Did Bitcoin Just Go Dark? | THE BITCOIN BRIEF 92

A weekly news show informing you on the latest in Bitcoin, privacy and open source tech, hosted by Ungovernables, Max and Q.

AOB Max: flooded the downstairs after leaving a sink running over the weekend, spent Saturday ripping out old timber and clutter he'd been meaning to clear out anyway, then a full kids' day that left them sick afterwards Q: spent the weekend building his own local, voice-controlled AI assistant after watching the new Spider-Man film Q: read this week's letter #7 from Keone, "Notes from the Inside", posted on The Rage -- a tough one on conditions moving between facilities; audio version out later this week, timed with Rick's Free Samurai prize draw Q: enjoyed last week's Freedom Tech Friday listener questions episode, ranging from Bitcoin to Monero to privacy, multisig and local AI NEWS Research lab [alloc] init, founded by Misha Komarov with Clara Shikhelman as Head of Protocol Research, published Shielded Bitcoin, a proposal for Zcash-style private transfers needing no soft fork; shielded transactions are encrypted data blobs carried in OP_RETURN or witness data that Bitcoin only orders and timestamps, while separate indexer software checks zero-knowledge proofs and stops double-spends; value sits in encrypted "notes" spent by publishing a one-time nullifier that proves the spend without revealing which note it is; the peg moving real BTC in and out isn't designed yet and rests on an unproven witness-encryption scheme called PIPEs v2; CoinDesk reports fees around 4x normal, a trusted setup and no launch date -- Bitcoin Magazine, CoinDesk, allocinit Blockstream published its own post-mortem of the 6 September Liquid exploit: a rangeproof-cache flaw dating to April 2018 ("Bug A"), responsibly disclosed 2 August and patched by 11 August, introduced a second flaw ("Bug B") where unprefixed cache keys let two different proofs collide; the attacker used it to mint about 4,000 unbacked LBTC and peg out 3,996 BTC through SideSwap, draining the reserve from about 4,205 BTC to 197 BTC; 3,400 BTC was returned and the network resumed 9-10 September, but about 602 BTC remains with the attacker and peg-outs stay paused with no date; the 11-of-15 federation multisig worked exactly as designed, the failure was in the software deciding what counted as a valid transaction -- Blockstream Bitget detected unauthorised transfers from its hot and warm wallets at 18:31 UTC on 24 September and froze withdrawals platform-wide; CEO Gracy Chen says the attacker compromised a backend system, spoofed transaction data and triggered Bitget's own approval process, with private key compromise ruled out; the loss was revised from $351.6M to about $387.5M once Zcash and TRON assets were counted, mostly ETH, TRX and USDT with no bitcoin taken; Circle and Tether froze about $318K, while roughly $83M in native XRP moved beyond Ripple's power to freeze; North Korea attribution comes from Bitget, Elliptic and MetaMask's Taylor Monahan, not yet from any government; Bitget says its User Protection Fund covers the loss and is reopening withdrawals in phases from 28 September -- CoinDesk, TFTC, Bitcoin Magazine, CoinDesk (freezes), CoinDesk (XRP), Bitget AMLBot traced part of the Bitget haul from TRX to USDT, bridged to Ethereum, swapped to about 145 ETH, then through THORChain into about 4.59 BTC, with roughly 4 BTC of that linked to an unnamed Wasabi coinjoin round and the addresses "blacklisted"; most of the stolen funds have not moved -- AMLBot on X, crypto.news Matt Morehouse disclosed two denial-of-service bugs in Eclair v0.13.1 and earlier, fixed in v0.14.0: oversized feature-bit init messages could allocate about 300MB per message and crash a node, and zlib-compressed channel queries could inflate 64KB into 64MB; his smite fuzzer found the first, an LLM-assisted search for similar code patterns found the second -- Delving Bitcoin Lightning Labs published four security advisories: a High-rated bug let an invoice be marked settled after an