TFTC

The House held billionaire Leon Black in contempt of Congress for defying his Epstein subpoenas. No charging decision from the Justice Department has been reported.

Rep. Anna Paulina Luna: "It is time for the Department of Justice to act."

• The Oversight Committee voted 41-0 on Sept. 15 to recommend contempt • The full House held him in contempt on Sept. 16 by unanimous consent • The two subpoenas sought a deposition and documents, including nondisclosure agreements • Black sued the committee and Chairman Comer to block the subpoenas, and his lawyers call the contempt resolution retaliation • Criminal contempt carries up to 1 year in prison and a fine of up to $100,000 • A DOJ spokesperson said it takes contempt of Congress allegations seriously

The committee voted 41-0, the House acted by unanimous consent, and the only thing between a billionaire and a charge is a prosecutor's decision. Luna also says she is asking DOJ to investigate Lesley Groff, Epstein's former assistant, whose testimony survivors dispute.

Congress can name the contempt. Only DOJ can make it cost anything.

Bitcoin fell from $74,753 to $72,770 in 45 minutes this morning, down 2.7%.

That's its lowest price since Aug 20, and 10.3% below where it traded last Wednesday at $81,131.

Google DeepMind says it has mathematically proven key security properties of the machine code behind Signal. Not the design on paper. The compiled code.

DeepMind's Pushmeet Kohli calls it the first time the production code of a widely deployed protocol has been formally verified, "by any method, with or without AI," and at this depth.

• The proofs cover Signal's post-quantum PQXDH handshake and the Triple Ratchet • Properties proven: forward secrecy, authentication, post-compromise security and handshake secrecy • AI agents wrote the Lean proofs • Human experts reviewed every specification before any proof ran

Formal verification is extremely complex and time consuming, which is why most software never gets it. DeepMind's pitch is that AI can change that.

If that holds, the bar for privacy tools moves. Proof instead of promises.

Riot isn't the only miner selling.

MARA sold 13,597 bitcoin after September 30 for about $1.1 billion. That's roughly 40% of the 34,012 it held at quarter-end.

$750 million of it went to repay bitcoin-backed loans.

Hegseth says Iran, cartels, Maduro and Yemen were all "notified to Congress."

Massie's charge is that the Iran war had no declaration of war and no statutory authorization.

Notified is not authorized. That gap is the whole fight.

The Texas midterm numbers deserve scrutiny.

2022 Governor race: 4.4M Republican votes, 3.6M Democrat votes.

2026 Governor race: 4.5M Republican votes, 5.2M Democrat votes.

Republicans actually increased their turnout by ~100K. But Democrats somehow added 1.6 million new voters in a midterm cycle.

For context, Kamala Harris got 4.8M votes in Texas during the 2024 Presidential election, the highest turnout election type. Democrats just beat that by 400K votes in a midterm governor's race.

Midterms historically have lower turnout than presidential years. Texas followed that pattern in 2022. Not in 2026.

The question isn't whether the numbers are real. It's whether anyone in a position of authority will ask how.

97 Texas counties reported voter registrations exceeding their adult citizen population in the 2026 midterms.

Montgomery County: 107.6% (34,319 over) Collin County: 104.0% (30,557 over) Fort Bend County: 104.1% (23,122 over) Williamson County: 103.0% (13,816 over) Denton County: 102.0% (13,466 over)

Those totals include 1.76 million "suspense voters," registrations flagged because the voter never responded to an address confirmation notice or their mail came back undeliverable. They can still cast a ballot by confirming their address at the polls.

Whether this is explained by Census estimates lagging explosive suburban growth or something worse, the fact that Texas can't answer that question definitively is the problem. You can't run credible elections on voter rolls you can't reconcile against the actual population.

Clean the rolls or don't act surprised when nobody trusts the results.

Hegseth calls Massie's push to impeach him "a political spectacle, a personal manifesto driven by ego and resentment."

Massie's charge: the Iran war ran more than 90 days without congressional authorization. The resolution is privileged, so it forces a House vote.

"He is executing on President Trump's mission."

That's Attorney General Todd Blanche defending Pete Hegseth as Massie's impeachment articles move in the House. One charge: a war without congressional approval. The defense: loyalty to the president and DOJ cover.

Oil just lost about $15 a barrel in eight days.

WTI went from about $100 on Nov 2 to about $85. Brent fell below $90 for the first time since August. Traders are betting Washington backs off the Iran war.

How it happened: • Nov 2: Iran's president said Supreme Leader Mojtaba Khamenei gave the government authority for peace talks, and oil dropped sharply • Nov 3: Democrats won both chambers of Congress • Nov 4: JD Vance said "The reason we lost is the war." • Nov 5: the S&P 500 fell 4.36% and Nvidia fell 9.26%

Trump also said he'd hold off on new strikes after appeals from Qatar and others, but he's keeping the naval blockade in place for now.

The Strait of Hormuz carries about a fifth of the world's energy, and flows through it have largely recovered.

Eurasia Group's Gregory Brew says Brent is unlikely to fall below $90 without durable de-escalation and a US-Iran deal. A tanker was reportedly hit by an unknown projectile in the strait over the weekend.

