Coffee meetup tomorrow, 9am. Come catch up on (crazy) recent events with fellow bitcoiners!

Greetings Bitcoiners! This Sunday, July 12th, we've got a summer hiking event on deck...Proof of Hike. Our experiences with hiking events in the past have been great, and we're really looking forward to hitting the trails with bitcoiners again. We'll be meeting at the Appalachian Trail parking lot on Peters Mountain, and departing north for Table Rock. We're looking to leave the parking lot right at 8am. Kids and dogs welcome! It's a great section of the Appalachian Trail, and isn't too much elevation change over the hiking route. Table Rock offers a nice view of the valley, and it's looking like the weather is going to cooperate with us. Hope to see you there! The year's half past us, and 2026 has offered no shortage of news items, be it in the bitcoin space or general news. I wanted to review an old resource, maybe some of you have come across it in the past: the so-called bitcoin ten commandments. Each one is a piece of the puzzle for a secure, redundant, and sovereign bitcoin custody setup. Although some are more optional than others, as part of your process of stacking skills, it's a good drill to be able to grok why each one of these has a place on the list. I'll be breaking down each one over the next few emails. 1. You shall back up your bitcoin seed When first setting up a wallet on your phone or on a hardware device, the software in whatever device you're using will generate seed words for you to write down and keep in a safe place. This seed is an amazingly powerful tool. It's the key to restoring your wallet should something happen to your device, or should you want to regenerate your wallet onto a second device. Modern wallets present this seed in way that's very easy to transcribe...a list of 12 or 24 words. Writing down these words, in order, backs up the keys for all past/present/future bitcoin associated with your wallet. It's important to be confident in your seed backup(s). There are places online to download cards that are used specifically for writing down your backup seed words, however regular pen & paper works just fine. Once your seed words are written down, you'll need to find a safe place for them. There are pros and cons to different potential places (ie home safe vs bank safe deposit box vs trusted contact's safe) and you'll have to decide where you want the backup seed words kept. If you only have one copy of the seed words, and you're using a hardware device (ie Coldcard or Passport), it is highly recommended to not store your device and your seed words in the same location. The reason for this is that a single event (fire/flood/theft) can take out both your device and your backup, which would leave you in a bad spot. There's another commandment that's specifically about single points of failure...let's save that for another time. Hope to see you this summer! Keep stacking sats, keep stacking skills. 1. Provide value to others 2. Spend less than you earn 3. Save in a money that can't be printed by someone else for free

Greetings Bitcoiners! This summer seems to be flying by! We've got a bitcoin & coffee meetup on deck for this Sunday. Join us at Denim in Mechanicsburg at 10:30am on Sunday, June 28th. For next month, we're looking forward to Proof of Hike, which will be on Sunday, July 12th, at 8am. We've had great experiences with hiking events in the past, and really looking forward to hitting the trails with bitcoiners again. We'll be meeting at the Appalachian Trail parking lot on Peters Mountain, and departing for Table Rock at 8am. Kids and dogs welcome! Hope to see you this summer! Keep stacking sats, keep stacking skills. 1. Provide value to others 2. Spend less than you earn 3. Save in a money that can't be printed by someone else for free https://npub18vk3pmdqugpkewtlldtjr9ewpanz6axtrs77flyee2g2um45k82sh222hk.blossom.band/7da8f2025865e5cc5e89772363bdea2ed51cdc663ffe9f15193b9582835ae69f.avif

