The Cop Who Robbed Silk Road | THE BITCOIN BRIEF 93

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

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NEWS Former National Crime Agency officer Paul Chowles has been ordered to repay GBP 1,810,678.93 after a Crown Prosecution Service confiscation order on 30 September; he stole 50 BTC in 2017 from a wallet holding coins seized from Silk Road 2.0 administrator Thomas White, worth about GBP 59,000 at the time, laundering it through Bitcoin Fog and spending it via CryptoPay and Wirex cards before Merseyside Police caught him in 2022; he was jailed for five and a half years in July 2025, and part of his confiscation order now pays off White's own unpaid confiscation order to the state -- CPS South Africa's Absa has become the first African bank to custody bitcoin, mainly for institutional clients, following Deutsche Bank's custody launch in September; head of digital assets Rob Downes said bitcoin will be the bank's largest custodied asset, with other digital assets to follow, in a market Chainalysis puts second in Sub-Saharan Africa by value received at about $36B -- Bitcoin Magazine Blink published its post-mortem of the 19 September attack: a permissions flaw in its admin tools, open since October 2023, let the attacker grant themselves admin rights through the OAuth consent page and take over 35 custodial accounts, withdrawing about 6.61 BTC from 24 of them; nine targeted accounts had 2FA on and all 18 login attempts to use them were refused, so nobody with 2FA lost anything; shareholders advanced the full amount as an interest-free loan so balances were restored by 24 September with fees refunded, and Blink is offering a 25% recovery bounty plus a matching 25% donation to circular economies including Bitcoin Beach, Bitcoin Ekasi and Afribit Kibera -- Blink Tether says USDT is coming to Bitcoin this month via the RGB protocol, issued by Utexo, whose co-founder Viktor Ihnatiuk says the company holds the commercial licence; Utexo can't freeze RGB addresses the way Tether freezes Ethereum ones, so instead it will blacklist UTXOs that become unredeemable at bridges and minting tools, with BTC-to-USDT swaps and BTC-backed lending to follow and Lightning support after launch; USDT first lived on Bitcoin via Omni back in 2014 -- CoinDesk A federal judge in Utah has granted a preliminary injunction blocking the VPN provisions of the state's SB 73, the first US law to penalise VPN use, which would have required adult sites to block VPN users or locate every visitor; the court found the law demands something technically impossible, though the separate ban on explaining how to use a VPN was not challenged and stays in force -- EFF Core Lightning is warning of active attacks on unpatched nodes: an operator on v26.06.7 reported an attacker opening a splice, routing a small keysend, then sending an error so the victim's node goes on-chain and sweeps its own output through the revocation path as if it had cheated; the path was already fixed in v26.06.8, and by 1 October Stacker News operators were reporting about 0.2 BTC lost between them, with one user reporting 4.88M sats across five incidents and a StartOS user reporting 3M sats; anyone on 26.06.7 or earlier should upgrade now, or restart with --offline if they can't upgrade immediately -- GitHub #9578, GitHub #9595, TFTC, Stacker News, Stacker News, CLN v26.06.8 The Dutch cabinet has told parliament that shares, bonds and options will move to a realised-gains tax from 2028, with other assets following in 2030; crypto isn't named among the 2028 instruments, so if it counts as an "other asset" Dutch bitcoin holders keep paying yearly tax on unrealised paper gains for two years longer than shareholders, and the tax-free allowance falls to EUR 1,000 per person -- NL Times, Bitcoin Magazine, Crypto Benelux The Liquid Federation says an independent external audit of Elements v23.3.4 is underway, fo