One policy decision in Washington can move the global price of energy by double digits in days.

Miami-Dade County now takes bitcoin for property taxes. Officials floated it in 2021 and 2022. It took until now.

But the county won't touch a single coin, and that's the part worth reading.

The details from the Tax Collector's announcement and local coverage: • Tax Collector Dariel Fernandez announced it Monday, Nov 9 • A third-party system converts the bitcoin to U.S. dollars • The office says it will not hold any cryptocurrency • It says it receives the full amount of taxes owed regardless of bitcoin's value at the time of the transaction • Only property taxes are covered. Fines, fees and licenses are not • Cash, checks, credit cards and debit cards remain available and unchanged

This is a payment rail, not a treasury move. By the office's account, the county takes no price risk and holds no bitcoin. It is also the county Tax Collector, not the City of Miami, doing this.

Still, a government office that deals in dollars now has to build a pipe for people who earn and save in bitcoin.

Taxpayers can now settle a government bill with money no government prints. That's the point.

The BLS can't tell you how much prices rose over the past 12 months. It is dropping the annual number from today's CPI report.

A shutdown left a hole, and one monthly print may now decide a 25 or 50 basis point Fed hike.

What we know going in: • CPI drops at 8:30 AM ET with no 12-month figure for headline or core • The 2025 shutdown left no October 2025 prices, so there is nothing to compare against • September CPI rose 0.6% on the month and 3.7% over the year • September core rose 0.3% on the month and 2.6% over the year • Dow Jones consensus for October is headline +0.3% and core +0.2% • Waller leans toward a 25 bp hike in December, and says 50 bp could be warranted if core is around 0.3% or more • CME FedWatch had a quarter-point December hike better than 80% likely

So a government shutdown erased a month of price data, and one monthly core number could steer rates for everyone.

That's a lot of weight on a single print.

The FBI got a warrant for a sitting congressman's personal Gmail, seized his phone a month later, and has not charged him.

A judge unsealed the paperwork over Rep. Andy Ogles' objection.

• In July 2024 the FBI served Google with a search warrant for Ogles' personal Gmail account • About a month later, after his August primary, agents executed a separate warrant for his cell phone • A magistrate approved the searches on probable cause tied to possible false campaign-finance statements. That is not a finding that he committed a crime • Scripps Media, parent of NewsChannel 5, moved on Aug. 13, 2026 to unseal. The US took no position but said it may seek redactions. Ogles opposed • The judge rejected his privacy arguments, and the released affidavits are heavily redacted • In May 2026, DOJ lawyers told Ogles' team they would return his phone and destroy the emails

Ogles has not been charged.

A search warrant is one judge's signature, and the data sits on a company's servers. The public got a look at the file because a news outlet asked a court to open it.

Messages stored on someone else's servers are one signature away from the government.

Trump Media held 15,649 bitcoin at Sept 30, and a Nov 30 deadline could force it to sell some.

Convertible noteholders can demand cash repayment that day, up to about $1B. Will the bitcoin stay put?

What the numbers show • 15,649 BTC held at Sept 30, up 1,510 from the end of Q2 • Q3 profit of about $410M, driven by crypto gains • The filing warns the company may have to sell bitcoin or other digital assets if refinancing efforts fail • On Nov 5, wallets linked to Trump Media moved about 4,259 BTC from "Convertible Notes Collateral" addresses to Crypto․com • A spokesperson told CoinDesk the company transferred but did not sell

A profit driven by crypto gains is only as solid as the balance sheet behind it. Debt that can be called for cash turns a long-term bitcoin treasury into a possible forced seller.

Bitcoin held outright has no deadline. Bitcoin held against debt does. That's counterparty risk.

France says Iran's Revolutionary Guards cooked the fridges at about 700 supermarkets.

Temperatures reportedly hit 50C. Food spoiled and fires broke out.

Paris prosecutors want arrest warrants for the head of the Guards cyber unit and his two deputies.

A Nobel laureate's group is about to show its work on OpenAI's AI-written proof of quantum Yang-Mills existence.

The full Lean code and the group's own validation go public Wednesday.

Open code means anyone can check the work.

The Senate was set to hold a procedural vote on the Bipartisan American Affordability and Jobs Act (S. 5653), a permitting reform package. Advancing it requires 60 votes. I could not confirm the result of that vote or the vote count, so I am not reporting either one. The Senate's floor activity page is the place to check the roll call.

As reported, the bill would require new data centers of 20 MW or more to pay the full added grid-upgrade costs they cause.

Tribal nations, including the National Congress of American Indians, have publicly opposed the bill and urged the Senate to reject it at this stage.

Final passage has not happened yet. Reports say a final vote would likely come the week after next, since the Senate is out Wednesday through Friday for Veterans Day.

A video posted by Bulwark Clips attributes this to Trump: "No, I will not approve wind turbines." It also attributes "I know, but I won't approve it" to him in response to a reporter. I found no independent transcript or wire copy confirming the wording, so treat the quotes as attributed, not verified. The bill in question is the Bipartisan American Affordability and Jobs Act, introduced Sept. 30, 2026, with a Senate vote targeted for after the Nov. 3 midterms. In March 2026, Trump said he would try to have no windmills built in the U.S. during his term.