Greetings Bitcoiners! We've got two events lined up for this month and next. First, we've got a bitcoin & coffee event this month, which will be at Denim in Mechanicsburg at 10:30am on Sunday, June 28th. Our July event will be Proof of Hike, and will be on Sunday, July 12th, at 8am. We've had great experiences with hiking events in the past, and really look forward to hitting the trails with bitcoiners again. We'll be meeting at the Appalachian Trail parking lot on Peters Mountain, and departing for Table Rock at 8am. Kids and dogs welcome! There was a story that grabbed my attention two weeks ago. The US treasury secretary, Scott Bessent, said during an interview that "I believe we have seized about $1 billion of [Iran's] crypto, just outright grabbed the wallets. Some of them may be typing in right now, and they might not have realized that their wallet had been grabbed.” What this implies is that the US treasury department has the ability to seize "crypto wallets" of individuals/organizations/nations, and has recently exercised that ability to sanction Iran's crypto assets. There's a critical nuance here that deserves explanation, our favorite, the seemingly evergreen "bitcoin vs crypto" distinction. The "crypto wallets" that were seized were those of fiatcoins such as USDT, AKA Tether. These products are centrally controlled, and one phone call from the right person to their operators can block an address from being able to transact. There have been many of these such occurrences over the years, in which "crypto" has been seized because either it was being held on an exchange, or the network itself is so centrally controlled that an address can be frozen. In both these circumstances, a massive amount of trust is being placed in a single counterparty. It isn't an accident that the treasury secretary used the word "crypto", and didn't use the word "bitcoin". It's in the interest of the powers that be for them to be perceived as being omnipotent. Admittedly, short interviews don't lend themselves to being nuanced in one's language. If he were were more nuanced and forthright in his language, he'd have said something to the effect of "we've seized about $1 billion of their stablecoins". If you want someone's bitcoin who hold their own keys, you have to get them to voluntarily send it to you. There's no one you can call to freeze their sats, no public official you can convince, no crypto project leads who you can coerce, and no exchange who you can bully to hand it over against the "owner's" wishes. Bitcoin ownership is a radical form of ownership and unlike anything else. Once that power is understood and wielded, it's hard to go back to only "owning" the promises of others. Hope to see you this summer! Keep stacking sats, keep stacking skills. @Lonelypumpkins Bitcoin in the Burg 1. Provide value to others 2. Spend less than you earn 3. Save in a money that can't be printed by someone else for free

Greetings Bitcoiners! Tomorrow is one of the most revered and celebrated of Bitcoin holidays: Pizza Day! Join our celebration at Ever Grain on Carlisle Pike at 6pm. If you're there and looking for us, we'll have some swag on our table as a beacon. On May 22nd, 2010, a very early bitcoiner by the name of Laszlo arranged for the purchase of two Papa John's pizzas for 10,000 bitcoin. At that time, exchanges weren't yet a thing, and this marked the first recorded transaction of bitcoin being used as a means of payment. It also indirectly provided an exchange rate to USD. The two pizzas were $41...$41/10,000 = 0.41 cents/bitcoin. Keep in mind those were 2010 dollars...seems like pizza inflation has been pretty flat in those 16 years, huh? I digress...nowadays, with the benefit of hindsight, some may get the notion that this was a foolish move. After all, the price ratio in 2026 is a lot closer to 10,000 pizzas for a bitcoin than 10,000 bitcoin for a pizza. This transaction had to happen, though. It was a necessary and important step in Bitcoin's path from a curiosity, embraced amongst only a tiny portion of the cryptography and libertarian communities, into becoming the world's best money. Laszlo generated his stack through mining, and he was one of pioneers who ushered in the era of GPU mining. I'd be surprised if he offloaded his whole stack on pizza that day in 2010. I don't know about you, but I wasn't buying bitcoin in 2010. I did buy pizzas though. In this way, we are all the Bitcoin pizza guy. Come and celebrate Bitcoin Pizza Day with us tomorrow night! Hope to see you there. Keep stacking sats, and keep stacking skills. @Lonelypumpkins Bitcoin in the Burg 1. Provide value to others 2. Spend less than you earn 3. Save in a money that can't be printed by someone else for free

