8-28-2025
Bitcoin advocates demand developer protections in Congress. Bukele toys with Bitcoin bets. CFTC deploys Nasdaq surveillance. Tether pushes USDT on RGB. AI vibe hacks and wrench attacks expose growing risks. It's the news you can use.
Bitcoin advocates finally told Congress what needed to be said: protect developers or lose the industry. A coalition of over 100 builders, investors, and lobby groups signed a letter demanding explicit safeguards for open source coders. Without it, they say, they won’t back new market structure bills. That’s a hard line, and it’s about time someone drew it. Developers aren’t banks. They write code. If regulators force them into “custodian” boxes, the United States will continue bleeding talent overseas. The drop from 25% to 18% of open source devs based in the U.S. proves the point.
Meanwhile, El Salvador’s president Naib Bukele amused himself by trolling prediction markets. Platforms like Kalshi and Polymarket are running bets on whether the nation’s Bitcoin stash hits $1 billion this year. After Bukele teased that he could “do the funniest thing right now,” odds spiked overnight. He could push the number higher by buying, or tank the bets by selling. Either way, he keeps the world guessing. The bigger question is why his government took IMF loans in the first place while still posturing as a Bitcoin champion.
Back home, regulators are arming up. The CFTC just announced it will use Nasdaq’s market surveillance platform to monitor crypto trading and prediction markets. They call it oversight. I call it putting more eyes on a casino. Derivatives are still nothing more than bets dressed up as sophistication. They don’t discover price, they don’t improve value, they just siphon money from the uninformed to the insiders. And now the CFTC wants tools to track that circus 24/7.
Tether also made waves by announcing USDT support on RGB, a smart contract protocol tied loosely to Bitcoin and Lightning. They claim it “inherits Bitcoin security.” I’m not buying it. The moment you leave the base chain, you leave behind the full guarantees of Bitcoin’s timechain and consensus rules. Still, compared to running USDT on Tron or Ethereum, RGB at least keeps the conversation closer to Bitcoin rails. Some Bitcoiners are furious, but given Tether’s history of chain-hopping, maybe it’s not worth the outrage. It certainly isn't worth mine.
The darker side of this week’s news came from two fronts: AI-powered cybercrime and old-fashioned violence. Anthropic admitted criminals are using Claude to run ransomware campaigns, even calculating ransoms and writing notes for maximum psychological pressure. Vibe hacking it's called. Sort of weaponized social engineering on autopilot. At the same time, France saw yet another wrench attack, with a former crypto trader kidnapped and beaten until a ransom demand was paid. France now leads Europe in crypto-related kidnappings.
The through-line is clear. While lobbyists push for legal shields, governments ramp surveillance, corporations toy with stablecoin rails, and nation-states troll markets, the individual Bitcoiner still carries the highest personal risk. Developers need protection; traders need anonymity; and people need to stop broadcasting wealth with swag.
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