Somebody on X is paying strangers to stop trusting him. @JoelBomgar is sending $250 of his own bitcoin to Bitcoin educators who do not yet own a hardware wallet, so they can go and buy one. No affiliate link. Nothing of his to sell. Most of what passes for Bitcoin marketing is a company asking to hold your coins for you. Every so often you get the opposite, and it is worth naming when you see it.

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.

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.

Our CEO Adam O'Brien is live now talking about privacy and the debanking problem!

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"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.

This week, @Core_LN is telling node operators to patch their code. Not to shut anything down. The Core Lightning maintainers have spent two weeks hand-checking a flood of machine-generated vulnerability reports. "Like many open source Bitcoin projects, CLN has received a number of AI-generated CVE reports from multiple sources over the past 10 days." Watch what it did to curl, the small piece of software running quietly inside almost every device you own. curl ran a bug bounty from 2019, paid out more than $90,000 for 81 real vulnerabilities, and shut the program down in February. Its confirmed-vulnerability rate fell from roughly 15% to under 5%. In June the maintainers announced they would not read a single security report for the whole of July. The Internet Bug Bounty had already paused new submissions in March for the same reason. Now the other half of the year. On January 27 OpenSSL shipped a patch for 12 zero-days, bugs nobody had ever reported, and an AI system found every one of them. Three had been sitting in that code since the late 1990s, through millions of CPU-hours of fuzzing, Google's included. Both sides of security picked up the same new tools at the same time, and only one of those sides has to publish, get reviewed and be right. That is now pointed at Bitcoin. Wallets, nodes, Lightning implementations, signing devices, most of it maintained by small teams and unpaid contributors. And Bitcoin is the one system with no database to quietly edit afterwards. Our read is that the next twelve months put Bitcoin's stack through the hardest audit money has ever been given, and that plenty of it looks alarming while it happens. Twelve zero-days was not OpenSSL failing. It was OpenSSL getting harder in an afternoon. Patch your node this week. That is the small job. The big one is already running.

Two weeks ago the price of bitcoin was beyond boring. VanEck's mid-August numbers, published August 18, showed realized volatility at 27.2% against a long-run average near 80%. Spot volume in the 10th percentile of its entire history. Eight of twelve capitulation signals firing. Long-term holders had just sold 356,000 coins into the weakness. Then August 19. Treasury scales up its bond buybacks. $2.99 billion of positions get liquidated, $2.6 billion of them short. And in that same window spot ETFs take in $2.88 billion, which is 88% of the week's flow, per CoinMarketCap. $63,549 on August 11. $81,235 on August 25. When almost nothing is for sale, every dollar of buying has to climb further up the order book to find a seller. A thin market does not absorb demand. It reprices against it. That is why $2.88 billion took this one up 28% in two weeks. Treasury liquidity policy. Forced buying from liquidated shorts. Voluntary spot demand through the ETFs. Three separate engines, and not one of them needed the other two to fire. That is the part that's new. For most of bitcoin's history these showed up one at a time, with months in between for the market to digest each one. And the amount available keeps shrinking. The mortgages Coinbase and Better switched on this morning lock $250,000 of pledged coins against a $100,000 down payment until the loan is repaid. Every one of those written is supply leaving the market for years. More weeks are going to look like this one, and sharper than anything before the ETFs existed. $2.6 billion of leverage got closed by somebody else last Wednesday. The best way to enjoy price action like we saw last week is with coins you hold in your own wallet.

Bitcoin Just Pumped $15K and Almost Nobody Told the Real Story

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Bitcoin Well

Bitcoin Just Pumped $15K and Almost Nobody Told the Real Story

Is Bitcoin Mining Being Quietly Captured?

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Bitcoin Well

Is Bitcoin Mining Being Quietly Captured?

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.

"Every basis point of artificial yield suppression is a subsidy to procrastination." Stanley Druckenmiller wrote that in a Wall Street Journal op-ed on Monday, about the Treasury's plan to at least double long-end bond buybacks to $4 billion per operation. He called the plan a mistake. He called it price management rather than liquidity management. He pointed out there was no liquidity freeze to justify it. The timeline is arguing about CTA positioning and short squeezes. Meanwhile the man has published Austrian interest theory on the WSJ opinion page. An interest rate is the price of waiting. Push it down by hand and the thing you have subsidised is the decision to do the hard thing later. Mises spent a career on that mechanism. He called it time preference. Here is the part worth holding onto. The 30-year touched 5.337% on August 18, a level last seen in 2007. The plan was announced the next day and took it to 5.196%. It has not stayed there, and the first operation does not run until September 9. Nothing has been bought yet. There is no basis point to manage on bitcoin already sitting in your own wallet. Hold spot.

We just restocked the rewards store, and three of the things you can redeem points for are hardware wallets. Blockstream Jade Core at 34,000. Jade Plus Link at 85,000. Bitkey at 109,000. Most loyalty programs reward you with credit to spend more with the company. Ours hands you the device you use to take your bitcoin off our platform entirely. We know how that sounds. We did it on purpose. Also in there: Broken Money, The Bitcoin Standard and The Price of Tomorrow, so you can earn the argument and the hardware in the same week. A steel seed plate for 7,000. Shirts, a hoodie, sunglasses, a Leatherman. And a Cybertruck for 69,000,000 points. Somebody is going to try. The Wishing Well still pays sats straight to your Lightning wallet. And the new referral program earns you points every time someone you brought in buys or sells bitcoin. Buy bitcoin. Earn points. Redeem the thing that lets you leave.

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.

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.

Over the last twelve months your Canadian dollar gained 0.44% against the US dollar. Over the same twelve months, Canadian prices rose 3.0%. Both numbers are official. One is from the currency market, one from Statistics Canada. Winning that race and losing anyway is the normal outcome, because an exchange rate only ever measures one government's money against another's.

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.

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!

Someone Put Bitcoin on a Game Boy. Let's Play It Live.

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Bitcoin Well

Someone Put Bitcoin on a Game Boy. Let's Play It Live.

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.

We are live with Bob Burnett of Ocean Mining!

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Is Bitcoin Mining Being Quietly Captured?