Greetings Bitcoiners! We've got a coffee meetup happening at Denim in Mechanicsburg this Saturday, May 9th, at 8am. Their bitcoin POS works like a charm...come buy a coffee with sats and spend some high-quality time with fellow bitcoiners! Also this month, we're having a Pizza Day celebration on Pizza Day itself! That'll be 6pm on Friday, May 22nd, at Ever Grain on Carlisle Pike. Hope you can join us for one or both.  2026 has been a year that has seen the most interest in Bitcoin forks since probably 2017. That year was a tumultuous one, and saw the splintering off of bitcoin cash, AKA bcash, as well as some lesser-known forks such as bitcoin gold and bitcoin diamond. What does it mean when Bitcoin forks? What are the consequences for holders? If a fork is anticipated, what moves should the resourceful and cautious bitcoiner make, or not make? Bitcoin users coordinate with each other on the Bitcoin network thanks to the complex concept of consensus. Everyone that runs a node is running software on a network that is based around a set of rules. Some of these rules: no more than 21 million coins, no one can spend bitcoin they don't have, miners can't pay themselves more than the current block subsidy (3.125 BTC) + fees, and blocks can't be over a certain size. If you try to act in a way that breaks one of these rules, your transaction will be rejected by the network, and if you keep acting up, nodes you're connected to will put you in time out and won't talk to you for a while. What if there is a minority of the ecosystem, which may possess influence, power, and even amassed bitcoin itself, that has objections to the rule set, and wants to change something? In 2017, there was a vocal subset of the bitcoin community who really wanted something that was against consensus...they wanted bigger blocks, which would enable a higher throughput for the network. (I'm glossing over the block size war here, and leaving out a lot of the history...if you want a deep dive into the players and the very consequential series of events that was the block size wars, check out The Blocksize War by Jonathan Bier). Although there were a significant amount of powerful and loud proponents of this change, they failed to sway the community at large and forked off on Aug 1, 2017, at block #478,558. If someone owned 1 bitcoin on July 31st, 2017, after that block on Aug 1st, they now owned 1 bitcoin and 1 bcash token. There was no decision or action that had to be made by the hodler, they were simply bequeathed a bitcoin cash token, whether or not they had an opinion on the matter, or even knew the fork occurred at all. This leaves the hodler with a few options: (1) don't do anything...hold your bitcoin and bcash in it's 1:1 ratio, (2) trade your bcash in for bitcoin, effectively getting a bitcoin dividend, (3) trade your bitcoin in for bcash, or (4) some partial measure, like unloading half of the bcash now and holding on to the remainder. People holding their own coins and unaware of the fork, through their inaction, chose #1.  In the days/weeks after that hard fork in Aug 2017, the bcash price hovered around 0.1 BTC. Therefore, if you had offloaded your bcash as quickly as possible, you'd have netted a bitcoin dividend to the tune of 10%. There was a pump in the months after that, as Coinbase ninja-launched bcash trading, and the bcash price at one point wicked up to 0.5 BTC in Nov 2017. Since then, the price has been following the usual shitcoin trajectory...slowly down and down, making a pop here and there, and finding new lows every year. If someone held onto that bcash and wanted to sell now, how much would they get? 0.006 BTC, which is about 1/17 what you would have received if you dumped it right after the fork. There's a site that was launched in 2017, that amazingly still exists nine years later, called fork.lol. It includes pricing data between the two coins, as well as relative mining stats. Unfortunately, some people lost real bitcoin in the wake of the bcash hard fork, due to certain opportunistic scammers. There were fake versions of bcash wallets (i.e. a version of Electrum) that were released & promoted. If someone punched their seed phrase into this software, it'd send it to the scammer, and both their bitcoin and their bcash now belonged to them. Always go slow with a process like this, and ask for advice from other bitcoiners that you trust. Remember, inaction results in continuing to hold the same amount of bitcoin you already had, plus an equal amount of the fork coin. Before any attempt is made to claim fork coins, your bitcoin stack should first be moved to a secure new wallet. This way, if the process of recovering the fork coins goes sideways, your bitcoin is safe.  Back to the 2017 bcash fork. So if you held your own coins, you could've offloaded your fork coins (bcash in that circumstance). How you would have done this would depend on which type of wallet software you were using at the time. The lead hardware wallets at the time, Trezor and Ledger, made the process pretty simple in their user interfaces. What if you didn't hold your own coins? What if your coins were being entrusted to a third party at the time of the fork? That depended on the abilities and desires of the company. The company has a few options: (1) keep the value of the fork coin themselves, giving none of it to the users, (2) sell the fork coin on behalf of the users, and credit their accounts with bitcoin accordingly, (3) give them a fork coin balance that matches their bitcoin balance. All three actually happened in 2017. Many people were denied what could have been a 10% bitcoin dividend because they didn't hold the coins themselves. For those that had bitcoin IOU's from companies that went with the second option, that process was generally opaque, and it's unclear how much of a haircut users got during the process. By haircut, I mean, for example, the company could've received an average price of 0.11 BTC/bcash when selling it, yet reported a price of only 0.08 BTC/bcash, and pocketed the difference. There's many ways it can shake out for users, and almost all of them result in being short-changed relative to if they had held the coins themselves and sold the fork coins themselves. When that fork happened in 2017, it was clear which chain was Bitcoin, and which one forked off. In the future, that may not be so clear. There may come a time that the network forks again, both sides have the resources and narrative to keep their chain alive, and both claim to be the real Bitcoin. If you're holding your own keys, you decide what to do. The power is in your hands. If you like, you can vote with your wallet, selling the coins you don't believe in for the ones that you are philosophically and economically aligned with. If an exchange is holding your coins, this decision will be made for you.  There are talks of two different forks this year. The more well-known is related to BIP-110, and the second is being spearheaded by developer Paul Sztorc. A persistent fork takes a lot of work...anyone can spin up a client that follows any rules they like. It could say "we're going to fork at block X in the near future, and every transaction has to have a smiley emoji, and every transaction has to pay my address 1m sats or it's invalid." Creating the fork isn't the hard part...the hard part is having enough of an ecosystem to mine it, maintain its development, and most importantly, value the coins. I can easily create my own version of chess and say the board is 10x10 now instead of 8x8, and pawns can move like knights too if they want. It's hard to get people to play it with me though, and it's basically impossible to get everyone to call my new version "chess".  Consensus takes a long time to build, and breaking it can be very costly. Hope to see you at one of our May events! Keep stacking sats, and keep stacking skills. @Lonelypumpkins Bitcoin in the Burg 1. Provide value to others 2. Spend less than you earn 3. Save in a money that can't be printed by someone else for free

