Hey all,

I’m Rizzo, the Bitcoin Historian. For more than a decade, I’ve been documenting Bitcoin’s evolution – the people, ideas, companies, and moments that defined it.

I spend every day tracking what’s shaping Bitcoin.

This week: ⚡ Bitcoin's Red Team has found nearly 8,000 bugs since the Coldcard hack ⚡ The Clarity Act finally got a floor date — September 15 ⚡ Plus, why I think the next wave of Bitcoin adoption won't look like the last one.

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I was on the Bitcoin Liberty Live podcast last week, and got a chance to answer a question I seldom get: why do I keep building new content platforms?

Fritz specifically asked me to talk about my history in crypto media, so let me actually walk through my product thinking here, because Bitcoin Treasuries wasn't an accident — it's the third deliberate bet I've made on who carries Bitcoin forward next. CoinDesk was TechCrunch for Bitcoin — built for the Silicon Valley crowd trying to understand the next hockey-stick technology. Bitcoin Magazine was the counterculture era — grassroots, peer-to-peer, a revolution you joined.

Bitcoin Treasuries is neither of those things – it's an institutional-only media outlet. A financial publication for digital assets, not the other way around. When you look at what we're publishing — Strive CEO Matt Cole this week, BlackRock's Robert Mitchnick the week before — we're not writing for people who want to have a social connection with a technology movement. We're writing for the people who want to do business with Wall Street. They're not here for the movement. They're here for the money.

That's exactly why we built the Bitcoin Treasuries conference this way. If you're used to a Bitcoin or crypto event — the panels, the vibe, the grassroots energy in the hallway — September 28th in New York is going to feel different on purpose. There's no entrepreneurial fringe track. No activist presence.

Adam Back, Grant Cardone, Eric Weiss are confirmed, with new XXI CEO Raphael Zagury, Jeff Garzik and Abra CEO Bill Barhydt joining this week.

Here's the part I think gets missed. A lot of people I respect — veteran builders, good technical minds — aren't thrilled about this model. Paul Storzc thinks the model is a scam. They're not thrilled about Michael Saylor these days, and they don't fully buy into what Bitcoin Treasuries as a movement is trying to do. I get it. But I don't think that discomfort changes where the next leg of adoption actually comes from.

I don't think Bitcoin culture is dying — it's just not going to be the vehicle that drives adoption. The people who orange-pilled me, the cypherpunk energy that built this thing — I genuinely worry about losing good people to disillusionment as this transition plays out. But wanting them to stay doesn't mean betting against demographic shifts.

STRC, SATA — these products are less than a year old. This is still cutting-edge territory, being built in real time, mostly by people who are more classically trained in finance than I am. That's the gap this conference and this platform are trying to close: not replacing the culture, but giving the institutional side a room of its own to build in.

Everyone has already imagined the quantum attack on Bitcoin. A headline. A hack. Billions gone overnight, on-chain, for the whole world to watch in real time.

Because there isn't one scenario. There are dozens. Jameson Lopp has spent months trying to think like the attacker instead of the defender, and what he keeps coming back to is that almost nobody outside a small circle of researchers has actually sat with how many ways this could play out — or how differently each one ends.

The scenario that unsettles him most isn't the loud one. It's the silent one.

"They would immediately just start running through a reverse order from top to bottom of every exposed pub key, ordered by how much Bitcoin is in it," Lopp explains. "But they would be doing this privately."

And that's just one branch. Lopp walks through the zero-day game theory sitting underneath it — the pressure to stay hidden, the risk of a rival attacker racing you to the same coins, the moment where waiting becomes more dangerous than moving. Then there's the timing question nobody agrees on. The disclosure question nobody agrees on. The question of whether it's already happening somewhere, right now, invisible, much like the Coldcard exploit.

CONGRESS KICKS THE CLARITY ACT INTO MIDTERM SEASON

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Senate majority leader Thune filed cloture on the motion to proceed just before the Senate left for its August recess, locking in a cloture vote for 2:15pm ET on September 15 — the day after lawmakers return, and the first real floor date this bill has had all year.

RED TEAM HAS FOUND 8,000 BUGS THAT COULD HACK BTC

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A volunteer audit calling itself the Bitcoin Red Team, funded by OpenSats and led by developer Calle and AnchorWatch CEO Rob Hamilton, has grown to 25 people using AI-assisted review to comb the ecosystem for the kind of bug that let attackers drain more than $100 million from Coldcard wallets in July. They're past 8,000 findings now, more than 1,200 of them rated high or critical.

Vortex, a Bitcoin developer and 2017 fork-wars veteran, predicted BIP-110 would end up a minority chain he dubbed "Bcash Junior." He undersold it: the fork produced a few blocks, then stalled cold, and Luke Dashjr was pulled as a Bitcoin BIP editor over it.

Check out the full conversation — taped days before the split — for Vortex's take on quantum. Plus: why BIP-110's backers now want to rewrite Bitcoin's mining algorithm entirely.