$21M BTC PRICE BY.... Thank you @saylor for guiding many people to Bitcoin, and for also inspired me today see you on $21 million Bitcoin price!

🚨 SAVE THE DATE 🚨 Build in El Salvador (BIES) is joining a spectacular lineup of events this November for Bitcoin Histórico. Saturday, November 14 | BIES Networking Night This is where Bitcoin meets El Salvador’s entrepreneurial community. For builders, founders, and entrepreneurs serious about moving projects forward, making the right connections, and taking the next step. 🎟️ Tickets go live soon.

Full post-mortem of the September 19 attack, and a 50% bounty — up to 3.3 BTC — on the stolen funds: blink.sv/blog/sept-19-attack… Bounty terms: blink.sv/bounty-terms On Saturday September 19 an attacker used a flaw in our admin tools to take over 35 Blink accounts and withdraw about 6.61 BTC from 24 of them. A customer called one of our engineers at 11:39 UTC. Fifteen minutes later the whole custodial service was off. By that evening the hole was closed and the service was back. By Thursday September 24 every affected customer had their exact balance back, in bitcoin and in dollars, paid for by Blink's shareholders. No customer bears any loss. This was our fault. Not Bitcoin's, not our users'. To the 22 customers whose bitcoin was taken, and to the 3,817 people whose account details were looked up: we are sorry. How it happened: From October 2023 until that Saturday, anyone with a free Blink account and a web browser could give themselves the powers of our support staff: change the email or phone on any account, log in as that customer, raise their limits. Three unremarkable mistakes in how our admin tools checked permissions, stacked on top of each other, in code we inherited. The whole team was busy moving tens of thousands of users to self-custody under new regulation. Monitoring built to catch outages didn't catch an administrator doing things no administrator should. What it didn't touch: The money came out of our hot wallet. Most customer funds sit in multi-signature cold storage that nothing in our admin tools can reach. Non-custodial accounts were never in play: we don't hold those keys. What the attacker saw: They also read the details of 3,817 other accounts, in some cases a phone number or email address. Not names, not IDs, not addresses, not passwords, not seed phrases. We wrote to every holder we could reach, saying exactly what was seen. What stopped them: Two-factor authentication. The attacker logged in to nine accounts that had it on and tried eighteen times to move money. Zero loss. None of the 24 drained accounts had it on. If you take one thing from this post: Settings → Security and Privacy → Two-factor authentication. Then turn it on for your email too. What we changed: The flaw was fixed the same day and a third layer added two days later. The admin tools are off the public internet. The functions that change a customer's email or phone are switched off for everyone while we redesign them. All customer API keys were revoked. The hot wallet now holds a fraction of what it did. Security fixes are developed privately and published once deployed; the code stays open source. A standing security reporting channel is live, with rewards of up to 0.1 BTC for critical findings. Where the money is: Some still sits where it was withdrawn to. About 5 BTC has gone through a cross-chain swap service; a small amount reached an exchange that is cooperating. Criminal complaints are filed in El Salvador and Próspera, the regulators are notified, and we have traced the funds continuously. We are not expecting the money back. So we are putting a 50% bounty on it. Whoever provides the information that leads to a recovery gets 25% of what is recovered. Another 25% of anything recovered goes to Bitcoin Beach, Bitcoin Ekasi, Afribit Kibera and the circular economies they choose. No cap, no end date, paid only out of funds that actually come back. Write to bounty@blinkbtc.com. We would far rather have spent this money on grassroots Bitcoin adoption than lost it to a thief. Shame on the attacker. One more thing: Ignore any email or SMS about this incident that contains a link: we contacted affected users only through messages in the Blink app. We will never ask for your PIN, password, seed phrase or a login code. The full post-mortem has the timeline, the technical detail for anyone running code derived from ours, and the bounty terms (links at the top).

El Salvador is pulling in a specific kind of person. Builders, pioneers - people who think in decades. Build In El Salvador is where these people find each other. Thank you @stacyherbert for the shout out! BIES is proud to be part of the renaissance happening here 🚀🇸🇻 H/t to @SimplyBitcoin for the clip. Pulled from their Sept 29th livestream.

I just tried the @BitBoxSwiss 02 Nova. This may be the first hardware I've tested that includes a lightning wallet. So how does it work? Well you can watch here to find out. youtu.be/dTQNZ4E6xS4

Starting today, @MyFirstBitcoin_ is accepting applications to fill three seats for it's Board of Directors. Applications will be open all month, the new term begins January 1 Help us grow the global independent bitcoin education movement Apply here: forms.myfirstbitcoin.org/boa…

Tuve el placer de hablar sobre lo que estamos construyendo con @SistersoSatoshi para que Bitcoin sea más accesible para las mujeres interesadas en las finanzas. Algunos de los puntos clave que se abordarán incluyen: 🔸 Mujeres liderando la adopción de Bitcoin. 🔸 Cómo la creatividad fortalece las comunidades. 🔸 El camino hacia la libertad financiera. ¡Disfrute mucho de este espacio con @EscuelaBTC!

