CHAINALYSIS HACKED IN AI-POWERED CYBERATTACK Blockchain analytics firm Chainalysis says hackers used “offensive agentic techniques” to gain unauthorized access to its internal systems and tools. The breach exposed customer names, email addresses, user IDs, and organizational roles. Chainalysis says it has found no evidence that passwords, MFA secrets, session tokens, or sensitive investigation data were compromised. The company says the attack is unrelated to the recent $6 billion Binance hack.

Eighteen years ago today, on Halloween 2008, Satoshi Nakamoto shared a nine page paper with a cryptography mailing list. Its first line pointed to the question this whole series has been circling. What if money could move between people “without going through a financial institution”? Over the past 30 days, we’ve walked through the history that made that question matter. A $100 note that is a very sophisticated bookmark. Yap’s stones and the ledger that lived in everyone’s memory. Rome quietly shrinking its coins. Goldsmiths writing more receipts than they had gold. A central bank created to fund a war. Nixon closing the gold window and calling it temporary. Banks typing money into existence, and a central bank tripling its balance sheet in under two years. The same pattern. Whoever controls the ledger can change the rules, and everyone else pays. Bitcoin was a different answer. Remember Yap, where the whole island was the ledger? Bitcoin rebuilt that for the world. As Lyn Alden puts it, it is “a ledger, but no single entity is in control of that ledger.” Thousands of computers keep a copy, and every one of them checks every payment. And like the rai stones, it takes real effort to make. New bitcoin can only be created by spending real world energy, through the same proof of work Adam Back used to fight spam. Every block of payments is sealed with that work and chained to the one before it. To change the past, you would have to redo all of it, faster than the rest of the world combined. Once a payment is in, it stays in. Your record, my record, and a shared record no one can alter. That changes what money can be. For the first time, we have money that can’t be cheated. A coin can’t be spent twice or counterfeited. The supply can’t be diluted or debased by central planners, because it is capped at 21 million by its code. There is no Cantillon effect, because no one gets to create money for themselves. New coins arrive on a fixed schedule, and they have to be earned with work. Anyone can use it freely. The network doesn’t ask who you are, where you live or what you believe. It is neutral, and it can’t be weaponised against you. And the person who made it walked away. No founder to pressure, no head office to raid, no one left to change the rules. It is still young. Its price swings wildly. Scams have used its name. Question it as hard as everything else in this series. Because that is the point. Money is not a law of nature. It is a choice, and for most of history, someone else made it for us. Nine pages handed that choice back. Debased coins. Phantom receipts. Broken promises. Printed money. We believe every way money has failed us throughout history finally has an answer. A fairer system now exists for all 8 billion of us. No permission needed. Happy Whitepaper Day. 🎃🧡 Thank you for walking alongside us for 31 days. What is the one thing from this series you’ll never see the same way again? 👇

I've built a website I always wished existed: a collection of all the books written about Bitcoin. I've found 110 of them. If I've missed any, let me know in the replies. btcbooks.org

In 1982, a young American cryptographer named David Chaum published a paper with a dry title, “Blind signatures for untraceable payments”. Inside was a radical idea. Digital money that could be spent online without anyone, not even the bank, being able to track who paid whom. Chaum didn’t just theorise. In 1989 he founded a company called DigiCash in Amsterdam and built it. His eCash let you withdraw digital coins from your bank and spend them privately, as anonymously as cash in a shop. For a moment in the 1990s, it looked like the future of money. The world’s biggest companies came knocking. Visa reportedly offered $40 million for a stake. Microsoft wanted eCash built into Windows 95, and reports put its offer at around $100 million. None of the deals happened. In 1995, Mark Twain Bank in St Louis became the first bank to offer eCash. By 1998 it had about 5,000 users. That same year, DigiCash filed for bankruptcy. Chaum later said he was too early, and that privacy was hard to explain to ordinary internet users. But critics pointed to a deeper flaw. eCash was private, but it still needed a bank to issue the coins and keep the ledger. And anything that depends on one company or one bank can be pressured, regulated or shut down. Remember the question that keeps coming up in this series. Who controls the ledger? Chaum had solved privacy. He hadn’t solved trust. His work did inspire a loose group of programmers and activists who called themselves the cypherpunks, and they spent the next decade trying to finish what he started. Tomorrow, the forgotten inventions that came before Bitcoin. Follow and ring the 🔔 on our profile so you don’t miss a day.

