Nine billion dollars in Bitcoin options expire this morning. Bitcoin is at a six-week low. Three hundred forty two million in long bets got wiped out overnight. Every cable desk on the timeline is calling this a referendum on Bitcoin. It is not a referendum on Bitcoin. It is a deadline for the people betting against it this week. Bitcoin has a habit of clearing the table on the way to the next move. The longs got cleared last night. The shorts are piling in this morning, leaning on the same chart, betting the next leg is down. They are about to learn the same lesson the longs just learned. Bitcoin does not move in the direction the most-crowded trade is pointing. Luckily you can skip all of this noise by just holding spot (see: actual) bitcoin in your own wallet.

Bitcoin slipped out of the top 10 global assets by market cap this morning. Above it on the chart this afternoon are Apple, Microsoft, Nvidia, Alphabet, Amazon, Saudi Aramco, Meta, Berkshire, Eli Lilly, TSMC. All private companies, not open sources software. The protocol doesn't know it dropped in fiat denominated comparison charts. Bitcoin issued the same 144 blocks today that it issued yesterday. The supply schedule didn't flinch. The hashrate was unefected. The only thing that moved is the dollar-denominated number on the chart. Apple makes phones. Berkshire makes allocations. Silver makes hats. Bitcoin makes unchangeable records of value transfers. A market cap ranking is a measurement of what other holders think a thing is worth right now, denominated in the unit those holders are trying to get away from. When the unit moves, the ranking moves. The thing being measured did not. Bitcoin will return to the top 10 the same way it left. By doing what it does day in and day out. The protocol does not optimize for the leaderboard, it optimized for truth.

Tether traded at 99.8 cents on Coinbase overnight. Kraken showed 99.83. Bitfinex got dragged with them. The peg is back already, but what can we learn from this? A stablecoin is a promise that one unit is always worth one dollar. The promise is collateralized by Treasuries, commercial paper, and the willingness of an arbitrage desk to buy below par when the spread opens. The collateral works most of the time. The arbitrage works most of the time. But what is "most" of the time worth, especially when the thing your pegged to is already losing value every day? Bitcoin made no such promise. The protocol does not target a price. It targets a supply. It produces a block every ten minutes whether the dollar is 1.00 or 0.97 or 1.04 against another currency. The chain has no peg to defend. Stablecoins stabilize against the dollar. They do not stabilize against the conditions that move the dollar. When the conditions move hard enough, the peg slips, the arbitrage opens, the spread closes, and the chart looks normal again two hours later. The thing the spread was telling you about the system underneath is the part you are supposed to remember. Bitcoin does not chase a price. 1 BTC = 1 BTC always.

How the Bitcoin ETFs Have Affected Bitcoin Companies

Robinhood launched a feature this morning that lets you connect an AI agent to your brokerage account. The agent reviews your portfolio, reads analyst notes, and places trades for you while you sleep. The CEO called it "extending our mission of democratizing finance to AI agents."Which, is just a weird way to word that. Not enabling its users to use new AI tools, but democratizing finance to software that runs on a server you do not control, attached to a brokerage you do not custody, executing trades on a schedule you did not write.You handed them your custody. Now you are handing AI your decisions, most of which are just run by other corporations that could be telling their AIs to run certain trades without your permission.Wild times!Bitcoin runs on a different stack. You hold the keys. You sign the transactions. You decide when to send and when to wait. There is no agent on a Robinhood server placing your stack into a rebalancing trade at three in the morning because a prompt hallucinated or an AI CEO wanted to push the market a certain way.Self-custody is not just about who holds the coin. It is about who decides what happens to it.A Bitcoin transaction is a sentence you wrote. A Robinhood agentic trade is a sentence someone else's model wrote in your name.Your free will choices are worth holding onto; just as much as your keys.

Senator Lummis posted a few hours ago that if the CLARITY Act fails this Congress, American software developers will be prosecuted again for the crime of publishing code. She is not exaggerating. The Samourai Wallet developers were arrested in 2024 for writing privacy software. The Tornado Cash developers were charged for shipping open-source contracts. The BitcoinFog operator went to prison for running a tool that other people chose to use. The pattern is established. Bitcoin runs on code that anyone in the world can read, fork, and ship. The same legal theory that puts a Samourai developer in handcuffs puts every Bitcoin Core contributor inside the same dotted line. Code is speech. In 2026, speech can be a felony. The CLARITY Act is not a Bitcoin bill. It is a free-press bill for the digital century. It draws the line between writing a program and running someone else's money. If that line is not drawn, the law treats every git push like a money-transmission offense. Hal Finney published the running-Bitcoin tweet from his living room in 2009. In a world without CLARITY, that tweet is a probable-cause affidavit. The cypherpunks were not paranoid. They were early.

The headline this morning is that Bitcoin apparent demand has fallen to a five month low. The chart is real. CryptoQuant's net-buying signal is at the lowest reading since December. Cable news will run this clip for the next 48 hours claiming the sky is falling. Here is the part the chart doesn't show. Apparent demand is a measure of public-market vehicle buying. ETF inflows, treasury company allocations, exchange net flows. It's a slice of the demand picture. It is not the demand picture. And it moves in cycles. It was at a five month high in December. It will be at a five month high again. Demand fluctuates. It always has. Supply does not. Every ten minutes, the Bitcoin network issues roughly 3.125 fresh coins to a miner who solved a block. Roughly four hundred and fifty new coins enter circulation per day. That number falls again in 2028. It falls again in 2032. It keeps falling on a schedule written in 2009 by someone who never read a CryptoQuant chart. Apparent demand can fall. Apparent supply cannot rise. The vehicles got tired. The chain did not.