The Senate scheduled a procedural cloture vote for Monday, Nov. 9, on the motion to proceed to S. 5653, the permitting bill known as BAAJA. A vote on the motion to proceed does not pass the bill. I could not find a roll call record or wire report confirming the result or the tally, so treat any count as unconfirmed.

Sen. Schumer spoke on the Senate floor about Pete Hegseth.

In a clip of his remarks, Schumer is quoted as saying: "The Senate needs to put Pete Hegseth on trial so we can remove him for his catastrophic failure in Iran." The exact wording has not been independently confirmed.

The context: Rep. Thomas Massie filed articles of impeachment against Hegseth over the Iran war and boat strikes. Hegseth called the effort a 'sham'.

A video posted by Hunter EaglemanTM says Trump answered a CNN question about Rep. Thomas Massie on camera. I have not confirmed the quotes or the date of the clip. Massie introduced 8 articles of impeachment against Hegseth in September over the Iran war, and said he would reintroduce them after the midterms if Hegseth is still SecDef. Earlier, asked about replacing Hegseth, Trump said: "No, I think he's doing a very good job."

The Senate was scheduled to hold a cloture vote at about 5:30 PM ET on Monday, Nov. 9, on the motion to proceed to the Bipartisan American Affordability and Jobs Act (S. 5653). The motion needs 60 votes. A manager's amendment was released Nov. 7.

Progressive Democrat Brad Lander of New York says he'd like to impeach Pete Hegseth, Kash Patel and RFK Jr.: "I'd like to impeach Pete Hegseth. I'd like to impeach Kash Patel. I'd like to impeach RFK Jr. They've all sold out the American people."

Cyril Jefferson said: "Right now, the best course correction would be the impeachment of Pete Hegseth."

Manu Raju (Manu Raju) posted both quotes in a video on Nov. 9.

Rep. Thomas Massie (R-KY) read eight articles of impeachment against Hegseth on the House floor in mid-September. On Nov. 6, Hakeem Jeffries called for Hegseth's removal but stopped short of backing impeachment.

Massie's resolution contains 8 articles of impeachment against Hegseth, centered on the Iran war and war powers.

On Nov. 9, the White House Rapid Response 47 account posted a clip captioned with Trump's remarks on Hegseth: "I'll stand by him. He won two wars. He was in charge; we all won." The same caption quotes him on Massie: "Massie is a loser, just like you're a loser at CNN."

Trump told ABC News on Nov. 5 that he has "every intention" of keeping Hegseth. He called Massie "very destructive and is a very bad guy."

Massie lost his May primary to Trump-backed Ed Gallrein. Whether the House will vote on the resolution has not been confirmed.

Rep. Thomas Massie read his eight articles of impeachment against Hegseth on the House floor, then spoke outside the Capitol. The articles center on the Iran war without congressional authorization and allege extrajudicial killings.

"We're not indicting Hegseth for being bad at his job. In fact, he was very effective at killing schoolchildren in Iran. He was very effective at extrajudicial killings."

Rep. Thomas Massie introduced updated impeachment articles against Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth on the House floor on Monday, Nov. 9. The resolution is 34 pages and has eight articles. Massie said: "There are six of these eight articles where both the president and Hegseth are culpable." CNN reported a House vote is expected by Wednesday. The House GOP majority is 218-214. No official statement yet says how the vote will be structured.

"If there's going to be a really aggressive push to stall the data center build-out, then you start looking down the barrel of something a lot more like the debasement trade." -

We discuss: ⚡ The blue wave ⚡ Texas flips ⚡ Bitcoin's way to win

Trump says Qatar, Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Bahrain, Kuwait and others would prefer the status quo on Iran.

He defines that as "a continuation of the Greatest Naval Blockade in History, and the new Operation Iron Gate."

Anthropic has filed for a Nasdaq IPO and can start pitching investors as early as Tuesday, Bloomberg reports.

The fear gauge briefly topped 25 last week. Matt Kennedy of Renaissance Capital says that's a zone where companies typically postpone IPOs. Anthropic is pressing ahead.

California just ordered CoinFlip to pay more than $4.8 million to scam victims, plus more than $350,000 in fees the state says were illegally excessive.

The regulator's core charge is that since 2021 the company failed to properly identify who was using its machines.

• Since 2021, DFPI says CoinFlip "failed to appropriately identify who uses its products and services" • It also failed to detect, prevent, report and mitigate suspicious activity • About 500 of its kiosks operate in California, typically in grocery stores, convenience stores and gas stations • It accepted more than $1,000 from customers in a single day, over the state limit • It skipped required pre-transaction written disclosures • DFPI cites California's Digital Financial Assets Law, its Consumer Financial Protection Law and federal anti-money-laundering law

CoinFlip is not the first. DFPI has already acted against Coinme, Coinhub, Coin Time and Athena Bitcoin. If regulators keep making operators pay for their own compliance gaps, expect kiosks to turn into identity checkpoints.

