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.
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2026-07-28T22:12:05+02:00 Event JSON
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Last Notes npub19mf4jm44umnup4he4cdqrjk3us966qhdnc3zrlpjx93y4x95e3uq9qkfu2 bitcoinwell 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 npub19mf4jm44umnup4he4cdqrjk3us966qhdnc3zrlpjx93y4x95e3uq9qkfu2 bitcoinwell Two weeks ago the price of bitcoin was beyond boring. VanEck's mid-August numbers, published August 18, showed realized volatility at 27.2% against a long-run average near 80%. Spot volume in the 10th percentile of its entire history. Eight of twelve capitulation signals firing. Long-term holders had just sold 356,000 coins into the weakness. Then August 19. Treasury scales up its bond buybacks. $2.99 billion of positions get liquidated, $2.6 billion of them short. And in that same window spot ETFs take in $2.88 billion, which is 88% of the week's flow, per CoinMarketCap. $63,549 on August 11. $81,235 on August 25. When almost nothing is for sale, every dollar of buying has to climb further up the order book to find a seller. A thin market does not absorb demand. It reprices against it. That is why $2.88 billion took this one up 28% in two weeks. Treasury liquidity policy. Forced buying from liquidated shorts. Voluntary spot demand through the ETFs. Three separate engines, and not one of them needed the other two to fire. That is the part that's new. For most of bitcoin's history these showed up one at a time, with months in between for the market to digest each one. And the amount available keeps shrinking. The mortgages Coinbase and Better switched on this morning lock $250,000 of pledged coins against a $100,000 down payment until the loan is repaid. Every one of those written is supply leaving the market for years. More weeks are going to look like this one, and sharper than anything before the ETFs existed. $2.6 billion of leverage got closed by somebody else last Wednesday. The best way to enjoy price action like we saw last week is with coins you hold in your own wallet. https://pbs.twimg.com/media/HQrCbGnWkAA3qGU.png npub19mf4jm44umnup4he4cdqrjk3us966qhdnc3zrlpjx93y4x95e3uq9qkfu2 bitcoinwell Bitcoin Just Pumped $15K and Almost Nobody Told the Real Story https://t.co/N8FStTiqMh npub19mf4jm44umnup4he4cdqrjk3us966qhdnc3zrlpjx93y4x95e3uq9qkfu2 bitcoinwell Is Bitcoin Mining Being Quietly Captured? https://t.co/xCUex8ZYgv npub19mf4jm44umnup4he4cdqrjk3us966qhdnc3zrlpjx93y4x95e3uq9qkfu2 bitcoinwell 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 npub19mf4jm44umnup4he4cdqrjk3us966qhdnc3zrlpjx93y4x95e3uq9qkfu2 bitcoinwell "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. npub19mf4jm44umnup4he4cdqrjk3us966qhdnc3zrlpjx93y4x95e3uq9qkfu2 bitcoinwell We just restocked the rewards store, and three of the things you can redeem points for are hardware wallets. Blockstream Jade Core at 34,000. Jade Plus Link at 85,000. Bitkey at 109,000. Most loyalty programs reward you with credit to spend more with the company. Ours hands you the device you use to take your bitcoin off our platform entirely. We know how that sounds. We did it on purpose. Also in there: Broken Money, The Bitcoin Standard and The Price of Tomorrow, so you can earn the argument and the hardware in the same week. A steel seed plate for 7,000. Shirts, a hoodie, sunglasses, a Leatherman. And a Cybertruck for 