Greetings Bitcoiners! We've got a new time and day for our coffee meetup this month! We'll be at Denim in Mechanicsburg this coming Saturday, April 11th, at 8am. Although we've been doing them early afternoons on the fourth Sunday, we're switching gears for this month and next. Join us at Denim at 8am this Saturday in Mechanicsburg! We've also got a Bitcoin Pizza Day celebration happening on Pizza Day. I'll talk more about what Pizza Day is soon, for now just giving a heads up about the event next month. It'll be 6pm at Ever Grain on Carlisle Pike, Friday May 22nd. I learned about a new website this week, am-i.exposed. It's reminiscent of a website that the Samourai team used to run, oxt.me, which is no longer operational. Both are enhanced bitcoin block explorers that offer insights into transactions beyond what others offer. Bitcoin privacy is its own tunnel within the bitcoin rabbit hole. Although bitcoin addresses aren't linked with an identity on-chain, someone with information about a transaction obtained outside of the network (i.e. from exchanges or merchants) can discern which addresses likely belong to whom, and make inferences about other addresses that belong to that same person. Since the ledger is publicly available, and forever, it's a smart idea to develop good hygiene when making bitcoin transactions. Much like you wouldn't want you bank account balance printed on your t-shirt, or your 401k balance on a bumper sticker, it's good practice to keep one's financial info to oneself.  The number one rule: don't reuse addresses. Although an address can be reused, it's very bad practice, and modern wallets avoid it by default. Some who stack sats at an exchange might give them one address to send withdrawals to, never update it, and continue to receive withdrawals to that same address. Let's say you did this, and then you want to pay someone for something. Maybe we enjoy a dinner out together, I pick up the tab, and you send me sats to pay for your portion. If I look in any block explorer, I can see the address you paid me from, every withdrawal that you ever made from that exchange, and your current bitcoin balance! It gets worse...if you keep using that one address, I can see all of your future transactions too. Using a different address each time (which your wallet will automatically give you every time you click "receive") will avoid doxxing yourself in this way. Bitcoin privacy is a rabbit hole...if you don't feel like you have the need or desire to dig any deeper into it, an amazingly effective bang for your sat is to avoid address reuse. Some exchanges support lightning withdrawals, which avoid this, whereas others will require manually adding a new address for each withdrawal. Do it...take that extra minute and give them a fresh address for each withdrawal. Your future self will thank you. Hope to see you on Saturday! Keep stacking sats, and keep stacking skills. @Lonelypumpkins Bitcoin in the Burg 1. Provide value to others 2. Spend less than you earn 3. Save in a money that can't be printed by someone else for free