@BuildInES social & launch party last night 🥁🪇

El Salvador is for builders!

If you want to come build cool things in the new El Salvador, then here is your community 👇

Every account affected by the September 19 incident has been made whole. We restored each account to its exact pre-incident balance. Affected users were notified directly before this post. Thank you to our mission-aligned shareholders who stepped in.

Never done a coinjoin before? Start here. Make your Bitcoin more private with @wasabiwallet. Automate everything to cold storage. Bonus: connect to your @umbrel node to level up. Full video: youtu.be/iyWNgmKHkB8

Buy something online → merchants see your address, your balance, and every coin your change touches. CoinJoin fixes this: ▪️ Full @WasabiWallet setup ▪️ Auto-mix to cold storage ▪️ Your own node ▪️ Private spending Watch on @SOVsessions 👇 youtu.be/iyWNgmKHkB8

A lot of people don't know this, but @bitdriver_sv was a big part of me integrating into El Salvador. Not only was he our source for our car rentals that allowed us to explore el salvador and travel across the country to shoot documentaries and content when we first got here, but when I decided to move, I rented a car from him for almost a year. More expensive than just buying a car, but I needed the flexibility and the optionality that, if I didn't like it here, I could leave. That I could just pick up and go. That was one of the conditions to take the risk which i negotiated with myself. Anyways Bit-driver gave me that flexibility through their car rental service, and I gotta say @OsorioNapoleon was always supportive and catering to me and my needs. If I needed a car switch, he'd switch it. When the car got into an accident, he helped me navigate the costs, there were no hard feelings, and we continued doing business. Big fan of Napo and Bit-driver, couldn't be more stoked for their support. And if you want to learn more about their story you can check out a podcast we did with link below: youtube.com/live/4ERx2RTUltk… Thanks again Bit-driver!

Exciting news! A huge thank you to @bitdriver_sv for sponsoring our BIES Social & Launch Party! 🙌 We’re honored to have them as part of the night.

Good job getting back online! Time for everyone to figure out non-custodial! @BTCsessions

A todos los usuarios, comerciantes y comunidades circulares de Blink Wallet 👇

I think I just found my new favorite VPN. 👀 I set up @obscuravpn, paid with Bitcoin over Lightning, and explored how its two-party design uses @mullvadnet exit nodes to separate who you are from what you do online. Watch: youtu.be/qjemXQgBJLw

I just imagine all the merchants that probably have the funds in custody and not have access to the funds. I hope this gets clear soon.

Salvadoran businesses could make a lot more revenue if they invested more in customer service and relationships. I don’t mean that people are rude or unkind. It’s more that many businesses seem unaware of the potential upside, because business development as a discipline is still relatively new here. Innovation isn’t necessarily the first thing that crosses your mind when you’ve spent years focused on surviving and barely making it to the end of the month. So when dealing with a vendor in El Salvador, I’ve learned that you need to be very specific about what you want, how you want it, and when you need it delivered. If you approach them proactively and respectfully, they’ll often follow your lead. And what could initially be perceived as bossy or arrogant starts to disappear once your intention to work together toward a common goal becomes clear. You make them feel part of the mission, like you’re both working on the same team, and communication becomes much easier. I’ve done this several times, and it has worked extremely well. People appreciate when you genuinely take an interest in their work and try to be helpful. At the end of the day, better execution means more business for them, more money earned, and food on the table. When that relationship is built properly, a lot of the complaints you hear about “gringo pricing” or getting scammed can also become less relevant. You start speaking a common language with local vendors. You understand each other better, build trust, and become someone they actually enjoy working with. You obviously can’t control how they’ll provide their service to everyone else in the future. But you can leave an imprint. They’ll remember you, understand your expectations, and usually be happy to work with you again. These lessons come from my own experience, but also from conversations with several members of the @BuildInES community who run businesses in construction, farming, logistics, and other hands-on industries. This is only one of many areas where there’s room for improvement in El Salvador, but I think it can be a segue toward creating goodwill and stronger relationships between locals and foreigners who genuinely want to contribute to the country and build their lives here. If you don’t have the energy, patience, or time to navigate these differences, El Salvador might not be for you. That’s not necessarily a bad thing. It’s simply something worth realizing before you lose your mind over situations you never wanted to deal with in the first place. At Build In El Salvador, we have a community of entrepreneurs, creators, and builders who have decided to be here for the long term They share these kinds of insights with each other to better navigate the realities of building in a developing country.

What happens to your Bitcoin if you lose your phone AND your hardware wallet? I stress-tested @Bitkey through a series of escalating disaster scenarios — including the company vanishing entirely. Find out what happened on @SOVsessions 👇️ youtu.be/toT8kQbFvLY