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Your morning Bitcoin brief: Strategy’s discretionary cash falls 72% amid STRC buybacks, JPMorgan projects bitcoin will outperform stocks and gold over the next decade, Quantinuum announces a quantum error-correction record and other bitcoin news
As of Oct 20, 2026, 5:02 AM EDT
MARKET
Price $81,502 (-1.44%)
24h volume $25.0 bn
Dominance 59.6%
Sats / $ 1,227
NETWORK
Block #972,296
Hashrate 1,046 EH/s
Difficulty +5.50%
Retarget 9 days
Halving 540 days (63.0%)
MEMPOOL
Fee 1 sat/vB
TX 45,104
Size 24.7 MB
Queue 25 blocks
LIGHTNING
Capacity 3,754 BTC
Channels 32,518Strategy spent $193.1 million buying back 1.94 million STRC shares, leaving $447.3 million in discretionary cash, and bought 267 BTC for $22.1 million, its third purchase of October, bringing the month’s spending to $73 million. cryptoslate.com cointelegraph.com
Japanese bitcoin treasury company Metaplanet is acquiring around 96% of Nasdaq-listed Super League. bitcoinmagazine.com
The Bitcoin treasury company added another 1,223 BTC after an earlier purchase pushed it past MARA Holdings, and continues to expand its reserves through equity financing. cointelegraph.com
AnchorWatch Trust Company has now opened its custody service. bitcoinmagazine.com
The proposed fund would use options and fixed-income investments instead of holding bitcoin directly, cushioning losses while capping potential gains. cointelegraph.com news.bitcoin.com
BlackRock’s IBIT led with $665.2 million in inflows, offsetting withdrawals from Fidelity and Grayscale, while other funds recorded no net flows. cointelegraph.com
J.P. Morgan Asset Management included Bitcoin in its long-term capital market assumptions for the first time; its 10% annual estimate tops every stock, bond and gold forecast, though it warns volatility and unstable correlations limit Bitcoin’s portfolio role. cointelegraph.com news.bitcoin.com
The project has built a minimal formal model of Bitcoin consensus; this month ProofOfKeags tries to anchor it to the live network, since directly verifying Bitcoin Core’s modern C++ is far out of reach with current resources. delvingbitcoin.org proofofkeags.com
A companion to bitcoin/bips PR #2294, the proposed policy would have a wallet also spend outputs whose public keys a spend would reveal and send change to a fresh, non-exposed condition, preserving resistance to BIP 360 long exposure attacks. mailing-list.bitcoindevs.xyz github.com
The firm says its record 99.9995% logical fidelity strengthens its path toward a commercially viable, fault-tolerant quantum computer by 2029, amid mounting concerns over quantum risks to Bitcoin. news.bitcoin.com
Bitcoin Magazine sent first-time users in Scottsdale to see how Bitcoin spending works in practice; setting up a Lightning wallet took seconds. bitcoinmagazine.com
Bristol Crown Court on Oct. 15 sentenced the men to five to six years for an aggravated burglary in a botched cryptocurrency robbery attempt that left the victim with severe injuries. news.bitcoin.com
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