bitcoinwell
Bitcoin Well

Bitcoin Well is on a mission to enable independence. We do this by making it easy to use bitcoin in self-custody.

Whether you’re looking to buy, sell or use bitcoin, we never hold on to your bitcoin.

Bitcoin Well is automatic self-custody.

Public Key

npub19mf4jm44umnup4he4cdqrjk3us966qhdnc3zrlpjx93y4x95e3uq9qkfu2

NIP-05 Address

[email protected]

Profile Code

nprofile1qqsza56ed667de7q6mu6uxspetg7gzadqtkeug3plserzcj2nz6vc7qpz3mhxue69uhhyetvv9ujuerpd46hxtnfduqs6amnwvaz7tmwdaejumr0dsmsvmxs

Publishing to

relay.damus.io

nos.lol

Author Public Key

npub19mf4jm44umnup4he4cdqrjk3us966qhdnc3zrlpjx93y4x95e3uq9qkfu2

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Last Notes

2026-10-06 16:24:18 GMT

On Friday, authorities cut the internet around a protest site in New Delhi for 12 hours.
By Saturday, Bitchat, the messaging app that works without the internet, was gone from the App Store and Google Play in India.
India had already told GitHub why it wanted the app gone. Its design made it hard for police to intercept messages or trace users. And it kept working during internet shutdowns.
That's not a charge sheet. That's the feature list.
Bitcoin exists for the same reason. Money that works without anyone's permission, even when the people in charge would rather it didn't.
When the state tells you exactly why a tool scares them, believe them.
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2026-09-29 17:50:51 GMT

30 minutes.
@thekylehuber is about to argue that HODL is holding bitcoin back.
Drop your best case for never spending a single sat below. We'll put the best one to him live.
The Deep Dive, 2 PM ET. Link below.
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2026-09-28 18:20:46 GMT

Today Washington offered to release Iran's frozen funds in return for concrete nuclear steps, U.S. officials told Axios.
The same morning, Tether announced it has frozen about $550 million in Iran-linked USD₮ this year.
Two headlines. One lesson, and it isn't about Iran.
In 2023, $6 billion of Iran's oil money was unlocked as part of a prisoner swap. That October, after the Hamas attack, the U.S. and Qatar agreed to hold it back.
Frozen, unfrozen, frozen again.
A balance someone else can freeze isn't yours. It's a bargaining chip, and it belongs to whoever holds the switch. A treasury, a bank, a stablecoin issuer.
Bitcoin in your own wallet is the one balance nobody can put on the negotiating table.
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2026-09-20 21:50:07 GMT

In 1970 Congress told your bank to file a report with the Treasury, with your name and Social Security number on it, for any cash transaction over $10,000. The House vote was 302 to 0.
$10,000 in 1970 is about $85,000 today. The threshold has never been updated.
Nobody had to amend the law to widen the net. Inflation did it for them.
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2026-09-19 21:50:03 GMT

what was the moment you decided to take your bitcoin off the exchange for the first time?

2026-09-19 13:50:04 GMT

Julian Assange is back on twitter... I mean X. Here's the part of his story that belongs to anyone holding bitcoin.
December 2010. WikiLeaks had just published a quarter of a million U.S. diplomatic cables, and Washington was furious. So the money got cut off. Not by a judge. By the payment companies. Over the next two weeks PayPal, MasterCard, Visa and Bank of America each announced they would no longer process donations to WikiLeaks. No charge had been filed against the publisher. No court had ordered anything. A senator made some phone calls, the companies pointed at their terms of service, and a publisher's income disappeared in 14 days.
Someone on a forum suggested WikiLeaks take bitcoin instead. Bitcoin's creator said no. On December 11, 2010, Satoshi Nakamoto wrote: "WikiLeaks has kicked the hornet's nest, and the swarm is headed towards us." Within days he stopped posting in public. He never came back.
WikiLeaks started taking bitcoin in 2011 anyway. In 2017 @JulianAssange thanked the U.S. government for the blockade: it had "caused us to invest in Bitcoin -- with > 50000% return."
The swarm came. The network is still here. The companies that flipped the switch on a publisher can flip it on you, and they don't need a judge to do it. The one payment rail that never had a switch is the one Satoshi was afraid to test.
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2026-09-18 20:20:02 GMT

Even nation states can't use the gold they supposedly own.
Venezuela 'owns' 31 tonnes of gold. For almost eight years it couldn't have it.
The gold sat in the Bank of England while London's courts decided who the owner was. Today the FT reports it's moving to the New York Fed. Under the deal, Venezuela still can't sell it. It can borrow against it.
A country with an army, a central bank and a seat at the UN needed two governments' permission to touch its own gold, and got a loan instead.
Bitcoin collapses ownership and possession into one thing. Whoever holds the key has the coins, and there's no appeal.
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2026-09-16 20:55:04 GMT

What She Couldn't Freeze: Chrystia Freeland, the Rhodes Trust and the Money the State Couldn't Reach

2026-09-14 22:30:22 GMT

Meetings about your money this week:
Mon: 18 attorneys general write to the Senate about it.
Tue, 2:15 PM: the Senate votes on whether to proceed on it.
Wed, 2:00 PM: the Federal Reserve sets the price of it.
The Bank of Canada will get back to you sometime next week.
------------------------------------------------------------
Meetings about bitcoin this week: none.
Block 967019 arrived on schedule while you read this.
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2026-09-14 22:24:55 GMT

Meetings about your money this week:
Mon: 18 attorneys general write to the Senate about it.
Tue, 2:15 PM: the Senate votes on whether to proceed on it.
Wed, 2:00 PM: the Federal Reserve sets the price of it.
The Bank of Canada will get back to you sometime next week.
----------------------------------------------------------
Meetings about bitcoin this week: none.
Block 967023 arrived on schedule while you read this.
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2026-09-14 15:24:49 GMT

The Bitcoin Well IRA Is Coming: Real Bitcoin, in the Account the IRS Can't Touch

2026-09-13 16:54:43 GMT

On September 8 Ottawa put a 50% tax on American cheese, appliances and clothing coming into Canada.
By that night Washington had answered. From September 29, Canadian whisky, wine, beer, whey and motorcycles may not enter the United States at all. Not taxed. Refused. The legal authority is a section of a 1930 tariff law that had never been used.
The Prime Minister says the goal is "ensuring that no country can hold us hostage."
Right goal. It applies to people too. Your dollar now buys what two governments allow, at prices two governments set, and the list changed twice in one day.
There is one thing on the shelf that neither capital gets a vote on. It crosses the border in your head.
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2026-09-13 14:24:44 GMT

The Federal Reserve wrote down a target for how fast your dollar should lose value. The date on the page is January 25, 2012.
Before that there was no number. The law told the Fed to pursue "stable prices" and for decades nobody wrote down what that meant. Then, on a Wednesday afternoon, a committee decided stable meant "inflation at the rate of 2 percent," published it, and promised to reaffirm it every January.
Two percent a year halves your money in about 35 years. That is the plan when everything goes right.
Since that page went up, the dollar has lost about a third of its purchasing power. The target was 2. The result has been closer to 3 than 2. The same committee meets again on Wednesday to set the rate for the year ahead, and nobody outside the room gets a vote.
A target for losing value is still a policy of losing value. It just has a number on it now.
Bitcoin's issuance schedule was also written down, in 2008. It has been hit every year since, and nobody has ever had to meet.
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2026-09-12 16:54:43 GMT