Greetings Bitcoiners! We had a great educational meetup last weekend...thanks for all those who came out to learn about the topic of "Bitcoin vs Crypto". Our fourth Sunday coffee meetup is slated for this Sunday, March 22nd, at 1pm. Hope you can join us at Denim Coffee in Mechanicsburg! They're a great local establishment who, several months ago, began taking advantage of Square's native bitcoin integration, allowing customers to pay in sats. How many times can something die? Well, according to bitcoindeaths.com, Bitcoin has died 471 times. That is, someone notable, be it a journalist, a well-known former CEO, or finance big wig has approached their respective podium and pronounced to failure of Bitcoin to the world. With greatest hit titles like "Even at $4,000 [Bitcoin] is Still a Bubble" (2017), "Bitcoin is Nearly Dead" (2014), or "So, That's the End of Bitcoin Then" (2011) from Forbes, these prognostications have aged like milk in the hot sun. Even economist Paul Krugman (yes, Paul "Fax Machine" Krugman) weighed in in 2013 with another one of bitcoindeath's greatest hits, "Bitcoin is Evil". 2025 didn't see many of these obituaries relative to past years...why not, you might ask? It's because it's hard to jump on an anti-Bitcoin band wagon, or lead one, when the exchange rate is at or near all time highs. Now that BTCUSD has cooled off a bit since last year, many are coming out of the woodwork to resume slinging that negativity that we've all grown to love. Keep it coming, gang! I'll even make a prognostication myself. I'm calling an over/under prediction...by Jan 1st, 2030, there will be at least 200 more "Bitcoin has died" calls, bringing the total obituary count to at least 671. Keep stacking sats, and keep stacking skills. @Lonelypumpkins Bitcoin in the Burg Provide value to others Spend less than you earn Save in a money that can't be printed by someone else for free

Coffee meetup this Sunday! Looking forward to meeting some more local newcoiners View quoted note →

Thanks to all that came out for our educational meetup on Saturday! Next meetup is 1pm on this coming Sunday, March 22nd, at Denim Coffee in Mechanicsburg

Greetings Bitcoiners! We've got an educational meetup this Saturday, March 14th, at Simpson Library in Mechanicsburg. Join us at 2pm for "Bitcoin vs Crypto". One big hurdle when starting out in this space is sifting through all that's being thrown at you. Tokens, assets, staking, yield...how does one separate the signal from the noise? Come and learn with us...beginners welcomed and encouraged! This week, the 20 millionth bitcoin was mined. Considering the maximum supply will ever be 21 million, this is noteworthy. Block 940,000 added another 3.125 bitcoin to the existing supply, pushing us over the 20 million threshold. Bitcoin's issuance was designed to operate like gold, and get continuously more difficult to create over time. In California in the 1850's, you could trip over a golf ball size nugget of gold walking your dog, figuratively...now, if you want to bring an ounce of gold into supply, it takes a bit more elbow grease and time. Bitcoin is the same way: miners were paid 50 bitcoin every 10 minutes in the early days, and that amount halves every 210,000 blocks (close to 4 years). There have been four halvings so far, so miners currently get paid 3.125 of brand new bitcoin, in addition to transaction fees, every 10 minutes. A great way to better understand the supply schedule is to see it on a graph, which is attached.  So it took 17 years to mine the first 20 million bitcoin...how long will it take to mine that last million coins? About 115 years! Since the new supply decreases exponentially, the flow of new coins becomes a smaller and smaller trickle every 4 years. Miners get over three new whole coins per block now, and in six years it'll be less than one. An important nuance is that they'll keep being paid transaction fees all the while, and eventually, what miners get paid in transaction fees will eclipse new issuance. In the early days, miners were paid via diluting hodlers...their income stream changes over time to be paid by those making transactions.  So we know there are a bit over 20 million bitcoin now, and there will be a max of 21 million. Ponder that for a moment...what else can we say that about? We can say with certainty that there are, as of the moment I'm typing this, 20,001,662.5 bitcoin in existence, and there will only ever be 21 million. What else can we say that about? Hope to see you at the meetup tomorrow! Keep stacking sats, and keep stacking skills. @Lonelypumpkins Bitcoin in the Burg 1. Provide value to others 2. Spend less than you earn 3. Save in a money that can't be printed by someone else for free

Greetings Bitcoiners! This weekend, we've got our monthly fourth Sunday coffee meetup at 1pm on Feb 22nd, at Denim Coffee in Mechanicsburg. They started accepting sats as a payment method a few months ago...hope to see you there! Reminder about events next month: in addition to our fourth Sunday coffee meetup, we've got an educational session lined up for March. Join us for a presentation on "Bitcoin vs Crypto" at Simpson Library at 2pm on Sat, March 14th. This event will feature a presentation, question and answers, and discussion afterwards. If you've never been to one of our meetups before, this would be a great first one to come to...beginners welcomed and encouraged! Keep stacking sats, and keep stacking skills. @Lonelypumpkins Bitcoin in the Burg 1. Provide value to others 2. Spend less than you earn 3. Save in a money that can't be printed by someone else for free

