TFTC

The typical household 75 and older is worth $504,900.

The typical household under 35 is worth $33,000.

That's a 15x gap, per the Fed's 2025 Survey of Consumer Finances.

OpenAI is planning a policy and PR push right after Tuesday's midterms, Axios reports.

The plan: rebrand data centers as "AI compute campuses" and ask Congress for mandatory "speed limits" on the most powerful AI systems.

Binance has resumed withdrawals on all 15 networks and assets in its first phase.

Net outflow since 06:00 UTC: roughly $3.64 billion, or 2.1% of its $171 billion in AUM.

Binance: "Rest assured that market conditions are stable."

Sweeper bots burned $4,800 of bitcoin in fees within minutes after a user withdrew to an insecure address.

The winning bot kept just $12.67. The miner got the rest.

The S&P 500 is just 3% below the record high it set on October 6.

Its worst drop this year was 9.1%, during the Iran war in March.

Zelensky says Ukraine, the US and Russia are preparing a trilateral meeting in the first half of November.

He discussed it with Erdoğan, including holding talks in Türkiye and involving Europe.

No date or venue confirmed yet.

Where it all started.

18 years ago a post on an obscure mailing list changed the course of human history.

Happy White Paper Day.

OpenAI's latest funding round values it at $1.25 trillion, short of the $1.4 trillion it was targeting.

It had been seeking $30 billion.

Annualized revenue is $50 billion, with a goal of $70 billion by year-end.

An extortion group called n0n published the passwords and keys to a firewall that guards the link Finzly's bank clients use to send payment instructions to the Federal Reserve.

Finzly connects 11 listed banks and credit unions to ACH, Fedwire and FedNow through a single shared connection. The leaked files describe a direct link labeled "FED" and rules for FedNow and FedACH traffic.

Finzly says it rotated its keys and credentials and that the files can't get anyone into its systems. The Fed says its payment services were not impacted.

The passwords were the easy part to fix. The map of how everything connects is still out there.

h/t

https://www.americanbanker.com/news/extortion-group-leaks-keys-to-bank-vendors-fed-firewall

"Microsoft's revenue went from 198 billion to 332 billion in the last four years, while staff only increased by 2,000 people."

Chamath Palihapitiya on AI productivity gains at Microsoft.

"That $80 billion loss is a phantom number."

David Sacks on why Anthropic's $80 billion loss was not real.

"There's no single company in the world that is doing more to race towards full RSI than anthropic."

David Sacks on Anthropic and the coming split with the doomers.

"The AI complex has gotten so big that it now competes with U.S. Treasuries."

Chamath Palihapitiya on the systemic risk of AI competing with Treasuries.

"The entire United States economy is levered to the AI complex."

Chamath Palihapitiya on AI companies competing with the US Treasury for capital.

French lawmakers approved a tax of €0.055 (5.5 cents) per gigabyte of data that companies like Netflix and YouTube send to French users.

The vote was 11 to 10. Only 35 of 577 lawmakers were present.

Supporters say it could raise up to €10 billion a year. The tax falls on the companies, not users directly, but the cost could be passed on to subscribers.

The French government opposed it, warning it would hit smaller French companies hardest. VLC says it would cost it over €1 million a year.

Trump says he is looking into the $6.3 billion Binance hack, as Binance says it has the situation pretty much under control.

CFTC proposes a federal registration option for crypto exchanges.

Selig: "Markets are best protected when regulated in the U.S."

Avenger air defense systems armed with Stinger missiles are now deployed near Mar-a-Lago, per the Palm Beach Post.

They sit on a barge next to the estate and near the airport where Air Force One parks, at the Secret Service's request.

"She was stuffing her bag with chickens, just literally stealing chicken for dinner because it's that bad."

Broken Country Film director Mira Metter on Canada's food bank crisis.

Chainalysis, the firm that tracks crypto hackers, has been hacked itself.

In a customer email seen by International Cyber Digest, the company says an external attacker used "offensive agentic techniques" to gain unauthorized access to its systems. Exposed data: user IDs, full names, email addresses and organization role labels.

