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Your morning Bitcoin brief: Bitcoin Core v31.1 with a -privatebroadcast clearnet fix, Lightning tightens invoice rules after a reported attack, Bessent’s plan B for the stalled CLARITY Act and other bitcoin news
As of Oct 28, 2026, 5:03 AM EDT
MARKET
Price $81,402 (+2.07%)
24h volume $23.7 bn
Dominance 59.5%
Sats / $ 1,228
NETWORK
Block #973,528
Hashrate 1,074 EH/s
Difficulty +6.47%
Retarget 1 day
Halving 531 days (63.6%)
MEMPOOL
Fee 1 sat/vB
TX 50,449
Size 21.6 MB
Queue 22 blocks
LIGHTNING
Capacity 2,571 BTC (0.0%)
Channels 25,211The release fixes a path that could connect over clearnet even with the privacy network enabled for -privatebroadcast. Anyone using that option should update promptly. delvingbitcoin.org
Applications that import PSBTs and rely on the vulnerable library’s accounting can miscalculate miner fees and miss an excessive-fee warning. cryptoslate.com
Antoine Poinsot cited a rise in reports driven largely by LLMs. Issues flagged as easy to discover will get fixes backported to all maintained releases, released as soon as possible with a security advisory. mailing-list.bitcoindevs.xyz bitcoincore.org
ETH here refers to the Exponential Time Hypothesis, and a theoretical SAT speed-up alone does not establish a practical cryptographic attack. cryptoslate.com
BOLT11 now requires one payment hash and one payment secret, and operators must check how their software records withdrawals. cryptoslate.com
Upgrading is highly recommended, as some of the issues can be exploited by malicious nodes. A new setting controls whether splices can spend unconfirmed inputs (off by default); the release is compatible with previous versions. github.com
Swaps run 1:1 via participating providers that handled 99% of pre-incident peg-out volume. Federation peg-outs stay under enhanced controls as an independent audit nears completion; full 1:1 BTC backing for LBTC is not yet restored. x.com x.com
US Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent told Ripple’s Swell conference that the Treasury can work with the SEC and CFTC to fill the gap left by the Clarity Act’s failure in the Senate. news.bitcoin.com
Nodes and miners should upgrade before block 979919: from block 980019, a 29.4.2 node may accept blocks this release rejects. A pruned node that upgrades late may need to re-sync from scratch. github.com
@ConorOkus argues the gap is mostly demand, not technology: Lightning runs in production and more than a million US merchants can accept bitcoin via Square, yet few people pay with it in everyday life. delvingbitcoin.org youtube.com
Luxor aims to use the proceeds to scale its AI infrastructure business and expand its GPU sourcing services as global chip supply chains become constrained. cointelegraph.com
The two miners independently found blocks on Monday and Tuesday, an unusual run on a network mostly dominated by mining firms and pools. news.bitcoin.com
Chainalysis’s Oct. 26 report tracks activity it classifies as everyday use; household access remains unmeasured. cryptoslate.com
A 27-year-old St. Louis man pleaded guilty in Hartford to conspiracy to commit Hobbs Act robbery over a failed August 2024 plot to steal bitcoin from a Connecticut family. bitcoinmagazine.com
In his eighth letter, he describes 13 days in Oklahoma City’s lockdown transit hub and 18 days caged 23 hours a day at USP Lewisburg, where he learned his grandmother had died. therage.co
On October 28, 2010, the first short trade with bitcoin was conducted with a loan of 100 BTC provided by the company nanotube to the Kiba company with the assistance of the bitcoin-otc market.
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