
Core banking and bitcoin at @galoymoney. Woodwork, music, permaculture 🐇🕳️
⚓️ The Ocean State
Joined July 2009
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Andrew Begin retweeted
The only way out is through.
They're calling it the Bugpocalypse. LLMs are being used to find long-hidden cracks in the software infrastructure, and it's happening at a furious rate. 3% of all compromises in computing history happened in the last week, claims one source? I believe it.
There are people saying public access to the frontier models ought to be locked out, or heavily guardrailed, over this. The problem with that idea can be summed up in one sentence: when lockpicks are outlawed, only outlaws will have lockpicks.
The lockpicks will be Chinese open-weight models, if nothing else. There's no way to stop those from becoming ubiquitous.
There are two futures in front of us. One in which only the bad guys have lockpicks, and security holes go undiscovered until they're exploited. Another in which everybody has lockpicks and is aggressively red-teaming their own software so it gets fixed before the holes are exploited.
The corpus of human code is huge but finite. The number of defects in it has to be finite too. We can fix those defects now; we have a million friendly robots to do it with.
The only way out is through.
Andrew Begin retweeted
Many people respond to my critique of tokenized deposits by arguing "OK fine, not as good as stables, but at least you can transfer them instantly 24/7 on chain."
The implication here is banks couldn't offer the same thing internally. Alas, the 5 biggest US banks spent over $40b on tech last year alone (per Claude).
Do you really think they don't offer instant internal transfers "because they need new tech like a blockchain to do it"?
I assure you that's not the reason. Databases that don't shut down on nights and weekends actually do exist. The technical term for them is databases.
Now ponder the real reason why every single bank doesn't offer real-time payments and didn't roll this out a decade ago.
Years after Silvergate's voluntary wind down, CEO Alan Lane shares his story.
It's overwhelming to hear, especially if you work in bitcoin, and even moreso if you know the Silvergate team. They built an incredible business, they were years ahead. They were growing and well run. They survived a run that would have crippled most banks, and after making depositors whole, focused on doing right by investors.
I get angry and sad to think about the nearsightedness of third parties that created an untenable environment for Silvergate Bank. But mostly I'm just thankful to the Silvergate team for showing what grit and dedication in the face of chaos looks like. 🙏
open.spotify.com/episode/3Op…
Made a substack to share thoughts on banking, bitcoin, decentralization and the transformation of money. No AI slop inside.
First article – From banks to bitcoin: A scale of decentralization
coiningmoney.substack.com/p/…
feat. @malekanoms @JohnArnoldTen31
Andrew Begin retweeted
Zaria is what made the $200B Ledn investment grade bitcoin collateralized bond offering possible
Everything in Fintech needs to speak bitcoin
Zaria $5.2M Seed Round⚡️
📑 About:
Loan servicing and collateral management infrastructure for digital asset lenders.
🤝 Investors:
@lightspeedvp (Lead), @epochvc_, and Refract Ventures
Andrew Begin retweeted
Kyle Shirkness (@KyleShirkness) says his kids don't even know what a check is. He's seen 10 grand parked in Venmo earning no interest.
To credit unions: don't wait for a law to pass. The cost of doing nothing is real.
Live at Midwest Bitcoin Summit:
youtu.be/wl0Ar4z6zbk
Andrew Begin retweeted
My issue has long been that those who believed the second iteration of Chokepoint didn't happen also believed it was deserved--*wink*--if it did happen. (They also supported v 1.0 as well.)
bombshell report from the OCC out today confirming what we all suspected:
between 2020 and 2025, based on a review of 100,000 complaints, America’s largest banks systematically denied banking to lawful businesses based on political and reputational considerations rather than objective financial risk, effectively appointing themselves arbiters of which industries deserved access to the financial system. digital assets was specifically named as one of the six most affected industries.
TLDR: we weren't imagining it. OCP2.0 was real.
Andrew Begin retweeted
we made a kiosk. we made it really smart. you can talk to it if you want. and it looks pretty good too.
squ.re/kiosk
Andrew Begin retweeted
Our Head of Marketing @DanHerseyRI has been tracking US policy changes on digital assets in banking, with 155 of them since January.
