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

nprofile1qqsza56ed667de7q6mu6uxspetg7gzadqtkeug3plserzcj2nz6vc7qpp3mhxue69uhkyunz9e5k7qg6waehxw309ahx7um5wghx7unpdenk2urfd3kzuer9wcpra370

Publishing to

Author Public Key

npub19mf4jm44umnup4he4cdqrjk3us966qhdnc3zrlpjx93y4x95e3uq9qkfu2

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Last Notes

2026-09-11 13:54:39 UTC

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

2026-09-09 20:24:34 UTC

"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.
https://pbs.twimg.com/media/HRy8MsqXMAw_VUB.png

2026-09-08 18:46:18 UTC

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

2026-09-08 14:54:32 UTC

On Sunday, just under 4,000 bitcoin left a wallet that needs 11 of 15 companies to agree before anything moves. Eleven agreed. That was the problem.
Here is how it happened, without the jargon. Liquid is a side network run by Blockstream. You deposit real bitcoin, you get a token called L-BTC, and the token hides transaction amounts for privacy. The software that checks those hidden amounts had a bug. Someone used it to create L-BTC that no bitcoin had ever backed, then asked to cash the tokens out for the real thing. To the companies holding the real coins, the request looked legitimate, so it was signed, and about 4,000 BTC walked out to a new address with a note attached: "we are whitehats. contact us on chain."
The bug had been there for more than two years.
On Monday, after Blockstream patched it, 3,400 BTC came back. 598.5 BTC, about $47,000,000, did not. Call it a bounty or call it a ransom. Either way it was negotiated, because a committee can be negotiated with.
Everyone holding L-BTC believed they held bitcoin. They held a promise from fifteen companies running one piece of software. That is not a Blockstream problem. It is what every layer built on top of Bitcoin is: a promise, with people in it.
Bitcoin at an address only you can sign for has no committee to fool and nobody to negotiate with.
https://pbs.twimg.com/media/HRs2yNnXEAAQ0Aw.jpg

2026-09-07 18:55:00 UTC

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:
https://pbs.twimg.com/media/HRZtNPeboAA3LEB.jpg

2026-09-07 13:54:36 UTC

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.
https://pbs.twimg.com/media/HRZnfBfbkAAUZoK.jpg

2026-09-05 21:54:33 UTC

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 UTC

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:
https://pbs.twimg.com/media/HRZhh0FaIAAaH9o.jpg

2026-09-03 16:54:29 UTC

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.
https://pbs.twimg.com/media/HRTHFOGXoAA5Jj7.png

2026-09-01 22:32:33 UTC

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.
https://pbs.twimg.com/media/HRJwXCFWwAAr05a.png
https://pbs.twimg.com/media/HRJyoB1XwAAK0Oo.png

2026-08-28 14:26:06 UTC

"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.
https://pbs.twimg.com/media/HQ0Ga6-XEAAclnw.png

2026-08-27 13:56:12 UTC

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.
https://blossom.primal.net/4b72f9f4a813f165d14ec9d86f28a0c20bc085b60176d8ef521e81a5960420d7.png

2026-08-26 18:29:06 UTC

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

2026-08-26 18:26:00 UTC

Is Bitcoin Mining Being Quietly Captured? https://t.co/xCUex8ZYgv

2026-08-26 14:25:58 UTC

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.
https://pbs.twimg.com/media/HQpx959WoAII8rb.jpg

2026-08-25 21:25:56 UTC

"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.

2026-08-24 20:59:00 UTC

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Regular, crappy corner store Merlot. lol

2026-08-23 16:55:05 UTC

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.
https://pbs.twimg.com/media/HQQiXX2XQAA1_N3.png

2026-08-22 22:25:04 UTC

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 UTC

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.

2026-08-20 21:24:55 UTC

Someone Put Bitcoin on a Game Boy. Let's Play It Live. https://t.co/fwYXyOvm8t

2026-08-19 21:24:52 UTC

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 UTC

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

2026-08-19 13:54:52 UTC

Jump out of the pot

2026-08-18 18:28:29 UTC

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Totally agree. Doesn't mean he won't do the other in the process.

