In 1992 the U.S. State Department told a Berkeley math student that his encryption code was a weapon. Not a figure of speech. A letter, dated August 20, 1992, from the Office of Defense Trade Controls: Daniel Bernstein's algorithm was "designated as a defense article under U.S. Munitions List Category XIII(b)(1)." The same list as bombs. Using it at home was legal. Posting it where a foreigner could read it was arms trafficking, and the State Department told him not to bother applying for a licence, because the code was too secure to approve. He sued in 1995. In April 1996 a federal judge ruled that source code is speech. In 1999 the appeals court agreed, and the export rules came down. Every bitcoin key you hold is protected by the class of math that Washington classified as a munition within living memory. It didn't become legal to share because the government changed its mind. It became legal because one graduate student refused to register as an arms dealer. The next time someone tells you self-custody is paranoid, remember that the official position, not long ago, was that the tools for it should not be allowed to leave the country.

Canada's bank regulator, yesterday: "Tokenized deposits are, for example, not legally distinct from traditional deposits." Correct. A deposit is money the bank owes you. Put that IOU on a blockchain and it is still the same IOU controlled by a third party. It just gains the buzzword "blockchain" for marketing purposes. Bitcoin at an address you control is the one thing on the list that nobody owes you because you truly own it yourself.

The Rabbit Hole Has an Exit: 25 Years of 9/11, a Lifetime of Psyops, and Why I Ended Up in Bitcoin

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.

"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.

Bitcoin Didn't Break. The $320M Shortcut Built on Top of It Did.

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Bitcoin Didn't Break. The $320M Shortcut Built on Top of It Did.