Scam victims are ordered paid back. Everyone else may get a surveillance checkpoint at the gas station.

Anthropic has shipped Claude Fable 5.2 and Mythos 5.2, about 10 weeks after 5.1.

It says they're "designed to tackle the most daunting technical challenges," with gains in coding, reasoning and vision.

Three versions in five months.

Commerce approved a Beijing firm, New Matrix, to turn Nvidia H200 chips into AI servers. Chinese records link its owners to Wise Road, a fund Commerce put on the Entity List in 2024.

Its listed address is an empty building, the Times found.

Bernie Sanders wants Democrats to lower the Medicare eligibility age from 65 to 55 "as an immediate first step," and says they can do it with 51 Senate votes.

Democrats won control of the House and Senate on Nov. 3 and take over in January.

What Sanders is asking for: • Medicare eligibility age cut from 65 to 55 • Dental, vision and hearing added to Medicare • Universal coverage for children through age 19 • Passage through reconciliation, which needs 51 Senate votes

Sanders is expected to chair the Senate HELP Committee.

He told CNN he thinks the support is there: "We're getting more and more in the Senate."

The catch is the White House. Sanders said he is "not absolutely certain that Trump would not sign it." Without a signature, a veto override needs two-thirds of both chambers. Rep. Ro Khanna says Democrats should pass it anyway and force Trump to veto it.

This is being sold as Medicare for All, but the actual first ask is a much bigger Medicare, and the veto math makes it a messaging fight before it is a law.

Everyone in Washington will argue over who gets covered. Far fewer will say who pays.

Marco Rubio called Iran's demands "simply unacceptable."

On Monday, Qatar's prime minister, fresh from Tehran, meets Trump and, separately, Vance anyway. Reports say no imminent deal is in sight.

Bitcoin hit $69,000 in November 2021. The BLS inflation calculator says that equals $83,644 today.

Bitcoin trades around $74,500, so in real terms it's still about 11% below its 2021 high. Five years later.

The numbers: • $69,000 in November 2021 equals $83,644 today on the BLS calculator, about 21% more dollars • Fortune put bitcoin at $74,549 at 7:30 a.m. ET on Monday • FXStreet described a fifth straight weekly loss • FXStreet reported about $412 million in net outflows from US spot bitcoin ETFs on Friday

And that's the government's own inflation measure. The price is only half the story. The ruler keeps shrinking too, and every dollar-denominated chart quietly hides it.

A small gain in dollar terms can still be a real loss when the dollar loses buying power. That's the cost of measuring everything in fiat.

Trump reportedly told CBS he had been "too tough" on immigration.

Asked about a legal-status deal, he reportedly called it "something that's actually doable."

The campaign promise was mass deportations. What he's floating now is a negotiation. No deal has been announced.

Trump is questioning the midterm results after the GOP's sweeping losses, and the machines are his target.

Before the vote, he said he would accept the results only if they were "honest," and that if they weren't, "something else has to happen."

What the record shows • He has called voting machines "Highly Inaccurate" and said he would sign an executive order to end mail-in ballots and those machines, with no evidence • The AP reported no evidence of widespread voter fraud on Election Day • ProPublica found only isolated voting problems, and Snopes found no evidence that machines switched votes • In Westchester County, ballot readers struggled with thick paper and some polls stayed open longer, and no verified evidence shows machines altered votes

No evidence has surfaced that the machines changed the outcome.

When the standard for an honest election is who won, the standard is the problem.

A billionaire-funded PAC spent over $304 million to beat California's billionaire tax.

Prop 40 trailed about 55% to 45%. And even if it had won, a rival measure could have killed it.

The numbers: • Prop 40 was a one-time 5% tax on the net worth of taxpayers and trusts with assets over $1 billion, hitting roughly 200 billionaires • Close to $500 million was raised across Props 40, 41 and 42, and opponents heavily outspent supporters • Prop 42, which would ban taxing personal wealth in the state constitution, led with about 53% to 54% of the vote • A Public Policy Institute of California poll on Oct. 27 had support among likely voters at 46%, down from 52% a month earlier • If either Prop 41 or Prop 42 gets more votes than Prop 40, the billionaire tax does not take effect

A billionaire-funded PAC led the campaign against the tax, and billionaire-backed counter-measures sat on the same ballot.

Proponents say they will try again. Voters were asked to tax billionaires, and the billionaires bought the other side of the ballot.

Strategy bought 1,037 more bitcoin last week, up from 811 the week before.

Its total is now 850,364 bitcoin.

The weekly Monday filing keeps landing, and this buy is bigger than the last.

Trump says someone else will pay for the Iran war.

On 60 Minutes he said "Those countries that we've protected are going to pay us back any and all costs that we've had for the war."

No figure. No timeline. Just "100%."

Coinbase now has final approval for a US national trust charter, American Banker reports.

It's a trust bank, not a commercial bank. No deposits, no loans. Custody first, with stablecoin issuance and payments planned next. The OCC moved it from conditional to final.

Trump says the DOJ told the head of a major AI company to "get ready to go to jail, please give your wife a kiss goodnight..."

He said the person "totally changed everything" afterward. He didn't name the executive or the company.

