Kate's out sick, so Brandon flies solo. The headline: a researcher used Claude Opus 4.8 to find a counterfeiting bug in Zcash's shielded pool that could've minted unlimited coins undetectably — ZEC fell 30%. Plus a Bitcoin selloff below $60K, Strategy's quiet sale, and Lava's Bitcoin-back card.

In this episode of Good For Bitcoin, Brandon and Kate discuss:

• Kate's out sick, so it's a short, solo, rapid-fire show this week.
• Market check: Bitcoin slid below $60K, down 21%+ on the week, with Fear & Greed in extreme fear.
• Treasury watch (busier than usual): buys from Strive (+2,500 to ~19,000 BTC), Orange BTC, Capital B, Smarter Web and DDC; sells from ProCap (-52) and Canada's Bitcoin Treasury Corp (-3.64).
• Strategy sold 32 BTC (~$2.5M) — just 0.004% of its stack — yet got blamed for the selloff, even though it bought ~25,000 BTC two weeks ago. The frustrating part: Saylor stayed silent. With an avg cost near $75K, MSTR and STRC both dipped.
• Lava launched a Bitcoin-back Visa: up to 5% back in BTC at partners, 3% in the US, 1% abroad, no annual or FX fees. It's a secured hybrid funded by your Lava balance — top up via bank transfer, stablecoins, or a Bitcoin-backed loan.
• The big one: researcher Taylor Hornby found a critical counterfeiting bug in Zcash's Orchard pool that could've undetectably minted unlimited ZEC — and its privacy means no one can prove if it was exploited. Arthur Hayes dumped his stack. The kicker: Hornby found it using Claude Opus 4.8, which surfaced it ~25% of the time. ZEC fell 30%, with Zooko pointing to a network upgrade to restore trust.
• Quick hits: the US Treasury froze Iranian leaders' accounts and seized $1B+ in stablecoins (easy to seize — unlike Bitcoin); the first Coinbase x Fannie Mae crypto-backed mortgage funded; and a crypto-tax hearing next week with seven House bills on stablecoins, mining, double-taxation, and a possible de minimis exemption.
• Follow the show on X — @goodforbtc.

Hosts:

• Brandon Marshall — @marshallmixing
• Kate Parkman — @katemparkman

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Someone moved 107 Bitcoin — nearly $8 million — out of ten-year-old, Mt. Gox-era addresses and torched it in a single burst of transactions on Monday. No note, no explanation. Brandon and Kate run the theories, then work through a packed week of treasury moves, Kraken's "native Bitcoin" yield product, and Stacks finally winning over Bitcoin Magazine.

In this episode of Good For Bitcoin, Brandon and Kate discuss:

• Quick recap of Wednesday's Hermetica episode: the hBTC cap went from 50 → 75 BTC and filled in under 24 hours — again. Go watch it if you missed it.
• Treasury watch: Strive adds 1,109 BTC to reach 16,500 BTC, edging past Coinbase's holdings by 8 BTC; DDC Enterprise adds 131 BTC for 2,714 total.
• Strategy buys back $1.5B of its 2029 convertible bonds at ~92 cents on the dollar — trimming total debt from $8.2B to $6.7B, with $871M still reserved to fund STRC payments.
• 🔥 The mystery: someone emptied five reused, Mt. Gox-era addresses (originally funded with 136 BTC back in April 2014) and sent ~107 BTC — almost $8M — to a provably-unspendable burn address, all in the same minute. Theories range from tax-loss harvesting to a vow of poverty to an AI agent gone rogue.
• A New York case tries to claw back Bitcoin losses on state grounds — Brandon and Kate think it gets tossed, since Bitcoin isn't a New York-only network.
• Kraken launches "Bitcoin Vaults," marketed as Bitcoin in, Bitcoin out — but under the hood it's KBTC wrapped onto the Ink network, routed through Veda vaults and Aave/Morpho strategies managed by Santora. It's CeFi yield; just be honest about the trust assumptions.
• Stacks lands its biggest validation yet: UTXO Management — David Bailey's asset arm, now folded into Nakamoto, parent of Bitcoin Magazine and the Bitcoin Conference — becomes the inaugural participant in stacking on Stacks. Notable given Bitcoin Magazine once made Stacks ineligible for coverage over the STX token.
• Quick hits: Coinbase brings back direct deposit so you can get paid in Bitcoin; SoFi becomes the first US national bank to launch its own stablecoin (SoFi USD); Cash App wires stablecoins into existing balances, so your balance can send and receive USDC across Solana, Ethereum, Polygon, and Arbitrum.
• Follow the show's new handle on X — @goodforbtc — and find everything at goodforbitcoin.com.

Hosts:

• Brandon Marshall — @marshallmixing
• Kate Parkman — @katemparkman

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Brandon sits down with Jakob Schillinger, founder and CEO of Hermetica, on the day they raise the hBTC cap from 50 to 75 BTC — and unpack how Michael Saylor's STRC quietly became a yield engine for Bitcoin-backed dollars.

In this episode of Good For Bitcoin, Brandon and Jakob discuss:

• Jakob's origin: from running an eyeglasses business in sub-Saharan Africa to building on Bitcoin in 2016 — and why most of the world doesn't have reliable money or property rights to it.
• USDh, plainly: a synthetic dollar backed by spot Bitcoin paired with a 1x futures short. ~10% historical yield, sourced from funding rates on Bybit, OKX, Bitget, and Binance via Copper and Sefu custody.
• The new integration: Strategy's STRC preferred equity now flows into USDh as a second yield source alongside the basis trade.
• Saylor's "financial distillation" framing: 50-vol Bitcoin → 2-vol STRC → 0-vol stablecoin — productized as USDh.
• hBTC, the Bitcoin carry trade: post BTC as collateral on Zest, borrow stables at ~3-5%, deploy into USDh at 8-10%, harvest the delta, swap back into Bitcoin. ~3% net yield in pure BTC terms, on-chain verifiable.
• Why a long-only Bitcoiner might pick hBTC over a stablecoin yield: cold storage stays cold storage; the unit of account never leaves Bitcoin.
• The property analogy: Saylor's optionality to sell some BTC isn't a thesis change — it's the same logic as selling a 10x'd house to buy more property. Strategy stays a net buyer.
• Saylor cosigned hBTC on stage at Bitcoin Vegas — unplanned. "X doing its magic," per Jakob.
• 📈 The news: Hermetica just raised the hBTC cap from 50 → 75 BTC. The last cap filled in under 24 hours. Borrow-side capacity is the only constraint on opening it wider.

Guest:

• Jakob Schillinger — Founder & CEO, Hermetica — @jakob_btc
• Hermetica — @HermeticaFi — hermetica.fi

Host:

• Brandon Marshall — @marshallmixing

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