The future won’t wait for you.

@TFTC21

CFTC releases topics for its Aug. 20 Innovation Advisory Committee meeting. Agenda focuses on "crypto’s regulatory evolution," efforts for greater clarity, modernizing rules, and frameworks that support innovation while protecting market integrity.

@TFTC21

UBS, Switzerland’s largest bank, discloses $83.2 million holding in BlackRock’s Bitcoin ETF.

@TFTC21

Franklin Templeton just signed on to @bitcoinpolicy's "Defenders Need the Frontier" open letter, which calls on frontier AI labs to give full-access intelligence to open-source defenders. Ties directly into the Bitcoin Red Team findings. The threat is real and the coalition is growing.

@TFTC21

A woman in Colorado says her smart thermostat blocked her from lowering the temperature, displaying a warning: "You are not allowed to lower your thermostat set point because the energy grid in your regional area is stressed." She had enrolled in Xcel Energy's voluntary demand-response program, which offers $50-150 in sign-up credits in exchange for letting the utility set limits on your AC. These programs are already running in multiple states. x.com/WallStreetApes…

@TFTC21

Bitcoin Red Team member @callebtc just dropped a field report after scanning virtually all of bitcoin's open source code with frontier AI. The summary: "everything is broken, bitcoin is burning" but it's getting stronger because of it. They're seeing "a massive collision between decades of human open source slop against 2 weeks of kimi k3." The low-hanging fruit is cleared, "a ton of real critical and high vulnerabilities" have been reported and validated by maintainers, unmaintained projects should be assumed vulnerable, and Lightning is "more broken than the average." He says "projects need their own AI audit pipeline going into the future." Oh, and "humans should never code in c (just stop)."

@TFTC21

Trezor just disclosed that one of its shipping providers suffered a data breach exposing names, addresses, phone numbers, and emails for ~13,700 customers across 7 countries. Devices and systems are unaffected, but expect a wave of phishing attempts targeting these users. x.com/Trezor/status/…

@TFTC21

Read more signal, less noise: tftc.io/bitcoin-brief

@TFTC21

The 256 Foundation just ran the first serious firmware security audit of Bitcoin mining hardware, and the results flip the conventional wisdom. After decompiling miner daemons and reviewing live connection tables on stock Bitmain S19j Pro and S21 units, the Red Team found no hashrate skimming, no kill switches and no covert beacons. Stock Bitmain was the cleanest firmware tested on hidden trust behavior. The third-party "optimized" firmware, LuxOS, VNISH, Braiins OS, produced the opposite tradeoff. Better features, but behavior an owner couldn't see in the dashboard and wouldn't knowingly choose. Better performance came with a larger trust surface. The broader audit filed 41 findings across the board: unauthenticated factory APIs, local paths to root access, fleet-default credentials, vendor SSH keys baked into firmware images and update mechanisms that don't verify what they install. These aren't exotic exploits. They're basic failures repeated across entire fleets. Three coordinated disclosures have been submitted to VNISH, Luxor and Braiins with 30-day response windows before technical details go public. Miners are not dumb appliances. They are high-value networked computers that earn money directly, run shared software across fleets and often sit on flat, poorly monitored networks. Hashrate decentralization is incomplete if operators can't inspect, constrain and replace the software controlling their machines. Bitcoin's security model depends on independent actors validating rather than trusting. Mining infrastructure should be held to the same standard.

@TFTC21

U.S. homebuyer demand just hit a record low. 967K buyers. 1.46M sellers. 80% of metros are now buyer's markets. But you need $110K/yr to afford a median home. Median income: $87K. The "buyer's market" is only for people who can already afford to buy. Everyone else is locked out.

@TFTC21

Trump just signed a memo authorizing private U.S. companies to conduct offensive cyber operations against foreign criminal organizations, under federal oversight. Cyber Letters of Marque, essentially. The U.S. Constitution (Article I, Section 8) has always allowed Congress to issue letters of marque and reprisal, commissioning private actors to fight enemies on behalf of the state. That 18th century naval warfare concept just got a 21st century upgrade. Vetted companies can now conduct "Cyber Surveillance Operations" and "Cyber Effects Operations" (disruption, degradation, destruction of criminal infrastructure) against transnational criminal orgs. The era of purely defensive cybersecurity is over.

@TFTC21

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.