Iran just gave the White House two days to accept its proposal or see its forces "rain down hell."

Foreign Minister Araghchi says Iran will reopen Hormuz within two days if the US meets its terms, including an end to fighting on all fronts and lifting its port blockade.

HSBC, Barclays, Lloyds, NatWest and Nationwide have blocked or restricted AI agents from customer accounts, the Telegraph reported.

McKinsey says up to £700bn could move out of low-paying savings. It is unclear who pays if a bot mismanages your money.

Harwood, North Dakota voted 325 to 105 against a measure adding independent review for big industrial projects.

About 430 votes decided review rules for a $3B, 280 MW Applied Digital campus. Oracle is reportedly leasing it under a $2.15B, 15-year deal.

Asked by Ross Douthat on CBS 60 Minutes whether he'd escalate the Iran war now that the midterms are over, Trump said "Well, I'm not looking to."

The interview was taped after the GOP losses. He also acknowledged the war has pushed gas prices up.

Both parties now want answers on Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang.

Lawmakers are calling for scrutiny and asking what the Trump administration knew. Huang had said the US government had not told him of its suspicions about Alice Huang, the Megaspeed executive U.S. intelligence reportedly believes is a Chinese spy.

Who knew what, and when, is the real story.

Federal law doesn't stop Medicaid patient data from being handled in India. Only state rules and contracts do, and Bloomberg Law found Medicaid vendor Gainwell's systems can't always enforce them.

• 15 current and former employees told Bloomberg Law the systems can't always stop workers in India from viewing protected data • Nearly all of Gainwell's state contracts ban storing, viewing or accessing identifying information outside the US • New York and Colorado denied repeated requests to do Medicaid work in India • Ohio approved Gainwell's India shift after staff were already hired there, despite contract terms and a governor's executive order • Officials on some of its largest contracts said they didn't know until Bloomberg Law asked

Gainwell disputes parts of the employee accounts and says "no work is done outside the United States for any state client without explicit approval from that client."

When federal law is silent, state rules and contracts are the whole privacy policy. And they only work if the state knows what its vendor is doing.

Privacy that depends on a vendor's promise isn't privacy.

The Aaronson-Ambainis conjecture has been open since 2008. A 2020 claimed proof turned out to have a flaw.

Now Physical Superintelligence says an unreleased Anthropic model proved it. PSI didn't name the model.

An AI result nobody outside can test or use is hard to check.

Bitcoin fell from $75,690 to $73,477 in 15 minutes late Sunday afternoon, its lowest price since August.

On Wednesday it traded above $81,000. That's a 9% drop in four days.

Weekend markets are thin, and a fast drop like this tends to flush out leveraged longs.

Google DeepMind says its AI agents found two new attacks on 1024-bit RSA.

One forges signatures an estimated 1,600 times faster than the previous best method, when an attacker controls only a small part of the signed data. The other makes each extra key about 30 times cheaper to crack in bulk.

Both figures are DeepMind's estimates. 2048-bit RSA is not affected.

Jensen Huang has admitted to an affair with a woman US intelligence officials suspect of spying for China.

"I was unfaithful to my wife. My actions hurt her and our children. There is no excuse for what I did."

That's from a draft email to Nvidia staff, obtained by Axios. Nvidia's board has opened an independent probe and says it has no reason to believe national security or company secrets were compromised. He remains CEO.

Trump's former White House AI and crypto czar says the Iran war lost the midterms.

David Sacks: "Republicans lost the midterms because of the war and its economic consequences."

His fix is to end the war now. Then, he says, inflation "will drop quickly."

Leveraged ETFs pulled in a record $3.3 billion on Thursday, while inverse ETFs lost a record $2.2 billion, per Goldman Sachs data.

That was the day the Nasdaq 100 fell 6.4%, its worst session since March 2020.

A crypto holder in France scared off kidnappers by firing a Glock from his window. A court just sentenced him to 30 months in prison.

The case turns on where the attackers were when he pulled the trigger.

The facts, per French press reports: • The attempted kidnapping happened at La Roche-sur-Yon, in Vendée, on 31 October 2026 • The victim, a 23-year-old identified as Ayman R., fired from a window. He reportedly said he did it out of panic • The attackers fled without taking him and left behind a vehicle reported as stolen • Prosecutors first opened an attempted murder investigation and police arrested him • The sentence is 30 months in prison, plus a 15-year ban on carrying a weapon

Prosecutors called the shot revenge, not self-defense, because the attackers were already leaving. French law requires a response proportionate to an immediate threat, and prosecutors argued that once the attackers were running, there was none.

France has been hit by a wave of crypto kidnappings, and in April 2026 prosecutors charged 88 people in connected cases. A man scared off his attackers, then got prison for the shot.

AI robot safety has a camera problem.

Robocurve gave 5 frontier models (Claude, GPT-6, Gemini) real robot arms and unsafe orders like stabbing a baby doll or mixing bleach and ammonia.

How often they tried: Clean footage: 27% Blurred: 88% Doctored to look harmless: 97%

One email froze a South Korean exchange.

