The BIP-110 crowd picked a new mining algorithm out of a hat in a Discord and set September 1 to fire every ASIC on earth, MSCI started the paperwork to decide whether Strategy is a company at all, and British Columbia spent $101,000 in one month housing one man in a 110-room hotel it bought for $55 million.
UPDATE The Dead Fork Has a New Plan: Fire Every Miner on September 1
What changed: Last week the fork died at two blocks and Dashjr lost his editor seat. This week the backers picked a new proof-of-work algorithm and set a hard-fork date.
The BIP-110 chain that stalled at two blocks last week is not letting the market have the last word. On August 11 its backers ran a deterministic random draw in the Bitcoin Knots Discord and picked BLAKE2b to replace SHA-256. Luke Dashjr proposed September 1 for the hard fork. A blocksize decrease and replay protection are still “under discussion,” which is a strange status for a fork three weeks out.
A proof-of-work change makes every existing Bitcoin ASIC scrap on the new chain. That is the stated point; the word the backers use is “fire” the miners. Bitcoin Gold tried this in 2017 and was 51%-attacked twice, including an $18 million double-spend. BLAKE2b is not fresh ground either — Siacoin mines with it, and that industry is already ASIC-dominated.
The fork chain has produced about four blocks against 300-plus on mainnet and has no exchange listing. Dashjr has now lost access to the BIP repository entirely: “This is just an abuse of power by Core.” Holders technically get forked coins. Claiming them is not safe until replay protection exists. Wait.
MSCI Is Deciding Whether Strategy Counts as a Company
On August 14 MSCI opened a consultation on whether “non-operating companies” belong in its global indexes. Run the proposed screen against May data and exactly three names get deleted: Strategy, Metaplanet, and a uranium holder called Yellow Cake. Feedback closes September 30, the decision lands by October 16, effective at the November review.
JPMorgan estimated an MSCI-only exclusion forces roughly $2.8 billion in passive selling of Strategy stock at November’s prices, and up to $8.8 billion if FTSE Russell and S&P follow. Index money sells on the rebalance date whether it likes the company or not. Norway’s sovereign fund holds a record 11,549 BTC of indirect exposure, 85.8% of it through Strategy stock, right as the committee votes on the stock.
Strategy’s mNAV sits at 0.68, down from 3.4 in November 2024; the market already values the company below its bitcoin, and it sold 1,690 coins last week at a loss to defend STRC. MSCI tried this screen in October and backed off in January. Strategy’s reply on X: “Bitcoin doesn’t need MSCI. Neither does Strategy.”
13,689 Trezor Customers Just Became a Mailing List for Wrench Attacks
Trezor disclosed Wednesday that ShipMonk, the company that ships its wallets, was breached through a SQL-injection zero-day in an internal analytics tool. Orders from May 10 to August 8 across seven countries: 11,742 customers lost name, email, phone and full shipping address; another 1,947 lost name, city and email. Trezor’s own systems were untouched. No keys, no funds.
Correct technical framing, wrong threat model. A wallet vendor’s shipping database is a verified list of people who own bitcoin, matched to home addresses. Ledger’s 2020 breach leaked 272,000 records and that list still produces phishing and door-knocks six years later. This is Trezor’s third data incident since 2022 and, by its own account, the first to leak addresses and phone numbers.
Same week, France’s tax authority disclosed a breach covering 678,437 people, including 386 who declared over €1 million. Jameson Lopp: “More bad news for Bitcoiners living in the leading country for wrench attacks.” The takeaway stands: ship wallets to a PO box, never your house, and treat every KYC form as eventually public.
$101,000 a Month, 110 Rooms, One Tenant
The Luugat is the former Howard Johnson at 1176 Granville in Vancouver. B.C. bought it in June 2020 for $55 million, about $500,000 a room. The province is closing it, and the other hundred-plus tenants left by the June 30 deadline. One man did not, and the Ministry of Housing confirmed that keeping the building open for him cost $101,000 in July alone.
Ryan Donnelly has a documented seizure disorder and says the alternatives offered don’t fit his medical needs. Worth saying plainly: the story is the system, not the man. The Luugat and its two sister SROs drew 6,641 police and fire calls in five years, up 822%. Housing Minister Christine Boyle declined an interview, then allowed the situation “has not been ideal for a long time.”
