Freedom Friday. Here is a freedom most people never test until the day they need it: the freedom to be wrong in someone else's eyes and still keep your money. A bank account can be frozen by a form you never see. A payment processor can decide your politics are bad for business. A government can call your savings suspicious and make you prove they are not. None of this requires a trial. It requires a checkbox. Bitcoin held in your own custody answers to none of that. No application. No permission. No one who can flip a switch because you fell out of favor. Money you can be denied is not really yours. Its an allowance with extra steps. The freedom to transact is the freedom every other freedom stands on. Guard it now, because the day you need it is a bad day to start.

Today at noon. The one Bitcoin session built for people who think for a living. "Most Investors Approach Bitcoin Backwards. Let's Fix That," with Eric Runge @VeritasForward . No price predictions. No hype. Just monetary first principles and a long, open Q&A. The same way you'd vet any other asset before you touched it. 12 PM ET. Bring your hardest question. Register:

Your raise was not a raise. You got 3% more dollars and the dollars lost more than that, so you did more work for less buying power and called it a promotion. This is the quiet tax nobody votes on. It never shows up on a pay stub. It shows up at the grocery store, the gas pump, the rent renewal. Inflation is not prices going up. It is your money going down. The Austrians named this a century ago: print more units, each unit buys less, and the people furthest from the printer pay first. Bitcoin has a fixed supply of 21 million. No board can vote to make more of yours worth less. You can't out-earn a currency designed to leak. You can only opt out of it.

Here's the question almost no investor asks before buying Bitcoin: what is money, actually? They'll study a company's cash flows for a week before buying the stock. They'll read the prospectus twice. Then they'll buy Bitcoin off a chart and a tweet, with no framework for what they're actually holding. Eric Runge @VeritasForward spends his career fixing that for advisors and their clients. Start with the long history of money, and why currencies that can be printed without limit keep ending the same way. Do that first, and the price chart stops looking like noise and starts looking like a consequence. Tomorrow, he's walking through the whole framework live with us, plus an extensive Q&A. "Most Investors Approach Bitcoin Backwards. Let's Fix That." Friday, June 12 · 12 PM ET. If you advise families or run a business, this is the framework you've been missing. Register:

Breaking: Peter Schiff

Bitcoin doesn't need your belief. Every ten minutes, on schedule, it adds a block. It has done it through every crash, every ban, and every obituary written about it. No CEO, no marketing budget, no quarterly guidance. Just code doing exactly what it promised, for over seventeen years straight. Most things asking for your money need you to have faith in the people running them. Bitcoin has no company running it just people like us that run the code ourselves. That is the entire point. The most reliable monetary network on earth has no boss. Strange that the one thing with nobody in charge is the one that never misses.

Most Americans who want Bitcoin in their retirement account end up holding a share, a ticker, an IOU. Never a coin. Never something they can point to on a blockchain and say that one is mine. We are changing that. Bitcoin Well is partnering with Heritage IRA to put real bitcoin inside a tax-advantaged US retirement account. Not a wrapper that merely tracks the price. Bitcoin you can verify. Trillions of dollars sit in American retirement accounts, and the demand to hold bitcoin in them is real. Implementation starts this month, with a targeted US launch in Q3 2026. Tax advantages are good. Bitcoin on-chain you can verify is better. You should never have to choose between them.

Sam Bankman-Fried asked Donald Trump for a pardon this week. Whatever happens to his sentence, the lesson he taught is permanent, and it costs nothing to remember. FTX customers didn't lose their Bitcoin to a crash. The price was fine. They lost it because Sam held the keys. Their coins sat on his exchange, on his balance sheet, spendable by him, and one morning they simply weren't there. No hack. No act of God. Just a man with custody of other people's money deciding it was his to gamble. That is the entire case for self-custody, dressed up as a scandal. Every exchange, every custodian, every "regulated platform" runs on the same arrangement SBF ran on: you get an IOU, he gets the keys. Most of them won't blow up. The point is that they can, and you'd find out the same way his customers did. A pardon can shorten a sentence. It can't give anyone their Bitcoin back, and it can't unteach the one thing FTX proved at scale. Not your keys, not your coins. Sam's customers learned it the expensive way. You don't have to.

Most people meet Bitcoin through a price chart. Green candles, red candles, a number that won't sit still. No wonder it looks like gambling. That's backwards. You can't understand Bitcoin by starting at the price, any more than you can understand a language by starting at its poetry. You start with the grammar. With money itself: what it is, why the version we use keeps losing value, and what a hard cap actually does to a balance sheet. That's the whole premise of our next Lunch & Learn: "Most Investors Approach Bitcoin Backwards. Let's Fix That." With Eric Runge, founder of Veritas Bitcoin Strategies @VeritasForward (partnered with Calamos and Schwab). Built for principals and advisors who want to think about Bitcoin the way they already think about every other asset class. First principles, monetary history, and a long open Q&A. Friday, June 12 · 12 PM ET. Bring your hardest questions. Register:

A 16-Year Satoshi-Era Whale Just Moved: How Many Bitcoin Does Satoshi Really Have?