2026-08-18 16:24:51 UTC

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.
https://pbs.twimg.com/media/HQA0f1kXQAAaJhm.png

2026-08-16 13:24:45 UTC

In 1993 the US government proposed putting an encryption chip in every telephone. Strong encryption, genuinely good, with one extra feature. The government would keep a spare key.
They called it the Clipper Chip. The pitch was that you could have real privacy and they could still listen when they had a good reason. Both at once.
In 1994 a researcher at Bell Labs named Matt Blaze @mattblaze published a short paper showing you could use the chip's encryption and make the government's spare key useless at the same time. The backdoor had a hole in it. One person found it by reading the spec carefully.
The program never recovered.
Nobody voted the Clipper Chip down. It died because someone checked in public and published what he found.
Every backdoor proposed since has arrived with the same promise, that only the right people will ever hold the spare key. Your bank holds one. Your exchange holds one.
A private key you generated yourself is a rare thing. It was never issued with a spare.
https://pbs.twimg.com/media/HPtX4qYXoAAaFJG.jpg

2026-08-14 16:24:39 UTC

Miners usually show up in this niche as the villain. Last week they were the escape hatch.
When the ColdCard entropy bug broke, a rescue transaction could not touch the public mempool without showing attackers the public keys they needed to race it. So the transactions went straight to a miner and got confirmed without ever being seen.
No vendor could have offered that. The open network did.
@PortlandHODL of Bitcoin Red Team built the tool. Live now with @q_liketheletter.
https://t.co/pJNL4Ylmkk

2026-08-13 16:24:37 UTC

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.
https://pbs.twimg.com/media/HPnRpTPWEAE3APF.png

2026-08-13 12:24:37 UTC

The Deep Dive starts in 2 hours.
Entropy and randomness are not the same thing, and the whole thing confuses the hell out of me!
Let's get some actual clarity!
Bitcoin researcher and filmmaker Alex Waltz (@raw_avocado) joins us to break down what real entropy actually is, and why it decides whether your keys are secure or a sitting duck.
10 AM EST. Last chance to register: https://t.co/GuSkOLHNaK

2026-08-12 15:24:36 UTC

$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
https://pbs.twimg.com/media/HPh6wDGWIAAWWj3.jpg

2026-08-11 14:24:31 UTC

Japan has not been allowed to price its own money since the war.
The yen sliding today is not a fresh problem. It is the bottom of a very deep stack. In 1949 an American banker named Joseph Dodge, working for the occupation, fixed the yen at 360 to the dollar by decree. Japan was slotted into Bretton Woods at that number and held there until Washington broke the system in 1971.
Then in 1985 the US and its allies signed the Plaza Accord and pushed the yen from 240 to 120 in three years. It gutted Japan's exporters, so Tokyo answered the pain the only way a central bank knows how: cheap money, everywhere. That blew the largest asset bubble in modern history. When it burst, Japan got the Lost Decades.
And every decade since has been another layer laid over the last one. Zero rates. Quantitative easing. Yield curve control. Negative rates. Each intervention prescribed to treat the damage of the one before it.
This is what a managed economy looks like at the end. Not one bad decision. Seventy years of overruling the market, foreign hands and domestic ones alike, until nobody can tell what anything's real value is.
This summer two governments spent real reserves to set the yen level again. The market erased half of it within a week.
Bitcoin has no Dodge, no Plaza, no committee. No one sets its price and no one can. That is the entire point.
https://pbs.twimg.com/media/HPcoItRW0AMYocU.jpg

2026-08-10 18:24:29 UTC

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.
https://pbs.twimg.com/media/HPYSzMyWIAAvUCk.jpg

2026-08-10 16:24:31 UTC

BIP-110 Is Dead. What Its Two-Block Fork Proved About Who Really Controls Bitcoin

2026-08-10 13:54:29 UTC

Friday's BIP-110 Spaces turned into one of the biggest conversations we've ever hosted. So we're bringing it back for a proper autopsy.
After the weekend, the dust is settling so we're getting everyone back in the room to unpack what actually happened. What it changed, and where Bitcoin goes from here.
@knutsvanholm and @w_s_bitcoin are locked in, with plenty more guests joining them.
You'll want to be in the room for this one.
https://t.co/wh5o0YcAhB