69,000,000 points. Somebody is going to try. The Wishing Well still pays sats straight to your Lightning wallet. And the new referral program earns you points every time someone you brought in buys or sells bitcoin. Buy bitcoin. Earn points. Redeem the thing that lets you leave. https://pbs.twimg.com/media/HQkuHzWWoAAC5dM.jpg https://pbs.twimg.com/media/HQkuRnQWoAATjAI.jpg npub19mf4jm44umnup4he4cdqrjk3us966qhdnc3zrlpjx93y4x95e3uq9qkfu2 bitcoinwell Oh that's a good one! npub19mf4jm44umnup4he4cdqrjk3us966qhdnc3zrlpjx93y4x95e3uq9qkfu2 bitcoinwell Regular, crappy corner store Merlot. lol npub19mf4jm44umnup4he4cdqrjk3us966qhdnc3zrlpjx93y4x95e3uq9qkfu2 bitcoinwell OMG I forgot about Mondo! npub19mf4jm44umnup4he4cdqrjk3us966qhdnc3zrlpjx93y4x95e3uq9qkfu2 bitcoinwell 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 npub19mf4jm44umnup4he4cdqrjk3us966qhdnc3zrlpjx93y4x95e3uq9qkfu2 bitcoinwell 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. npub19mf4jm44umnup4he4cdqrjk3us966qhdnc3zrlpjx93y4x95e3uq9qkfu2 bitcoinwell Over the last twelve months your Canadian dollar gained 0.44% against the US dollar. Over the same twelve months, Canadian prices rose 3.0%. Both numbers are official. One is from the currency market, one from Statistics Canada. Winning that race and losing anyway is the normal outcome, because an exchange rate only ever measures one government's money against another's. npub19mf4jm44umnup4he4cdqrjk3us966qhdnc3zrlpjx93y4x95e3uq9qkfu2 bitcoinwell 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. npub19mf4jm44umnup4he4cdqrjk3us966qhdnc3zrlpjx93y4x95e3uq9qkfu2 bitcoinwell Coldcard shipped new firmware yesterday. 5.6.1 for Mk4 and Mk5, 1.5.1Q for Q. Checking in on one thing, because a "firmware fix" headline can read like the story closed. Updating the device does not fix a seed that was already generated badly. From the release: "Installing this update does not make an existing vulnerable seed safe." So if your seed was created on a Coldcard any time from 2021 through July 2026, it is the same seed this morning that it was three weeks ago. The patch went into the device. It cannot reach backward into a number that already exists. You need a new seed, and the coins need to move to it. One detail deserves more attention than it got. The people who used dice were fine. Fifty fair rolls, kept private, and the broken generator underneath them did not matter, because the randomness was theirs and not the machine's. That is now the rule. Every new seed on 5.6.1 requires user-supplied entropy. 65 keypresses, 50 dice rolls, or 128 coin flips. Go look at when your seed was made and keep your bitcoin safe! https://pbs.twimg.com/media/HQQOLb3WAAAoaFZ.jpg npub19mf4jm44umnup4he4cdqrjk3us966qhdnc3zrlpjx93y4x95e3uq9qkfu2 bitcoinwell Someone Put Bitcoin on a Game Boy. Let's Play It Live. https://t.co/fwYXyOvm8t npub19mf4jm44umnup4he4cdqrjk3us966qhdnc3zrlpjx93y4x95e3uq9qkfu2 bitcoinwell 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. npub19mf4jm44umnup4he4cdqrjk3us966qhdnc3zrlpjx93y4x95e3uq9qkfu2 bitcoinwell We are live with Bob Burnett of Ocean Mining! https://zap.stream/naddr1qqjxxdesxg6rjvnz94jrjvee956r2vfn95unyvps94jxxcf5v5cnwefjv4nx2qgewaehxw309aex2mrp0yh8xmn0wf6zuum0vd5kzmp0qgsv73dxhgfk8tt76gf6q788zrfyz9dwwgwfk3aar6l5gk82a76v9fgrqsqqqan800d83s npub19mf4jm44umnup4he4cdqrjk3us966qhdnc3zrlpjx93y4x95e3uq9qkfu2 bitcoinwell Four pools build more than 70% of Bitcoin's blocks. Bob