Aron Clementi 🚀🍊

EXCLUSIVE: 🇨🇭.@adam3us's Bitcoin development firm @Blockstream expands its European footprint with the acquisition of Swiss blockchain startup Elysium Labs.

imagine you move funds off ledger after they leak 270k customer addresses then you move to coldcard, and a seed generation bug drains $130m from 5,200 wallets then you try trezor, and their support portal leaks 66k users so you give up on self custody and put it on coinbase, where someone bribes the support staff to get your financial info fine. you cash out. move it all to revolut like a normal person you survived it all today revolut hands your passport and full transaction history to someone pretending to be a government agency maybe its better to be broke

To those responsible for the theft of bitcoin from the Liquid Network: Blockstream will not pay a ransom for the return of stolen funds. Taking assets without authorization and withholding their return is a crime, not responsible disclosure. It is not white-hat activity. It is theft. We have engaged in good faith in an effort to secure the return of stolen user funds and protect the broader Bitcoin community. That effort should not be mistaken for acceptance of the actions taken nor of the terms being demanded. We will not be a party to the precedent that open-source software developed for the good of the Bitcoin community should subject its developers to paying a ransom that far exceeds their economic participation. Bitcoin is hard money and can’t be minted without costs, Bitcoin doesn’t haircut users to pay a ransom. To the Bitcoin community: We are fighting for what we believe in, for the users whose funds were taken, and for the principles on which Bitcoin was built. The community has demonstrated incredible resolve with teams of people dedicating their time in support of each other to identify and patch vulnerabilities in each other's products and systems. We are all driven by the mission that Bitcoin is the single best asset, for every person, company, and institution on the planet to invest, use, and build on. The world is a different place with the advancements of AI, and the Bitcoin community has responded with force to combat that threat. Damage has been done, battles have been lost, but on the whole the Bitcoin community is gaining ground in the war with bad actors. We want to thank the community for those efforts, for your support in hardening the network, helping users recover funds, and for your support in our assertion that crime does not deserve rewards. To those holding the stolen bitcoin: There is still an opportunity to resolve this responsibly. The bitcoin can be returned and we can revert to the standard of white-hat principals. However, if the funds are not returned, we will pursue every lawful avenue available to us. We will work with law enforcement, exchanges, service providers, forensic specialists, and other relevant parties to trace and recover the assets and identify those responsible. More importantly, Bitcoin is transparent by design and the community is made up of the most sophisticated engineers, cryptographers, and white-hat hackers globally. Transactions do not disappear, and neither does the evidence they leave behind. We will not pay for the return of stolen property. We will not abandon our users. The Bitcoin community will not stop pursuing the funds. Return the bitcoin.

Today is a dark day for freedom and democracy in Europe. General chat surveillance has been implemented in Brussels. A disgrace. The so-called Chat Control 1.0 cleared a crucial hurdle in the European Parliament today. This means platforms may once again be allowed to scan private messages, officially on a “voluntary” basis, but in practice this marks the return of indiscriminate monitoring of private communication. What makes this especially bitter is that a majority of the MEPs who voted were reportedly against it. According to Patrick Breyer, 314 MEPs voted against the regulation, 276 voted in favor and 17 abstained. And yet the rejection failed because it was not enough to have a simple majority of those voting. An absolute majority of all MEPs would have been required. That is the democratic scandal. When a majority of those present votes against a proposal and it still passes because a formal threshold is not reached, it does not feel like democratic decision-making to many citizens. It feels like a procedural trick. And it becomes even more problematic when you look at the context: Chat Control had already been rejected before. Yet the issue was put back on the agenda shortly before the summer break, through an urgent procedure, at a time when absences could become decisive. This is not just some technical regulation. It goes to the very core of private communication. It is about whether digital messages remain fundamentally private or whether platforms may systematically scan content again, without concrete suspicion, without a court order and without any individual cause. A free society must not turn private communication into a potential surveillance zone. Anyone who takes digital fundamental rights seriously cannot accept millions of innocent people being placed under general suspicion. Today, a dangerous signal was sent: fundamental rights can be hollowed out through procedural logic, timing and political tricks. Not through an open, clear and honest majority, but through a system in which absence effectively helps the supporters. This is a dark day for Europe. Not because the fight is over, but because today showed how easily digital fundamental rights come under pressure when surveillance logic, symbolic politics and institutional tricks come together. Anyone who wants a free internet, anyone who wants to protect private communication and anyone who takes democracy seriously should talk about this. Share this issue. Inform yourself. Look at who voted how. And never forget: freedom rarely disappears all at once. It disappears step by step, often in technical details, often in complicated procedures and often exactly when too few people are watching.