The Nasdaq is printing 1999 valuation metrics. The S&P is printing 2000 valuation metrics. Cisco hit $80 a share in March of 2000 and then spent the next eight years getting back to a third of that. The chart that has every macro account talking this week is the same chart, 26 years later. Mises wrote this story before anyone alive on this app was born. Easy credit pushes capital into the riskiest end of the risk curve. The riskiest end gets bid past any cash-flow story the underlying asset can support. The cash-flow story eventually arrives. The bid does not survive it. Bitcoin is on the same chart as Cisco was in 2000 in one sense, and on the exact opposite chart in another. Both go up when the dollar weakens. Only one has a supply that cannot expand to meet the buying. The supply of stocks went up forever. The supply of Bitcoin will not. When the Nasdaq corrected from 5,000 to 1,100, the Federal Reserve printed its way out of the hole. There is no Federal Reserve for the Bitcoin supply schedule. Some assets get bailed out. Some are the bailout.

Bitcoin is below $76,000 this morning. Stocks are at all-time highs. Gold is climbing in the same chart frame. Half of crypto Twitter is calling capitulation. The other half is calling manipulation. Both halves are looking at the wrong picture. Yesterday the Federal Reserve added another sliver to the balance sheet. The Treasury rolled another tranche of maturing debt at a higher coupon. The dollar lost a little more purchasing power against every asset that has not yet been issued, allocated, or printed. Stocks at all-time highs are not a strong-economy signal. They are a soft-currency signal denominated in the asset everyone has the most of. Gold runs because the same dollar is buying less of it. Stocks run because the same dollar is buying less of them. Bitcoin runs harder over a longer horizon than either, for the same reason and one additional one. The supply schedule is in the code. The other two assets do not have a code. Stocks are not at all-time highs. The dollar is at an all-time low against stocks. Bitcoin isn't lagging, its readying the next face melting bull market.

In sixty minutes we go live with @reardencode for The Deep Dive on Bitcoin and quantum computing. Most coverage of this topic gets one thing badly wrong. The threat is not the day quantum machines turn on. The threat is the gap between when those machines reach the cryptographic threshold and when Bitcoin's signature scheme upgrades to a post-quantum standard. That gap has a name. The vulnerable set is roughly five million Bitcoin sitting in addresses that have ever exposed a public key on the chain. Satoshi's stash is in there. So is every coin in a reused address. Brandon Black has spent the last two years inside this problem. Tonight he walks through BIP-360, the soft-fork timeline cryptographers actually argue about, and the self-custody hygiene every Bitcoiner should already be running. The math is not at the threshold yet. The hygiene is the part you can fix today. 7 PM ET. May 26.

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The Deep Dive - The Quantum Question w/ Brandon Black

The Deep Dive - Deeper into Bitcoin Knowledge This episode: We'll be joined by Brandon Black (aka Rearden Code) to cut through the noise around qu...

Someone just destroyed 107 Bitcoin on purpose (we think). Five transactions to the canonical burn address. Roughly $8.3 million gone. Not lost. Not frozen. Destroyed. There are now 107 fewer coins competing for the 21 million ceiling. Voluntary scarcity or a major mistake? Here is the harder question. There are also roughly five million BTC sitting in addresses that have ever exposed a public key. Including Satoshi's. Those coins are not gone. They are vulnerable on a long enough timeline to the kind of math problem cable news has been over-selling for a decade. One person took 107 coins off the supply ledger by choice. A quantum computer could take millions from their rightful-owner right off the ledger... or could it? Tonight at 7 PM ET we sit down with @reardencode for The Deep Dive on quantum computing and Bitcoin. Brandon Black walks through BIP-360, the soft-fork path to post-quantum signatures, and the self-custody hygiene that matters before the math tips. May 26th. 7 PM ET.

Memorial Day exists because a proposition was paid for. The proposition was simple. A government can't tell a free person what they may own, where they may travel, who they may speak to, or with whom they may trade. People died holding this line. The cost was very real. The line was paid for in blood. It has been kept for two centuries by paper. The paper is increasingly negotiable. Your dollar can be debased without a vote. Your bank account can be frozen on a list you didn't know existed. Every layer between you and your money is a layer that can be coerced. Bitcoin is the first asset that holds the line in code. Twenty-one million. Air-gapped. No senator can sign it away. No central banker can debase it. No court can reverse a confirmed block. The men and women remembered today didn't die so you could trust an intermediary. Bitcoin is a real way you can hold the line yourself.

The conditions that created Bitcoin are gone forever. A pseudonymous creator. A fair launch. A period when nobody knew what it was and there was nothing to be gained by getting in early except belief. That window closed in 2009. You can't manufacture a fair launch once everyone knows what one is worth. Every coin since has been a derivative of the only one that mattered.

Buried in the CLARITY Act markup the Senate is voting on Thursday: a line that bans the Fed from issuing CBDC directly to consumers. That's not a small detail. That's the door to programmable central-bank money being nailed shut from the inside. The Act splits oversight between the SEC and CFTC, protects software developers from money transmitter rules, and writes a framework for stablecoin yield markets that compete with checking accounts paying 0.04%. Tim Scott calls it innovation and certainty. Elizabeth Warren calls it a risk to investors. They call it "comprehensive regulation." The piece that matters is the piece they're not advertising. The Fed loses the direct-issuance lane to your wallet. Permissioned money lost a battle most people didn't know was being fought. Self-custody wins by attrition every time the state tries to draw a new line. Every law that names Bitcoin without controlling it is a law that confirms Bitcoin can't be controlled by law. Thursday's vote is the next checkpoint. Either way the vote goes, your seed phrase still works. Not your keys, not your coins is gospel because the gospel doesn't need a markup hearing.