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As of press time, MicroStrategy has converted $425 million into bitcoin. The stock has surged 30% since its first bitcoin buy on Aug. 11. It was up 9% on Tuesday.

“We just had the awful realization that we were sitting on top of a $500 million ice cube that’s melting,” Saylor said. MicroStrategy has settled on bitcoin as the treasury alternative.
“This is not a speculation, nor is it a hedge,” said Saylor. “This was a deliberate corporate strategy to adopt a bitcoin standard.”

• Hong Kong : Bitcoin for freedom
• China : Bitcoin for capital flight
• Turkey : Bitcoin for capital flight
• Cuba : Bitcoin to access the world
• Nigeria : Bitcoin spreading quickly

The end game is leveraging Bitcoin to successfully wage asymmetric financial warfare against a tyrannical hydra made up of a global central banking and political system run amok. Or fail trying.

Paul Tudor Jones removed career risk for hedge fund managers from investing in Bitcoin.

MicroStrategy removed career risk for CFOs from putting company treasury into Bitcoin.

MicroStrategy, the publicly-traded business intelligence company bought 21,454 bitcoins for $250 million (usd). From BusinessWire

“Our investment in Bitcoin is part of our new capital allocation strategy, which seeks to maximize long-term value for our shareholders,” said Michael J. Saylor, CEO, MicroStrategy Incorporated. “This investment reflects our belief that Bitcoin, as the world’s most widely-adopted cryptocurrency, is a dependable store of value and an attractive investment asset with more long-term appreciation potential than holding cash. Since its inception over a decade ago, Bitcoin has emerged as a significant addition to the global financial system, with characteristics that are useful to both individuals and institutions. MicroStrategy has recognized Bitcoin as a legitimate investment asset that can be superior to cash and accordingly has made Bitcoin the principal holding in its treasury reserve strategy.”

Great resource to see who is giving grants to Bitcoin developers : Bitcoin Grants Tracker

Your personal information on bitcoin exchanges is not private, rules a Court in the US. In other words, "All your info are belong to us".

Judge Haynes, writing for the Fifth Circuit, decided the case under the well-established doctrine that "a person generally has no legitimate expectation of privacy in information he voluntarily turns over to third parties." Courts have applied this "third-party doctrine" to customer financial records kept by banks. The Fifth Circuit reasoned that Bitcoin records kept by an exchange should be treated the same way.

Great article about living on bitcoin in the Middle East. This article also mentions Amir Taaki (a legend in the bitcoin community).

“I rely on providers abroad,” Mo said. “I’ve had to work several part-time jobs as a graphic designer and web developer to provide financial support for my family. … I’ve finished 10 online courses at Edx, four at Udemy and read more than 10 books about programming and bitcoin.”

He said learning about bitcoin dramatically changed his life over the past two years.

“It was a great feeling when I realized I could buy food and other stuff using bitcoin,” he added.

"Minsc" : a miniscript-based scripting language making it easier to create good quality, more easily reviewable Bitcoin contracts.

There's a new Ledger vulnerability : Ledger App Isolation Bypass. If you use a Ledger, please read this article carefully and then buy something else, please. The scariest thing about this vulnerability report is the "disclosure timeline" that shows Ledger being pretty negligent in responding to the disclosure. It's really worrying as to how serious they are about security. You can also read these reddit threads: Ledger App Isolation Bypass and Ledger response to BTC derivatives exploit..

v0.9.0: code named "Rat Poison Squared on Steroids" in honor of Warren Buffet calling Bitcoin "rat poison" (him being "the biggest rat", in the words of the amazing Max Keiser). Amongst other benefits, this major release of c-lightning (bitcoin lightning implementation) includes : multi-part payments (sending and receiving) and also support for watchtower plugins that help protect the node's funds while the node is not currently connected to the network.

Some of Ledger's customers' personal info leaked around July 14th. Criminals might come to know the physical address of some people who decided they had enough bitcoin to buy a dedicated hardware wallet. That's not a very good thing. Ledger should have purging that information. Remember to buy hardware wallets with bitcoin, without giving your name, and have it delivered to another address than your personal address.

Want to donate to bitcoin developers? There's a webpage for that : bitcoindevlist.com

Remember : not your keys, not your bitcoins. Don't entrust your bitcoins to anyone, least of all banks. However, that being said, here's the big news : (in the US) the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency has concluded that national banks may provide cryptocurrency custody services on behalf of their customers.

Should you choose to go down that road, at least do it in Wyoming with the likes of what Caitlin Long is working on :

“I’m thrilled that the OCC yesterday followed Wyoming in allowing banks to provide custody for digital assets,” Long continued. “Wyoming has been developing its digital asset custody initiative for two years and already has a comprehensive framework and supervisory process in place, which does not exist elsewhere. The OCC and 49 other states do not yet have in place the comprehensive legal structure necessary for enabling digital asset custody without significant legal risk. They also do not have a roadmap for courts to adjudicate disputes involving digital assets and do not provide the certainty in bankruptcy that Wyoming provides for digital asset custodians. Its prudential standards make Wyoming the only jurisdiction in the U.S. where digital asset custody in a bank can truly be executed in a safe and sound manner.”

Who's contributing to Bitcoin development? Here's a Bitcoin development grants tracker.

Privacytools.io has a PeerTube instance. You'll find free privacy and computer security videos from Techlore. Luke Smith has great videos about digital autonomy : running your own email server, running your own metasearch engine, using rss feeds, etc.

Sendcash allows nigerian users to get a bitcoin wallet address for their nigerian bank account. One more option to send money to Africa. It might help convert some nigerian precoiners to the value of Bitcoin.

According to Motherboard, police are buying access to hacked website data :

Hackers break into websites, steal information, and then publish that data all the time, with other hackers or scammers then using it for their own ends. But breached data now has another customer: law enforcement. Some companies are selling government agencies access to data stolen from websites in the hope that it can generate investigative leads, with the data including passwords, email addresses, IP addresses, and more.

The Strike app has many possible uses among which : to buy Bitcoin (and custody it yourself), send remittances to family outside of the US, make micropayments for digital content, make purchases offline and online. Notably, this means Bitcoin-Only merchants all of a sudden have many more potential customers : all customers who have a debit card in the US (except a few States mentioned in the article). Great stepping stone to a circular Bitcoin economy.

The Bitcoin Genesis Block : The Times 03/Jan/2009 Chancellor on brink of second bailout for banks.