Greetings Bitcoiners! We've got some events lined up for the upcoming months. For February, we've got our monthly fourth Sunday coffee meetup at 1pm on Feb 22nd, at Denim Coffee in Mechanicsburg. For March, in addition to our fourth Sunday coffee meetup, we've got an educational session lined up. Join us for a presentation on "Bitcoin vs Crypto" at Simpson Library at 2pm on Sat, March 14th. This event will feature a presentation, question and answers, and discussion afterwards. If you've never been to one of our meetups before, this would be a great first one to come to...beginners welcomed and encouraged! The Bitcoin (and crypto) space can feel intimidating and confusing, and can have pitfalls for those without a basic level of understanding. Come and build that with us at our next educational session. Keep stacking sats, and keep stacking skills. @Lonelypumpkins Bitcoin in the Burg 1. Provide value to others 2. Spend less than you earn 3. Save in a money that can't be printed by someone else for free

Greetings Bitcoiners! Due to the winter storm last weekend, we pushed our 4th Sunday coffee meetup to tomorrow. Denim started accepting bitcoin recently in their point of sale system, enabling bitcoiners to pay in the world's best money. Join us at Denim Coffee in Mechanicsburg at 1pm! Bitcoin hash rate, or total mining power on the network, fluctuates as different individual miners join and leave the network. The hash rate reached an all-time high of 1,100 exahashes (AKA 1.1 zetahashes) per second about 3 months ago.

The Mempool Open Source Project®

Explore the full Bitcoin ecosystem with The Mempool Open Source Project®. See the real-time status of your transactions, get network info, and more.

Since then, it's been decreasing, currently sitting at about 900 exahashes. It's been especially decreasing over the past two weeks, which is very likely due to the frigid temperatures in the US. Why would the amount of computational power pointed towards mining bitcoin decrease due to cold weather? The proportion of miners located in the US has been increasing in past years, particularly after the 2021 Chinese mining "ban". I say ban in quotes because China has a history of banning Bitcoin every other year for the past decade...once you ban something the second time, it's a bit of an admission of the futility of said ban, don't you think? The 2021 ban was one that several big mining outfits took seriously enough to focus their future projects towards the US. 2021 marked the start of an exodus of a big chunk of mining hash power out of China and into the US. Big miners only ever locate themselves where electricity is the cheapest, and a large portion of American miners are located in Texas. Large miners often have agreements with energy producers such that when demand for energy increases, the miners are either contractually required to turn their machines off, or their electricity rate increases substantially, which incentivizes them to turn their machines off. Demand for energy in the US has been very high over the past two weeks, due to the cold temperatures. Because of this, large mining outfits have been turning off their machines, allowing that energy to flow to the heating needs of homes and businesses. Once the temperature increases a bit, and that temporary power demand decreases, we'll likely see much of that hash rate come back to the network as miners turn their machines back on and soak up that excess supply. What does that mean for the Bitcoin network, or for the bitcoiner who uses the network? Not much...when hash rate drops, the time between blocks increases. If you're sending an on-chain transaction, it might take a little longer to confirm, although this difference is quite small. Currently, blocks have been coming in at 12 minutes on average, compared to the target of 10 minutes. The network difficulty adjusts every 2016 blocks, or about every 2 weeks, in a beautifully constructed feedback process that keeps block time averaging close to 10 minutes. This ensures Bitcoin's heartbeat keeps time perpetually, even if a large amount of hash rate is added to or subtracted from the network. What does it mean for the home miner? When hash rate drops off the network, and you keep your own the same, you now represent a larger portion of the total network. Therefore, you're now going to be more profitable in bitcoin terms when the difficulty adjusts. Increasing difficulty is an arch nemesis of every miner, slowly decreasing the amount of bitcoin they earn. These temporary hash rate drops offer a respite to those who are still operational. Interested in how mining works, or other topics in Bitcoin? Come join us tomorrow (Feb 1st) at 1pm at Denim Coffee in Mechanicsburg. For further reading, if you want to know more about mining's part in the network, an accessible read is Inventing Bitcoin by Yan Pritzker, which is available for free online. I can send you a PDF copy if you like. Yan dedicates a few chapters to it, as grokking mining is a big part of grokking Bitcoin. Another fun rabbit hole to go down...why did Satoshi choose 10 minutes for the target block time? Why not 60 minutes, or 5 seconds? Enjoy! Keep stacking sats, and keep stacking skills. @Lonelypumpkins Bitcoin in the Burg 1. Provide value to others 2. Spend less than you earn 3. Save in a money that can't be printed by someone else for free