2026-08-09 20:54:30 UTC

"Random" and "random enough" are not the same word. With your Bitcoin keys, the gap between them is everything.
Every private key you hold is really just one enormous, unguessable number. If the randomness behind it isn't truly random, nobody has to steal your keys. They can just guess them.
Wednesday we get into it. Bitcoin researcher and filmmaker Alex Waltz [@raw_avocado] joins The Deep Dive to break down what entropy actually is, how it differs from randomness, and why that difference sits underneath every wallet you'll ever trust.
Starts technical, ends personal. Aug 13, 10 AM ET. Free to join:
https://pbs.twimg.com/media/HPJLtwcWUAAlf9D.jpg

2026-08-09 17:54:31 UTC

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

2026-08-09 14:24:28 UTC

In 1976, an economist most people had already written off did something quietly radical. He argued the government should lose its monopoly on money entirely.
His name was Friedrich Hayek, and the book was "Denationalisation of Money." His case was blunt. "Practically all governments of history," he wrote, "have used their exclusive power to issue money in order to defraud and plunder the people." Not an accident. The whole point of the monopoly.
His fix sounded impossible at the time: let money compete. Strip the state of its exclusive printing press and let people freely choose the money that best held its value. Good money would win the way good anything wins, by being chosen, not mandated.
For decades it stayed a thought experiment. There was simply no way to run a money outside a government. Then, 33 years after Hayek wrote it down, a network switched on that no state could issue, inflate, or shut off. Nobody needed permission to use it. People just started choosing it.
Hayek didn't predict Bitcoin. He described the hole Bitcoin fills: a money the government can't debase, because the government doesn't run it.
The competition he wanted is finally here. You get to choose which money holds your life's work.
https://pbs.twimg.com/media/HPJK2OTWkAAXZEf.jpg

2026-08-09 01:54:27 UTC

Soft fork that we all knew was going to make another chain.
All so predictable!

2026-08-08 16:54:29 UTC

Self-custody shouldn't feel like defusing a bomb with the wires unlabeled.
This week, Bitcoin Guidance is free. A private, one-on-one call with a real Bitcoin expert who walks you through it live: setting up your own wallet, moving your coins safely, and backing up your keys so a lost phone never means a lost fortune. No sales pitch. No jargon wall. Just a human who stays on the line until it's done and it actually makes sense to you.
After the couple of weeks Bitcoin holders just had, nobody should be guessing with their savings.
Free for a few more days. Book a call: https://t.co/2bh6Nub4Uq

2026-08-07 19:54:25 UTC

Heads up if you run a BTCPay Server. There's a critical bug being actively exploited right now, and it can put your funds at risk. This one needs action today.
BTCPay is the open-source software thousands of merchants and plebs run to accept bitcoin themselves. No processor, no middleman, no one else holding the keys. If that's you:
1. Update to version 2.4.2 now (Server > Maintenance > Update). Can't patch yet? Take the server offline until you can.
2. Refresh your macaroons and any backend auth strings.
3. If you created a hot wallet inside BTCPay, move those funds and make a new one.
Here's the part worth sitting with. Running your own infrastructure is real sovereignty, and real sovereignty comes with real responsibility. Nobody else is going to patch this for you, because nobody else is in control.
The open-source upside showed up too. A volunteer security team found this, reported it, and shipped a fix in the open before attackers could run wild. Closed systems fail quietly. This one failed loud and got fixed fast.
Patch now. Send this to a merchant who needs it.

2026-08-07 15:18:53 UTC

- reply

https://streamyard.com/watch/7DVSa49WxT46

2026-08-07 15:17:42 UTC

- reply

This is seriously going to be awesome!

2026-08-07 13:24:23 UTC

🟠 TODAY, 12PM EST on Spaces: The BIP-110 Debate
Both sides. No filter. No stacked audience.
Right now the Bitcoin community is blocking each other instead of talking. We want to change that. So we put strong voices from both sides in one room to make their case and actually hear the other out.
FOR BIP-110: @hodlonaut & @knutsvanholm + more
AGAINST: @DavidFBailey, @w_s_bitcoin + more
Hosted by @bitcoinwell. Bring an open mind. 👇
https://t.co/djc4LVnttg