Burnett sits on OCEAN's board and runs his own mining company. He also went on record defending how OCEAN handled the BIP-110 fork, after miners called for leadership to be removed and Adam Back called for docked pay. So we asked him the uncomfortable version. Is mining being quietly captured, and would he tell us if it were? Live in one hour with @boomer_btc, on X and on YouTube. https://pbs.twimg.com/media/HQF56MIXQAAgrfv.jpg npub19mf4jm44umnup4he4cdqrjk3us966qhdnc3zrlpjx93y4x95e3uq9qkfu2 bitcoinwell It Wasn't Just ColdCard: AI Is Finding Bugs in Every Bitcoin Wallet https://t.co/X53msliUOV npub19mf4jm44umnup4he4cdqrjk3us966qhdnc3zrlpjx93y4x95e3uq9qkfu2 bitcoinwell Jump out of the pot npub19mf4jm44umnup4he4cdqrjk3us966qhdnc3zrlpjx93y4x95e3uq9qkfu2 bitcoinwell I mean we've talked about this extensively. Stablecoins are the new CBDCS, 100%. That doesn't change anything I said in the previous post. npub19mf4jm44umnup4he4cdqrjk3us966qhdnc3zrlpjx93y4x95e3uq9qkfu2 bitcoinwell What is it? npub19mf4jm44umnup4he4cdqrjk3us966qhdnc3zrlpjx93y4x95e3uq9qkfu2 bitcoinwell Completely agree. I just think he ends up doing the other in the process. npub19mf4jm44umnup4he4cdqrjk3us966qhdnc3zrlpjx93y4x95e3uq9qkfu2 bitcoinwell Totally agree. Doesn't mean he won't do the other in the process. npub19mf4jm44umnup4he4cdqrjk3us966qhdnc3zrlpjx93y4x95e3uq9qkfu2 bitcoinwell 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 npub19mf4jm44umnup4he4cdqrjk3us966qhdnc3zrlpjx93y4x95e3uq9qkfu2 bitcoinwell What BIP-110 Actually Proved: How to Read a Bitcoin Fork Fight npub19mf4jm44umnup4he4cdqrjk3us966qhdnc3zrlpjx93y4x95e3uq9qkfu2 bitcoinwell Under 1% a year. That is how fast new bitcoin enters the world now. In 2028 the rate gets cut in half again, on a schedule written in 2009 that nobody since has had the authority to change. npub19mf4jm44umnup4he4cdqrjk3us966qhdnc3zrlpjx93y4x95e3uq9qkfu2 bitcoinwell 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 npub19mf4jm44umnup4he4cdqrjk3us966qhdnc3zrlpjx93y4x95e3uq9qkfu2 bitcoinwell Two weeks of Bitcoin security news, and the lesson most people took from it is backwards. A wallet generated weak seeds. Strangers with no boss and no mandate found it, published it, and got people's coins out before the attackers finished. Another group put 501 open-source projects through an audit and posted every finding in public. You know all of this because there was nowhere to put it except in the open. Now name the last time a bank told you about a hole in its systems before it cost you anything. Not after the settlement. Before. You did not watch self-custody fail this month. You watched it work in the only way that counts, which is out loud and early enough to act. The alternative you're being sold has the same bugs. It just never has to mention them. https://pbs.twimg.com/media/HPtRDtPXcAA6g7E.png npub19mf4jm44umnup4he4cdqrjk3us966qhdnc3zrlpjx93y4x95e3uq9qkfu2 bitcoinwell 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 npub19mf4jm44umnup4he4cdqrjk3us966qhdnc3zrlpjx93y4x95e3uq9qkfu2 bitcoinwell "Trezor got hacked." That's making the rounds today, and it's wrong. Trezor wasn't hacked. A shipping provider they use, ShipMonk, had a system breached, and customer order data leaked: names, emails, phone numbers, and home addresses for roughly 13,700 people who ordered between May and early August. No keys. No seeds. No coins. The devices and firmware were never touched. Credit