On Wednesday a committee at the Federal Reserve will vote on the price of your money. Markets put the odds of a hike near 80%.
On Thursday a developer on a Bitcoin fork floated pausing that chain's new coin issuance for a month, to push back on miners he says are there only for the fees. A month of new coins, held back by decision.
And it isn't surprising. The BIP-110 coin exists because its developers changed Bitcoin's rules once to create it. When the chain stalled in August, they changed the rules again to get it moving. A third change to discipline the miners follows logically from the first two, and there will be a fourth. The moment a money's rules bend for one good reason, it has a process for bending, and every future reason will find that process. That is the entire history of the dollar: not one bad decision, but a precedent, then a committee, then a calendar of meetings.
Which is why Bitcoin has the best defence ever built against people who need to be in charge of the money.
It lets them. Anyone who wants to bend the rules can take their ball and go home. Copy the code, change what you like, go play with your friends. Bitcoin doesn't stop you and it doesn't follow you. It stays exactly where it was, running the same rules it ran in 2009, for everyone who didn't leave.
The dollar has no exit like that. Its control freaks stay in the building.
The people who most want to change Bitcoin end up holding something else.
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2026-09-10 18:54:28 GMT

Two headlines from the last 24 hours.
- Washington is talking about mailing every adult $5,000.
- U.S. Bank tested a dollar it can freeze and claw back.
Money that can be promised from a stage and pulled back by a bank is the money your retirement account is denominated in. Every fund in it. Every bond.
This fall the Bitcoin Well IRA lets Americans hold real bitcoin inside a Traditional or Roth IRA. Not a fund that holds a company that holds bitcoin. Actual coins, at an address you can check on-chain, any day you feel like checking.
Three companies, one job each. We source the bitcoin. Heritage IRA administers the account. BitGo holds the coins in qualified custody.
If a $5,000 check ever lands, you'll already know where the money nobody can print more of lives.
Waitlist in the comments.
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2026-09-09 20:24:34 GMT

"I am the house now."
That was the US Treasury Secretary yesterday, daring traders to bet against the yen. In 1992 Scott Bessent was 29 years old and helped George Soros break the Bank of England for $1,000,000,000. He knows exactly what he is saying.
Here is what the house has been doing. The yen fell to 164 per dollar in July, its weakest in nearly four decades. Japan spent the equivalent of $98,600,000,000 in four weeks buying it back, the largest intervention on record, with the US Treasury joining in for the first time since 1998. To pay for it, Japan sold $87,800,000,000 of foreign bonds in August, and Japan's foreign bonds are mostly US Treasuries. Japan is America's largest foreign lender.
So America helped Japan sell America's debt to prop up Japan's money, then doubled its own bond buybacks to undo what that selling did to America's borrowing costs.
Every fiat currency is backed by another fiat promise. The yen by Treasuries, Treasuries by the dollar, the dollar by Japan agreeing to keep holding Treasuries. Pull one and the rest have to move.
The house always wins because the house writes the rules and can rewrite them mid-hand. Until the day everyone at the table notices the emperor has no clothes.
Bitcoin is the one table with no house. The rules are the rules, and nobody, not even a Treasury Secretary, sits on the other side of them.
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2026-09-08 18:46:18 GMT

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That is the only way to do these right now, but working on it for the future.

2026-09-08 17:24:30 GMT

The Revolution Is Next Tuesday: How a 1992 Email Predicted the Way Bitcoin Would Spread

2026-09-07 20:25:02 GMT

New money does not reach everyone at once. It reaches whoever is closest to the printer first, and by the time it reaches you, prices already know.
Mises wrote that in 1912. It has not been refuted, only ignored.
Bitcoin hands new coins to whoever did the work. Not to whoever knows the banker.
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2026-09-07 18:55:00 GMT

Labor Day question for our American readers: where is the 401(k) from the job you left?
It's still there. Sitting in your old employer's plan, in a fund lineup somebody in HR picked, earning whatever the market hands it. You didn't choose those funds. You can't put bitcoin in them.
An eligible 401(k) or IRA can be rolled over into a Bitcoin Well IRA, and rollovers don't have the annual cap contributions do. Money you already earned, moved into real bitcoin you can verify on-chain, inside the same tax-advantaged structure.
Not advice. Eligibility depends on your plan and your situation. But the money is yours, and "I haven't thought about it in years" is not a plan.
Launching this fall:
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2026-09-07 13:54:36 GMT

Happy Labour Day. Here is what a year of labour bought the average Canadian worker.
Statistics Canada, Friday: average hourly wages up 2.0% over the year, to $37.02.
Bank of Canada, Wednesday: prices "hovering around 3%."
Paid more. Bought less. A raise and a pay cut in the same envelope, in the Bank's own numbers.
You can negotiate your wage. You cannot negotiate the unit it is paid in. That gets decided at a meeting you were not invited to.
Bitcoin is the one thing you can be paid in whose rules were fixed before you were hired.
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2026-09-06 14:24:35 GMT

On April 5, 1933, it became a federal crime for an American to hold their own gold.
Executive Order 6102. Every person was ordered to deliver their gold coins, gold bars and gold certificates to a Federal Reserve bank by May 1. The government paid $20.67 an ounce. The penalty for keeping it: up to $10,000 in fines, up to ten years in prison, or both. (You were allowed to keep $100 worth. About five ounces.)
The following January, the Gold Reserve Act reset the price to $35 an ounce. The same gold, now in government vaults, was worth 69% more. The people who handed it in got none of the difference.
Nobody broke in. Nobody picked a lock. The confiscation was a form and a poster at the post office, and it worked because gold has to sit somewhere, and somewhere can be searched.
The order's title didn't say confiscation. It said "hoarding." Your savings became hoarding the day the government wanted them.
That is the whole case for money you can carry in your head. Twelve words, memorized, cannot be delivered to a Federal Reserve bank by May 1.
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2026-09-05 21:54:33 GMT

Saturday question, long-weekend edition.
How many hours did you have to work to buy your first whole bitcoin? Not the price. The hours.

2026-09-05 16:54:32 GMT

You've probably already bought bitcoin and put it in cold storage with income you already paid a tax on.
Your retirement account is the biggest tax advantage most Americans will ever get, and for most of you it's the one place your plan won't let bitcoin in.
We're fixing that. The Bitcoin Well IRA: real bitcoin, held in a Traditional or Roth IRA, with holdings you can verify on-chain. Not a share of a fund. Not "exposure." Actual coins at an address you can check.
Straight about the structure: three separate companies, each doing one job. We source the bitcoin. Heritage IRA administers the account. BitGo holds the coins in qualified custody. That is not self-custody and we won't dress it up as self-custody. It is verified ownership, and the freedom to leave.
Launching this fall. Get on the list:
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2026-09-05 13:24:31 GMT

The idea behind every bitcoin key you own was rejected as a homework assignment.
Fall 1974. Ralph Merkle, an undergraduate at Berkeley, submits a project proposal for his computer security course: a way for two strangers to agree on a secret over a wire anyone can listen to. The professor turns it down. Merkle rewrites it shorter, resubmits, gets it back with notes in the margin, and drops the course.
He keeps working on it anyway. In August 1975 he sends the paper to the Communications of the ACM. The anonymous reviewer's verdict: "not in the main stream of present cryptography thinking." It took almost three years to get published. By then the world had named it: public key cryptography.
He wasn't done. In 1979 he worked out how to fold thousands of records into one fingerprint you can check in seconds. Bitcoin calls it the Merkle root. There is one in the header of every block.
You see, the experts weren't lying. They were describing the mainstream, accurately. The mainstream was wrong.
Bitcoin is built almost entirely out of ideas that were turned down first. That should make you more comfortable holding it, not less.
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2026-09-03 16:54:29 GMT

Conbase @coinbase launched bitcoin trading in Canada yesterday. To use it you need $5,000,000 in financial assets, not counting your house. And you never receive a bitcoin.
It is 23 contracts that pay out in dollars, with up to 10x borrowed money, run by Coinbase's US futures arm. Not one coin moves. You cannot withdraw a bitcoin from it because there are none in it.
These contracts are a claim on Coinbase. A coin in your wallet is bitcoin. Only one of them can actually be yours.
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2026-09-02 18:29:15 GMT