Peter Schiff ran a poll this weekend asking how far Bitcoin had to fall before holders would admit he was right. Most of them answered: never. He called that a cult. He's half right. By his rules, it is irrational. Schiff prices everything in dollars, so to him a saver who won't sell at any number has lost his mind. But the saver isn't playing Schiff's game. He isn't pricing his Bitcoin in a currency that has lost more than 90% of its purchasing power since the Fed was founded in 1913. He's measuring something Schiff can't put on a chart. A man who holds his own keys doesn't need Bitcoin to hit a price to feel right. He already opted out of needing anyone's permission. That's the part Schiff reads as cult behavior. It isn't. A cult needs a leader to obey. Self-custody is the one financial position on earth with no leader, no central office, and no exit anyone can talk you out of. Schiff thinks he's watching people refuse to admit a loss. He's watching people refuse to sell their sovereignty back to the system he works inside. Gold bugs measure conviction in price. Bitcoiners measure it in custody.

Your IBIT shares are not Bitcoin. This morning made that impossible to ignore. BlackRock moved roughly $226 million of Bitcoin to Coinbase Prime, and the timeline split in half. One side is screaming "they're selling." The other is insisting it's fresh inflows. Both sides are arguing about the wrong thing. It doesn't matter which one is right. Either way, not a single IBIT holder got a vote, a notice, or a key. The coins behind the largest Bitcoin ETF on earth sit on a custodian's books, get moved on the custodian's schedule, for the custodian's reasons. You own a share of a fund that owns coins Coinbase holds. Two layers of intermediary between you and a key you will never touch. That's the trade the ETF asks you to make. Convenience now, control never. BlackRock spent decades getting between people and their assets, because the gap is where the fees live. Bitcoin was built to delete the gap. The ETF quietly sells it back to you, $226 million at a time. A fund share rises and falls with the price. It cannot send one satoshi without permission. Let BlackRock move their coins. While you hold yours.

Before Bitcoin existed, the U.S. government decided that strong encryption was a weapon. In 1991 a man named Phil Zimmermann wrote a program called PGP and gave it away for free, so ordinary people, not just governments and banks, could send a message no one else could read. Soon after it spread beyond U.S. borders, the Customs Service opened a criminal investigation. The charge they were chasing: exporting munitions without a license. The munition was math. The investigation lasted three years. Zimmermann's answer was perfect. He published PGP's entire source code as a book through MIT Press, because the government can restrict exporting a weapon, but it cannot restrict exporting a book. Code is speech. In early 1996 they dropped the case without filing a single charge. That fight is why Bitcoin can exist. The right to run cryptographic software you control, to hold a key the state cannot pry open, was won by people like Zimmermann years before Satoshi wrote a line of code. Self-custody is just encryption applied to your money. Same math. Same right. Same fight. Hold a key no government can open, and you are standing exactly where he stood.

"Buy the dip" is trending today. So is "DCAing." The whole timeline suddenly discovered courage at 60 grand. Both phrases are still a trader's words, though. Buying the dip is timing. It's a bet that you've spotted the bottom. It runs on adrenaline, and adrenaline runs out. The Austrians had a better word for what actually builds wealth: low time preference. The willingness to choose later over now, on purpose, every week, whether the chart is green or red. Not a bet on the bottom. A refusal to care where the bottom is. That's the difference between the trader and the saver. The trader needs to be right about timing. The saver only needs to be patient and to actually hold what he buys. And that last part is the whole game. Stacking sats into an account someone else controls isn't saving, it's lending. The saver who lowers his time preference and pulls his coins to his own keys is the only one who actually owns the patience he's practicing. Don't buy the dip. Lower your time preference. Then hold your own keys. - Zach 🧙‍♂️

It's Saturday. Bitcoin is down for the week. And the people who will still be here in ten years are not looking at a chart. They're at a kid's soccer game. Walking the dog. Making coffee without checking the price before the first sip. Here is the quiet thing nobody tells you about self-custody. It isn't only safer. It's calmer. When your coins sit on a key only you hold, there's no exchange to log into at midnight, no withdrawal queue to refresh, no counterparty whose solvency is suddenly your problem. The setup is done. You can close the app and go live your life. The trader can't look away, because his position needs him watching. The saver can look away for a year, because his Bitcoin doesn't need him at all. It just needs to be held. Down weeks are loud. Sovereignty is quiet. Go enjoy your weekend. Your sats will be exactly where you left them. - Zach 🧙‍♂️

