Christine Lee

Anchor, @BNNBloomberg
Fmr. CoinDesk, Reuters, ProPublica
🏆 Pulitzer Prize for Public Service
#Bitcoin • Journalist • Recovering Lawyer • Mom

[Christine Lee @christinenews]

Well said.

[Cory Klippsten 🦢 Swan.com @CorySwan]

THE "FED PUT" ISN’T A CONSPIRACY.

IT’S MATH.

The Fed doesn’t really have a put under the stock market.

It has one under the debt system.

And once you understand why, you understand a lot more about where the dollar is headed, and why many choose to store value in hard assets.

[Christine Lee @christinenews]

@pythianism Bond yields up, BTC bulls are out.

[Christine Lee @christinenews]

@matthew_sigel This never gets old.

[Christine Lee @christinenews]

@CharlieShrem @ErikVoorhees @rogerkver Where's the Bitcoin Historian at @pete_rizzo_

[Moat Financial @MoatFinancial]

Great show with @christinenews on Wednesday.

https://t.co/DbRqG8OdnL

https://t.co/clfxD7Kkog

https://t.co/wUryCOHKZF

[Christine Lee @christinenews]

@CorySwan @harryyeh Harry was known to hire personal security. Missing details on that.

[Christine Lee @christinenews]

Hey CT, can we solve this murder?

@harryyeh devastating to see this.

[David @Nikzad1111David]

It’s been 24 hours, and I’m still trying to process losing Harry.

For the last two years, Harry and I spoke almost every day. We had both been through a lot in life, and somehow we randomly connected at Satoshi Roundtable. We quickly realized our worlds had crossed in more ways than we knew, including mutual friends going all the way back to the early YC days.

Harry became much more than a friend. He taught me an enormous amount. He challenged the way I thought. He was, without question, one of the smartest people I have ever known.

I want to say this publicly because whatever people may read about Harry or the circumstances surrounding his death, I want people to know the human being I knew.

Harry had one of the biggest hearts.

He was extraordinarily intelligent, deeply curious, generous with what he knew, and relentlessly progressive in how he thought about technology and the future. He came from very little, built an extraordinary life and fortune, and never lost his willingness to share what he had learned with the people around him.

There are still many unanswered questions about what happened, and I’m not prepared to draw conclusions. I hope the truth becomes clear in time.

For now, I want to focus on Harry’s life, not his death.

He taught a lot of people a lot of things. I was fortunate enough to be one of them.

I’ll carry those lessons forward for the rest of my life.

Love you very much, Harry. Thank you for everything. ❤️ @harryyeh

[Christine Lee @christinenews]

@Bulldozer0 @CorySwan @harryyeh Investigative journalist Cory is my favorite version of Swan. I don't know Harry, but I hate to see people in the crypto space face violence, kidnapping, and/or murder. I support any investigation that exposes criminals and seeks justice.

[Christine Lee @christinenews]

I'm just looking forward to the day Knots is a non-topic.

Onward to AI and quantum safety solutions...

[mononaut @mononautical]

WE HAVE FORK-OFF!

BIP-110 nodes have rejected the non-signaling block at height 961632, and fallen behind the canonical chain tip.

[Christine Lee @christinenews]

@CorySwan @harryyeh From what I understand, he was living in UAE. Some people assume he was in Asuncion for Paraguay Blockchain Summit.

[Christine Lee @christinenews]

@peterktodd @QubesOS Before the hack, Peter warned not to use Cold Card, and recommended Phoenix.

[Shanaka Anslem Perera ⚡ @shanaka86]

Freezing Iran's money was only stage one. A court in Manhattan is now being asked to let a private company erase 344 million dollars from one wallet and recreate it inside another, and if a judge says yes, every self-custodied dollar-token on earth quietly becomes something new. Not censorship-resistant money. Reassignable money, controlled by an issuer that never held your keys.

What actually happened on July 14th is narrower and stranger. The US Treasury added four Tron wallets to the Central Bank of Iran's sanctions entry, an entry already tied to the Revolutionary Guard's Quds Force. The wallets had received more than 165 million dollars in stablecoins.

Tether then immobilized about 131 million of it. Nobody seized a private key here in this case matter. Tron kept producing blocks. The balances still glow on the ledger tonight. What vanished was the one thing that makes money money. The owner's ability to move it.

That is the distinction most of us miss. The revolution here is not programmable money at all. It is "programmable property rights". A solana:Es9vMFrzaCERmJfrF4H2FYD4KCoNkY11McCe8BenwNYB holder owns a private key that authorizes a transfer. Tether owns a separate power that decides whether that authorization still works. Two layers of sovereignty over one balance. The holder can say yes. The issuer can still say no. That makes USDT neither cash, nor Bitcoin, nor a bank deposit. It is rather a conditional bearer claim. You can hold it outside any bank, secure it with your own keys, move it across a public chain, and still never remove the issuer's veto from the token.