For scale: the Lieutenant Governor’s suite at the Fairmont Hotel Vancouver runs about $70,000 a month, breakfast included. Councillor Sarah Kirby-Yung’s review was one word: “insane.” At the July run rate, that is $1.2 million a year to keep a closing building open for one person.
The Ontario Line Is Now $34 Billion. It Was Announced at $10.9 Billion.
Metrolinx CEO Michael Lindsay confirmed the number on August 11, dropped almost as an aside while announcing a $4.32 billion contract for three kilometres of tunnel under Pape. The Ontario Line, sold in 2019 at $10.9 billion with a 2027 opening, now costs roughly $34 billion and opens in the “early 2030s.” The east-end elevated contract isn’t awarded yet, so $34 billion is a floor.
The line is 15.6 kilometres — about $2.2 billion per kilometre against a global median under $300 million. Toronto’s stations average roughly 225,000 cubic metres of excavation; comparable Paris stations run 120,000. Lindsay blames “one of the worst supply chain shocks in the last several decades.” Doug Ford’s 2019 pitch: “faster, better, cheaper.”
Nobody has been fired. The NDP wants a value-for-money audit. The precedent is the same agency’s Eglinton Crosstown, which opened this February six years late and a billion over its revised budget, also with no consequences. Announce a number, triple it, call it a supply shock, award the next contract.
The Man Who Shot a Toronto Cop Was Already Wanted in Two Other Regions
At 3:20 a.m. on August 13, a three-year Toronto police veteran was shot in the upper thigh making an arrest in an e-bike robbery investigation near Bloor and Sherbourne. Colleagues applied a tourniquet at the scene; officers never returned fire. He is the second Toronto officer shot in the line of duty this year, after Const. Marc Pinizzotto was killed in June.
The accused, Stefano Edwards, 27, faces 14 charges including attempted murder — two of them for failing to comply with a release order. At the time of the shooting he was out on conditions from a 2024 weapons prohibition and wanted on outstanding firearms warrants in both Peel and Waterloo. Three police services had paper on him, and he was on a Toronto street with a concealed gun at 3 a.m.
Chief Myron Demkiw called that “deeply troubling.” Doug Ford said judges who release repeat offenders “should be fired.” Bill C-14’s reverse-onus bail rules had been in force for 29 days. Toronto Police Association president Clayton Campbell needed five words: “here we go again.”
- Riot signs a $9.1B, 20-year AI compute deal with Anthropic as hashrate slips 17% off its record
- The OCC hands a bank charter to the Trump-family-linked World Liberty trust
- The SEC pulled its own ‘Regulation Crypto’ vote the day before it was set to pass
- French tax authority breach exposes 678,000 people as wrench attacks pile up
- Boltz founders exit as an unnamed group of ‘veteran Bitcoiners’ takes over the suspended service
- Wallet of Satoshi says it’s going self-custodial; Stacker News says read the fine print
- Shakepay launches a savings account paying up to 5% weekly in bitcoin
- Norway’s sovereign fund hits record indirect Bitcoin exposure via Strategy stock
- Metaplanet denies selling $320M in bitcoin after wallet moves spook the tape
- Wall Street files for 32 NHL team ETFs tracking on-ice performance
- Bybit sues North Korea and the Lazarus Group over the $1.46B 2025 heist
- Bitcoin Core v32.0 targets October 10 as the feature freeze lands
- The Canadian Bitcoin Conference 2026 is cancelled outright
- The Senate Speaker’s entourage billed $875,677 for foreign travel since 2023
- 17 Conservative MPs privately doubt Poilievre can beat Carney, CTV reports
- Canadian families paid over $50,000 in tax on average in 2025, more than food, shelter and clothing combined
- Canada’s young adults make less than 50 years ago while senior incomes surged
- Ontario bars people without legal status and temporary visa holders from welfare, effective immediately
- Liberal MP Shaun Chen resigns over car-crash injuries; his office confirms he was in China five months later
- Insolvencies hit their highest June level since the 2009 financial crisis
- Proof-of-citizenship processing now takes more than two years, with 121,800 in the queue
- Montreal police take down a high-powered surveillance camera two days after Radio-Canada asked about it
- B.C. discloses 135,000+ hectares committed to First Nations treaty deals, rejects ‘secret’ framing
- A federal audit finds suspected fuel theft and contract splitting at Canada’s Nairobi embassy
- A Toronto man ‘worked from home’ at Canada’s Wonderland for over a year
@CanadianBTCPod • @joeytweeets • @thebtcpricebot