A Year Without a Difficulty High, Binance's Reserves Snapshot, and 40 to 47 Percent of Reachable Core Peers Announcing an End-of-Life Line

The paper's first week back ran on the chain's block headers, Binance's reserves page and posts, two monitors' counts of peers read against Bitcoin Core's tables, and Strategy's filing.

Difficulty

Bitcoin's mining difficulty passed the longest stretch in the chain's history without a new all-time high at 13:29 UTC on 28 October, the 364 days of 2011–12. Read The high was set at block 921,312 on 29 October 2025, at 155,973,032,196,071.947, and the stretch reached a full year at 10:14 UTC on 29 October. The ledger holds each header's target and time; it does not count miners or state a cause. Read The retarget at block 973,728 that evening raised difficulty 5.539 percent, to 148,364,561,003,867.395, 4.878 percent below the high. It was the 26th retarget without a new high, one more than 2011–12 ran. A new high at the next retarget, at block 975,744, needs a rise of more than 5.128 percent. Read

Binance

Binance said on 2 November that the zero-knowledge proof for its reserves snapshot of 00:00 UTC on 31 October is complete. Its reserves page gives 692,488.864 BTC in on-chain wallets, 10,824.153 BTC of it in third-party custody, against 692,186.737 BTC in net account balances, at block 973,895, and offers its wallet addresses for download without a login. Those are Binance's figures. Checking that an account is included needs a Binance login and a verifier from its site, which Binance says is open source and independently audited; the paper has not run it. Binance put its loss in the theft of 29 October at about $6.3 billion and says it has covered about 95 percent of it. Read

Core peers

Of 8,076 peers announcing Bitcoin Core at KIT's monitor on 30 October, 3,808, 47.2 percent, announced a release line past its end-of-life date in Core's own table. One group of 781 peers adds 5.7 points: peers on 25.x announcing services number 1037 on five cloud and hosting networks, whose connections' median age was 12 minutes, against about seven days for other Core peers. Without it the share is 41.5 percent. BTC Nodes' IP entries, read by the same rule 13 minutes earlier, give 39.9 percent. The 29.x line, 610 peers in KIT's file of 28 October, entered the share on 27 October, the table's date for that line's end, without those peers changing software. Core's High advisory of 5 May, a crash that needs an attacker to mine a block with valid proof of work, covers releases announced by 39.6 percent of Core peers, and 5.3 percent announced a release with the fixes for three further advisories Core posted on 28 October, about 46 hours after those releases reached GitHub. A version is what a peer announces, and a peer is an address. Asked about the 781, KIT's monitor team replied that its node connects to all reachable peers and stays connected as long as possible, so a low connection age usually means a peer is new, has disconnected from it, or had its connection closed by network issues; the reply said it does not know who runs the group. The Story carries the answer as a note of 3 November. Read

Strategy

Strategy bought 811 bitcoin for $65.5 million from 26 October to 1 November and held 849,327 as of 1 November, by its filing of 2 November. It sold 1,178,552 common shares for $164.0 million net, put $98.5 million of that into USD Cash, and used $208.2 million of USD Cash to buy back 2,092,035 STRC preferred shares. Read