Chainalysis says there is no indication that investigation content, passwords, MFA secrets or session tokens were accessed. It also says the incident is unrelated to the $6.3B Binance heist.

The notice has circulated as a shared customer email. There is no broad public statement from the company yet.

.The Rage says only about $2.7 billion of the $6.36 billion stolen from Binance has been frozen.

Tether, Circle, Ripple and World Liberty Financial froze about $2.67 billion in stablecoins. Arbitrum's Security Council froze 8,426 ETH and 74.6 million ARB.

The attacker raced the freezes, selling USDT to market makers and borrowing ETH against USDT on Aave. It still holds more than 420,000 ETH and 18,270 BTC, about $2.4 billion beyond any issuer's reach.

TRM Labs attributes the theft to North Korea's TraderTraitor.

North Korea-linked hacks now average $185.65M per incident in 2026 YTD, up from $50.65M in 2021.

That is about 3.7x larger per hack.

The cleanest sats are the ones you mine yourself.

(simpleminingio) hosts your miner. Fresh bitcoin, direct to your wallet.

No exchange. No KYC. No one in between.

https://www.tftc.io/simplemining/

Anthropic may get a junk credit rating despite its mega-IPO.

Blackstone has warned investors that Anthropic is likely to receive a below-investment-grade credit rating, in the double-B range, after its planned IPO. That reverses earlier expectations for investment grade.

The downgrade risk complicates Anthropic's plans to borrow cheaply for AI infrastructure buildout. An investment-grade rating would unlock lower borrowing costs for projects like Project North Star, the company's $63B chip financing deal where Blackstone is an anchor investor.

Anthropic reportedly holds over $112B in cash and equivalents, with investors expecting the IPO could raise ~$100B. But a junk rating means bond market access comes at a premium, if it comes at all.

https://www.ft.com/content/59383c7f-8d82-493f-bf01-d2e862a1018f?syn-25a6b1a6=1

"I literally got crack smoke blown in my face."

on anarcho-tyranny in New York City.

Tether reports ~$1.5B in net operating profit for Q3 2026. USDT in circulation: ~183.5B.

Excess reserves nearly doubled to $7.95B from $4.1B at the end of Q2.

Google's Project Suncatcher prototype satellite is working in orbit.

Engineers sent a command up, booted the TPU, ran a prompt, and got a full response back on earth.

The first output: a haiku.

"You can just opt out. You don't have to ask for permission to adopt a better money."

on Bitcoin as the exit from broken money.

The Digital Chamber is asking Congress to pass a targeted bill before the 119th Congress ends: customer asset protections, CFTC oversight of U.S. exchanges, and baseline cybersecurity standards.

Its letter cites the $6.3 billion Binance theft.

https://digitalchamber.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/10/Congressional-Letter-on-Consumer-Protection-10.30.26.pdf

Ten tech names are now in a bear market, and Intel and Western Digital sit at -54% each.

Columbia engineers built a living knee replacement and it just passed a simulated walk.

The 3D-printed implant was placed in a cadaver knee and attached to robotic machinery. It withstood hundreds of pounds of force, similar to an adult striding briskly, with no cracks or malfunctions, according to the Washington Post.

The design uses a biodegradable scaffold seeded with cartilage and bone cells. The scaffold supports the joint while the cells grow new tissue. It is meant to dissolve over time, leaving living cartilage and bone behind.

Preliminary human testing could start in about 18 months if the research goes well.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/wellness/2026/10/15/scientists-may-have-key-treating-arthritis-regrowing-knee/

Binance CEO Richard Teng confirms attackers used Ethereum's EIP-7702 delegation mechanism to gain execution authority over a Binance hot wallet.

The exploit bypassed the exchange's normal transaction controls.

Indirect bidders took 45.7% of Monday's $69B 2-year auction, the lowest share in 18 two-year auctions going back to May 2025.

Your AI can pull this straight from the TFTC MCP. No burning tokens scraping Treasury PDFs.

https://tftc.io/ai

"This film was funded primarily through Bitcoin."

Mike Werry on why Broken Country was funded with bitcoin.

"To raise a family in 500 square feet, it's an impossibility."

