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.

Bitcoin Just Pumped $15K and Almost Nobody Told the Real Story

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Bitcoin Well

Bitcoin Just Pumped $15K and Almost Nobody Told the Real Story

Is Bitcoin Mining Being Quietly Captured?

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Bitcoin Well

Is Bitcoin Mining Being Quietly Captured?

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.

"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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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!

Someone Put Bitcoin on a Game Boy. Let's Play It Live.

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Bitcoin Well

Someone Put Bitcoin on a Game Boy. Let's Play It Live.

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.

We are live with Bob Burnett of Ocean Mining!

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Is Bitcoin Mining Being Quietly Captured?

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.

It Wasn't Just ColdCard: AI Is Finding Bugs in Every Bitcoin Wallet

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Bitcoin Well

It Wasn't Just ColdCard: AI Is Finding Bugs in Every Bitcoin Wallet

Jump out of the pot

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.

What BIP-110 Actually Proved: How to Read a Bitcoin Fork Fight

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.