2026-08-06 16:24:24 UTC

A firmware flaw allowed someone to drain $130 million from self-custody wallets. Days later, a volunteer red team audited 390 Bitcoin codebases in a weekend and filed thousands of findings.
Strip away the headlines and both stories point at the same quiet thing: entropy. The randomness your Bitcoin keys are born from, the part you never see and never think about, right up until it fails.
Most people use "entropy" and "randomness" as if they mean the same thing. In daily life, fine. In the code that generates your keys, that mistake is the difference between money only you can spend and money anyone can.
On August 13 we go deep with Bitcoin researcher and filmmaker Alex Waltz (@raw_avocado). What entropy actually is, why "random enough" isn't, and what the Coldcard controversy revealed about the assumptions we all make when we trust a hardware wallet to make a key.
It starts technical and ends personal. Because if your keys weren't born from genuine entropy, they aren't as secure as you think.
The Deep Dive. August 13, 10:00 AM. Register Now:
https://pbs.twimg.com/media/HPDP0b1XkAAdQQc.jpg

2026-08-06 15:24:23 UTC

Self-custody is still the point

2026-08-05 18:24:22 UTC

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

2026-08-05 15:54:19 UTC

The loonie just slid to about 71 cents against the US dollar, a two-month low.
That is not weather. Nobody woke up to a storm. A committee sets the price of money in this country, and when the gap between what Ottawa pays and what Washington pays widens, your currency follows that decision down. You didn't vote for it. Neither did your savings.
You see, a dollar that loses value on a schedule isn't a place to store your work. It's a leak. And you can't out-save a leak when the people running the printer set the rate.
There is an exit, and it doesn't answer to any of this. Bitcoin has no committee, no overnight rate, no chair reading the room. Its supply follows a schedule nobody can vote to change. You don't have to beat your own central bank. You can just stop holding what it's quietly diluting.
Not your keys, not your coins. And not your central bank's rate to cut.
https://pbs.twimg.com/media/HO9zRYNWUAAfwc4.jpg

2026-08-04 14:40:05 UTC

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.
https://pbs.twimg.com/media/HO4jqjqXUAAXP73.png

2026-08-02 16:40:01 UTC

A company most people have never audited just reported a $1.5 billion profit for one quarter. Its reserves now include roughly 146 tons of gold and nearly 99,000 bitcoin.
That company is Tether, the issuer of the dollar-token in half the crypto trades on earth. Read that again. The people printing the digital dollars are quietly parking their own wealth in gold and Bitcoin.
They know what a paper claim is worth over time. So do you now.
You can hold the token they print, or the assets they're hoarding to back it. One of those you have to trust them for. The other you can hold yourself.
https://pbs.twimg.com/media/HOliRUdW8AA_i3V.png

2026-08-01 16:39:57 UTC

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.
https://pbs.twimg.com/media/HOlfserXgAAECd2.png

2026-07-31 21:09:55 UTC

"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.
https://pbs.twimg.com/media/HOlbS5cW8AAkl3U.png

2026-07-31 19:39:58 UTC

1/A hardware wallet spent years quietly generating guessable Bitcoin keys.
Last week someone drained $38 million from them in about 25 minutes.
The culprit wasn't a hacker. It was bad entropy.
Here's what entropy actually is, why it's so important in self-custody, and how to make a wallet from scratch with nothing but dice. 🧵
https://pbs.twimg.com/media/HOlCbgGXQAAK73N.jpg

2026-07-31 01:39:33 UTC

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 UTC

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

2026-07-28 13:39:29 UTC

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.
https://pbs.twimg.com/media/HOUVvAsWwAEPT46.png

2026-07-27 14:21:53 UTC

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.
https://pbs.twimg.com/media/HOPV4S8WUAAz-Xq.png

2026-07-26 17:21:51 UTC

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.
https://pbs.twimg.com/media/HOBT1NrWcAAn7uF.jpg

2026-07-25 20:21:50 UTC

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.)
https://pbs.twimg.com/media/HOBSJ7kWMAAzYs5.jpg

2026-07-25 16:21:52 UTC

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 🧙‍♂️
https://pbs.twimg.com/media/HOBP4uTXkAAXSZi.png

2026-07-25 13:21:53 UTC

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.
https://pbs.twimg.com/media/HOBQWPCXoAAZWFg.png

2026-07-24 17:49:44 UTC

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.
https://blossom.primal.net/28f36736f86b80e9a42d0224db0220caa5523df9ef2b8d725ee21166667972eb.png