Fully agree, Anja, and thank you for doing the reading most people won’t (and @francispouliot_ for cc). In EU DAC8, our version of the OECD’s CARF, has applied since 1 January 2026. First reports go to tax authorities in 2027. Same pattern you describe: the power is set in the law, and the detail is filled in later by officials. We didn’t think “comment and hope” was enough, so we went to court. @BULLBITCOIN_ (together with #Paymium), has challenged France’s DAC8 decree before the Conseil d’État, asking for a referral to the EU Court of Justice. Our argument: general, indiscriminate collection of financial data on everyone, with no link to any suspicion, is disproportionate under the right to privacy and data protection. This isn’t a fringe argument. The EU Court has struck down mass data regimes before. “It’s for tax” has never been a blank cheque. After reading your tweet, I'd like to offer a few thoughts. The most intrusive parts of this bill aren’t CARF at all. Per-transaction reporting with transaction IDs, quarterly, with no threshold, seems to come from a separate domestic regime Australia is adding on top. That’s a domestic choice and it should be justified on its own terms. Australia is party to the ICCPR (Art. 17, privacy), and any bill introduced to Parliament needs a statement of compatibility with human rights. Ask Treasury to publish its assessment now, while the design can still change. Make the safety argument concrete. Every database built is a database that can leak, and here the leak comes with an address attached. Less intrusive tools already exist. The ATO can compel information when there’s a real reason to, and CARF itself works on aggregates, with details available on request. Targeted access beats mass collection. Your six asks are reasonable and modest. Good luck! 🧡

Why I think this crypto bill deserves real scrutiny I’m not against paying tax. I want to say that upfront, because whenever someone raises privacy, the first response is “what have you got to hide?” Nothing. And that’s the point. Wanting privacy is not evidence of wrongdoing. It’s a right. I’ve read the Treasury Laws Amendment Bill 2026: Tax Information Reporting, and the explanatory notes that come with it. Here’s why it worries me. 1. Parliament is being asked to approve a power, not a policy. The bill doesn’t list what data will be collected about you. Treasury’s notes give an “expected” list: your name, address and bank details, plus the date, time, value and ID of every transaction. But the final list is set by the ATO later, and it can change. It goes further. The bill lets the government sign Australia up to any future international data sharing framework by regulation. No new law. No vote to approve it. Treasury’s notes say these frameworks concern foreign residents. The bill itself doesn’t say that anywhere. A reassurance in the notes is not a protection in law. 2. It collects more than tax needs. Moving crypto to your own wallet isn’t a taxable event. You haven’t sold anything or made a gain. Yet that transfer must be reported. If it isn’t taxable, why does a tax law need to know about it? The only thing it reveals is where you keep your money, and that you hold it yourself. 3. The transaction ID could follow you forever. Every report includes a “transaction ID”. The bill doesn’t define it. If it means the blockchain ID, your name could be linked to your wallet and its entire history. The Bitcoin ledger is public and permanent. You can change a password. You can’t change a blockchain. The ATO doesn’t need this to calculate tax. The date, value and asset are enough. 4. It goes further than banks. Banks report your annual interest to the ATO, not every transaction. Transfers between your own accounts aren’t reported at all. Where cash is reported, there’s a $10,000 threshold. This bill reports every crypto transaction of any value, every quarter. The notes never explain why crypto should be treated more intrusively. 5. The safeguards aren’t there. No limit on how long data is kept. No security standard. No breach rules. No notice that you’ve been reported. No published human rights assessment or privacy impact assessment. Just one sentence pointing to existing privacy law. 6. This is a safety issue, not just a privacy one. A bank transfer can be frozen or reversed. A Bitcoin transfer can’t. If someone forces you to send it, it’s gone. Criminals know this. Physical attacks on crypto holders are rising worldwide, and gangs now pick victims using leaked databases and exchange records. In France, a tax official allegedly sold crypto investors’ details to criminals. Optus. Medibank. Latitude. Databases leak. In trying to stop one crime, tax evasion, we risk making another far easier. 7. It’s been rushed. We’ve had 13 days to comment. Treasury’s average is 27. That’s not enough time for a bill that hands this much power to officials. What I’m asking for Not to scrap it. To do it properly: A minimum threshold No blockchain IDs or wallet addresses No reporting of transfers to your own wallet Retention, security and breach rules written into the law Any new international data sharing approved by Parliament More time to consult Submissions close at midnight on 28 October. Anyone can make one, and it doesn’t need to be formal. consult.treasury.gov.au/c202…

Those who are opposed to corporations and favor government do not realize that government is simply the largest, most monopolistic corporation of all and it has a monopoly on violence.