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Your morning Bitcoin brief: Liquid Network restores full bitcoin backing for LBTC, BTCPay urges merchants to replace wallets after thefts estimated at $1.6 million, Strategy adds 811 BTC and other bitcoin news
As of Nov 3, 2026, 5:02 AM EST
MARKET
Price $76,975 (-1.24%)
24h volume $27.1 bn
Dominance 59.9%
Sats / $ 1,299
NETWORK
Block #974,379
Hashrate 1,033 EH/s
Difficulty -1.92%
Retarget 10 days
Halving 525 days (64.0%)
MEMPOOL
Fee 1 sat/vB
TX 40,289
Size 20.5 MB
Queue 21 blocks
LIGHTNING
Capacity 2,531 BTC
Channels 22,680A further 250 BTC was added to the reserves. Blockstream says all LBTC is again backed 1:1 by BTC, verifiable by anyone running a Liquid node. news.bitcoin.com x.com
The October 27 release requires confirmed inputs from peers for splices by default and improves recovery when a channel has to close while its funding is still pending. cryptoslate.com
The November 2 advisory on the incident affecting BTCPay Server 2.4.1 and earlier ties the hot-wallet thefts to a flaw patched in August and says updating cannot remove access attackers have already gained. cryptoslate.com blog.btcpayserver.org
The flaw was patched in April, but a malicious announcement already saved on an affected node has to be removed separately. cryptoslate.com
The release mitigates TCP flaw CVE-2026-98432 and upgrades NodeJS (CVE-2026-111497) and Bitcoin (CVE-2026-117349). Raspberry Pi lacks a kernel TCP fix, so it gets mitigations instead: LND v0.21.6, new firewall rules and disabled MPTCP. x.com mynodebtc.com
Strategy paid $65.5 million, reaching 849,327 BTC, while spending $208.2 million on STRC preferred-share buybacks; its deployable USD cash fell 45.3% to $133 million. Strive’s purchase brings its holdings to 43,124 BTC. bitcoinmagazine.com cointelegraph.com
The Tokyo-listed bitcoin treasury company spent about $160 million in just over two weeks and has completed nearly half of its authorized buyback. news.bitcoin.com
IBIT shed $405.3 million on Monday as US spot Bitcoin ETFs opened November with nearly $399 million in net outflows. cointelegraph.com
In a reply brief, the crypto-focused bank asks the US Supreme Court to review a 10th Circuit decision that allowed regional Federal Reserve banks to deny master accounts to eligible institutions. news.bitcoin.com
It also brings updated payment requests, response caching without Redis and improved Lightning payment handling. Mint database migrations are included: back up databases and stop older mint workers before upgrading; Spark operators should reconcile pending payments first. github.com
According to @bkeroack, satd is the first node implementation to offer this: values at or above a chosen size can be pruned at least 288 blocks behind the tip without breaking consensus, and -restoreopreturns restores them. The post cites the BIP-110 controversy. delvingbitcoin.org delvingbitcoin.org
BTC fell about 1.7% on Monday and slipped below $77,000 as stocks pared early gains driven by hopes of a diplomatic resolution to the US-Iran war. cointelegraph.com news.bitcoin.com
After the $6.3 billion hack attributed to North Korea, Binance has covered 95% of losses and holds reserves for the remaining 5%; post-mortem reviews remain open. bitcoinmagazine.com
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