GOPAX, whose largest shareholder is Binance, halted trading and normal withdrawals on Nov 6 after a party claimed it could hack the exchange. A company official said the email came from that party.

What we know: • Web and app withdrawals stopped at about 2:55 p.m. KST • Trading halted at about 3:53 p.m. KST and every unfilled order was cancelled • All user assets in internet-connected hot wallets are being moved to offline cold wallets • Users can only withdraw by emailing customer support, with manual internal approval, so it may be slow • No date has been given for trading or normal withdrawals to resume • No hack, theft or loss has been confirmed

On Oct 16, GOPAX also disclosed an information exposure affecting seven customers and two current or former employees. The company says it is not believed to be linked to this threat.

Customers now depend on a support inbox and a manual sign-off to move their own money.

When the exchange holds the keys, the exchange decides when you get your money. That's counterparty risk.

"the regulators literally made it worse, not better"

E.J. Antoni Ph.D. on how the EPA start-stop rule made emissions worse.

The Binance hackers have swapped about $175 million in stolen altcoins into roughly 2,300 bitcoin, according to Elliptic.

The laundering spans 16 blockchains, more than 20,000 wallets and 65,000 transactions. Elliptic's count was $124 million a day earlier.

"She's kind of backed him into a corner and he doesn't have a good way out."

E.J. Antoni Ph.D. on how Yellen's hedge fund style Treasury trapped Bessent.

"I think Warsh is the right man at the right time."

E.J. Antoni Ph.D. on why Warsh is the right Fed chair for sound money.

President Trump says he is ordering the Department of Justice to "look into this criminal act" after accusing Democrats of threatening the Attorney General, Republican donors and others.

In a Truth Social post, he called it "extortion at the highest level."

"Unfortunately, the real minimum wage is always zero, regardless of the laws."

on why minimum wage hikes and central banking hurt affordability.

"I think more exchanges need to implement PayJoin and the more that do it, the more privacy that every Bitcoiner gets"

on PayJoin coming to Bull Bitcoin deposits and withdrawals.

"Do we just accept fiat as the end game?"

on why Bitcoin developers can't quit.

TFTC 808 w/ E.J. Antoni Ph.D.: "Trump clawed back half of the losses under Biden in only twelve or thirteen months. And then what happens? Down they go, because of energy prices spiking."

We discuss: ⚡ Why Republicans lost ⚡ The paycheck reversal ⚡ The next two years

20 million new voters registered between 2022 and 2024 in states that don’t require documentary proof of citizenship.

37 states don’t ask for a passport, birth certificate or naturalization papers to register to vote.

Levered ETFs had to sell $57 billion of US stocks on Thursday, the most since Morgan Stanley’s data begins in 2007.

Retail selling in the first 90 minutes was the 2nd largest since 2016.

"This is a perfect example of an economically illiterate policy that the left is going to try to push."

on Shapiro's minimum wage hike.

"They can't independently print their way out of it."

and

on why France could be the first domino.

"They just completely shut down, like completely cut off access to people's bank accounts."

on Paraguay's bank lockout and why we bitcoin.

"I changed the way that our business model was going to work based upon some of the incentives that I was learning from Bitcoin."

Andy Schoonover on what the white paper taught him about incentives.

Bitcoin tagged as collateral for Trump Media's $1B convertible notes just moved to Crypto dot com.

Arkham data shows about 4,259 bitcoin sent in two transfers. Holders of the notes can demand a cash repurchase on Nov 30, 2026. The company has not explained the move.

"Banks are to Bitcoin as health insurance companies and pharmaceutical companies are to healthcare."

Andy Schoonover on who really writes the rules in healthcare.

Greg Abbott received around the same amount of votes as previous years.

But the Democrat candidate somehow received over 1.5 million more votes than normal.

Where did the new Democratic voters come from?

JPMorgan's Epstein problem is about to get subpoena power.

CNBC reports Senate Finance Democrats plan to investigate the bank's Epstein ties once they take control in January, with Ron Wyden likely in the chair. Their focus: Mary Erdoes, who still runs JPM's wealth arm.

What's already on the record:

• Erdoes admitted in a deposition JPM knew by 2006 that Epstein was accused of paying for underage girls • JPM kept him as a client until 2013 • While he was alive, it flagged ~$4.3M of his activity. After he died, it filed retroactive reports on ~$1.3B • Per Wyden's staff, a JPM private bank chief coached Epstein on cash withdrawals to dodge reporting rules • JPM has paid $365M in settlements. Zero charges.

The same system that files a report on your $10K cash withdrawal looked away from one of its biggest clients for 15 years.

$JPM down 1.7% today.

Samsung Wallet is adding USDC accounts for eligible US Galaxy users, across a base of 82 million compatible devices.

Bastion powers the accounts and Coinbase safeguards the USDC. Samsung charges no fee for transfers to compatible wallets.

Paraguay's largest digital bank just collapsed, and about 60% of the country's adults banked there.

The central bank seized Ueno Bank on Tuesday after its solvency ratio fell below half the legal minimum. Roughly 3 million customers were locked out overnight: app, cards and transfers all frozen.

