New Satoshi Emails Emerge

The Breakdown First Five - Monday, February 26, 2024

Welcome back to The Breakdown First Five — the 5 most interesting and/or important stories in bitcoin, crypto, and markets to start your day.

5. Riot Wins Injunction

Riot Platforms and the Texas Blockchain Council have won a temporary restraining order against government collection of granular mining data. The Department of Energy wanted a list of every mining rig and the details of electricity contracts. The government claimed this draconian list-making effort was an emergency, because Bitcoin’s price was rising and additional mining could overload the grid. The court disagreed.

4. Binance Plea Accepted

The court has accepted Binance’s plea deal, setting in motion one of the largest corporate settlements in history. Binance will pay $4.3B in fines and has agreed to a 3 year monitorship to oversee compliance. The judge said this was a case where the “ethics of the company were compromised by greed.” The DOJ have also asked for CZ to hand in his passports to await sentencing in April. 

3. Carlson Group Adds Bitcoin ETFs

Carlson Group, an investment firm with $30B in AUM has activated four Bitcoin ETFs for their network of advisors. Carlson RIAs will now be able to put their clients in Bitcoin provided by Blackrock, Fidelity, Franklin Templeton or Bitwise. This combination includes the highest liquidity ETFs as well as those with the lowest fees. The big boys are still doing their diligence before letting their RIA networks loose, but this is still progress. 

2. Uniswap Hits the Fee Switch

The Uniswap foundation has put forward a new proposal to activate the fee switch, this time suggesting that governance participants should receive a share of the platform’s profits. Markets went ballistic, with UNI up 60% and numerous DeFi governance tokens following, suggesting that the market sees profit sharing as the new DeFi paradigm. Others suggested that Uniswap knows that they won’t be sued by the SEC and are now comfortable to distribute fees. 

1. The Satoshi Files

A new trove of early Satoshi correspondence has been released adding new insights on the Bitcoin inventor. The emails went back and forth with early contributor Martti Malmi between 2009 and 2011. Key was the revelation that Satoshi wanted much larger throughput, vindicating large blockers. There were also opinions on environmental impacts, time stamping arbitrary data and regulatory risk. Many think they now have enough information to identify Satoshi.