2026-07-23 13:18:23 UTC

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
https://pbs.twimg.com/media/HN2yRSpXUAAsvva.jpg

2026-07-22 18:18:24 UTC

China's 190,000 Bitcoin Problem Nobody's Talking About https://t.co/6kPy2cvfYy

2026-07-22 16:50:27 UTC

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

2026-07-22 16:48:22 UTC

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.
https://pbs.twimg.com/media/HN2FwV-WQAAo8RK.jpg

2026-07-22 16:48:21 UTC

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.
https://blossom.primal.net/e45ba63b448192b6405326cecd43f31f67260cdc1fd224ab421f0c1989c2f55f.mp4

2026-07-21 20:46:56 UTC

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.
https://pbs.twimg.com/media/HNxRpPMXYAEeRfX.jpg

2026-07-21 18:16:57 UTC

Trump's primetime speech last week named China directly: election interference claims, declassified documents, the whole thing. Bitcoin dipped not long after.
Tomorrow, 2pm EST: Episode 3 of the Bitcoin Well Podcast: is that a real signal for bitcoin, or noise dressed up as one?
Live on X and YouTube.
https://pbs.twimg.com/media/HNd89L0acAEMB8p.jpg

2026-07-21 13:16:55 UTC

Everyone's on Bitcoin Twitter keeps acting like the Clarity Act is a big deal for Bitcoin but in reality it has almost nothing to do with Bitcoin at all.
CLARITY is a market-structure bill: it decides whether the SEC or the CFTC polices a token, and it builds a brand-new rulebook for doing it.
But have you actually read the thing? Its got: A capital-raising exemption so a project can sell its token. Resale limits on project insiders. A "maturity test" that only lets a token count as a commodity once no insider group controls more than 20% of the supply. None of that describes Bitcoin. Bitcoin had no company, no insiders, no token sale, no 20% holder to regulate. It has been treated as a commodity for a decade.
The entire bill is a permission structure for everything that isn't Bitcoin: the thousands of tokens trying to earn the status Bitcoin was born with. The law needs seven criteria to ask "is this thing decentralized enough?" Bitcoin answered that question by existing.
Regulate the middlemen and the tokens-with-founders all you want, but none of this thing touches Bitcoin and I'm kind of sick of hearing about it!
- Zach 🧙‍♂️
https://pbs.twimg.com/media/HNsuohRXsAAl1Gh.png

2026-07-20 20:34:09 UTC

Your grocery cart is a debasement chart. You just don't read it that way.
A 28-item Target order that cost $64.50 in 2020 rings up at $158.30 today. Same cart. Same store. The number on the receipt nearly tripled while the food stayed exactly the same. That is not "the economy just running hot."
I can't say this enough, but inflation is not prices going up. Prices are just the final result. Inflation is the money underneath them getting weaker, because someone can create more of it and you cannot. Mises had a plain word for what that does over time: it transfers wealth from the people holding the currency to the people printing it. Your receipt is the transfer, itemized.
Bitcoin runs on the opposite rule. The supply is fixed, enforced by every node, changeable by no one with a printer and a mandate. Nobody can dilute what you hold to pay for a problem you did not cause.
You cannot vote your way out of a shrinking dollar. But you can opt out of it, one paycheck at a time, into money nobody can print more of.
https://pbs.twimg.com/media/HNsoj5VWIAAYqnf.png
https://pbs.twimg.com/media/HNspQ0pWAAA11V8.jpg

2026-07-20 17:29:43 UTC

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.
https://pbs.twimg.com/media/HNrpR8cXAAAdPBi.png

2026-07-20 15:59:18 UTC

Bitcoin's rallying. Fear & Greed is still stuck "extreme fear."
Institutions buying quietly. Retail still not convinced.
We're unpacking that split screen Wednesday, 2pm EST live on X and YouTube.
Which side are you on?
https://pbs.twimg.com/media/HNd8qtcagAAKrYR.png

2026-07-20 15:28:57 UTC

Why Nobody Trusts the Bitcoin Rebound (And Why That Is the Point)