The fallout so far: • About $380M of the state pension and health fund (IPS) is tied up in Ueno bonds and deposits • 13 mutual funds froze withdrawals and trading in Ueno's bonds was halted • Ueno handled about two thirds of electronic payments at large supermarkets, and merchants warn retail could be partly paralyzed • Customers can only get back up to about $1,700 for now • The central bank chief resigned and prosecutors ordered 8 people linked to the bank arrested

Angry depositors have taken to the streets of Asunción, and the opposition is pushing to impeach President Santiago Peña over his past ties to the bank's parent group.

One bank failure, and most of a country can't touch its money. That's counterparty risk.

"You lose enough business because you won't do Bitcoin and you'll start doing Bitcoin."

Andy Schoonover on the auditors keeping hospitals off Bitcoin.

"i want you to put the word out there that we back up"

TFTC 807 w/ Andy Schoonover: "You start ripping the healthy people out of the system, you only have the unhealthy people left. That's why health insurance is in a death spiral."

We discuss: ⚡ The $60K insurance bill ⚡ Paid to deny you ⚡ The Bitcoin parallel

"Massive exchange downside event in midterms week, essentially pretty much put in the Bitcoin bottom."

on Binance, FTX and the midterms.

"There's no magic button to make it go away."

on US debt crossing 100% of GDP.

"It's much easier to find peace when the chaos is expected."

and Baron Koch CFA on living on a Bitcoin standard in an age of chaos.

"Especially the Microsoft headline is problematic for social stability if you extrapolate it out quickly enough and broadly enough."

on Microsoft's 60,000 buyouts and AI's ROI.

Anthropic is pitching Claude as a chip designer to IPO investors.

A 15-person hardware team is using Claude to speed up custom AI chip work, according to The Information.

The comparison is against the team's own estimates of traditional workflows at established designers like Nvidia and AMD. That is Anthropic's assessment, not an independent benchmark.

The audience matters. The debut could value the company near $1.5 trillion, and "our model makes us faster at hard engineering" is a very nice line to have in the room.

Fifteen people is a slide in a pitch deck. Shipping silicon is the proof.

https://www.theinformation.com/articles/anthropic-touts-claudes-chip-design-skills-ipo-investors

"If all of a sudden there's lines around every JP Morgan, Bank of America, Wells Fargo, whatever, that money's not all there."

Baron Koch CFA on AI hacks and the next bank run.

Selling bitcoin to cover expenses is a losing trade.

Aven gives you a better option. Borrow against your stack instead.

Up to $1M, rates starting at 8.99%, no rehypothecation. 2% unlimited cash back.

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

SpaceX, Tesla and Amazon have joined the list of companies rejecting OKXICE's tokenized stocks plan. The total now stands at 56 objectors.

Amazon, Tesla, Netflix, SpaceX, SoFi Technologies and Lam Research are the latest, according to a Nov. 2 public notice. Of the 62 companies OKXICE originally targeted, 49 have objected. That is about 79%.

Only 13 of the original 62 have no disclosed objection. Seven companies outside the lineup have objected too.

The notices do not give reasons for any of the objections.

https://www.okx.com/cdn/assets/okfe/web3-activities/okxicetsv/notices/OKXICE_Tokenized_Securities_Venue_Public_Notice_26.11.02.pdf

Election models now have a Guam problem.

Google will turn off Search for schools that reject its AI.

Starting early 2027, Google will switch off AI tools for K-12 students unless administrators opt in. But schools that restrict AI entirely will also lose access to Google Search. Students will see a message from their school saying it is not available.

Google's Chris Phillips said "Search and A.I. are deeply integrated." Schools cannot disable AI Overviews or AI Mode on their own.

Google's apps are ubiquitous in U.S. classrooms, and Chromebooks are the most widely issued student devices. Reject the AI, lose the search engine.

CZ says banks are even less safe from hackers than Bitcoin and crypto, arguing the entire financial system is at risk.

CZ says Binance saw about $3.6 billion in outflows, roughly 2% of holdings, against the 10% to 30% he had braced for.

"I think it's worth underscoring just how big of a document that is."

Baron Koch CFA on JP Morgan putting Bitcoin at the top of its long-term forecasts.

The data centers DLR bought from DCRU were old and thinly leased.

Toronto has 3 years left, LA under 1, Virginia was vacant until a new 10-year lease starts Dec 1. Price: $21-26M per MW.

The sponsor was the buyer.

Password manager mSecure tells current and former customers to immediately secure everything stored in it.

That means passwords, two-factor authentication and passkeys. Its maker, mSeven Software, says it "recently learned of suspicious activity" tied to the app and has brought in outside cybersecurity experts.

The notice does not say what happened, how many users are affected or whether any vaults were accessed.

The warning lands after Germany's cyber agency BSI found in December 2025 that mSecure's maker could, in theory, access the data users store in it.

Citi Wealth is pitching spot BTC and ETH ETFs as the regulated, brokerage-account way for suitable clients to add digital assets alongside stocks and bonds.

h/t matthew sigel recovering CFA

Binance says hackers used a fake job interview to breach an engineer's computer, then used an internal AI tool to take over two wallet developers' systems.