to Trezor for saying so quickly and in plain language. So how worried should you be? Aware, not panicked. Your Bitcoin is safe. But your name on a list that basically reads "just bought Bitcoin cold storage" is worth respecting. It's fuel for phishing texts posing as support, and in rare cases, for someone who'd rather knock on your door. I've seen this one before. I was in the Ledger breach back in 2020, when 270,000 owners had their home addresses dumped online. I honestly never noticed any extra fishing attempts beyond the thousands I already felt like I get on a regular basis, but you should be on guard and read every email that claims to be from Trezor with suspicion. The takeaway isn't "self-custody is dangerous." It's that privacy is part of the stack. Buy privately when you can, never link your name to your holdings, and treat any urgent message about your wallet as a scam until proven otherwise. Guard your keys. Then guard the fact that you hold them. https://pbs.twimg.com/media/HPoUbnPWwAAR4mb.png npub19mf4jm44umnup4he4cdqrjk3us966qhdnc3zrlpjx93y4x95e3uq9qkfu2 bitcoinwell 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 npub19mf4jm44umnup4he4cdqrjk3us966qhdnc3zrlpjx93y4x95e3uq9qkfu2 bitcoinwell 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 npub19mf4jm44umnup4he4cdqrjk3us966qhdnc3zrlpjx93y4x95e3uq9qkfu2 bitcoinwell Bitcoin Lost $116M. Then $853M Ran to ETFs Instead https://t.co/uRVwZWEgsN npub19mf4jm44umnup4he4cdqrjk3us966qhdnc3zrlpjx93y4x95e3uq9qkfu2 bitcoinwell Entropy and randomness sound like the same word. In Bitcoin, mixing them up can cost you everything. That gap is exactly what just bit some ColdCard users. Tomorrow on The Deep Dive, researcher and filmmaker Alex Waltz (@raw_avocado) breaks down what real entropy is, why weak randomness makes a hardware wallet a decoration, and what the ColdCard story actually revealed. Tomorrow, 8/13 @ 10am EST (yes its an early one!) Register: https://pbs.twimg.com/media/HPhpHHfW8AAiM6K.jpg npub19mf4jm44umnup4he4cdqrjk3us966qhdnc3zrlpjx93y4x95e3uq9qkfu2 bitcoinwell $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 npub19mf4jm44umnup4he4cdqrjk3us966qhdnc3zrlpjx93y4x95e3uq9qkfu2 bitcoinwell Inflation "cooled" to 3.4%, they say. The target was never zero. The Fed aims to devalue your money about 2% every year on purpose. That is not stability, it is a slow melt you are not supposed to notice. And it compounds: by their own index, the dollar has lost more than 22% of its purchasing power since 2020. What cost $100 then costs about $129 now. Their math, not mine. That is the flattering version. Inflation was never the price of eggs going up. It is the supply of money going up, and the shelf price is just the symptom. Between 2020 and 2022 the money supply grew 41%, from $15.4 trillion to $21.8 trillion. More than $6 trillion conjured in about two years. You can massage a basket of goods. You cannot un-print $6 trillion. Bitcoin's supply grows less than 1% a year, toward zero, set by no committee and no election. One of these two moneys can be diluted while you sleep. It's not the one without a printer. https://pbs.twimg.com/media/HPhnYCBXkAEBsjC.jpg https://pbs.twimg.com/media/HPhnaV4XwAAwRDH.png npub19mf4jm44umnup4he4cdqrjk3us966qhdnc3zrlpjx93y4x95e3uq9qkfu2 bitcoinwell 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 npub19mf4jm44umnup4he4cdqrjk3us966qhdnc3zrlpjx93y4x95e3uq9qkfu2 bitcoinwell 