Saylor Just Broke His Months-Long Bitcoin Buying Pause https://t.co/6Cjc3B2Yij

2026-09-01 22:32:33 GMT

Nobody can tell you what those coin-splitting sites do. That is the point.
On Sunday @ForrestHODL warned that scam sites were circulating around claiming BIP-110 and BLAKE2b coins, and said plainly not to put your information into any of them. On Monday, Bitcoin News posted a link to a coin-splitting portal, then deleted its own post and explained why: it had not audited the site or its software and would not point readers at code that could put their bitcoin at risk.
Every one of these sites needs one of two things from you. Send bitcoin to an address it controls, or hand over your keys or seed. There is no third option, because there is no way to move coins on any chain without one of those. Both are the end of the conversation.
And look at the trade you are being offered. Unknown upside on a coin with no established price, no verified splitting method, no wallet support you can check and no exchange that will take it, against the entire stack sitting behind those keys.
Just wait. There is no deadline on this and nothing expires. The coins, if they are ever worth anything, will still be claimable when there is software people have actually reviewed. Forrest has good explainers for when that day comes.
Right now the correct action is none.
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2026-09-01 16:24:17 GMT

The list is a weapon

2026-08-29 13:56:06 GMT

The Treasury Secretary published a letter Thursday defending a currency operation. Buried inside the defence is one of the clearest descriptions of the system you will read this year.
His words: Treasury "exchanged existing Exchange Stabilization Fund foreign-currency assets for yen," and "no new congressional appropriation was involved." He notes the same fund was used to steady Argentina. He cites the statute it runs on, Section 5302, which he says lets the Secretary deal in foreign exchange with presidential approval.
Read it as a defence and it is a good one. Nothing was printed. No loan was made. It is legal, and the statute is right there in the footnote.
Now read it again as a description.
There is a pool of money at the Treasury deep enough to steady the yen and steady the peso, and moving it takes one Secretary and one President. Not a vote. Not a debate. No approval from you (and its really your money).
The statute has one more line in it that he didn't need to quote. Decisions of the Secretary on that fund are final, and may not be reviewed by another officer or employee of the Government.
The argument in Washington this week is about whether that power was used wisely. Nobody in the argument is asking whether it should exist.
You cannot vote that fund out of existence. but you CAN decline to keep your savings inside its blast radius.
Buy spot bitcoin. Take custody of it.
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2026-08-28 21:26:06 GMT

The Fed chair gave a speech this morning and announced nothing.
He said the economy "appears to have strengthened." He said financial conditions are "hard to describe as restrictive." He said the 2% target is "firm and fixed," and that if inflation is not moving there clearly and fast enough, "we have work to do."
No policy changed. No vote was taken. Nothing was built and nothing was destroyed. And the price of nearly everything you own moved in both directions inside a few hours, on tone.
That is the actual machine. The purchasing power of your savings is a function of how a small group of people choose to describe the economy on a random Friday.
Bitcoin's issuance schedule had no comment today. It has never had one.
Buy spot bitcoin, move it into your own custody, and let the adjectives land on somebody else's balance sheet.
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2026-08-28 18:05:08 GMT

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Our CEO Adam O'Brien is live now talking about privacy and the debanking problem!
https://zap.stream/naddr1qqjrwdp3vgurgdnx94snqcec956rzvt994snvepe94jnwdryxqmx2dn9vf3rvqg4waehxw309aex2mrp0yhxgctdw4eju6t09upzpn6956apxcad0mfp8grcuugdysg44eepex68h50t73zcathmfs49qvzqqqrkvuw7xmkp

2026-08-28 14:26:06 GMT

"Running bitcoin."
Two words, posted at 10:33 PM on January 10, 2009. No thread, no explanation. Hal Finney had downloaded the software on the day it appeared and switched it on, which at that moment put him among a tiny handful of machines anywhere keeping the network alive.
Hal died twelve years ago today.
He gets remembered as the first person to receive bitcoin, 10 coins from Satoshi two days after that post. That is true, but it's the smallest thing he did.
In 2004, four years before the whitepaper existed, he built RPOW. Reusable proofs of work. A system for turning proof of work into a token you could hand to somebody else, who could then hand it on again.
In August 2009 he was diagnosed with ALS. He kept writing code. When his hands stopped cooperating he wrote it with eye-tracking software, one letter at a time, and he was still working on Bitcoin years after most people would have been forgiven for putting it down.
None of that is the story of a recipient. All of it is the story of someone who did the work.
And the work is not finished. Nodes still need running. Code still needs reviewing. There are still people in your life who have never been shown how to hold their own coins, and nobody is going to show them if you don't.
Bitcoin has never once maintained itself. It runs because people decide to run it.
You can start running bitcoin tonight.
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2026-08-26 18:29:06 GMT

Bitcoin Just Pumped $15K and Almost Nobody Told the Real Story https://t.co/N8FStTiqMh

2026-08-26 14:25:58 GMT

I dug my old Ledger out of a drawer this morning. Hadn't touched it in years. The screen is so faded I could barely make out the characters.
So the thing going around yesterday is true. The screen on the Ledger Nano S fades with age. Nothing gets hacked and nothing gets tampered with, an old display just goes too faint to read. @janrothen posted about it and is past 189,000 views. Nick Neuman at Casa said the same thing five days earlier, and the two of them independently landed on the same workaround.
Point your phone camera at the device and read the screen off your phone instead. A camera sensor gathers far more light than your eye does and holds it longer, so a display that looks blank to you comes back sharp in your hand. Dim the room, get close, pinch to zoom.
Now notice what a faded screen is not. Your bitcoin was never on that device and could not have been. It is a record on Bitcoin's ledger, and thousands of machines are holding a copy of it right now. The device signs. It does not store.
A faded screen is not a lost balance so much as it is an annoyance if you backed up your seed phrase.
Go make sure you can still read your ledger and move your seed to a new device when you get a chance. No rush.
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2026-08-24 20:59:00 GMT

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Regular, crappy corner store Merlot. lol

2026-08-24 20:57:34 GMT

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OMG I forgot about Mondo!

2026-08-23 16:55:05 GMT

The person who named the cypherpunks is the one nobody can name.
Judith Milhon called herself St. Jude. She was a self-taught programmer in Berkeley, and in the early 1990s she coined the word cypherpunk, stitching together cyberpunk and cipher. It was in print within months. Every person who has ever used the word is quoting her.
Twenty years before that, in 1973, she helped build Community Memory. A public terminal in a Berkeley record store that anyone could walk up to and post on. No account, no permission, no gatekeeper deciding whose message counted.
She died in 2003, five years before the white paper.
She never saw a block get mined but she lived life on her own terms and would have made a killer Bitcoiner.
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2026-08-22 22:25:04 GMT

Saturday question.
What was the first thing you ever actually bought with bitcoin? Not traded. Bought.
Mine was a bottle of wine at the corner store using a Bitcoin debit card in 2018. Of course the person behind the counter had no idea.

2026-08-21 21:24:58 GMT

The US stock market closed an hour ago. It does not open again until Monday morning, roughly 65 hours from now.
Bitcoin's market did not close, because there is nobody with the authority to close it.
That is not a philosophical point this week. Bitcoin rose more than 4% in the Asia session this morning, while every US exchange was dark, and it opened the week near $63,000.
Nasdaq has noticed. On December 6 they move to a nearly 23-hour trading day with a new overnight session running 9 PM to 4 AM.
So it runs 9 PM Sunday to 8 PM Friday, so the 23-hour market is still shut all weekend. Market orders will not be accepted overnight. Any order still sitting there at 4 AM is cancelled, and you get to enter it again in the morning.
They can try to copy the hours. They cannot copy the settlement.
The coins in a wallet you control are spendable right now, at 5 PM on a Friday, without checking whether the building is open.

