Bitcoin maximalist class of 2012. Advocate of the Liechtenstein model. Managing Director of Global Private Wealth at @blinkbtc, and co-founder of @SequentiaSEQ
Joined April 2013
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Nothing is more important to the future of Bitcoin and the world than getting more people to be paid, save, and spend, in BTC.
Everything else is a distraction carefully designed to hinder the above. Especially if it gets you bickering with other bitcoiners on social media.
Andreas Kohl retweeted
Some personal news: after more than five years, I am no longer part of the Blink team.
In August 2021, shortly before El Salvador announced bitcoin as legal tender, I joined the small Galoy and Bitcoin Beach Wallet teams as Marketing Director and started working on bitcoin full time.
My first assignment was to help organize a bitcoin conference in San Salvador, the first of its kind in the country. The goal was to bring bitcoin knowledge and expertise to El Salvador, and to bring Salvadorans and the international bitcoin community together in the capital in support of adoption. That conference became Adopting Bitcoin @AdoptingBTC.
It was an exciting time, with many unknowns. No sovereign nation had ever declared its intent to embrace bitcoin, and for the first time since the blocksize debate, the conversation around bitcoin had turned back to its use as a medium of exchange. Our team was in the middle of it. We had been on the ground since 2020 as one of the country's first bitcoin startups, building the infrastructure that let the Bitcoin Beach community in El Zonte use bitcoin as money with ease, which President Bukele later cited as the proof of concept that inspired the nation's move.
It was also a frightening time. Travel and gatherings were restricted around the world and in El Salvador, and abroad, El Salvador was known above all for its homicide rate, among the highest in the world, and for decades of gang violence. Organizing an international conference there asked a lot of trust from everyone who came, and they came anyway.
In the years that followed, I led the rebranding of Bitcoin Beach Wallet into Blink and its expansion from a wallet built for one Salvadoran village into a wallet for everyday bitcoin payments, used today in 180 countries. In October 2024, Blink became independent of Galoy, which had incubated it since 2020, and passed to new ownership. I was one of the team members who moved over to Blink to carry the work forward.
The ideas that started in El Zonte travelled further than any of us expected. The community custody model, where a multisig holds the funds to make a seamless Lightning experience possible, has been iterated on by many other projects and companies. The idea of a bitcoin circular economy was exported to the world, and communities everywhere have replicated the Bitcoin Beach approach, many of them with Blink as their wallet of choice.
I am grateful to have been part of that work.
None of it happened alone. Many of the people I worked alongside in those early years have since returned to private lives away from the spotlight, so I will not name them here. You know who you are, and I am grateful for everything we built and every risk we took together. Thank you to the people of El Zonte and the Bitcoin Beach community, who showed the world what bitcoin as money looks like; to the Salvadorans who trusted a small team with their savings and their payments; to the circular economy builders who took the model home to their own communities; and to every Blink user.
Blink is no longer a purely custodial Lightning wallet. It now offers the same experience that helped El Zonte adopt bitcoin as money in a self-custodial model, and is in the middle of moving tens of thousands of users off custodial accounts. To the Blink team carrying this forward: I wish you every success.
As for what comes next, Adopting Bitcoin continues, and I remain on its board. The conference that began as my first assignment in San Salvador has grown the same way the Bitcoin Beach idea did, carried by local teams into their own communities. After five editions in El Salvador, Adopting Bitcoin Cape Town (@abcptza) holds its fourth edition on 26–27 February 2027, and Adopting Bitcoin Arnhem (@AB_Arnhem), hosted by the longest-running local bitcoin economy, returns for its second edition on 28–29 May 2027. Both are run by local teams and funded mostly through ticket sales, so if you want to support bitcoin as money on the ground, buying a ticket is one of the most direct ways to do it.
Beyond that, I am taking a break to spend time with my family, and I will keep building. When I started in 2021 I could not write software myself. With LLMs I now can, and I have been putting that to use on a couple of projects. More on those when the time is right.
See you in Cape Town and Arnhem.
Andreas Kohl retweeted
Spoiler: no, it's not! The country still hosts one of the highest-concentration hot-spots worldwide of Bitcoin-accepting businesses and Bitcoin-related people/events.
But the following misguided ideas are (finally) dying kinda everywhere (including there):
- that Bitcoin permissionless payments are the main use case as of now (price dynamics make permissionless savings more interesting for now, at least until one gets to the point of being all-in, then spending gets interesting too),
- that the little current attractiveness of Bitcoin payments is especially expressed for brick&mortar in-person businesses (magic Internet money is especially used over the internet, especially for privacy-sensitive or censorship-resistant cases),
- that Bitcoin marketing could be the only driving force for a country's touristic, financial or geopolitical renaissance (it could help as a bootstrap gimmick, but most people care for security, surf or real estate much more).
Always good to do reality checks, BTW! Looking forward to land in Bitcoin Country next week! :)
TIL... The most promising fusion reactor project is called SPARC and it's considered a stepping stone towards a future generation called ARC.
Deja vu
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Andreas Kohl retweeted
It’s crazy to think some people are still not anarchocapitalist at this point.
Andreas Kohl retweeted
I truly believe freedom money can have a very important place in the current world.
Unfortunately though, the more bitcoin starts fulfilling that function, the more it will be singled out by regulation. While we stay an inflation hedge, gov't don't care.
Andreas Kohl retweeted
I love @BlockstreamJade, but lack of support for taproot miniscript unfortunately makes it useless for me personally. The day @Blockstream adds this, Jade will become an integral part of my stack.
Andreas Kohl retweeted
Nothing in Limoges was built by the state that mourns it. Banks, bills, bookkeeping, exchanges: the towns made them, the crown collected them and called the proceeds France, the committee inherited the lot. The fruits of freedom are harvested in times of growing unfreedom.
