News, with sources

U.S. crude oil closed at $107.89 a barrel on October 20, up 85% from a year earlier. The U.S. benchmark natural gas price closed at $3.10, up 4%. For Bitcoin miners the gas price is the one that matters: gas plants make the largest share of Texas grid power, and at $3.10 their fuel costs about 2.3¢ per kWh, against the roughly 7.6¢ a typical modern mining machine can pay. Gas would have to more than triple before fuel alone priced miners out.

The yield on 10-year U.S. Treasury notes, the benchmark rate behind mortgages and corporate loans, closed at 5.31% on October 5, its highest since May 2002, and was 5.12% on October 20, up from 4.00% a year earlier. Over the same year bitcoin fell 23%. But across 53 weeks, the direction rates moved in a given week said almost nothing about which way bitcoin went. The dollar said a little more.

Between September 15 and October 14, 2026, daily average real-time prices at ERCOT's four trading hubs ran $37–42 per MWh on the days with data, about half the $78–85 per MWh a 20 J/TH Bitcoin miner could pay and still cover electricity. Only ERCOT North crossed breakeven, on September 16 and 17. MISO's Indiana hub averaged $64 and crossed it on six days.

Bitcoin's mining difficulty reset to 140.58 trillion at block 971,712 on October 16, up 5.92% from 132.72 trillion and the largest increase since the +7.15% adjustment on June 27. The same Bitcoin now pays miners about 5.6% less per unit of hashrate: at the October 15 close of $82,133.70, subsidy-only hashprice falls from $38.90 to $36.73 per PH/s per day.

A paper posted to arXiv this week reports that more than 100 researchers and their AI coding agents, working in an open challenge run by Eigen Labs, cut a benchmark for the core arithmetic of a quantum attack on Bitcoin's signature curve by 86% in about 8 weeks, landing at half the figure Google published in March. The circuit breaks nothing, and no machine exists to run it. What it measures is how fast the estimates move, and they now move in weeks. For a holder, the one variable that matters is whether your public key is already on the chain.

BlackRock's head of digital assets told Bloomberg that IBIT has processed more than $5 billion in in-kind Bitcoin-to-ETF conversions, up from roughly $3 billion in October, after the firm cut the minimum swap size from $25 million to $1 million in July. His explanation for the demand: kidnappings, ransom, and custody failures are motivating holders to trade their keys for shares. The trade removes the home-invasion attack surface by moving coins to the same custodial stack that already holds most of the US spot ETF complex.

Drones hit 2 tankers operated by Abu Dhabi's state oil company ADNOC as they transited the Strait of Hormuz on Thursday evening, and the UAE Foreign Ministry called the attacks acts of piracy by Iran's Revolutionary Guard Corps and named the mechanism: economic coercion. The strikes land 8 days after Tehran agreed in principle on a corridor through its own waters, and the toll-and-insurance apparatus underneath that corridor settles in bitcoin.

The Bank of Russia published its first approved list of cryptocurrencies for public exchange trading on August 11: Bitcoin, Ether, and Tether's USDT. Retail investors get a 300,000 ruble annual cap (about $3,600) per intermediary and a mandatory risk test, every trade runs through a state-licensed chokepoint, and the only stablecoin on the list answers to an issuer that has repeatedly frozen funds in cooperation with US law enforcement.

Strategy disclosed its 2nd consecutive weekly Bitcoin sale on August 10: 1,690 BTC at an average of $64,262, roughly $11,000 per coin below its cost basis, with every dollar going to buy back its STRC preferred stock. The company built to absorb Bitcoin spent the week selling it to defend the yield instrument stacked on top.

BIP-110's mandatory signaling window opened at block 961,632 on August 8 with miner support near 2.5 percent, and the nodes enforcing it split onto a minority chain that mined 2 blocks and stalled. The main network never blinked. The fork shipped without replay protection, and that design choice is the part holders should actually understand.

The US Treasury on July 29 designated Hormuz Safe and the Persian Gulf Marine Insurance Company, the 2 firms running Iran's mandatory Bitcoin-settled 'insurance' scheme for ships transiting the Strait of Hormuz. The same day, Iran rejected Oman's plan to split the strait into 2 shared lanes and fired a surprise missile salvo at US forces in Jordan. The designation is a live case study in what sanctions can and cannot do to a payment rail that was built to need no banks.

A pseudonymous Bitcoin holder calling himself 'John Doe 33' filed the first wallet-holder motion to dismiss a New York lawsuit that seeks court-ordered ownership of 39,069 dormant Bitcoin addresses, worth an estimated $234 billion, under a decades-old lost-property statute. The case has already drawn a rebuttal from the blockchain itself: Galaxy Research says 52 of the named addresses have moved over 34,000 BTC since the suit was filed, including one wallet that sent coins on July 4 after 15 years of silence. It is a live test of whether a state court can call cryptographic dormancy abandonment, and a preview of the legal theories self-custody holders may eventually have to answer.