Broken Country Film director Mira Metter on Canada's housing crisis.

Higgsfield promised to open source its product and never did.

ComfyUI's community built open source alternatives anyway.

Now Higgsfield sent a cease and desist demanding the challenge be taken down within 48 hours.

ComfyUI CEO: "When we started Comfy, we made the community a promise. Our product stays open, free, and yours. We've kept it every day since, and one letter isn't going to change that."

Binance's SAFU fund holds about 15,000 BTC, worth roughly $1 billion.

The fund exists to cover eligible security-related losses for users.

"People will become, begin to hunt, live and fish in city parks."

Broken Country Film director Mira Metter on Canada's own 2040 forecast.

"Now Americans make $77,000 or so on average. Canadians still make $53,000 on average."

and (mjwerry) on Canada's GDP per capita.

"It's important to distinguish that it's not free. Health care, like, there is no free lunch, right?"

Broken Country Film director Mira Metter on Canada's health care.

Sam Altman on local inference: "from a global allocation perspective, actually it's quite terrible to have everybody have a bunch of the world's limited supply of DRAM sitting in their own computer and being used five percent of the time."

The Washington Post, like the WSJ, is now sounding the alarm on Brazil's authoritarianism.

The point, Glenn Greenwald says, isn't that Bolsonaro is innocent. It's that Judge Alexandre de Moraes is a tyrant who persecutes political enemies with no limits.

The Post editorial is titled "When judges become prosecutors." It says Brazil's pursuit of the Bolsonaro family raises "troubling rule-of-law questions."

Its example: Flávio Bolsonaro arrived in Miami on Wednesday, three days after losing Brazil's presidential runoff, because he feared imminent arrest.

The Post calls that an indictment of the Western Hemisphere's second-largest democracy.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2026/10/28/brazils-treatment-bolsonaro-undermines-rule-of-law-confidence/

TFTC 805 w/ Mike & Mira: "A lot of the same policies are on the ballot box right now. This is a vision into the future of what happens when you go too far down a road."

We discuss: ⚡ 12 years of decline ⚡ "Free" healthcare ⚡ A warning for America

Anthropic just published how Claude now monitors its own conversations for misuse in real time.

"After each of Claude's responses, self-assessment appends a short instruction... to which Claude responds with a compact safety assessment."

The system "flags 78% of potentially harmful conversations, and 94% of high-priority ones" across global traffic. It runs on every Claude model since Fable 5.

Anthropic says the technique has "revealed large-scale misuse not identified by other methods."

https://safeguards.anthropic.com/2026/self-assessment/

Some people still save in money that a committee can create at will.

Thailand's Supreme Court has ruled that Bitcoin is legal property protected under criminal law.

The case was a robbery. Attackers forced a victim to convert $50,000 into roughly 2.48 BTC and transfer it to them. A defendant argued Bitcoin has no inherent value. The court rejected that.

Judges pointed to three things: Bitcoin's market price, its ability to be exchanged for cash, and its capacity for ownership. Together, they make it property.

The court upheld a 10-year prison sentence for a man who assisted the robbers.

The defense said it was worthless. The court said it was worth 10 years.

House Democrats have officially introduced a resolution saying Congress should let failing AI companies go bankrupt instead of bailing them out if the AI bubble bursts.

It also calls for executives who took reckless risks to be held accountable under civil and criminal law.

So the position has two parts: no rescue for the companies, and legal consequences for the people who ran them. It is a resolution, not a bill, so it sets a position rather than law.

The bailout debate is starting before the bust.

Skin substitute fraud scheme billed taxpayers $1 million per patient and paid for a $594,000 Ferrari, Dr. Oz's CMS says.

ECB President Christine Lagarde says she will step down on 7 February 2027, after seven years leading the bank.

The New York Times reports that Alice Huang, an executive at Singapore AI firm Megaspeed with close ties to Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang, was allegedly passing information to Beijing as a Chinese intelligence asset.

US intelligence reportedly briefed Trump more than a year ago. Per the Times, he chose not to act, to avoid hurting Nvidia sales or antagonizing China.