Andreas Kohl retweeted
It will be pretty funny if the only we get out of 4 years of Trump presidency is firing Gary Gensler and a stablecoin bill that makes USDC a defacto a CBDC.
No "US bitcoin stockpile", nothing about protecting privacy, money transmitters laws or removing capital gains tax.
Your beloved national identity originally started out as nothing more than a LARP and meme that simply became trendy enough to last generations and become more sophisticated over time.
Doesn't mean it has no value. But it is what it is.
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Andreas Kohl retweeted
This is really exciting. This is the first time I've heard of a thief moving funds over lightning to obfuscate his trail, and the first time I've seen someone try to trace the flow of funds over lightning and claim they know where it now sits: blink.sv/blog/phase-two-foll…
Andreas Kohl retweeted
Explaining clearly, taking responsibility, refunding the affected users in short and predictable time. Others should take note.
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 [email protected].
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).
Andreas Kohl retweeted
Tokenization of securities is the biggest thing to happen to the global economy in 500 years. I believe it will be bigger than the Internet.
If you haven’t seen this interview please check it out and share it.
In this video I explain some past, present and future of this.
Why Tokenization Could Be the Most Important Economic Innovation of Our Lifetime | Bruce Fenton
@BruceFenton is a longtime Bitcoin advocate since 2012, securities professional, and one of the early pioneers of tokenized securities. He is the founder and CEO of Chainstone Labs and founder of Atlantic Financial.
Alongside Overstock founder @PatrickByrne, Bruce was involved in some of the earliest efforts to bring securities and financial-market infrastructure onto blockchain rails. In 2018, he tokenized equity in his own company, Chainstone Labs, on the Ravencoin blockchain—years before tokenization became one of Wall Street’s biggest narratives.
In this episode, Bruce breaks down naked short selling, the plumbing behind traditional securities markets, and why he believes much of the problem is ultimately a ledger problem. We dive into questions such as: Who actually owns the stocks sitting in your brokerage account? How can shares be lent and rehypothecated? What role do brokers, clearing firms, DTCC, and Cede & Co. play in determining who owns what? And could blockchain replace an opaque system of claims and intermediaries with a transparent ledger showing exactly where an asset is and who owns it?
We unpack what “tokenized stocks” actually means—and the important distinction between a token that simply gives you exposure to a stock’s price and a security issued natively onchain, where the token itself represents the actual share and the ownership rights that come with it.
Bruce discusses how tokenization could allow smaller businesses to tokenize ownership and have their stock traded globally without needing to be listed on a traditional exchange like the NYSE, as well as what a future without KYC could look like. Finally, we get into Wall Street’s embrace of tokenization, the SEC’s evolving approach to tokenized securities, and one of the biggest questions surrounding the future of this technology: who ultimately controls these new financial rails?
Remember to subscribe and hit the bell “🔔” icon to get notifications
0:00 Bruce Fenton & Patrick Byrne: Pioneers of Tokenized Securities
3:36 Naked Short Selling Explained
6:28 Who Actually Owns the Stocks in Your Brokerage Account?
12:00 Tokenization Solves Wall Street’s “Ledger Problem”
15:48 What Are You Actually Buying With Robinhood’s Tokenized Stocks?
16:48 Real Tokenized Stocks: When the Token IS the Share
21:46 Tokenization Could Open U.S. Markets to the Entire World
22:52 Why Companies May No Longer Need the NYSE
26:29 Could Tokenized Markets Exist Without KYC?
29:31 Bruce Tokenized Equity on Ravencoin in 2018
30:53 Will Blockchain Make Clearing Houses & DTCC Obsolete?
33:17 Could Tokenization Have Prevented the GameStop Crisis?
38:19 Wall Street Is Embracing Tokenization — Who Gets the Power?
40:20 The SEC’s New Tokenized Securities “Innovation Exemption”
42:57 Why Robinhood’s Tokenized Stocks Don’t Qualify
47:01 Could Everything Eventually Be Tokenized?
51:02 The Dystopian Side of Tokenization: Surveillance & Asset Seizure
Andreas Kohl retweeted
"The institution of a State is praxeologically incompatible with private property and private property based enterprise. It is the very anti-thesis of private property, and any proponent of private property and private enterprise then must, as a matter of logic, be an anarchist."
—Hans-Hermann Hoppe
Andreas Kohl retweeted
Central bankers and shitcoiners hate this one simple trick...
You can just live on a Bitcoin Standard in El Salvador.
The number of businesses that voluntarily accept sats has actually increased over the years.
But the truth doesn't suit clickbait shitcoin scammer narratives
The Bitcoin Law encouraged Medium of Exchange adoption. Grassroots communities are making it happen.
@Bitcoinbeach inspired “the Big Bang of circular economies” around the world.
Salvadorans have built on El Zonte’s example, and President Bukele’s support for economic liberty, with multiple other hotspots of merchant adoption throughout the country:
- @BitcoinBerlinSV
- @BitcoinLaLaguna
- @Bitcoinpirraya
- @BitcoinCoast_sv
- @btcsuchitoto
- @BTChalchuapa
- Bitcoin Santa Ana @la_hojita
- @BitcoinOriente
- Citadel of Hope @Bitcoinbeach Punta Mango
El Salvador already has the most circular economies of any country, and the number continues increasing, year after year.
Many other circular economy projects from around the world are also coming to Bitcoin Beach for the Circular Economy Summit this November 19-20 (after @btchistoricosv)
🇸🇻🚀
nitter.gq/Bitcoinbeach/status/20…
Andreas Kohl retweeted
So much FUD in the news these days, and specifically targeting those that are actually building on Bitcoin. It’s nothing new though. It’s always been this way and doesn’t change anything for those that are dedicated to the mission.