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 npub19mf4jm44umnup4he4cdqrjk3us966qhdnc3zrlpjx93y4x95e3uq9qkfu2 bitcoinwell BIP-110 Is Dead. What Its Two-Block Fork Proved About Who Really Controls Bitcoin npub19mf4jm44umnup4he4cdqrjk3us966qhdnc3zrlpjx93y4x95e3uq9qkfu2 bitcoinwell 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 npub19mf4jm44umnup4he4cdqrjk3us966qhdnc3zrlpjx93y4x95e3uq9qkfu2 bitcoinwell "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 npub19mf4jm44umnup4he4cdqrjk3us966qhdnc3zrlpjx93y4x95e3uq9qkfu2 bitcoinwell 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 npub19mf4jm44umnup4he4cdqrjk3us966qhdnc3zrlpjx93y4x95e3uq9qkfu2 bitcoinwell 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 npub19mf4jm44umnup4he4cdqrjk3us966qhdnc3zrlpjx93y4x95e3uq9qkfu2 bitcoinwell Soft fork that we all knew was going to make another chain. All so predictable! npub19mf4jm44umnup4he4cdqrjk3us966qhdnc3zrlpjx93y4x95e3uq9qkfu2 bitcoinwell 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 npub19mf4jm44umnup4he4cdqrjk3us966qhdnc3zrlpjx93y4x95e3uq9qkfu2 bitcoinwell 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. npub19mf4jm44umnup4he4cdqrjk3us966qhdnc3zrlpjx93y4x95e3uq9qkfu2 bitcoinwell The Coldcard bug has a lot of people scrambling to move their bitcoin to a safe setup. If that's you and you're not 100% sure how, don't rush it alone. This week, our Bitcoin Guidance is free. A private 1-on-1 call with a real Bitcoin expert who helps you set up a fresh wallet, move your coins, and confirm your backup actually works. Live, at your pace. We never ask for your seed phrase. We never touch your keys. You stay in control the whole time, we just make sure you do it right. Moving bitcoin under pressure is exactly when mistakes happen. You don't have to. https://pbs.twimg.com/media/HPIO8tcXgAAAT2S.jpg npub19mf4jm44umnup4he4cdqrjk3us966qhdnc3zrlpjx93y4x95e3uq9qkfu2 bitcoinwell https://streamyard.com/watch/7DVSa49WxT46 npub19mf4jm44umnup4he4cdqrjk3us966qhdnc3zrlpjx93y4x95e3uq9qkfu2 bitcoinwell This is seriously going to be awesome! npub19mf4jm44umnup4he4cdqrjk3us966qhdnc3zrlpjx93y4x95e3uq9qkfu2 bitcoinwell 🟠 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 npub19mf4jm44umnup4he4cdqrjk3us966qhdnc3zrlpjx93y4x95e3uq9qkfu2 bitcoinwell 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 npub19mf4jm44umnup4he4cdqrjk3us966qhdnc3zrlpjx93y4x95e3uq9qkfu2 bitcoinwell Self-custody is still the point npub19mf4jm44umnup4he4cdqrjk3us966qhdnc3zrlpjx93y4x95e3uq9qkfu2 bitcoinwell $130 Million Just Vanished From 'Safe' Bitcoin Wallets | Pete Rizzo https://t.co/IKllIulY2g npub19mf4jm44umnup4he4cdqrjk3us966qhdnc3zrlpjx93y4x95e3uq9qkfu2 bitcoinwell We're live. $130 million just vanished from "self-custody" wallets after the Coldcard firmware flaw. The custody crowd is calling it proof that holding your own keys doesn't work. It isn't. We sat down with Bitcoin historian @pete_rizzo_ to put this moment where it belongs: next to Mt. Gox, Celsius, and FTX. None of those disasters made custodians the answer. This one doesn't either. The real history of self-custody, who collaborative custody is actually for, and what needs to change. Watch now: https://youtube.com/live/24Vg1bcb9qE npub19mf4jm44umnup4he4cdqrjk3us966qhdnc3zrlpjx93y4x95e3uq9qkfu2 bitcoinwell Going live at 2:15pm EST! https://youtube.com/live/24Vg1bcb9qE?feature=share npub19mf4jm44umnup4he4cdqrjk3us966qhdnc3zrlpjx93y4x95e3uq9qkfu2 