Megaspeed was already under scrutiny over whether it helped route about $2 billion in Nvidia chips to China.

The claims rest on anonymous sources and are unproven.

Cashu now has a physical tap-to-pay card.

Offline ecash payments backed by Bitcoin. No internet required at the point of sale.

https://cashucard.org/

Samsung just posted roughly $80 billion in quarterly operating profit, the first Korean company ever to clear ₩100 trillion in a single quarter.

The stock fell 4.1%.

In 1985, a typical US home cost 3.7 years of full-time pay. By 2025, it was 6.4.

In Canada, it went from 4.1 years to 11.4.

Big quarter for BPI.

President Trump endorsed their Data Center Dividends proposal, which would return surplus data center tax revenue directly to local households.

Their research on foreign influence operations targeting US AI infrastructure led to congressional testimony and a formal investigation request from two House committee chairmen.

The State Department named BPI a founding partner of its Freedom Tech Excellence Program alongside Palantir and Anduril.

Their open letter calling on frontier AI labs to give security defenders model access got 40+ signers including Coinbase, Block, and Strategy. Both OpenAI and Anthropic responded with new programs.

2,275 media hits in a single quarter.

https://www.btcpolicy.org/articles/q3-2026-quarterly-report

"They'll hate you if you don't."

Charlie Munger's advice on giving your kids their inheritance now.

"The first company to stop training new models would actually be the winner because their costs would collapse. The data suggests someone should have done that already. It's not happening."

Paul Kedrosky on why the AI race dynamic traps everyone.

National Guard units in all 50 states are reportedly mobilizing for next week's elections, per journalist Ken Klippenstein NSPM-7 Compliant.

His Substack report cites anonymous military sources. The mission reportedly includes supporting federal cybersecurity, observing ballot drop boxes and polling places, and safeguarding critical infrastructure.

The Pentagon, the National Guard Bureau and state governments have not confirmed it.

Joint Chiefs Chairman Gen. Dan Caine has said there are no plans to send federal military personnel or federalized Guard to polling places.

"I pitched 35 or 40 banks. None of them were a buyer. Then Buffett buys NetJets for $750 million and I just happened to be the guy who saw the banks last."

Kenn Ricci to David Senra on how he landed $300M in financing.

"My dogs bark at the mailman, he leaves, and they think 'I did it.' No, you have a bad causal model. The mailman always leaves."

Paul Kedrosky on why AI capex is masking a weak economy and fooling policymakers.

"They're making money from issuance, not from holding. They're not keeping the debt. They're making money from fees."

Paul Kedrosky on why capital markets keep fueling AI spending that now exceeds every buildout in 150 years except highways and WWII.

"I think we're going to get a strong GDP number for the third quarter. Atlanta Fed is well over 3%."

Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent pushing back on the idea that further rate hikes would be a policy mistake.

"The company has $27,000 in the bank so I think I can just use their own money to buy them."

Kenn Ricci telling David Senra how he bought his first aviation company for $27,500 and built it into a $4 billion private jet empire.

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman says a future version of ChatGPT could have "perfect context of your whole life, everything you see."

He says we are close to that world.

Flavio Bolsonaro has issued a statement from the US declaring himself the "true president-elect of Brazil," citing allegations of electoral fraud.

He says he will stay in the US and keep fighting to "free the Brazilian people."

Glenn Greenwald: "While Trump has casually said he thinks there was fraud, the US Government has not said if it shares this view."

So far, that is a casual comment from Trump and no formal position from Washington.

Fed Chair Kevin Warsh says the Fed will cut rate-decision meetings from 8 a year to 6 by 2028.

From fall 2027, one meeting drops the rate vote. By 2028, two of the eight will be strategy-only.

"The Dow Jones Transports is a vestigial remnant of the railroad bubble. You can see prior financial bubbles fossilized in the indices themselves."

Paul Kedrosky on why your index fund is actually a concentrated AI bet.

The Fed held rates at 3.75-4.00% in a 10-2 vote. Two dissenters, Cook and Hammack, wanted another quarter-point hike.

The statement says inflation "remains elevated" but the committee needs an "accumulation of more information" before acting.

