Friends,
It’s been a turbulent month for Bitcoin.
First, artificial intelligence (AI) identified a hidden bug in a popular hardware device’s firmware... and then someone used AI to exploit that bug and steal somewhere around 2,000 bitcoins – all from people who were using a relatively complex cold storage set-up.
On top of that, a contentious battle within Bitcoin’s development community boiled over to the point where it caused a soft fork over the weekend. That’s where a second blockchain splits off and diverges from the main chain – creating a new cryptocurrency.
That soft fork appears to have petered out very quickly, and it doesn’t look like much will come of the new coin... but it reminded me of the block size war from ten years ago – only much more mild.
Back then you could still run a small-scale Bitcoin mining operation profitably, and I had two Antminer S9’s running partially on solar power. That gave me a front row seat to the war’s twists, turns, and deceits. And I promise, the real story is much more interesting and nuanced than the whitewashed version people are told today.
So in episode 17 of The Phoenician League podcast, we’ll talk about the ColdCard exploit and what a robust self-custody set-up looks like today. Then I’ll share my memories of the block size war with you. If you didn’t see it live, I expect my view may be a little surprising.
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