FRIDAY, APR10
1. Iran bitcoin tolls at Hormuz, 2. Nic Carter on Satoshi, 3. Cloudflare 2029 post-quantum, 4. EU kills Chat Control
From Proto and Bitkey - part of the Bitcoin ecosystem at Block, Inc.
1. hormuz
Iran is requiring shipping companies to pay transit tolls in bitcoin for oil tankers passing through the Strait of Hormuz during a two-week ceasefire with the United States, according to a Financial Times report confirmed by Hamid Hosseini, a spokesperson for Iran’s Oil, Gas and Petrochemical Products Exporters’ Union. The fee is roughly one dollar per barrel of crude cargo, putting the cost for a fully loaded supertanker at approximately two million dollars per transit. Hosseini told the Financial Times that once a vessel emails its cargo details and Iran completes its assessment, crews are given seconds to pay in bitcoin to avoid tracing or confiscation under sanctions. The IRGC, which controls the strait, issues a one-time permit code and escort instructions routing ships along Iran’s northern coastline. Blockchain analytics firm TRM Labs reports the toll system has been operational since mid-March and could generate up to twenty million dollars per day from tanker traffic alone. The arrangement represents the first time a sovereign state has deployed cryptocurrency infrastructure as a revenue mechanism at a major maritime chokepoint. For the roughly twenty percent of global oil and LNG trade that normally flows through Hormuz, the message is stark: bitcoin is now a gatekeeper currency at the world’s most critical energy corridor.
-EDITOR·OP_DAILY2. satoshi
Nic Carter argues that Satoshi Nakamoto is likely deceased, and Bitcoin’s growing quantum vulnerability is the strongest evidence. In a detailed thread on X, Carter points to the roughly 1.7 million BTC sitting in early “pay to public key” outputs that expose their public keys, making them crackable by a sufficiently powerful quantum computer. Carter notes that recent research from Google and Caltech suggests this threat might be easier than previously expected, potentially doable by a quantum computer with as few as 26k quantum bits. With Google and Cloudflare targeting 2029 for post-quantum upgrades and U.S. agencies aiming for 2030, the timeline is tightening. Carter’s core logic is simple: only Satoshi can resolve this by rotating those coins to safer addresses or provably burning them, and the silence from that wallet speaks volumes. The thread arrives amid renewed Satoshi speculation following a New York Times piece identifying Adam Back as Bitcoin’s creator, which Carter dismisses as lacking rigorous evidence.
-EDITOR·OP_DAILY3. quantum
Cloudflare is accelerating its post-quantum security roadmap, setting 2029 as the deadline for fully upgrading both encryption and authentication across its entire product suite. Writing in the Cloudflare Blog, Bas Westerbaan details the technical developments that forced this move: a Google breakthrough in cracking elliptic curve cryptography, and a separate finding by startup Oratomic showing that breaking P-256 requires only 10,000 qubits on a neutral atom computer, far fewer than previously expected. Those converging advances have pulled Q-Day estimates well ahead of the typical 2035-plus horizon. Westerbaan argues the threat has shifted: while post-quantum encryption has been standard on Cloudflare’s network since 2022, authentication is now the more critical gap. For businesses, Cloudflare recommends making post-quantum support a procurement requirement and assessing critical third-party vendors now, given that migration dependency chains will take years to work through.
-EDITOR·OP_DAILY4. chatcontrol
The European Parliament has killed Chat Control 1.0, voting 311 to 228 to reject extending the ePrivacy derogation that since 2021 gave companies like Meta, Google, and Microsoft legal cover to scan private messages for child abuse material. Writing in the EFF’s Deeplinks blog, the organization calls the vote a real blow to voluntary mass scanning but warns the fight is far from over. The derogation expired April 3, meaning platforms operating in the EU no longer have a legal basis for indiscriminate message scanning. A key amendment, tabled by Pirate Party MEP Markéta Gregorová, demands that any future scanning be strictly limited to users suspected by a judicial authority of involvement in abuse, not swept across entire platforms. The EU Commission’s own evaluation revealed the old system was deeply flawed: nearly half of the three hundred thousand chats reported annually in the EU were false positives, and around ninety-nine percent of all reports came from a single company, Meta. But the permanent replacement regulation, Chat Control 2.0, is still alive, with trilogue negotiations resuming in May and a political deal targeted for July. For advocates of encrypted communication and digital privacy, the expiration is a milestone, not a finish line.
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