@TFTC21

"474 gigawatts in the queue sounds huge. But if you have control of the load and they bring their own generation, literally, we can fit all of that." @MartyBent and @GideonOPowell on what's really happening in ERCOT and why the headline number is misleading. x.com/TFTC21/status/…

@TFTC21

CFTC releases topics for its Aug. 20 Innovation Advisory Committee meeting. Agenda focuses on "crypto’s regulatory evolution," efforts for greater clarity, modernizing rules, and frameworks that support innovation while protecting market integrity.

@TFTC21

UBS, Switzerland’s largest bank, discloses $83.2 million holding in BlackRock’s Bitcoin ETF.

@TFTC21

Franklin Templeton just signed on to @bitcoinpolicy's "Defenders Need the Frontier" open letter, which calls on frontier AI labs to give full-access intelligence to open-source defenders. Ties directly into the Bitcoin Red Team findings. The threat is real and the coalition is growing.

@TFTC21

A woman in Colorado says her smart thermostat blocked her from lowering the temperature, displaying a warning: "You are not allowed to lower your thermostat set point because the energy grid in your regional area is stressed." She had enrolled in Xcel Energy's voluntary demand-response program, which offers $50-150 in sign-up credits in exchange for letting the utility set limits on your AC. These programs are already running in multiple states. x.com/WallStreetApes…

@TFTC21

Bitcoin Red Team member @callebtc just dropped a field report after scanning virtually all of bitcoin's open source code with frontier AI. The summary: "everything is broken, bitcoin is burning" but it's getting stronger because of it. They're seeing "a massive collision between decades of human open source slop against 2 weeks of kimi k3." The low-hanging fruit is cleared, "a ton of real critical and high vulnerabilities" have been reported and validated by maintainers, unmaintained projects should be assumed vulnerable, and Lightning is "more broken than the average." He says "projects need their own AI audit pipeline going into the future." Oh, and "humans should never code in c (just stop)."

@TFTC21

Trezor just disclosed that one of its shipping providers suffered a data breach exposing names, addresses, phone numbers, and emails for ~13,700 customers across 7 countries. Devices and systems are unaffected, but expect a wave of phishing attempts targeting these users. x.com/Trezor/status/…

@TFTC21

Read more signal, less noise: tftc.io/bitcoin-brief

@TFTC21

The 256 Foundation just ran the first serious firmware security audit of Bitcoin mining hardware, and the results flip the conventional wisdom. After decompiling miner daemons and reviewing live connection tables on stock Bitmain S19j Pro and S21 units, the Red Team found no hashrate skimming, no kill switches and no covert beacons. Stock Bitmain was the cleanest firmware tested on hidden trust behavior. The third-party "optimized" firmware, LuxOS, VNISH, Braiins OS, produced the opposite tradeoff. Better features, but behavior an owner couldn't see in the dashboard and wouldn't knowingly choose. Better performance came with a larger trust surface. The broader audit filed 41 findings across the board: unauthenticated factory APIs, local paths to root access, fleet-default credentials, vendor SSH keys baked into firmware images and update mechanisms that don't verify what they install. These aren't exotic exploits. They're basic failures repeated across entire fleets. Three coordinated disclosures have been submitted to VNISH, Luxor and Braiins with 30-day response windows before technical details go public. Miners are not dumb appliances. They are high-value networked computers that earn money directly, run shared software across fleets and often sit on flat, poorly monitored networks. Hashrate decentralization is incomplete if operators can't inspect, constrain and replace the software controlling their machines. Bitcoin's security model depends on independent actors validating rather than trusting. Mining infrastructure should be held to the same standard.

@TFTC21

U.S. homebuyer demand just hit a record low. 967K buyers. 1.46M sellers. 80% of metros are now buyer's markets. But you need $110K/yr to afford a median home. Median income: $87K. The "buyer's market" is only for people who can already afford to buy. Everyone else is locked out.

@TFTC21

Trump just signed a memo authorizing private U.S. companies to conduct offensive cyber operations against foreign criminal organizations, under federal oversight. Cyber Letters of Marque, essentially. The U.S. Constitution (Article I, Section 8) has always allowed Congress to issue letters of marque and reprisal, commissioning private actors to fight enemies on behalf of the state. That 18th century naval warfare concept just got a 21st century upgrade. Vetted companies can now conduct "Cyber Surveillance Operations" and "Cyber Effects Operations" (disruption, degradation, destruction of criminal infrastructure) against transnational criminal orgs. The era of purely defensive cybersecurity is over.

@TFTC21

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.

@TFTC21

"474 gigawatts in the queue sounds huge. But if you have control of the load and they bring their own generation, literally, we can fit all of that." @MartyBent and @GideonOPowell on what's really happening in ERCOT and why the headline number is misleading. x.com/TFTC21/status/…