2026-07-20 15:14:02 UTC

America: freezes Russia's reserves
Russia: you know you can't freeze Bitcoin, right?
America: no, you can't just opt out of the dollar
Russia: oh yeah? hold my vodka
https://blossom.primal.net/28c1559e2a9aac87814857c3f79ef2d26c471d8c34758d7704ece3dd8df02f70.mp4

2026-07-19 17:20:45 UTC

Everything humans make gets easier to make over time. Faster chips. Cheaper energy. More dollars, always more dollars.
Bitcoin is the one exception ever engineered. The harder people work to produce it, the harder it becomes to produce. The supply is capped at 21 million and the issuance schedule answers to no one.
That isn't a tech feature. It's the first time in history money got harder to make instead of easier.
Everything around you is being quietly inflated. One thing can't be.
Store your work in the thing no one can print more of.
https://pbs.twimg.com/media/HNdKY6nWwAAtXt1.jpg

2026-07-19 16:20:21 UTC

Prefer audio? Every episode of the Bitcoin Well Podcast is on Spotify and Apple Podcasts too: same conversations, no screen required.
This week's episode: Bitcoin's split-screen market, Japan's regulatory overhaul, and a China story everyone's about to be talking about.
Subscribe now so it's already in your feed Thursday morning.
https://pbs.twimg.com/media/HNd8NFbb0AAdTUV.png

2026-07-19 14:19:38 UTC

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.
https://pbs.twimg.com/media/HNdKGmOXAAA2t3Y.jpg

2026-07-18 15:11:05 UTC

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.
https://pbs.twimg.com/media/HNd7aeFbwAAaiFt.png

2026-07-18 13:40:44 UTC

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.
https://pbs.twimg.com/media/HNdIHB1WQAASA6C.png

2026-07-17 22:07:34 UTC

It's dangerous to go alone in a world that prints money forever.
Take this. 🟧
https://pbs.twimg.com/media/HNdHZekWkAAOUEG.jpg

2026-07-17 20:37:23 UTC

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 20:07:21 UTC

2026-07-17 18:55:15 UTC

- reply

What he was saying has nothing to do with number of day jobs around the market.

2026-07-17 16:07:21 UTC

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

2026-07-17 15:18:02 UTC

A gold analyst just made the best case for bitcoin I've heard all year. By accident.
His whole thesis: "the beauty of gold is it's not used for anything." Send gold to $1,000,000 and nobody gets hurt. Send corn to $1,000 a bushel and people starve. Send oil there and the economy collapses. A reserve asset has to be useless, because money that doubles as something people need to consume punishes everyone the moment it goes up.
He's right. He just stopped one step short.
Gold still has day jobs. Jewelry, electronics, dentistry. Bitcoin is used for even less. It was built to be money and nothing else. No industrial demand fighting its monetary demand, nothing to melt down, no factory waiting on the supply.
Gold is useless enough to be great money. Bitcoin is useless at everything except being money. Same principle, taken to its logical end.
The purest reserve asset isn't the one with the fewest uses. It's the one with none.
https://blossom.primal.net/ddbb5761c674bbaf1098eddacc781b4ec0e08d5de2c283edb4bade3158595518.mp4

2026-07-16 21:09:45 UTC

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.
https://pbs.twimg.com/media/HNYLAD8XcAEoFe2.png

2026-07-16 13:24:59 UTC

Your bitcoin isn't in your hardware wallet. It never was.
Your coins live on a public ledger that thousands of computers each keep a full copy of. Your hardware wallet holds the keys, the secret that proves the coins are yours and lets you move them. The device is a keychain, not a vault.
This is why "I lost my wallet" doesn't have to mean "I lost my bitcoin." Your twelve or twenty-four words can rebuild those keys on any device on earth.
And it's why those words matter more than the gadget ever could. Protect the phrase, not the plastic.
https://t.co/f4EaNJVSuP

2026-07-15 16:24:59 UTC

Michael Saylor made the biggest corporate bitcoin bet in history. Now the charts are red, and the question nobody wants to say out loud is getting louder: what happens if he's forced to sell?
Today, 2 PM EST on the Bitcoin Well Podcast, we put it to two people who at least seem like they know what's going on! @ChrisAlaimo6 (Strategic Advisor at Simple Bitcoin) and @JoeConsorti (Horizon) dig into what's really going on with Saylor's position, whether the "forced seller" fear is real or overblown, and what it would mean for the rest of the market if it played out.
No panic. No hopium. Just the mechanics, straight. No chaser.
Watch live at 2 PM EST on this channel!
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2026-07-15 14:24:55 UTC

