Bitcoin has officially decoupled from global M2.

The White House is preparing to bring open-source AI models under its prerelease safety testing framework. Once open models reach frontier capabilities, they'd face a potential 30-day government testing period before public release. The catch: officials know that excluding open models creates a government-approved advantage for closed labs like OpenAI and Anthropic. But including them could slow US open-model development and hand China an edge. The framework is technically voluntary for now, but the competitive pressure to get a government seal of approval could make it mandatory in practice.

Bitcoin Mechanic says the rejection of BIP110 on Saturday "shattered a long-standing belief that Bitcoin's anti-fragility and hard-monetary properties would continue thanks to its decentralized network of nodes." He argues that mining pools acted as "a small cartel of centralized pool operators clearly acting on behalf of industry players who operated behind closed doors" to kill BIP110, while supporters "operated in public" using "neutral metrics that everyone had access to." His core concern is that "Proof of Work is completely pointless if the criteria for what constitutes validity is decided by the ones doing the work." He says he's now running a stalled Knots node at block 931,633 and is open to a hard fork with a new proof-of-work algorithm, stating "the only defense the network would have would be to hard-fork to a new Proof-of-Work algorithm." He closes by saying he has "no desire to attempt to call this new chain Bitcoin" and that captured Bitcoin "becomes a tool for the sickest of purposes."

Senator Rand Paul confirms after Fort Knox visit: "Yes, the gold is there all (approximately) 147 million ounces. It is impressive."

The Bitcoin Policy Institute just published an open letter asking AI labs to give open-source bitcoin and digital asset defenders access to their strongest cybersecurity models. The problem: "Open-source defenders today occupy the least privileged position in the AI security landscape." Bitcoin secures over a trillion dollars in value, but the developers maintaining wallets, cryptographic libraries, and node software are getting blocked by guardrails when they try to use frontier AI for legitimate security work. The letter warns that "nation-state adversaries, criminal syndicates, and sophisticated hackers will not wait for permission to deploy AI against critical open-source infrastructure." Defenders are stuck using weaker open-weight alternatives while attackers face no such constraints. BPI is asking for early access to the best cyber models, compute budgets for real security reviews, and secure environments for sensitive code analysis. The coalition is massive: Coinbase, Block, Strategy, MARA, Blockstream, Chaincode, Brink, Ten31, Unchained, Trezor, Casa, Strike, River, OpenSats, and dozens more. "Frontier AI could become one of the most powerful defensive technologies ever developed, but only if defenders get fair access."

Defenders Need the Frontier

An open letter to frontier AI labs: the defenders of open-source financial infrastructure need the frontier too, before attackers do.

Saudi crude exports dropped 460K barrels/day in July to 4.19M bpd. Houthi threats are now targeting Yanbu, the backup port Saudi built specifically to bypass Strait of Hormuz chokepoint risk. Tankers are going dark on transponders. Global energy supply chains remain incredibly fragile.

BIP-110 nodes just forked off the main chain after rejecting a non-signaling block at height 961,632.

Bitcoin ETFs just had their best week of inflows (~$1B) since April. IBIT, FBTC, and others saw inflows every single day this week.

All 8 Flock surveillance cameras in Winona, Minnesota were cut down and removed over a few days. Poles sawed at the base, cameras gone. It's part of a growing nationwide backlash against automated license plate surveillance. Multiple cities have now shut their Flock systems down entirely.

Coldcard is directing users to follow their next firmware updates on GitHub as they work on a new release focused on customer key migration.

Senate may delay August recess to vote on the CLARITY Act. Sen. Lummis: “I don’t think we’ll be leaving on Friday. I think we’ll go into the weekend.”

Strategy matching the $1,000 Trump Account contribution for every employee's newborn plus $250/year per kid.

Giacomo Zucco announced he's resigned from the board of OCEAN mining pool. He says he still has love for Luke Dashjr and believes in OCEAN's core ideas, miner-side block production, KYC-free coinbase payouts, and Lightning share markets, but felt he needed to "speak the truth." The resignation comes as BIP-110 support from miners remains below the 55% activation threshold, and some BIP-110 proponents are now floating a proof-of-work change hard fork.

Coinkite published a new update on the ColdCard vulnerability. They say the bug "lived at a boundary between two unrelated submodules, not in the parent code, and not in the cryptographic or Bitcoin-specific logic that are the subject of most internal and third-party reviews." They ran AI-assisted review against their codebase in the weeks before the exploit and it didn't catch it. They've since tested frontier models including Kimi K3, Claude, and Codex 5.6, none of them caught it either. Coinkite is now warning other bitcoin projects: "If your team relies on AI review of security-critical code, we recommend you test it specifically against build and submodule boundaries."

Chris Guida (cguida6) has rebased Luke Dashjr's 2017 proof-of-work change hard fork code onto a recent version of Bitcoin Knots, arguing it should be kept ready in case miners refuse to signal for BIP-110. "I think we should have this in our back pocket in case miners decide to collude to betray bitcoin."

American HODL received a phishing email urging him to download a fake "ColdCard Desktop" app. Scammers are exploiting the panic around the ColdCard vulnerability to trick people into downloading malware. As he points out, there is no ColdCard desktop app and there never has been. Stay vigilant.

Users are reporting that Coldcard's emergency firmware update is bricking some devices. These reports are anecdotal and have not been confirmed by Coinkite, but if you're planning to update, move your funds off the device first.

As much as this hurts. The network will grow stronger from it. Don't give up.

TFTC 777 w/ (jamesob): "If you're single-sig with no passphrase or dice rolls, you need to drive home and migrate your funds. These wallets are dangling in the wind." We discuss: ⚡ The flaw exposed overnight ⚡ How to check your risk ⚡ Why self-custody still wins