2026-08-21 16:24:56 GMT

Coldcard shipped new firmware yesterday. 5.6.1 for Mk4 and Mk5, 1.5.1Q for Q.
Checking in on one thing, because a "firmware fix" headline can read like the story closed.
Updating the device does not fix a seed that was already generated badly. From the release: "Installing this update does not make an existing vulnerable seed safe."
So if your seed was created on a Coldcard any time from 2021 through July 2026, it is the same seed this morning that it was three weeks ago. The patch went into the device. It cannot reach backward into a number that already exists. You need a new seed, and the coins need to move to it.
One detail deserves more attention than it got. The people who used dice were fine. Fifty fair rolls, kept private, and the broken generator underneath them did not matter, because the randomness was theirs and not the machine's.
That is now the rule. Every new seed on 5.6.1 requires user-supplied entropy. 65 keypresses, 50 dice rolls, or 128 coin flips.
Go look at when your seed was made and keep your bitcoin safe!
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2026-08-19 21:24:52 GMT

Stack Hodler wrote something at 3:30 this morning that is worth more than any price take on the timeline today.
He drew a line between saving and investing, and then admitted that fusing his whole outlook to a single asset had been draining, because it made him pretend to feel optimism he didn't actually feel.
Here is what we would add to it. The reason to hold bitcoin cold, in a wallet only you control, is not that it makes you richer this quarter. It's that it lets you stop looking. The people refreshing a chart at 2 AM are usually the ones whose coins sit somewhere they cannot fully reach, because what they are really checking is their exposure managed by somebody else. Take custody and the price stops being a grand news event and turns into weather.
He also said something worth holding onto. The same human ingenuity that produced digital scarcity is producing abundance everywhere else at the same time, and breakthroughs are accelerating across a dozen fields that have nothing to do with money.
That one lands harder around here than we would like to admit. Our own feed is central bank votes, currency decrees, firmware failures and debasement charts. Spend every day in that and you can start to believe the world only ever decays. It doesn't. And saving was never the pessimist's move anyway. You only put money away for a future you expect to be worth showing up for.
Save in the thing nobody can print. Then go be an optimist about everything else.
Thanks for the reminder, @stackhodler.

2026-08-19 18:20:23 GMT

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We are live with Bob Burnett of Ocean Mining!
https://zap.stream/naddr1qqjxxdesxg6rjvnz94jrjvee956r2vfn95unyvps94jxxcf5v5cnwefjv4nx2qgewaehxw309aex2mrp0yh8xmn0wf6zuum0vd5kzmp0qgsv73dxhgfk8tt76gf6q788zrfyz9dwwgwfk3aar6l5gk82a76v9fgrqsqqqan800d83s

2026-08-19 17:24:52 GMT

Four pools build more than 70% of Bitcoin's blocks.
Bob Burnett sits on OCEAN's board and runs his own mining company. He also went on record defending how OCEAN handled the BIP-110 fork, after miners called for leadership to be removed and Adam Back called for docked pay.
So we asked him the uncomfortable version. Is mining being quietly captured, and would he tell us if it were?
Live in one hour with @boomer_btc, on X and on YouTube.
https://pbs.twimg.com/media/HQF56MIXQAAgrfv.jpg

2026-08-18 18:29:16 GMT

- reply

What is it?

2026-08-18 16:24:51 GMT

The Treasury just committed the United States to building the best Bitcoin onboarding infrastructure anybody has ever funded. I don't think they know that yet.
Look at what these rails actually are. Wallets. Keys. Settlement on a public ledger. A generation getting comfortable with money that lives in an app instead of a branch, and a real share of them learning what a seed phrase is, because that is how you hold the thing yourself.
None of that is dollar infrastructure. It is self-custody infrastructure that happens to be carrying dollars first.
And it teaches the lesson incompletely, which is the interesting part. A stablecoin has an issuer. Eventually somebody gets frozen, or a court order lands, or the reserves have a bad quarter, and the question arrives on its own. Who is on the other side of this, and can they tell me no?
One answer survives that question.
So, sincerely, thank you Secretary Bessent. Teach the world to hold its own keys and we will take it from there.
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2026-08-13 16:24:37 GMT

Give Saylor credit. He put Bitcoin at the top of his "monetary spectrum" and called it digital capital. He is right about that part.
Here is the step he will not take.
Everything to the right of pure Bitcoin on that chart is a layer of someone else's promise. Digital credit is money you are owed. Digital money is money someone issues. Digital currency is money you rent. Only the first rung is actually yours.
That is not a ladder of stability. It is a ladder of counterparty risk.
And this is Wall Street doing exactly what Wall Street was always going to do with Bitcoin. Wrap it, tranche it, stack layers on top until they've built something else that behaves like the system Bitcoin was built to escape. None of those layers are Bitcoin. They are the middleman, reintroduced with a ticker symbol.
Bitcoin is still the one thing you can hold without asking anyone. Their spectrum sells that back to you one permission slip at a time.
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2026-08-12 15:24:36 GMT

$116 million vanished from self-custody wallets this month.
A ColdCard firmware bug quietly broke wallet randomness for five years, and the coins behind those weak keys got swept.
Here's the twist almost nobody predicted: that same week, $853 million flowed INTO Bitcoin ETFs. The most custodial option on the board.
A bug in the hardware wallet, and the money runs to the bank.
Today on the podcast, Eric Yakes (author of The 7th Property) and Trey Sellers (Fire BTC) join us for a two-part conversation on the week that tested what "owning Bitcoin" actually means:
- What really happened with ColdCard, and what to do about it
- Why those ETF flows might be Bitcoin's most interesting contradiction right now
- The BIP-110 fork that died in two blocks, and what it proves about who governs Bitcoin
- The CLARITY Act's September 15 Senate vote
Eric's case for Bitcoin's 7th property: absolute scarcity
The ColdCard story isn't an argument against self-custody. It's an argument for understanding what you hold and how it's made. That's the whole conversation.
Follow today's guests: @ericyakes and @ts_hodl
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2026-08-10 18:24:29 GMT

You cannot secretly hard fork a network by changing nothing.
That is the tell in the whole "the miners did a secret hardfork" story. A hard fork means changing the rules your node enforces. The miners changed nothing. They kept validating the same Bitcoin they always have. The side that wanted a new restriction didn't get consensus, so now it's calling the side that stood still the "forkers." That is completely backwards.
A proof-of-work change does not fire the miners. Bitcoin's miners keep mining Bitcoin, same chain, same hash function, same rules. Swap the proof of work and you haven't fired anyone. You've built a different coin and walked off with it.
That isn't a coup against the network. It's taking your ball and going home, then insisting the empty court is the real game.
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2026-08-09 17:54:31 GMT

In 1990, a programmer named John Gilmore helped found the Electronic Frontier Foundation. Two years later he helped start a mailing list called the Cypherpunks.
His most famous line is one sentence: "The Net interprets censorship as damage and routes around it." Meaning, try to block information on a distributed network and it simply flows another way. No central switch to flip. No single door to lock.
Gilmore was talking about speech. But the same design is exactly what makes Bitcoin work. There's no headquarters to raid, no server to seize, no CEO to lean on. Try to censor a transaction and the network routes around the block, literally.
The cypherpunks understood something early. Freedom that depends on permission isn't freedom. It's a privilege, and privileges get revoked. So they built tools that don't ask.
Bitcoin is that idea applied to money. It treats censorship as damage, and routes your value around it.
https://pbs.twimg.com/media/HPJLJXoWcAA8uks.jpg