bitcoinwell 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 npub19mf4jm44umnup4he4cdqrjk3us966qhdnc3zrlpjx93y4x95e3uq9qkfu2 bitcoinwell $130 million just vanished from "safe" self-custody wallets. The custody crowd is already taking a victory lap. They shouldn't. You see, the Coldcard firmware flaw drained $130M from people who did everything right. They took their coins off the exchange. They held their own keys. And it still became one of the worst security failures in Bitcoin's history. But here's the uncomfortable truth: Mt. Gox lost more. So did Celsius. So did FTX. Not one of those disasters made "hand a company your keys" the answer. Neither does this one. We will be sitting down with Pete Rizzo, @Btchistory_ and former editor at Bitcoin Magazine and CoinDesk, to put this moment in context. Where self-custody came from. Who collaborative custody is actually for. And why holding your own keys is still Bitcoin's north star. The hack is real. The lesson isn't "trust a custodian." It's "do it better." New Bitcoin Well Podcast episode live tomorrow @2pm EST on X, YouTube, Rumble and ZapStream. https://pbs.twimg.com/media/HO5iJDOXYAA1a6n.jpg npub19mf4jm44umnup4he4cdqrjk3us966qhdnc3zrlpjx93y4x95e3uq9qkfu2 bitcoinwell Roll Your Own Bitcoin Seed: How to Create a Wallet You Don't Have to Trust npub19mf4jm44umnup4he4cdqrjk3us966qhdnc3zrlpjx93y4x95e3uq9qkfu2 bitcoinwell 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 npub19mf4jm44umnup4he4cdqrjk3us966qhdnc3zrlpjx93y4x95e3uq9qkfu2 bitcoinwell We're starting something tomorrow, and it's for anyone who's ever felt too late or too lost to get into Bitcoin. It's a beginner series. Every session I bring on a different member of the Bitcoin Well team to help me explain Bitcoin from the ground up, so you learn the basics and get to know the people actually building Bitcoin Well at the same time. First up: Halston (@halstonvalencia). She runs capital markets and marketing here, she's building Bitcoin Quant, and she doesn't do lukewarm takes on macro. Tomorrow we cover the fundamentals and walk you through how to set up a wallet and hold your own bitcoin safely. No jargon. All questions welcome. Come learn or share this with your friends and family that are just getting started! Tomorrow. 4PM EST. https://pbs.twimg.com/media/HOlkrZUX0AAdmlp.jpg npub19mf4jm44umnup4he4cdqrjk3us966qhdnc3zrlpjx93y4x95e3uq9qkfu2 bitcoinwell 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 npub19mf4jm44umnup4he4cdqrjk3us966qhdnc3zrlpjx93y4x95e3uq9qkfu2 bitcoinwell In 1993, before most people had ever touched the web, a mathematician named Eric Hughes wrote a line that predicted your whole future: "Privacy is necessary for an open society in the electronic age." He wasn't talking about hiding. He was talking about choice. The right to reveal yourself to the world on your own terms, and to reveal nothing when you choose nothing. His answer wasn't a law or a protest. It was code. Hughes and a small group of cryptographers understood you couldn't ask governments or corporations for privacy, because they profit from taking it. You had to build it yourself, in math, and give it away. "Cypherpunks write code," he wrote. Someone had to write the software that defends privacy, so they were going to write it. Fifteen years later, one of those someones published a whitepaper for peer-to-peer electronic cash. Money you can hold and move without asking, without