Now the part that turns a freeze into a doctrine. Victims holding American terrorism judgments against Iran/IRGC, worth roughly 2.42 billion dollars, have asked a federal court to order Tether to wipe the 344 million frozen back in April and mint the same amount straight to them. A judge has not granted it. But the question is now inside the law. If the power to freeze and reissue counts as control, an issuer who never touched your wallet can be treated by a court as holding your property.

The kill switch becomes a restitution switch. And it will not stop at Iran. Theft, fraud, bankruptcy, divorce, tax, any judgment could reach for the same lever next.

There is a subtler danger the code already reveals. The visible Tron contract blocks a blacklisted wallet from sending, but does not block it from receiving. A frozen address becomes a one-way trap. Money can still flow in, and none can ever flow out. That is not a detail. It rewires how every stablecoin processor must screen a payment before it settles.

Watch where this points, because global regulators already are. A March 2026 report from the body that writes the world's anti-money-laundering rules openly discusses stablecoins where only pre-approved wallets may hold or move the asset.

Today's model says you may transact until you are blacklisted. Tomorrow's says you may not transact until you are "allow-listed". The blockchain stays permissionless. The money does not. That is the endpoint taking shape, permissioned money running on permissionless rails, and it is exactly why the freeze feature is not a flaw institutions will remove. It is the feature that makes institutional adoption possible. A token nobody can stop appeals to a libertarian. A token someone accountable can stop is the only kind a bank will ever touch.

The system carries one irreducible flaw. Execution is certain, attribution is not. A sanctions label becomes a line of code, and once it runs, the chain does not reconsider the evidence. An innocent holder can petition to be unblocked, but the money stays frozen while the human process crawls behind the machine. Enforcement is instant. Due process is not.

Crypto did not abolish sovereignty. It split it into parts. Public chains execute. Analytics accuses. Private issuers revoke. Governments supply the list. And a Manhattan court may soon decide who receives the replacement tokens. The state did not put money on the blockchain. It put jurisdiction inside the money.

[Christine Lee @christinenews]

@Excellion The Samson Simpson is 🐐

[Christine Lee @christinenews]

@mikerosssky @BNNBloomberg Thank you ❤️

[Christine Lee @christinenews]

Thank you for the warm welcome from everyone at the
@BNNBloomberg newsroom this week. I'm thrilled to be part of Canada's premier financial news channel.

I want to cover as much Bitcoin and crypto as my producers will allow, so please, my fellow degens, hit me up.

[Christine Lee @christinenews]

@Kdog98422156 @BNNBloomberg I will certainly try!

[Christine Lee @christinenews]

@sethginns Congratulations, Seth 🚀

[Christine Lee @christinenews]

@Raindropactual Is there a crypto exchange you trust?

[Christine Lee @christinenews]

ECB President Christine Lagarde blocked Binance's MiCA license in Greece to keep a closer eye on their stablecoin volumes from France? If true, that is a major blow to the emerging Greek tech sector and who knows if they'll even be approved in Paris.

[Grégory Raymond 🐳 @gregory_raymond]

🔴 Exclusif @TheBigWhale_

MiCA : la France, dernier recours de Binance en Europe

Selon nos informations, la France est désormais la seule option solide de Binance pour conserver un accès au marché européen.

Des discussions sont en cours avec l'AMF, mais aucune candidature formelle n'a été déposée.

Ce scénario fait suite au refus grec dévoilé hier par Reuters, que nous sommes en mesure de confirmer.

Et les dessous de ce refus sont plus politiques que réglementaires.

Selon nos sources, le régulateur grec (HCMC) avait jugé le dossier complet et conforme à MiCA.

Le blocage serait venu d'en haut : Christine Lagarde aurait directement signifié au Premier ministre grec que Binance n'était pas la bienvenue en Europe. La consigne aurait été transmise au ministre des Finances, puis à la HCMC.

La motivation supposée de la présidente de la BCE serait liée aux stablecoins.

Binance est le premier vecteur de liquidité de ces actifs en Europe. Lui couper l'accès à ce marché, c'est renforcer par la contrainte la place du futur euro numérique.

Côté français, le Trésor et Tracfin pousseraient pour que Binance soit supervisée depuis Paris.

L'enjeu : conserver une visibilité sur les flux financiers de la plateforme, qui disparaîtrait si elle quittait le marché européen.

Toutes nos infos dans notre enquête disponible en accès libre ci-dessous

https://t.co/qwE28HWcLa

[The Bitcoin Historian @pete_rizzo_]

BREAKING: COINBASE JUST URGED CONGRESS TO REMOVE TAXES FOR #BITCOIN PAYMENTS

"YOU SHOULD NOT NEED AN ACCOUNTANT TO BUY A PAIR OF JEANS WITH BTC"

BTC BEING USED AS MONEY, ITS COMING 🔥