Untagged Bitcoin blocks sparked solo-miner speculation before NiceHash confirmed they were mined during internal testing, highlighting limits of onchain attribution. Social media buzzed this week after Bitcoin blocks 932129 and 932167 were mined without an immediately visible pool tag, prompting speculation that a solo miner had struck it rich, a familiar “Bitcoin lottery” narrative that briefly captured the market’s attention. The excitement, however, had less to do with the blocks themselves than with what their apparent mislabeling revealed about how Bitcoin mining attribution works. It also revealed how quickly assumptions can take hold. Amid the speculation, NiceHash emerged as the miner behind both blocks. NiceHash operates a hashrate marketplace that connects miners with buyers of computing power, rather than running a traditional mining pool. Read more
Brian Armstrong posted to social media late on a Wednesday saying Coinbase couldn't “support the bill as written,“ potentially leading to a postponement in consideration. Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong has weighed in on the future of a cryptocurrency market structure bill under consideration in the US Senate less than 24 hours after he said the exchange could not support the current version of the legislation. In a Thursday CNBC interview in the US Capitol building, Armstrong spoke after posting on X Wednesday that Coinbase was pulling its support for the CLARITY Act, a bill to establish digital asset market structure. Members of the US Senate Banking Committee had been scheduled for a markup of the bill on Thursday, which was postponed following Armstrong’s post. “We developed this concern that if [the bill] went into a markup, the only way to edit some of that base text would have been through an amendment, and amendments had already been submitted,” said the Coinbase CEO. “And so we didn’t think it was prud...