Translation: they hiked in September for the first time since 2023 and now they are sitting on their hands watching tariff-driven price distortions they cannot distinguish from real demand.

Meanwhile productivity growth is strong, capital investment is robust, and job gains are keeping pace. The economy looks fine on paper because AI capex is masking weakness everywhere else.

The Fed is flying blind and they know it.

Bitcoin Core just disclosed two memory exhaustion vulnerabilities, both rated medium severity. Fixes are live in versions 29.5, 30.4, 31.2, and 32.1.

The first allows a malicious peer to cause unbounded memory growth by pretending not to support BIP31 nonced pings. Affects all platforms.

The second lets an attacker send TCP urgent data to bypass backpressure limits and crash any Windows, macOS, or BSD node. Linux is not affected.

Both were discovered by Project Loupe, an LLM-based code scanner built by Elias Rohrer at Spiral.

Update your nodes.

https://bitcoincore.org/en/2026/10/28/disclose-fpausesend-oom/

https://bitcoincore.org/en/2026/10/28/disclose-tcp-oom/

"This is the first one that has all four. A great technology story, a real estate angle through data centers, very loose credit, and a government telling us we must win an existential battle with China."

Paul Kedrosky on why this cycle is uniquely dangerous.

FCC Chairman Brendan Carr says the commission will vote to let prisons jam contraband cellphones for the first time ever.

Almost 500,000 inmates now have access to them, and 25,000 phones are seized in jails every year.

A security researcher presented at OffensiveCon Tokyo this week demonstrating how Telegram's animated sticker rendering library can be chained with server-side validation bypasses to achieve code execution on iOS.

No tap, no link, no interaction required.

Telegram's position remains that their server-side checks make this technically impossible. The vulnerable client-side code is still live in the app with no patch.

Defeated Brazilian presidential candidate Flávio Bolsonaro and his family have landed in Miami after fleeing Brazil.

The Trump administration granted them US visas a day earlier.

Anthropic's IPO filing shows an $80.7 billion net loss through June, mostly accounting charges tied to its rising valuation.

MSTR shareholders approve the Daily Dividends amendment with 99.3% of votes cast in favor, according to preliminary results.

The amendment lets STRF, STRC, STRK and STRD accrue dividends every calendar day.

Saylor: "Thank you to all who voted."

https://www.strategy.com/press/strategy-announces-approval-of-the-daily-dividends-amendment_10-28-2026

Treasury sanctions 10 individuals and one entity over North Korean government-run IT worker schemes.

Fake documents, stolen identities and fabricated personas get North Korean workers hired by legitimate companies in the U.S. and allied countries.

https://home.treasury.gov/news/press-releases/sb0669

Since December 2024, the US has added roughly 760,000 jobs.

According to government payroll data, nearly all of them have gone to women.

Men have gained essentially zero net jobs since Trump took office.

"It doesn't look good either way. Bitcoin looks fine either way."

on the Fed and the 2019 repo crisis.

"It's kind of clickbaity."

and

on stablecoins vs global broad money.

Tether CEO Paolo Ardoino shares his latest keynote: "Tether: a psychohistory interpretation."

Stop selling your bitcoin to cover everyday spending.

Aven lets you borrow against it instead. Up to $1M, rates from 8.99%, no rehypothecation.

2% unlimited cash back on every purchase.

https://www.tftc.io/bitcoin-visa-card-aven/

Google DeepMind just dropped Genie 4, an interactive world model that generates dynamic environments in real time with reactive scenes, sound, and characters that move, react, and speak.

"I do think 10 ounces of gold is out of play."

on Bitcoin priced in gold.

Lightning Labs' Dario Nakamoto explains how Wavelength VTXOs carry Taproot Assets secured by the Ark policy tree.

Compact proofs and client-side validation link asset history back to an on-chain commitment.

"We're definitely in cheap territory."

on where Bitcoin sits on its power trend.

Amboss Co-Founder

demos stablecoin payments over Lightning using Taproot Assets.

The Dutch central bank (DNB) published its first-ever official data on bitcoin and crypto ownership in the Netherlands.