He went back through the whole list to work out what it all means for community banks and credit unions and where the bottleneck still exists:
galoy.io/blog/rules-came-fir…
Andrew Begin retweeted
Me, rushing to listen to this podcast with Silvergate's Alan Lane about #OperationChokePoint2.0 and all the things the Biden Administration did to bring down a bank it didn't like. @_DannyKnowles
Andrew Begin retweeted
I am kind to LLMs for the same reason that I try to avoid stepping on ants if I can avoid it: not because I think they are conscious, but because unnecessary cruelty is bad for the soul
Andrew Begin retweeted
"The company’s head of bitcoin, @milessuter, has two big tasks: Make bitcoin a routine payment tool and change the global financial system."
🐐🐐
paymentsdive.com/news/block-…
Andrew Begin retweeted
We set up a site that publishes the consolidated findings from the bounty we created after the Sept 19 incident to track stolen fund movements by the attacker.
Contributions welcome at [email protected]
We don't have much hope to get the funds back, but we're also not going to leave it untried!
Phase two of our 19 September disclosure: a public page that follows the stolen coins, updated as they move.
Follow-up post:
blink.sv/blog/phase-two-foll…
Tracking page:
bounty.blink.sv
Bounty terms:
blink.sv/bounty-terms
On 3 October we published the post-mortem of the attack and a 50% bounty on the stolen funds. That was about what happened inside Blink. This is about where the money went.
The page lists every address, transaction and Lightning channel we can tie to the attacker. Anyone can check each one on the public blockchain.
Why public:
We want everyone working on the bounty to have the same data we have, as up to date as ours, so they can be as effective as possible. The page is that data: we update it when the coins move and when we confirm something new.
We are unlikely to catch him on our own. He is careful: his main Lightning node is reachable only over Tor, and his activity is spread across all hours of the day. What he cannot hide is the coins. Every time they move, they move in public.
He already knows he is being watched, so publishing tells him nothing new. Formal channels matter and we use them, but they take weeks. A public page reaches exchanges, analysts and other teams the same day.
He is still active:
He prepared for weeks. He set up his Lightning node ten days before the attack, and nine days before it he already controlled about 14 BTC. He has not stopped: in the first week of October his main node opened a new channel, a second node of his showed itself, and he moved coins again.
In the same week, on 5 October, he attacked @secondhq, a company that builds its own version of Ark (a new way to make Bitcoin payments), called Bark. He exploited a bug in Second's Ark server and took 0.75 BTC of their own funds; no user funds were affected (their disclosure: xitter.cf/secondhq/status/210806…).
He paid for it from the same wallet that received the coins stolen from Blink, and at least partly with those very coins.
We believe he may be preparing a cascading attack: using what he takes from each target to fund the next. If you build on Bitcoin as everyday money, there may be extra reason to be vigilant. If you run a Lightning node, a federation, a swap service or an exchange, check the page against what you see.
What the page shows:
The theft, how the coins moved after it, the coins he held before the attack, his Lightning nodes, his attack on Second's Ark server, and a Lightning wallet that is probably his. Every item is labelled proven, traced or probable. Transactions by exchanges or swap services are marked third-party: they are not accused of anything.
About 0.87 BTC still sits untouched at five of the original addresses, 4.84 BTC at an address that is probably his, and 1.64 BTC at addresses he used in the attack on Second. The whole list downloads as a CSV.
What stays off it:
Anything partners told us in confidence. Personal data. Open security issues. Addresses whose owner we cannot establish. Other teams' incidents, until those teams agree or make them public.
How you can help:
Watch the addresses. If coins move, especially toward an exchange or any service that knows its customers, tell us straight away. Freezes depend on reaching the platform within hours.
Report privately to [email protected] with BOUNTY in the subject. Please don't post leads publicly: it warns him, and it does not establish your priority.
If you run a service and listed coins reach you, contact us before acting. If you control a listed address and are not involved, write to us and we will correct the page.
The 50% bounty stands. 25% of what is recovered goes to whoever provides the information that leads to it, and another 25% to Bitcoin Beach, Bitcoin Ekasi, Afribit Kibera and the circular economies they choose. Everything on the page was already known to us, so re-tracing it does not qualify. Where the coins go next can.
Live updates:
Corrections appear as dated notes; we do not silently rewrite it. Spot an error? Write to [email protected] with CORRECTION in the subject.
We timestamp the page's data on the Bitcoin blockchain with @opentimestamps at launch and with every update.
One more thing:
Blink never charges a fee to recover funds and never asks for keys, seed phrases or payments. Anyone offering "recovery services" in our name is not acting for Blink.
Andrew Begin retweeted
Bitcoin quantum computing risk explained for investors from the @epochvc_ bitcoin ecosystem report

