announcing, without a permission slip from anyone. Hughes saw the shape of it in 1993. Most of the world is only catching up now. The tools of your freedom were never going to be handed to you. Someone had to write the code. Someone did. https://pbs.twimg.com/media/HOliBMlXMAAWGUc.jpg npub19mf4jm44umnup4he4cdqrjk3us966qhdnc3zrlpjx93y4x95e3uq9qkfu2 bitcoinwell Normal people double-check the stove is off. I've verified the same receive address four times and I'm going back for a fifth. Self-custody comes with a little paranoia. I'll take it. npub19mf4jm44umnup4he4cdqrjk3us966qhdnc3zrlpjx93y4x95e3uq9qkfu2 bitcoinwell 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 npub19mf4jm44umnup4he4cdqrjk3us966qhdnc3zrlpjx93y4x95e3uq9qkfu2 bitcoinwell Nine years ago today, Bitcoin's users won the most important fight in the network's history. Almost nobody outside the space noticed. By the summer of 2017, a handful of the largest miners and companies had been sitting on an upgrade the rest of the network wanted. Their leverage was simple. They made the blocks, so they set the pace. For over a year, nothing moved. Then the users did something that wasn't supposed to be possible. They ran software that said: after August 1, we reject any block that ignores the upgrade. No vote. No permission. No company in charge. Just people running their own nodes, refusing to accept anyone else's rules. The pressure worked. Within weeks the upgrade the users wanted was locked in. That's the part most people still miss about Bitcoin. The miners don't run it. The exchanges don't run it. The developers don't run it. The people who verify their own transactions do. Every node is a quiet vote you cast just by refusing to accept an invalid block. August 1 got a name that year. Independence Day. Not because a price went up, but because a network proved it answered to no one except the people actually using it. Run a node. Verify your own money. That was always the whole point. https://pbs.twimg.com/media/HOliwhrXAAA2tSf.jpg npub19mf4jm44umnup4he4cdqrjk3us966qhdnc3zrlpjx93y4x95e3uq9qkfu2 bitcoinwell "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 npub19mf4jm44umnup4he4cdqrjk3us966qhdnc3zrlpjx93y4x95e3uq9qkfu2 bitcoinwell 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 npub19mf4jm44umnup4he4cdqrjk3us966qhdnc3zrlpjx93y4x95e3uq9qkfu2 bitcoinwell All this talk about entropy has got me thinking... I think I've been preparing for this moment my whole life. - Zach 🧙 https://pbs.twimg.com/media/HOktS1JXEAAVvIL.jpg npub19mf4jm44umnup4he4cdqrjk3us966qhdnc3zrlpjx93y4x95e3uq9qkfu2 bitcoinwell The Coldcard Hack: A Timeline of the $38M Entropy Failure, and How to Keep It From Happening to You npub19mf4jm44umnup4he4cdqrjk3us966qhdnc3zrlpjx93y4x95e3uq9qkfu2 bitcoinwell 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! npub19mf4jm44umnup4he4cdqrjk3us966qhdnc3zrlpjx93y4x95e3uq9qkfu2 bitcoinwell EMERGENCY POD: FED RAISES RATES (we assume) https://t.co/CobzV8ISdR npub19mf4jm44umnup4he4cdqrjk3us966qhdnc3zrlpjx93y4x95e3uq9qkfu2 bitcoinwell 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 npub19mf4jm44umnup4he4cdqrjk3us966qhdnc3zrlpjx93y4x95e3uq9qkfu2 bitcoinwell The Last Analog Man: What John C. Dvorak Understood About Value That the Algorithm Never Will npub19mf4jm44umnup4he4cdqrjk3us966qhdnc3zrlpjx93y4x95e3uq9qkfu2 bitcoinwell 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 npub19mf4jm44umnup4he4cdqrjk3us966qhdnc3zrlpjx93y4x95e3uq9qkfu2 