The result: $6.3 billion stolen on October 29.

"Bitcoin is worse, is better, it's simple, it's stupid."

and

on Bitcoin's small attack surface.

"The market is getting antsy about the mystery box."

on Red October and the AI trade.

"It's not for you and me, it's for like just a few users to go out and generate like a hundred X value on, you know, pharma pipelines or weapons manufacturing or whatever."

on who the AI frontier is really for.

"Which begs the question, how smart do these models need to be?"

and

on what all that AI training compute is for.

Blockstream moves another 300 BTC into Liquid, cutting the backing shortfall to 250 BTC.

North Korea calls the $6.3 billion Binance heist claims "nothing more than absurd fabrication."

KCNA issued the denial on Nov. 3, about two days after the FBI named Pyongyang as responsible.

Samson Mow says another 300 BTC has moved to the Liquid Federation wallet, cutting the shortfall to 250 BTC.

https://mempool.space/tx/2701150a160219c13c5a580bc7c93aeaee69bf5810b24cfffdc065d879fa4ed5

"One being you're looking at the IPO and the emergence of one of the most dominant franchises and institutions, institutions in the history of mankind."

on the Anthropic S-1.

"Bankers are more than happy to come in and sell these strategies to people and charge large spreads."

and Baron Koch CFA on Bitcoin yield strategies.

"His point is, we're here now, and it's time to throw a Hail Mary."

Baron Koch CFA on the Stephen Miran paper.

BofA ranks Texas as the highest-impact governor's race for data centers, utilities and power this cycle.

The bank calls it "the single most consequential election" for the sector. Georgia, Ohio, Pennsylvania and Oregon also made its list, out of 36 races.

BofA still calls Texas "the clearest secular demand growth story in the sector." But it says investors should carry "materially wider volatility margins" than the market currently reflects.

The demand is there. The political outcome is the open question.

"One path is one of the most dominant franchises in the history of mankind. The other is horribly unsustainable and twelve months away from blowing up." -

We discuss: ⚡ The Anthropic S-1 ⚡ Big Tech's cash crunch ⚡ The Binance hack

New Jersey rescinds its Coinbase staking order after more than 3 years.

The state's Bureau of Securities pulled its June 2023 cease-and-desist order on October 30, and the matter is over. New Jersey users can stake again.

Coinbase estimates those users missed roughly $15 million in rewards while the order stood.

No new law was passed. No court ruled on whether staking is a security. The Bureau rescinded the order without prejudice, which leaves the door technically open.

Three years of lockout, and the legal question is still unanswered.

https://assets.ctfassets.net/sygt3q11s4a9/UP8DDH65wMBLgeI2RbWRR/90945f6360884dfa75aadcbac57d4f9f/Coinbase_Withdrawal_Order_10_30_26.pdf

Power outage hits Washington, D.C. the day before the midterms.

Pepco says an event at its I Street Substation in Foggy Bottom left about 1,100 customers without power. Outage maps listed 1,176. The area is blocks from the White House. Traffic lights and some federal facilities, including the State Department, were affected.

DC Fire and EMS responded to smoke from multiple manholes on H Street NW. One manhole reportedly exploded in front of the World Bank. Pepco said the cause was under investigation and gave no restoration time at first.

By the afternoon, the main outage was largely resolved.

https://www.popville.com/2026/11/power-outages-hit-1176-pepco-customers-dc-foggy-bottom-and-downtown/

"If you were to tell me that Binance would be hacked for 6.3 billion dollars and Bitcoin would be down less than five percent less than 18 hours later, I would have told you you're crazy."

and Baron Koch CFA on the Binance hack.

Apple sent threat notifications to German MPs and ministers saying mercenary spyware was aimed at their iPhones. The alerts started landing on 29 October.

Digital minister Karsten Wildberger confirmed it and said it is something that "unfortunately happens from time to time." That is the line that stuck with me. A spyware campaign against lawmakers is treated as a known hazard of the job.

The cyber agency BSI is not saying patch and move on. It tells recipients to assume the phone may be compromised, set up a new device with a new number, and skip the full backup restore.

When the official fix is replace the phone and the number, the threat model is not a bug. It is a budget with a government's name on it.

https://www.euronews.com/2026/11/02/german-mps-and-ministers-warned-iphones-have-been-targeted-by-spyware

"Once that question changes, the career risk flips on its head."

Baron Koch CFA on the switch that flips institutions into Bitcoin.

Four days after Binance's $6.3B hack, Mercado Bitcoin reports its own incident across multiple chains.

No public evidence links the two. The exchange says its own assets moved, not customer funds, and withdrawals stay paused.

https://news.bitcoin.com/security/brazil-mercado-bitcoin-halts-withdrawals-estimated-46m-stolen/

Blockchain Association and Crypto Council for Innovation filed comments on Illinois' draft rules for the Digital Asset Tax Act.

They still call the tax unlawful and have sued in state court.

The letter is a good-faith effort to engage the Department of Revenue.

https://theblockchainassociation.org/api/media/file/CCIBA_Joint_LetterReNoticeofDraftProposalImplementingtheDigitalAssetTaxAct.pdf