non-compliance; Venezuela requires miners to use a national mining pool.
— FinCEN leaks expose systemic hypocrisy: BuzzFeed published investigation revealing 2,100 Suspicious Activity Reports showing major banks facilitate trillions in money laundering while imposing burdensome compliance on ordinary businesses and individuals.
— Software releases improve self-custody: Specter v0.8.0, Dojo v1.8.0, Tails v4.11, and Samurai updates deliver better hardware wallet integration, easier multi-sig setup, smart card support, and improved privacy coinjoins with two-person transaction mixing.
Market & price signals
— Bitcoin trading at $10,650 per BTC, yielding 9,390 sats per dollar. Market cap hovering around $196.9 billion. Block height 649,811. Recent difficulty adjustment was +11.3% upwards; next retarget (October 3rd) estimated at −1.3% downward. Transaction fees remain low: 75 sat/byte for next block, 62 sat/byte for one-hour confirmation, 2 sat/byte for daily settlement. Samurai Whirlpool liquidity pool reached 1,633.04 BTC, first time above 1,600 BTC. 9,769 coin join cycles in last 30 days.
Actionable insights
— Use Tor and VPNs if you mine or transact in jurisdictions imposing mandatory address disclosure (Russia, Venezuela); consider self-hosted Bitcoin Core + Specter setup to avoid leaking addresses to third-party wallet services and custodians.
— If running a business holding Bitcoin, explore multi-sig custody with services like Unchained Capital or Knox Custody rather than single custodians; Unchained's $1,500 white-glove service (code TFTC = $50 off) walks you through setup and provides $1,000 seeded into your vault.
— Participate in two-person coinjoins via Samurai's upcoming Tor-based messaging layer to break address-clustering heuristics used by surveillance firms; combine with Whirlpool rounds to degrade blockchain analysis confidence.
Episode sponsorships
Paid placements mentioned in this episode. BTC Pods is not sponsored by or affiliated with these advertisers. Links are included so you can find offers mentioned on the show.
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