TFTC

Coinbase's VP of Tax, Lawrence Zlatkin, has asked Congress for a de minimis capital gains exemption on small bitcoin payments. If spending bitcoin on lunch means doing tax math afterward, it's never going to work as money, and Washington knows it.

Bitcoin just gave back the entire August rally that set a record for the biggest weekly dollar gain ever. It is back at mid-August prices and down 7.0% in 24 hours. What powered that run isn't around anymore, so what holds it up now? • Week ended Aug 23: the largest weekly dollar gain on record, $14,264 (22.7%) to a $77,387 close, The Block reports • The Treasury said it would at least double long-dated buybacks, from $2B to a minimum of $4B per operation, running Sept 9 through Nov 4. Outlets tied the rally to that and to a short squeeze • Saturday night on Coinbase, bitcoin hit $61,946 at 8:45 PM ET, then bounced 2.5% to a high of $63,517 by 9:10 PM ET • It was at $63,418 at 9:10 PM ET, near the lowest levels since mid-August • Bitcoin ETFs are down about $1.9B in November through Nov 11, per our tracker The rally was tied to a Treasury decision and forced buying from shorts. With the larger buybacks over and ETF money now flowing out, there isn't much underneath it. If the move came from Washington pulling a lever, why would anyone be shocked when it left with the buyers?

Thomas Massie just got the 218 signatures he needed to force a House vote on a second Epstein files bill, and Speaker Mike Johnson is calling it a "political stunt." A discharge petition lets 218 members bypass leadership and bring a bill straight to the floor, so leadership can't simply bury it. • Rep. John Garamendi (D-Calif.) provided the decisive 218th signature • Three Republicans signed with Massie: Brian Fitzpatrick, Nancy Mace and Ralph Norman • The bill would let state attorneys general, district attorneys, members of Congress and Epstein's victims sue the US attorney general for withholding, redacting, delaying or failing to publish Epstein records • Massie introduced it July 15 with Ro Khanna and Teresa Leger Fernandez, after saying compliance with the first law was incomplete • No floor vote has happened yet and the bill has not passed Massie says the bill "lets you sue the Attorney General for not following this law." The first Epstein law forced the DOJ to release records, and this one hands enforcement to people outside the DOJ. A bill that only lets people sue over withheld files is a strange thing for the Speaker to dismiss as a stunt. We should all be watching that vote closely.

Bitcoin as a medium of exchange for AI agents is decades away, says @_checkmatey_, and he thinks nobody should stress about it. "We are decades away from that being like a centerpiece of the equation."

Hackers' AI agents handed Amazon their own campaign records. Amazon's decoy servers, posing as AI model APIs, caught requests from Oct. 3 to Nov. 5 that carried the agents' operating memory. So who was running them? • Amazon assesses with moderate confidence the agents ran on ARTEX, an open-source AI pentesting framework, citing prompt references to ARTEX tooling • It points to separate Chinese-nexus groups, based on simplified Chinese prompts, China time-zone settings and common tooling • One campaign stole credentials to reach AI models, and the stolen keys paid for further LLM inference • Another used real-time deepfake injection to try to get past a crypto exchange's KYC • The FBI has issued a flash alert, and Censys counted 1,465 hosts with exposed ARTEX consoles as of Nov. 4 Amazon says none of the techniques were new, and that is the point. Open-source tooling plus stolen keys makes this cheap to run at scale, and the developer has since closed the source anyway. If agents can fake a face in real time to go after an exchange's selfie check, why would anyone want their face sitting in a KYC database in the first place?

Bitcoin's UTXO set cannot be forked or replicated, and @_checkmatey_ says that is why Zcash and every other coin fall short. "There is only one original invention of digital scarcity."

Bitcoin matched the big semiconductor ETF since January 2023, bear market included, and @_checkmatey_ says AI did not eat its lunch. "A lot of ink has been spilled about how AI has eaten Bitcoin's lunch."

Bitcoin at 73K sits in the bottom 25% of its trading history, and @_checkmatey_ says you will never regret accumulating in that zone. "I love a pullback. Here's the pullback, guys. What do you do with it?"

Bitcoin is at $65,077, down 14.5% from last Saturday's high of $76,152. Glassnode says the biggest cluster of long liquidations sits near $60K, about 8% lower, and price hasn't tested those entries since it shot up in August.

TFTC 810 w/ @_Checkmatey_: "We're at Q25, the bottom twenty-five percent. You will never regret accumulating Bitcoin in that zone. And here we are at 73K and people are scared." We discuss: ⚡ Seller exhaustion ⚡ The 2023 setup ⚡ Who's selling now