2026-08-07 15:24:25 GMT

The Coldcard bug has a lot of people scrambling to move their bitcoin to a safe setup. If that's you and you're not 100% sure how, don't rush it alone.
This week, our Bitcoin Guidance is free. A private 1-on-1 call with a real Bitcoin expert who helps you set up a fresh wallet, move your coins, and confirm your backup actually works. Live, at your pace.
We never ask for your seed phrase. We never touch your keys. You stay in control the whole time, we just make sure you do it right.
Moving bitcoin under pressure is exactly when mistakes happen. You don't have to.
https://pbs.twimg.com/media/HPIO8tcXgAAAT2S.jpg

2026-08-06 15:24:23 GMT

Self-custody is still the point

2026-08-05 18:24:22 GMT

$130 Million Just Vanished From 'Safe' Bitcoin Wallets | Pete Rizzo https://t.co/IKllIulY2g

2026-08-04 14:40:05 GMT

Gary Cardone looked at self-custody, saw a little friction, and said "GTFO, not scalable."
That reflex is the entire reason Bitcoin had to exist.
You see, the dice rolls aren't the point. They're a UX problem, and UX problems get solved. What doesn't get solved on its own is the mindset underneath the comment: the belief that doing the work yourself is beneath you, that "serious money" hands its keys to a suit and calls it control.
It isn't control. The money an institution holds for you is the money that gets frozen, loaned out behind your back, and seized. Ask anyone whose account froze in 2022. Ask the Americans who lived through Executive Order 6102.
The friction is temporary. The subservience is permanent, right up until the day you decide to hold your own keys.
Serious money isn't the money a custodian guards. It's the money nobody can take.
Not your keys, not your coins. Not your entropy, not your keys.
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2026-08-02 13:40:03 GMT

In 1993, before most people had ever touched the web, a mathematician named Eric Hughes wrote a line that predicted your whole future: "Privacy is necessary for an open society in the electronic age."
He wasn't talking about hiding. He was talking about choice. The right to reveal yourself to the world on your own terms, and to reveal nothing when you choose nothing.
His answer wasn't a law or a protest. It was code. Hughes and a small group of cryptographers understood you couldn't ask governments or corporations for privacy, because they profit from taking it. You had to build it yourself, in math, and give it away. "Cypherpunks write code," he wrote. Someone had to write the software that defends privacy, so they were going to write it.
Fifteen years later, one of those someones published a whitepaper for peer-to-peer electronic cash.
Money you can hold and move without asking, without announcing, without a permission slip from anyone. Hughes saw the shape of it in 1993. Most of the world is only catching up now.
The tools of your freedom were never going to be handed to you. Someone had to write the code. Someone did.
https://pbs.twimg.com/media/HOliBMlXMAAWGUc.jpg

2026-08-01 21:39:59 GMT

Normal people double-check the stove is off.
I've verified the same receive address four times and I'm going back for a fifth.
Self-custody comes with a little paranoia. I'll take it.

2026-08-01 16:39:57 GMT

Canada is the only G7 country that holds no gold.
Not a reduced reserve. Zero. The Bank of Canada sold its last bars in 2016, the end of a sell-off that ran for decades under governments of every party. The official reasoning was that gold had become an illiquid relic in a world of floating currencies.
So the country traded the hardest money on earth for other people's paper promises, and called it prudent.
You don't have to make the same trade. You can hold an asset no central bank can print, dilute, or quietly sell out from under you. Canada gave up its hard money. Nothing stops you from picking up better.
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2026-07-31 21:09:55 GMT

"This is why you should just leave it on an exchange."
Every time self-custody has a bad day, the custodial crowd shows up to tell you the fix is handing your coins to a company. They said it this week about the Coldcard flaw. They're missing the forest for the trees.
Here's the question that ends it. What if you had moved your Coldcard stack onto FTX the week before it collapsed?
You'd have "solved" a firmware bug by handing everything to Sam Bankman-Fried. A risk you can inspect and patch, traded for one you never see coming until the withdrawals freeze for good.
Funny thing. The company at the center of this week's story is the same one that told you, during the FTX collapse, to get your bitcoin off exchanges. They were right then. They're still right.
The answer to a self-custody problem was never to give up self-custody. It's to make yours better. Verify your entropy. Roll your own dice. Spread the keys across vendors with multisig. Remove the risk you can find, and keep control of the rest.
Sovereignty isn't believing nothing breaks. It's being the one who can fix it when it does.
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2026-07-31 14:39:34 GMT

The Coldcard Hack: A Timeline of the $38M Entropy Failure, and How to Keep It From Happening to You

2026-07-31 01:39:33 GMT

My funds are safe but I'm in the danger zone with a mk3 ColdCard wallet.
If you haven't heard, if you have a mark 3 ColdCard with version 4.0.1 or newer you are potentially at risk.
As a stop gap measure you can move your funds to a new version of your same wallet with a passphrase, which will generate a new wallet based on your initial seed phrase plus whatever new pass phrase you input.
Remember that will only be as secure as your new passphrase so make it a good one.
Also don't panic and make sure to test your new wallet (send test funds, test sending those funds from the new wallet and test restoring that wallet) before you send all of your funds!
Will be talking about other wallet alternatives and multisig set ups here in the future. Stay tuned!

2026-07-29 18:09:31 GMT

EMERGENCY POD: FED RAISES RATES (we assume) https://t.co/CobzV8ISdR

2026-07-28 13:39:29 GMT

Everyone is watching whether Warsh raises rates a quarter point tomorrow. But that's the wrong number to be paying attention to.
The only number that matters is $40 Trillion.
And that number says, ultimately, this train only goes in one direction.
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2026-07-27 14:21:53 GMT

Bitcoin mining difficulty is on track to finish 2026 lower than it started. That would be the first annual decline in Bitcoin's history. So is it the beginning of the end?
Difficulty is just a thermostat. When too many miners pile in, it climbs and crushes margins. When the overbuilt and overleveraged operators tap out, it falls and the survivors breathe again. That's a build in balancing system meeting the free market.
And there is nothing to fear on the security side. The hashpower behind Bitcoin is orders of magnitude past what the network needs to stay safe. A drop of roughly 13.8% off record highs still leaves it parked near the most secure it has ever been. "No miners left" was never on the table.
Here's the part the doomers miss. Lower difficulty means fatter margins for everyone still plugged in. It quietly invites the small, nimble, efficient miners back online, the ones who got priced out while the giants were flexing. The network doesn't get weaker. It gets more distributed.
Bitcoin doesn't get a bailout when its miners overbuild. It adjusts, in public, and hands the advantage back to whoever is left and paying attention. The miners compete so you never have to trust any single one of them.
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2026-07-25 22:51:50 GMT

Normal people check the weather before the weekend.
I check if my node is still synced.
We are not the same, and I've made peace with it.
https://pbs.twimg.com/media/HOBSzxpWwAAscYb.jpg

2026-07-25 20:21:50 GMT

We asked AI for a heartwarming photo of a dad teaching his kid self-custody.
It melted the hardware wallet and engraved the backup plate "BITCOIM." We're not sure where the family went.
Anyway. The point survives the slop.
Most people inherit a bank account. A number someone else controls, that shrinks a little every year. You can leave your kids the money itself. Keys they hold, that no bank has to approve and no government can inflate away.
Real inheritance isn't a balance. It's the ability to hold their own.
(Still waiting on the version that can spell Bitcoin.)
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2026-07-25 16:21:52 GMT

El Salvador's president just turned 45. Five years ago he did something every serious institution called reckless. He started buying bitcoin for his country and holding it in the national treasury.
The IMF warned him. The ratings agencies downgraded him. The op-eds wrote his obituary.
The country is still here. The national stack is still growing. And those coins sit in El Salvador's own custody, not on loan from any foreign lender.
Turns out the reckless move was trusting the people doing the mocking.
Happy 45th to the first head of state who chose math over permission.
— Zach 🧙‍♂️
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2026-07-25 13:21:53 GMT

