LuxWire

Bitcoin Fact #25: Bitcoin's supply rules have been broken by a bug once, and the rules won. On August 15, 2010, a flaw let someone create more than 184 billion Bitcoin in block 74,638, and within hours developers released a fix and the network moved to a chain without those coins. #BitcoinFactOfTheDay

Binance has paused withdrawals while it investigates a security issue that CoinDesk reports as a multi-billion hack. CZ says "it does look like a hack on Binance" and expects all user funds to be fully covered. Tether froze at least $971M in USDT and Circle about $823M in USDC. Binance says user funds are safe.

Your dollar has been a broken promise since August 15, 1971. Bitcoin is the first money nobody can break a promise on. Porter Stansberry's book "2029: The End of America" traces how the dollar got here. It took 27 years to build the promise and one Sunday night to break it. THE DEAL July 1944. Delegates from 44 Allied nations meet at Bretton Woods, New Hampshire. The war is ending and the world needs a new money system. The deal: every major currency is pegged to the dollar, and the dollar is pegged to gold at $35 an ounce. Foreign central banks can hand in their dollars and get gold. The dollar becomes "as good as gold." It becomes the world's reserve currency. THE FLAW In 1960 economist Robert Triffin warned the system could not last. To supply the world with dollars, America had to run deficits. The more dollars piled up overseas, the less anyone could believe there was enough gold behind them. Then Washington made it worse. The Vietnam War and the Great Society were paid for with deficits, not taxes. Dollars multiplied. The gold did not. THE RUN France 🇫🇷 saw it first. Its finance minister, Valéry Giscard d'Estaing, called the dollar system an "exorbitant privilege." In 1965 Charles de Gaulle began trading dollars for gold, even sending ships to bring it home. Others followed. America's gold stock, more than 20,000 tonnes in the early 1950s, fell to about 9,000 by 1971. On August 12, 1971, Britain 🇬🇧 asked the US Treasury to "cover" about $3 billion of its dollar reserves, a request Washington read as a call for gold. THE DEFAULT Friday, August 13, 1971. Nixon gathers his economic team in secret at the Camp David presidential retreat. Among those at the table: Treasury Secretary John Connally, Fed Chair Arthur Burns, Treasury's Paul Volcker and budget director George Shultz. Nixon orders that no calls go out except to gather information. Over three days they decide the fate of the world's money. Sunday night, August 15, 1971. Nixon goes on TV and "temporarily" closes the gold window. Foreign governments can no longer redeem dollars for gold. Temporary lasted forever. By 1973 the peg system was gone. The dollar was backed by nothing but Washington's word. THE PATCH After 1973 the dollar needed a new anchor. It got oil. The US and Saudi Arabia agreed oil would sell in dollars and Saudi surpluses would be recycled into US Treasuries. The petrodollar was born. That kept the world buying dollars for 50 years. No treaty ever required it. It rests on habit and Washington's word. THE BILL A dollar from August 1971 buys about 12 cents of goods today by the government's own CPI. That is a loss of 88% of its purchasing power. Gold, once $35, now trades in the thousands. Federal debt has passed $40.5 trillion. Nobody voted for this. It was done by announcement on a Sunday night. THE ZERO YEARS Without gold, the only limit left is the Fed's own judgment. Twice it has taken rates to zero. December 16, 2008: the Fed cuts its target to 0 to 0.25%. It stays there seven years, until December 2015. March 15, 2020: a second emergency cut in two weeks, on a Sunday. In the Fed's own words, it "decided to lower the target range for the federal funds rate to 0 to 1/4 percent." It stays there two years, until March 2022. The same Sunday in 2020 did something quieter. The Fed cut reserve requirements, the share of deposits banks must hold back, to zero, effective March 26. The top rate on checking accounts had been 10%. It is still zero today. No rule requires a bank to hold any share of checking deposits in reserve. Today the range sits at 3.75% to 4%, held on October 28. Zero is always one Sunday away. THE EXIT Here is the lesson of 1971: any money with a window can have that window closed. Gold had a window. The dollar had a window. A central bank can always change the rules. Bitcoin has no window. 21 million coins. Fixed in code. No president, no Fed chair, no emergency broadcast can print one more. Anyone can verify the supply. Anyone can hold it themselves. No one can freeze it on a Sunday night. Fiat is a promise. Bitcoin is a rule. The dollar broke its promise 55 years ago. Bitcoin is the only real path to financial freedom. 🟠

A hardware implant was reported inside a Trezor hardware wallet. Trezor says a customer reported a hardware implant in a Safe 5 bought from CryptoBilis, a reseller in Southeast Asia. Trezor has not yet examined the device but treats the report as credible. Bought a Trezor from CryptoBilis since March 2026: move your funds to a new wallet with a fresh seed now. Restoring the old backup on another device does not fix it. No losses have been reported, and Trezor says it has seen no cases outside CryptoBilis.