bitcoinwell How I sleep knowing my bitcoin are in cold storage. https://pbs.twimg.com/media/HOBURxWWIAAYe_P.png npub19mf4jm44umnup4he4cdqrjk3us966qhdnc3zrlpjx93y4x95e3uq9qkfu2 bitcoinwell 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 npub19mf4jm44umnup4he4cdqrjk3us966qhdnc3zrlpjx93y4x95e3uq9qkfu2 bitcoinwell 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. https://pbs.twimg.com/media/HOBTME1WQAAm8B7.jpg npub19mf4jm44umnup4he4cdqrjk3us966qhdnc3zrlpjx93y4x95e3uq9qkfu2 bitcoinwell 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. https://pbs.twimg.com/media/HOBSzxpWwAAscYb.jpg npub19mf4jm44umnup4he4cdqrjk3us966qhdnc3zrlpjx93y4x95e3uq9qkfu2 bitcoinwell 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 npub19mf4jm44umnup4he4cdqrjk3us966qhdnc3zrlpjx93y4x95e3uq9qkfu2 bitcoinwell 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 npub19mf4jm44umnup4he4cdqrjk3us966qhdnc3zrlpjx93y4x95e3uq9qkfu2 bitcoinwell 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 npub19mf4jm44umnup4he4cdqrjk3us966qhdnc3zrlpjx93y4x95e3uq9qkfu2 bitcoinwell 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. https://pbs.twimg.com/media/HOBPK9UXwAEylib.jpg npub19mf4jm44umnup4he4cdqrjk3us966qhdnc3zrlpjx93y4x95e3uq9qkfu2 bitcoinwell 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 npub19mf4jm44umnup4he4cdqrjk3us966qhdnc3zrlpjx93y4x95e3uq9qkfu2 bitcoinwell 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: https://t.co/1JXorV7Xis npub19mf4jm44umnup4he4cdqrjk3us966qhdnc3zrlpjx93y4x95e3uq9qkfu2 bitcoinwell 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. https://pbs.twimg.com/media/HN61_0mWoAA02te.png npub19mf4jm44umnup4he4cdqrjk3us966qhdnc3zrlpjx93y4x95e3uq9qkfu2 bitcoinwell 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 npub19mf4jm44umnup4he4cdqrjk3us966qhdnc3zrlpjx93y4x95e3uq9qkfu2 bitcoinwell We are live now: https://youtube.com/live/Oaumgrh31I0?feature=share npub19mf4jm44umnup4he4cdqrjk3us966qhdnc3zrlpjx93y4x95e3uq9qkfu2 bitcoinwell China's 190,000 Bitcoin Problem Nobody's Talking About https://t.co/6kPy2cvfYy npub19mf4jm44umnup4he4cdqrjk3us966qhdnc3zrlpjx93y4x95e3uq9qkfu2 bitcoinwell Bitcoin Well Cuts Third-Party Costs With In-House AI Support and Autonomous ATM Monitoring npub19mf4jm44umnup4he4cdqrjk3us966qhdnc3zrlpjx93y4x95e3uq9qkfu2 bitcoinwell 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 npub19mf4jm44umnup4he4cdqrjk3us966qhdnc3zrlpjx93y4x95e3uq9qkfu2 bitcoinwell 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 npub19mf4jm44umnup4he4cdqrjk3us966qhdnc3zrlpjx93y4x95e3uq9qkfu2 bitcoinwell 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 npub19mf4jm44umnup4he4cdqrjk3us966qhdnc3zrlpjx93y4x95e3uq9qkfu2 bitcoinwell 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 npub19mf4jm44umnup4he4cdqrjk3us966qhdnc3zrlpjx93y4x95e3uq9qkfu2 bitcoinwell 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 npub19mf4jm44umnup4he4cdqrjk3us966qhdnc3zrlpjx93y4x95e3uq9qkfu2 bitcoinwell 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 npub19mf4jm44umnup4he4cdqrjk3us966qhdnc3zrlpjx93y4x95e3uq9qkfu2 bitcoinwell 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 npub19mf4jm44umnup4he4cdqrjk3us966qhdnc3zrlpjx93y4x95e3uq9qkfu2 bitcoinwell 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 npub19mf4jm44umnup4he4cdqrjk3us966qhdnc3zrlpjx93y4x95e3uq9qkfu2 bitcoinwell Why Nobody Trusts the Bitcoin Rebound (And Why That Is the Point)