The blockchain wasn't invented in 2008. The core idea showed up seventeen years earlier, and it was built to solve something boring: proving a document hadn't been backdated.
In 1991, two researchers at Bellcore, Stuart Haber and Scott Stornetta, published a paper called "How to Time-Stamp a Digital Document." The problem was simple. A digital file can be edited and its date faked, and no one can prove otherwise. Their fix was to fingerprint each document with a hash, then chain every new timestamp to the one before it. Alter any record and every link after it breaks.
They even anchored it in the physical world. For years, their company published a summary of the chain every week in the classified pages of the New York Times. Millions of printed copies, impossible to quietly rewrite.
A tamper-evident chain of records, anchored in public, trusting no single authority. Sound familiar?
When Satoshi wrote the Bitcoin whitepaper, three of its eight citations pointed back to Haber and Stornetta.
Bitcoin didn't fall from the sky. It was the moment someone wired a chain of honest records to money nobody can print.
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2026-07-24 20:48:29 GMT

Oil is up about 10% this week on Hormuz tensions. Liquidity is draining. And suddenly the same market that spent all year begging for rate cuts is quietly pricing in hikes.
"Higher for longer" was always a bluff. You don't run a debt this size, fund new conflicts, and keep money tight. The math doesn't allow it. The printer is not retired. It's resting.
They manage your psychology because they lost control of the ledger.
Bitcoin doesn't have a psychology to manage. Twenty-one million, no matter who's panicking.
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2026-07-24 17:49:44 GMT

Nine of the biggest names in finance just pledged $15M to protect Bitcoin. BlackRock. Fidelity. Coinbase. Strategy.
Two things are true at once.
Yes, some of this is a press release. Goodwill with the Bitcoin community is cheap at $15M, and every firm on that list knows it.
But the cynics miss the better point. These companies hold staggering amounts of bitcoin. Game theory doesn't care about their motives. Own enough of the network and you protect it and promote it, saint or not. Bitcoin was built this way on purpose. It never asked anyone to be virtuous. It just makes self-interest and security point the same direction.
Same reason the quantum panic is overblown. Bitcoin isn't defended by a foundation or a pledge. It's defended by millions of aligned incentives and a network that has upgraded before and will again.
$15M is a nice gesture. The incentives were already doing the work.
Hold your keys, follow the upgrades, and don't mistake a press release for the moat.
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2026-07-24 15:18:28 GMT

Starts in 1 hour.
Michael Saylor spent this morning showing off a dashboard and a whole team to manage Strategy's bitcoin. Fair enough.
Here's the question nobody's asking: who's managing yours?
Today at 12PM EST we're introducing The Bitcoin Family Office Group. Five bitcoin-native firms across wealth, tax, legal, acquisition, and mining, working as one coordinated team. Built for the families and businesses that actually hold their own keys.
Free Lunch & Learn. Live Q&A. Bring your questions.
Register now: https://t.co/1JXorV7Xis

2026-07-23 13:18:23 GMT

Corporate Bitcoin treasuries are unwinding in public. Satsuma's shareholders just voted to sell the company's 668 Bitcoin. Strategy paused its buying. The "own Bitcoin through a stock" trade is wobbling.
Here is what the wealthy have always known. You don't protect real wealth by holding a paper claim on it. You hold the asset, and you build a team around it. Wealth, tax, legal, estate, acquisition, all coordinated. That structure has a name: the family office.
For a century it was reserved for people with nine figures and a law firm on retainer. We are bringing it to Bitcoin.
Tomorrow we introduce The Bitcoin Family Office Group. Five independent, bitcoin-native firms, coordinated into one experience, built for people who intend to actually own their Bitcoin rather than a claim on someone else's.
Bitcoin Well Infinite: Lunch and Learn. Friday July 24, 12 PM EST. Full Q&A after.
https://t.co/1JXorV7Xis
@wyattorourke_ @jordanguess @Beau_Turner21 @TellyBitcoin @KyleLaw79
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2026-07-22 18:25:47 GMT

We are live now:
https://youtube.com/live/Oaumgrh31I0?feature=share

2026-07-20 17:29:43 GMT

Chamath says the energy behind Bitcoin mining is worth 10 to 20 times more if you point it at AI. He's measuring the right number and missing the entire point.
Mining doesn't spend energy to compute something useful. It spends energy to make one thing true: that no one can counterfeit, freeze, or rewrite your money. That security is the product. Compare it to AI compute and you've quietly assumed the only thing energy should ever buy is more output. Some things are worth more than output. A property title is "wasteful" too, right up until someone tries to take your house.
Miners already chase the cheapest, most stranded energy on earth, the flared gas and curtailed hydro that no data center will ever sit next to. That power was never going to train a model. It was going to be wasted.
AI makes energy more productive. Bitcoin makes energy into money nobody can debase. Those aren't competing bids. They're different jobs.
The question was never whether the energy is worth more elsewhere. It's whether your money is worth owning outright.
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2026-07-19 14:19:38 GMT

Nobody posts about it, but there's a quiet kind of peace in holding your own keys.
The market can be red. The headlines can be loud. Some exchange can be melting down on your timeline. And none of it reaches what's yours, because there's no one in the middle who can freeze it, lend it out, or lose it on your behalf.
You stop refreshing. You stop worrying about someone else's balance sheet. What you hold is simply yours, verified by you, answerable to no one.
That's the part the price charts never show. Self-custody isn't only safer. It's calmer.
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2026-07-18 15:11:05 GMT

Last week we asked whether Saylor was panicking or playing the long game. Not the kind of conversation you get from a headline.
Full episodes, including that one, are on our YouTube channel. No clickbait cuts, just the actual discussion.
New episode drops Wednesday, 2pm EST. Worth catching up first.
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2026-07-18 13:40:44 GMT

In 1976, two Stanford researchers solved a problem that had stumped cryptographers for centuries. Their fix is the reason you can own bitcoin at all.
Before Whitfield Diffie and Martin Hellman, secret communication had a catch. To send someone a coded message, you both had to agree on the same secret key first. That meant meeting in person, or trusting a courier, or a bank, or some middleman to carry the secret for you. There was always a someone in the middle.
Their paper, "New Directions in Cryptography," broke it open. They split the key in two. A public key you can hand to the entire world, and a private key you never share with anyone. One locks, the other unlocks. No prior meeting. No trusted middleman.
That single idea is your bitcoin wallet. Your public key receives. Your private key signs. Nobody can forge it, and nobody has to vouch for you.
Here's the lesson. The tools that end up protecting your freedom usually arrive as pure math, decades before anyone builds the thing that needs them.
Diffie and Hellman weren't building money. They were making it possible to trust no one. Thirty-two years later, Satoshi proved that was the same thing.
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2026-07-17 20:07:21 GMT

The ultra-wealthy have always had a team. A family office quietly coordinating their wealth, taxes, legal, and estate so nothing slips through the cracks.
Bitcoiners never had that. Until now.
On July 24 we're introducing The Bitcoin Family Office Group: five independent, bitcoin-native firms working as one across wealth, tax, legal, acquisition, and mining. One coordinated team, and you still hold your own keys.
Joining us: Wyatt O'Rourke, Basilic Financial
Kyle Lawrence, Falcon Rappaport & Berkman
Jordan Guess CPA, Satoshi Pacioli
Beau Turner, Abundant Mines
Chantel Lillycrop-Kostiuk, Bitcoin Well VP of Operations
We'll cover how it came together, introduce each firm, and walk through what the client experience actually looks like, from first call to a team working in sync on your behalf. Bring your questions. There's a full Q&A.
Bitcoin Well Infinite: Lunch and Learn. July 24, 12:00 PM. Register:
https://pbs.twimg.com/media/HNdFj63XkAAB0VM.jpg

2026-07-17 16:07:21 GMT

They Knew the Strait Would Close. That Was the Point.