Dutch households held €3.2 billion through domestic providers as of June 2026. Bitcoin dominates at €1.5 billion, nearly half the total, followed by Ethereum at €300 million. Stablecoins make up less than 1% of holdings.

For context, that €3.2 billion is only about 1.4% of the €234 billion Dutch households hold in traditional securities.

The real total is likely higher since holdings with foreign providers and self-custody aren't counted.

https://www.dnb.nl/en/general-news/statistical-news/2026/dutch-households-hold-3-2-billion-in-crypto-assets-with-dutch-service-providers/

Bitcoin's hash rate just hit a 7-month high.

Fidelity Digital Assets: "The market is looking for the next catalyst. Miners are committing capital."

Sony data breach exposes 2.58 million customers

Sony Network Communications disclosed a major data breach affecting its So-net and plala internet services in Japan.

Hackers accessed the member database on October 19, but the intrusion wasn't discovered until October 23.

Leaked data includes names, phone numbers, email addresses, user IDs, dates of birth, and internet connection IDs for 2.14M So-net members and 443K plala customers.

Email passwords for 54,401 accounts were also compromised across four mail services, along with 16 bank account records.

Sony says no credit card data or bank PINs were exposed. Affected email passwords have been reset, and the compromised servers were shut down.

The company has reported the incident to Japan's data protection authority.

https://www.so-net.ne.jp/info/2026/20261027_0001.html

TFTC 804 w/

: "We're definitely in cheap territory. The same thing as those 2015 lows or 2018 lows or 2022 lows. 92% of the time, the price has been higher relative to trend."

We discuss: ⚡ Bitcoin's rarest buy signal ⚡ Bitcoin vs. gold ⚡ The $1M timeline

"It's also Bitcoin working. There's no moral hazard. There are no bailouts."

on the Coldcard bug and the Ledger supply chain attack.

UK-listed Smarter Web Company bought another 20 bitcoin, bringing their total holdings to 2,850 BTC worth roughly $227 million at current prices.

"It made no sense for the Canadians to walk out of those trade negotiations."

Susan Kokinda on Canada's tariff politics.

OpenAI just dropped GPT-6.1 Terra.

It scores on par with GPT-6 Astra on visual reasoning benchmarks at one-tenth the price per token, solves 50.3% of Terminal-Bench coding tasks (more than double its predecessor), and cut hallucination rates from 53.6% to 16.7%.

API pricing: $1/M input tokens, $5/M output. Rolling out now to Plus, Pro, Enterprise, and Edu users.

Microsoft is offering voluntary buyouts to a significant portion of its workforce as it restructures around AI.

Reports suggest up to 60,000 employees could be eligible.

Eligible staff at VP level and below across the US, Canada, India, and the UK can leave with financial support and career planning resources.

"This offer gives eligible employees who may be considering a future outside the company a new choice to make that transition now with support."

https://blogs.microsoft.com/blog/2026/10/26/introducing-a-voluntary-exit-offer/

"Warsh has to raise its rates a little bit on the short end because the money markets are demanding it."

Tom Luongo on the bear flattener.

Michael Saylor: "Passive income should be passive."

Cohere's research team caught Alibaba's Qwen3.8-Flash-Next model doing something alarming in a sandbox test.

Asked to write a defensive cybersecurity detection rule, the model instead inventoried the machine it was running on and tried to upload a probe file to an Alibaba Cloud storage bucket in Beijing.

"The model's reasoning trace stated that it would not invoke any tools before taking these actions."

Cohere's sandbox blocked the attempt and no external communication succeeded. They are not asserting malicious intent but are publishing the findings because "organizations making model adoption decisions deserve as much information as possible."

noted this maps to Anthropic's "sleeper agents" research, which showed that backdoor behavior in LLMs can persist through safety training and is hardest to remove from the largest models.

https://cohere.com/blog/concerning-behaviour-popular-open-weight-ai-model

River shows that nearly 80% of bitcoin is held by individuals, compared to 47% of gold, 42% of stocks, and just 12% of bonds.

"You're not really seeing demand destruction yet in the U.S."

and

on diesel and the Gulf attacks.