Strategy is sitting on a 13 billion dollar unrealized loss this week as Bitcoin's price drops. The options desks have started betting against them. Here's the part worth your attention. The saver who holds the same Bitcoin in a cold wallet is down the exact same percentage this week. Same asset. Same price. Same red number. One of them can be forced to sell. The other can't. That's the whole difference, and it's the difference self-custody was built to create. A company that holds Bitcoin through layers of financing has stakeholders, instruments, and obligations stacked on top of the coins. When the price moves, all of that machinery moves too, and at some point the machinery can decide for you. Coins on a key you control have no machinery. No preferred holders. No options chain pricing your pain. No quarter to answer for. A 30% drawdown is a feeling, not a forced event. The price falling tests everyone the same way. What it can't do is reach into a cold wallet and pull the trigger. Down bad is survivable. Forced to sell is not. Hold the version nobody can liquidate but you.

Look at what this week was actually about. A famous investor told you to sell your Bitcoin for gold. A card network announced it can move dollars on weekends now, if it feels like it. Wall Street decided how to package Bitcoin for you and hold it on your behalf. A Senate committee kept drafting the definition of the thing you already own. Every one of those is a story about someone else's permission. Self-custody is the one financial decision nobody gets a vote on. Freedom isn't a feeling. Freedom is a setup. It's the boring, specific, technical fact that the asset is yours, the keys are yours, and the next move is yours. Most people never build that setup. Not because it's hard, but because nobody ever showed them how. So we will. Today at noon ET we're running Bitcoin for Beginners: why Bitcoin is a savings tool, how self-custody actually keeps your coins safe, and a walkthrough of setting up your first wallet, sending and receiving your first sats, and storing them for the long haul. Stop waiting for permission. Come build the setup. 12:00 PM ET today. Register here:

StreamYard

Bitcoin for Beginners

Bitcoin for Beginners teaches the basics of why bitcoin is a powerful savings tool, how Bitcoin self-custody is incredibly safe, and how you can st...

- Zach 🧙‍♂️

You can buy a house with your Bitcoin now without selling it, but there is a catch, and the catch is the whole story. Coinbase just funded the first Fannie Mae-insured mortgage backed by Bitcoin. You pledge your stack as collateral, keep it on paper, and get the down payment. It goes nationwide this summer. Now read what actually happens to the coins. To pledge Bitcoin as collateral, you hand the keys to a custodian. Your stack sits on Coinbase's books, under Coinbase's control, against a margin call you did not write the terms of. Bitcoin is down 13% this week. A collateralized lender does not wait for your conviction to recover. They sell the asset you were trying not to sell. "Don't sell your Bitcoin" quietly becomes "let someone else hold it and decide when you sell." The headline is adoption, and the adoption is real. Wall Street is pricing Bitcoin as pristine collateral because that is exactly what it is. Just price the trade honestly. Bitcoin you control is sovereignty. Bitcoin you pledge is someone else's leverage with your name on the loan. Keep the keys. Borrow against a dollar if you have to.

Mastercard is going to let its partners settle in a stablecoin. Weekends, holidays, around the clock. The headline is that the card networks are finally embracing crypto. But a stablecoin settlement rail is just a faster dollar. It clears on weekends because the issuer wants it to. It settles on holidays because the network currently allows it. Every one of those decisions belongs to someone who is not you. A faster dollar is still a dollar that answers to its issuer. Mastercard moving to weekend settlement is Mastercard catching up to something Bitcoin has done every ten minutes since 2009. The card network gets to choose its hours. Bitcoin processes every ten minutes forever. Tether can mint over a weekend. Circle can mint over a weekend. Now a card network can move them over a weekend too. The convenience is real. So is the issuer who sits behind every token. Bitcoin is the only one in this story with no issuer to call. Settle in a dollar if you want permissioned speed, but hold the asset that settles to a key only you control.

The Fear and Greed Index just hit 12. Extreme Fear. One of the sharpest sentiment collapses of the year. Bitcoin is near cycle lows. Down from $73k Monday to the low $60s this morning. The index measures how people feel. It does not measure what they do. Here is what they are actually doing on our exchange. 76% of transactions on our exchange this week have been buys. The number of buys doubled from last week and the $ amount spent has tripled. A fear index is a survey of emotions. But what are people actually doing? The two have been pointing in opposite directions all week. The saver who bought this morning didn't check the gauge first. The saver doesn't need a sentiment reading to know that a fixed-supply asset on sale means more sats for his dollar. Extreme fear is what the chart looks like to a trader with a stop loss. To a saver with a cold wallet and a plan, extreme fear is just a discount. The people selling into the fear are selling someone else's keys. The people buying into it are funding their own.