2026-07-16 21:09:45 GMT

Citadel Securities just paid $400 million for a piece of the exchange holding "your" crypto. CryptoDOTcom is now worth $20 billion. Sit with who just became your counterparty.
You see, Citadel isn't a Bitcoin company. It's the market maker that stands between you and the price of almost everything you trade. The same firm at the center of the payment-for-order-flow fight, the one retail spent 2021 screaming about, now owns a slice of the on-ramp millions of people trust with their coins.
This is the pattern, not the exception. The plumbing of "crypto" keeps getting bought by exactly the institutions Bitcoin was built to route around. First the ETF custodians. Now the exchange cap tables. Every layer between you and your keys is being consolidated by people who make money on the layer itself.
Here's the part they can't buy. A coin in a wallet only you control has no cap table. No strategic investor. No market maker taking a spread on your sovereignty. Citadel can own the casino. It cannot own the money you took home.
The whole point was never a better middleman. It was no middleman at all.
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2026-07-15 20:24:56 GMT

How the West is Being Priced Out of the Starter Life

2026-07-15 18:04:01 GMT

We're live. Episode 2 of the Bitcoin Well Podcast — the sell-off, the "never sell" reversal, and what it actually means for Bitcoin's biggest corporate bet, with @JoeConsorti and @ChrisAlaimo6.
https://youtube.com/live/ryYKA9anKsg?feature=share

2026-07-14 20:54:53 GMT

"You can avoid reality, but you cannot avoid the consequences of avoiding reality." Ayn Rand wrote that. She could have been describing fiat money.
For fifty years the plan has been to avoid reality. Spend more than you collect, borrow the difference, print whatever's left. Every year the bill comes due, and every year the answer is to push it forward with more of the same.
Bitcoin doesn't let you avoid reality. There's no printer to paper over a bad quarter, no committee to vote yourself out of a shortfall. You hold exactly what you hold.
Sound money isn't a restriction. It's reality, finally kept on the books.
— Zach 🧙‍♂️
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2026-07-13 20:24:52 GMT

"Bitcoin has no intrinsic value."
Neither does the dollar. Let's actually compare what backs each one.
The dollar is backed by:
· a government that has debased it nearly every year it has existed
· debt it can only service by printing more
· a promise to keep the promise
Bitcoin is backed by:
· energy that was genuinely spent and can't be faked
· rules no single party can change
· a supply cap that tens of thousands of independent computers enforce every ten minutes
"Intrinsic value" was always a story. The only question is whose story you're holding.
— Zach 🧙‍♂️

2026-07-12 14:24:52 GMT

Almost every currency in history has died. The ones still standing just haven't died out yet.
This isn't pessimism, it's arithmetic. Mises wrote that there is no way to avoid the final collapse of a boom built on credit expansion. You can delay it by printing more, but every dollar printed to postpone the reckoning makes the reckoning bigger. That stopped being a theory a long time ago. It's been proven in the last thousand years of monetary history.
Mises said it first, Rothbard said it louder, and the point never changed. Money that can be created out of nothing will be created out of nothing, and the people closest to the printer always spend it first. Your savings pays the bill last.
Bitcoin is the first money no emergency can dilute. No committee, no election, no war can vote more of it into being.
The question was never whether fiat fails. It's whether you're holding something else when it does.
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2026-07-11 17:54:47 GMT

The companies that road the "never sell your bitcoin" slogan to market their companies keep selling their bitcoin.
Strategy parted with roughly 3,588 coins last week. This week a Nasdaq-listed miner sold about 1,400 more to fund a data center and pay down debt. Different names, same lesson. When you bolt a dividend, a loan, or a payroll on top of Bitcoin, you have created an obligation that does not care what you post about diamond hands. The obligation has a due date. The bitcoin is what gets sold to meet it.
A claim stacked on an asset answers to its own schedule, not to your conviction.
The coin in your own cold storage owes nothing to anybody.
Own the asset. Not a promise stacked on top of it.
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2026-07-11 14:24:47 GMT

Every Bitcoin block carries the fingerprint of a man who never worked on Bitcoin. You just can't see it.
In 1979, a cryptographer named Ralph Merkle patented a way to take a mountain of data and boil it down to a single fingerprint, so anyone could check whether one piece belonged to the whole without having to see all of it. He called it a hash tree. Everyone else calls it a Merkle tree.
Thirty years later, Satoshi cited Merkle by name in the Bitcoin whitepaper and wired the idea into the heart of every block. Each block header carries one Merkle root, a single string that commits to every transaction inside it. It's why your phone can confirm a payment without downloading the entire chain. It's why nobody can quietly rewrite an old block, change one transaction and the fingerprint shatters.
Merkle wasn't building money. He was one of the people who invented public-key cryptography itself in the 1970s, then handed the world a tool for proving things without trusting anyone.
That was Bitcoin's whole spirit, decades early. Don't trust, verify. Merkle gave us the math to do it.
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2026-07-10 23:54:46 GMT

They don't need to take your money. They just need to make it worth a little less every year while you sleep.
Mises saw this a century ago. He called sound money an instrument for protecting civil liberties against a government's despotic reach. Not an investment. A defense.
Bitcoin doesn't ask the government to behave. It just works around them.
That's the defense he was talking about.
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2026-07-10 17:24:46 GMT

Someone sent a friend $5 of Bitcoin over Lightning. Strike froze it and demanded the sender's full legal name.
But the person receiving it had no way to answer. Nobody knows a stranger's surname from a Lightning payment. That's the whole point of the technology. Strike's CEO, Jack Mallers, apologized and named the culprit directly: the new MiCA regulations.
That's the same rulebook doing its work from the other side. MiCA is why 70% of Binance's exiting EU users just fled into self-custody. It is also why a $5 tip on Strike now triggers a demand for a stranger's legal name. One regulation, two doors. Wherever the state can reach a custodian, it makes that custodian watch you.
Here's the lesson hiding in both. A custodian is a chokepoint by design. However good its intentions, it holds a door the state can always knock on. Your own wallet has no door. A self-custodial Lightning payment never asks for anyone's name, because there is no middleman left to compel.
They can write every rule in Brussels and still never reach the wallet you hold yourself. Not your keys, not your coins. Not their business, either.
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2026-07-09 23:24:46 GMT

Michael Saylor says Bitcoin has no spam problem. A lot of people are furious he said it. Here is the part everyone in the fight is missing.
It doesn't matter what Saylor thinks. It doesn't matter what the pools signal by July 15. Bitcoin doesn't have a CEO who decides what it is for, and that is the entire point of the thing.
The rules of Bitcoin are not enforced by a vote, a company, or a mining cartel. They are enforced by the node you run. Every full node quietly checks every block against the rules its operator chose to accept. Miners can propose. Pools can signal. Billionaires can post. None of them can force a rule onto a node that rejects it.
That is why the "spam" fight, for all its noise, is really a question about you. Do you run your own node and enforce your own rules, or do you outsource that judgment to whoever has the loudest account this week?
Let them debate the filter. Sovereignty was never up for a vote.
Run your node. The rules are yours to keep.
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2026-07-09 21:24:45 GMT

SWIFT just built a blockchain so it never has to let go of the switch.
The interbank network that clears your wires announced a shared ledger with 17 banks across six continents. Tokenized deposits, moving 24/7, overnight and on weekends. Sounds like Bitcoin, but read the fine print. Final settlement still runs through the same legacy plumbing, and every participant is a bank you already need permission from.
You see, this is the tell. They took the one feature they liked, a ledger that runs around the clock, and stripped out the part that actually mattered. No permission. No gatekeeper. No off switch. What they shipped is a faster version of asking a bank for your own money.
Citi and HSBC on a shared database is not decentralization. It's the old gatekeepers using the blockchain buzzword to make people believe in fake "hope and change".
Bitcoin is the innovation, not blockchain.
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2026-07-09 16:24:44 GMT