Two governments just agreed to build money you can track across an ocean. They're calling it innovation. But they certainly aren't innovating for freedom.
The US and UK announced a joint plan for cross-border tokenized assets and stablecoins. Tokenized, not decentralized. A dollar or a bond wrapped on a ledger the issuer still controls, that still reports, that can still be paused or reversed or geofenced the moment someone decides your transaction is a problem. Surveillance money with a blockchain sticker on the box.
States don't coordinate international plans around technology they find harmless. They're building a programmable, trackable, permissioned version of the exact thing Bitcoin was designed to route around. That's the anti-Bitcoin, shipped by committee, with a press release.
Here's the part that matters for you. A tokenized dollar moves the moment two governments agree it should, and freezes the moment they agree it shouldn't. The bitcoin in your own custody asks no treaty for permission. It crosses a border because you decided to move it, and nobody on either side of that ocean gets a vote.
They can tokenize the dollar. They can't tokenize your consent. Although God knows they'll try...
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2026-07-14 18:24:55 UTC

Tomorrow, 2pm EST, Episode 2 of the Bitcoin Well Podcast.
@JoeConsorti has spent years mapping Bitcoin against global liquidity and monetary policy. @ChrisAlaimo6 has spent years in the trenches of Bitcoin media.
Two different lenses on the same question: is the playbook breaking, or is everyone else just early to the exit?
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2026-07-13 16:54:52 UTC

A central bank digital currency isn't digital cash. It's a leash with a balance.
Cash doesn't care what you buy. It doesn't expire. It doesn't report to anyone. A CBDC is the opposite of all three. It's programmable money, which sounds like a feature until you remember who holds the keyboard.
Programmable means an issuer can put an expiry date on your savings to force you to spend. It can block a category of purchase it disapproves of. It can fence your money to a zip code, or switch it off entirely if you step out of line. None of that is speculation. It's just what the technology is for.
Bitcoin is programmable too. But the rules are fixed, and they're enforced by you, not aimed at you. No one can freeze it, expire it, or tell it where it's allowed to go.
One system asks you to trust that they'll never abuse the switch. The other doesn't have a switch.
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2026-07-12 17:24:49 UTC

An exchange showing you "proof of reserves" is showing you half of a magic trick.
Proof of reserves tells you what the exchange holds. It says nothing about what the exchange owes. A vault full of coins means nothing if five different customers each hold a claim on the same coin. That isn't an audit. It's a photograph of one side of the ledger.
This is fractional-reserve banking wearing a crypto costume. Your balance shows a number. Whether that number is actually backed, one to one, not lent out three times over, is something you are trusting them about, right up until withdrawals freeze.
There is exactly one audit that can't be staged. The coins in a wallet whose keys you hold. You don't have to believe a report. You can check the chain yourself.
If you don't hold the keys, it isn't a reserve. It's an IOU with good marketing.
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2026-07-11 17:54:47 UTC

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 UTC

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 20:24:47 UTC

Public companies bought 110,000 Bitcoin last quarter. Almost none of the people cheering it own a single satoshi of it.
Corporate treasuries now hold more than 1.26 million Bitcoin, over 6% of everything that will ever exist, and Q2 alone added roughly 110,000 coins, about 1.8 times the two prior quarters combined. It's a real signal. Serious balance sheets are treating Bitcoin as a reserve asset. Good.
But here's the quiet distinction underneath the headline. A company holding Bitcoin on its balance sheet is not you holding Bitcoin. If your exposure to all of this is a share of that company, you own a claim on a claim, subject to a board, a custodian, an auditor, and a stock price that can trade above or below the coins it represents. The coins are real. Your grip on them is not.
The 110,000 coins that moved into treasuries this quarter are locked behind someone else's keys. The ones that matter to your sovereignty are the ones behind yours.
Adoption is the network winning. Self-custody is you winning. Don't confuse the two.
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2026-07-09 23:24:46 UTC

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 16:24:44 UTC

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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2026-07-07 22:54:53 UTC

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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2026-07-06 19:54:40 UTC

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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