The Last Analog Man: What John C. Dvorak Understood About Value That the Algorithm Never Will

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.

How I sleep knowing my bitcoin are in cold storage.

24 words. That's what stands between you and a lifetime of asking permission. People think a hardware wallet holds their bitcoin. It doesn't. Your coins never leave the network. What the device holds is a key, and that key is really just a very large number, one so large that guessing it is effectively impossible. Your twelve or twenty-four word phrase is that number, written in a form a human can back up. Whoever knows it controls the coins. Nobody else can, no matter what they threaten or promise. That is the whole game. Not a password you can reset. Not an account someone can restore for you. A secret only you hold. Guard the words. Everything else is noise.

The US national debt just crossed 39.6 trillion dollars. Write it out: 39,663,000,000,000. Nobody voted for that number. No election approved it. It grows while you sleep, funded by a printer that quietly turns your savings into their spending. This is the tax that never lands on a ballot. Your paycheck buys a little less each year, and the people running the press keep their jobs the whole time. Bitcoin was built for exactly this. A supply capped at 21 million, enforced by every node, changeable by no committee and no emergency. One of these systems asks you to trust that they'll behave. The other doesn't ask you to trust anyone at all.

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.

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.)

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 🧙‍♂️

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.

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.

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.

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:

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Bitcoin Well Infinite: Lunch and Learn - The introduction of The Bitcoin Family Office Group

A monthly lunch and learn session to equip you with the bitcoin blueprint for your family, business, or organization. This session we will be intro...

BitMEX is shutting down after 11 years. So make sure you "withdraw your funds before September 23, or lose access." Here's the thing. BitMEX outlived Mt. Gox. It survived the 2020 DOJ and CFTC charges. It traded through three bull runs and every crash in between. And after all of that, the exit for anyone who kept coins there is the same exit it always was. Withdraw before the doors close, or or lose "your" coins forever. The only balance no exchange can sunset is the one you hold yourself in your own wallet.

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.

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Bitcoin Well Infinite: Lunch and Learn - The introduction of The Bitcoin Family Office Group

A monthly lunch and learn session to equip you with the bitcoin blueprint for your family, business, or organization. This session we will be intro...

@wyattorourke_ @jordanguess @Beau_Turner21 @TellyBitcoin @KyleLaw79

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

China's 190,000 Bitcoin Problem Nobody's Talking About

X (formerly Twitter)

Bitcoin Well

China's 190,000 Bitcoin Problem Nobody's Talking About

Bitcoin Well Cuts Third-Party Costs With In-House AI Support and Autonomous ATM Monitoring

Treasury companies are selling their Bitcoin. Governments are quietly stacking it. Satsuma voted to dump 668 BTC. Strategy paused its buys. China sits on 190,000+ coins. The US on 300,000+. So who's really left buying, and does that make Bitcoin a geopolitical weapon? Today, 2pm EST right here on X. @mcshane_capital and @HankHudsonTV break it all down. The one stash nobody can vote away is the one in your own keys.

Let's clear something up, because it's all over X this week: nobody froze any Bitcoin. Here's what actually happened. OFAC flagged Iran-linked wallets, and Tether froze the tokens sitting in them. $131 million in USDT, on Tron, switched off by the company that issues it. A private firm pressed a button and the money stopped. That's a stablecoin freeze, not a Bitcoin freeze. And that's the whole lesson. A stablecoin has an issuer, and an issuer has a kill switch. Which makes it a dollar that still answers to someone. A CBDC with a corporate logo. Even if they said they froze bitcoin, there is zero reason to believe them. So, next time you see "they froze Bitcoin," ask for the block height. There isn't one.

Wealth. Tax. Legal. Acquisition. Mining. Five independent, Bitcoin-native firms. One coordinated team. Your family's Bitcoin blueprint in a single room. Introducing The Bitcoin Family Office Group. A first of its kind. Lunch and Learn, Friday July 24, 12 PM EST. Come with questions.