Bitcoin dropped about 20% last month. Wall Street's clients spent it handing their coins back to an exchange. We spent it onboarding people taking custody of their own.
You see, the timeline this week is all outflows. Spot ETFs bleeding, BlackRock's clients moving Bitcoin into Coinbase, a billion dollars in leverage liquidated. That is the paper layer doing what paper does in a drawdown. It runs for the exit, because the exit is the whole reason it exists.
Now look off the timeline. In that same down month, over 2,100 new people opened a non-custodial Bitcoin account with us, pushing total signups past 77,000, up roughly 58% year over year. Active customers grew 12%. Gross profit rose 32% to an estimated $364,000, while the price fell 20%.
"Bear markets are for building," says our founder Adam O'Brien. Consider these numbers the receipt.
A custodial holder can only sell. A key holder can keep stacking, keep transacting, keep owning, whatever the chart does.
Tourists sell the paper. Owners keep the keys.
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2026-07-08 20:54:42 GMT

A billion dollars in Bitcoin bets got liquidated this week. The people who actually own Bitcoin didn't notice.
That distinction is the whole game. This week Strike launched loans it calls "volatility-proof," with no margin calls and no price-based liquidation, reportedly up to 14.2% APR. It sounds like the answer to a week like this one. Read it again. "No liquidation risk" is not "no risk." It is a relocation of risk.
To borrow against your Bitcoin, you hand the collateral to someone else. You haven't removed danger, you have swapped price-liquidation for counterparty risk. Rehypothecation. Insolvency. A freeze. Terms that change while you sleep. Celsius holders and BlockFi holders also believed their coins were safe, right up until the withdrawals stopped.
The thing that got liquidated this week was never Bitcoin. It was leverage wearing Bitcoin's name. Positions, promises, IOUs against coins someone else held.
Spot in cold storage cannot be margin-called. It cannot be liquidated at the bottom. It cannot be frozen by a lender's bad quarter.
The only loan that can never freeze you is the one you never took against keys you hold.
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2026-07-08 14:24:45 GMT

Bitcoin isn't 21 million coins. It's 2.1 quadrillion satoshis. Keep that in mind the next time someone says there won't be "enough."
Eli Ben-Sasson, a Zcash co-founder, wants to swap Bitcoin's fixed cap for 4% annual issuance, worried that lost coins leave too little to go around. Start with the obvious part. The 21 million cap is the product. Change it and you don't have Bitcoin anymore. You have another coin that borrowed the name.
Now the "just 4%" part. There is no just once. The moment the cap can move, someone owns the dial, and 4% stops being a ceiling and becomes a precedent. Every future emergency will argue for a little more. That is the entire history of fiat money, restarted from scratch.
And the shortage he fears isn't real. Each Bitcoin splits into 100 million sats. When coins are lost, the ones that remain simply carry more value, and the network keeps pricing life in smaller units. Lost coins don't starve you. They make everyone else's sats worth more.
A cap you can vote to raise was never a cap. It's fiat with extra steps.
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2026-07-07 22:54:53 GMT

The U.S. government holds more than 328,000 Bitcoin, worth about $21 billion, and 16 months in it still can't figure out who holds the keys.
Bloomberg reports the Strategic Bitcoin Reserve has stalled. Treasury and Commerce are fighting over which one runs it, and government lawyers are now reviewing a more basic question. Whether Washington even has the legal authority to custody Bitcoin for the long term.
The most powerful state on earth, holding $21 billion in Bitcoin, is stuck on the exact problem every one of us solved on day one. Where do the keys live, and who is allowed to move them?
This is the whole lesson in one headline. Custody is not paperwork you delegate to an agency. It is the asset. A reserve nobody can agree how to hold is just a number in a press release.
You don't need an interagency working group. You need a seed phrase, a piece of steel, and an afternoon. No turf war. No legal review. No 16-month delay.
They have $21 billion and no answer for the keys. You can have yours today.
That is the whole difference between owning Bitcoin and being told you own it.
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2026-07-07 20:24:40 GMT

Everyone got rugged this cycle. Trump didn't.
Tomorrow @ 2pm EST: Ep. 1 of the Bitcoin Well Podcast, live.
@tatumturnup joins to unpack Trump's crypto money trail and what's really happening in bitcoin mining.
How do you think he came out ahead?
Check this stream tomorrow to find out, or click the youtube link below to get notified when we go live👇
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2026-07-06 19:54:40 GMT

An exchange showing you its "Proof of Reserves" tells you almost nothing. It's a magic trick, and you're the mark.
Here is the sleight of hand. Proof of reserves shows you the assets. It says nothing about the liabilities. It's a bank flashing a vault full of Bitcoin while staying very quiet about how many different customers were promised that exact same coin. Reserves without liabilities isn't an audit. It's a photo of the good half of the story.
This is fractional reserve banking 2.0. The exchange holds some Bitcoin, lends against it, rehypothecates the rest, and shows you a clean snapshot on a good day. It works right up until enough people ask for their coins at once. Then the math breaks, withdrawals "pause," and you learn what you actually owned: an IOU.
There is only one audit that can't be faked. You hold the keys, the coins sit on the network as yours, and no snapshot, press release, or trust-me page stands between you and your money.
Drain the exchanges.
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2026-07-06 16:54:40 GMT

Record listings. Six-figure price cuts. Rising foreclosures. Welcome to housing Demonetization.

2026-07-06 15:54:35 GMT

This morning: Strategy sold 3,588 Bitcoin to fund dividends.
Same morning: Trump floated adding Bitcoin to government accounts for American kids.
Companies sell. Governments buy. That's not a crisis, that's a mature asset doing what money does.
Bitcoin isn't dying. It's becoming embedded into the global economy.
— Zach 🧙‍♂️
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2026-07-05 20:24:33 GMT

Independence weekend, so let's read the fine print.
If your Bitcoin lives on Coinbase, Cash App, or any exchange, here is what you actually own: an entry in their database that says they owe you Bitcoin. Not the Bitcoin. A promise about it. Same structure as the bank you are frustrated with, just with a friendlier app.
That is not a knock on the people who work there. It is the design. A custodian can freeze your account, get hacked, get subpoenaed, or get into trouble and take your coins down with it. Most people find out none of that mattered right up until the day it did.
Self-custody flips the whole thing. You hold the keys, the coins sit on the network as yours directly, and no company sits between you and your own money. That is the entire reason Bitcoin was built in the first place.
We help people make that move, so yes, we are biased. But you do not have to trust us on it. Move a little off the exchange, hold the keys yourself, and feel the difference. Owning the asset beats owning a promise about it.
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2026-07-05 16:24:33 GMT

They declared independence from a king in 1776. Then they tried to pay for it with a printing press.
The Continental Congress had no gold and a war to fund, so it printed. Paper dollars called Continentals, millions of them, backed by nothing but a promise and the hope of victory. At first they spent fine. Then prices climbed. Then they ran. Within a few years it took a fistful of Continentals to buy what a single silver coin once did, and "not worth a Continental" entered the language as the insult it still is.
The same government that fought a war over taxation without consent taxed everyone anyway, quietly, through the printer, no vote required. The soldiers who won that war were paid in money that melted in their hands.
Sound money was the unfinished business of 1776. It still is.
Bitcoin is the first money in that whole story that no Congress can print more of. Fixed supply, enforced by every node, no emergencies and no exceptions.
Independence from a king was step one. Independence from the printing press is the part we still owe them.
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