***Date Changed...Although our monthly coffee meetups are held on the 4th Sunday of each month, we rescheduled the Jan 25th event to Feb 1st d/t the impending storm*** Bitcoin in the Burg Monthly Coffee Hang Join us for our monthly Bitcoin meetup at Denim Coffee Co. in Mechanicsburg, PA, where you can grab great coffee and pay in sats right at the Square terminal. Come hang, chat, and sip with fellow Bitcoiners. ☕️⚡️ All levels welcome.

Greetings Bitcoiners! First off, happy new year! 2025 is behind us, and was another unique year in many respects. As I reflect on each year I experience as an adult, I'm reminded of the old expression, "may you live in interesting times." Here are some things that 2025 brought us in the realm of Bitcoin: 📈 The Four-Year Cycle Broke: The widely known and widely expected 4 year price cycle broke: the meme is "3 greens and 1 red", referring to yearly historical price candles. Up 2011, 2012, 2013, down 2014. Up 2015, 2016, 2017, down 2018. Up 2019, 2020, 2021, down 2022. Up 2023, 2024, then down for 2025? BTCUSD did indeed end the year lower than it started, however if you compare 2025 against the other down years, it looks more like a flat year than a down year. Those other three red years each booked USD losses of over 50%, whereas 2025 was down by a mere 6%. Bitcoin breaking these patterns is to be expected. People are pattern recognizing machines. Pattern recognition was a very valuable tool in caveman times...the human who recognized that seeing bear cubs is correlated with a mother bear being in the vicinity was likely to be better off than the human who didn't. The pattern recognition abilities engrained in us over generations is prone to errors, though. People can sometimes think they see patterns where none actually exist. Did a 4 year cycle pattern exist historically for BTCUSD? Yes. Should you base your decisions on such a pattern continuing into the future? No. Stay humble, stack sats, and stack skills. 🧾 Square Made Bitcoin Easier for Merchants: Square rolled out native Bitcoin support for its POS systems. That means small businesses can now accept bitcoin with just a few taps. Want to spend sats locally? Check btcmap.org to find merchants near you. This is how circular economies grow! ⚖️ Samourai Developers Sentenced: The Samourai developers were sentenced and imprisoned. This is probably the darkest news in the space for 2025. See the newsletter from Dec 17th for a deeper dive into the details. A silver lining: these guys were pretty divisive in the space prior to their 2024 arrest. Many bitcoiners were fans, many weren't. The flame wars got hot between different coinjoin wallet teams in 2019-2021, and there was other drama over the years too. 2025 saw bitcoiners come together in support of Rodriguez and Hill, and in a strong voice called out an injustice levied upon two of their own. 🔑 Proof of Keys Day — January 3: This month marks the eighth Proof of Keys Day celebration. What's Proof of Keys Day, you ask? Trace Mayer, an OG bitcoiner with a somewhat complicated history, started promoting Proof of Keys Day in late 2018, to coincide with Genesis Block Day (celebrating the anniversary of the first block being mined in 2009) on January 3rd. One of the mantras in Bitcoin is "not your keys, not your coins". One of my favorite quotes from Satoshi: “The root problem with conventional currency is all the trust that’s required to make it work. The central bank must be trusted not to debase the currency, but the history of fiat currencies is full of breaches of that trust.” The core power of bitcoin is that it can be used in a sovereign way, AKA without having to trust someone else to send or receive a payment on your behalf. When bitcoin is held on an exchange, you're trusting the exchange in multiple ways: That they're actually acquiring the bitcoin on your behalf, instead of, say, Bermuda real estate for themselves (FTX) That the bitcoin they're acquiring isn't being held by a single person, who might end up dying under mysterious circumstances (Quadriga CX) That they are storing their giant stack of bitcoin in a way that's not vulnerable to hackers (Bitfinex) That they'll actually send you your bitcoin when you ask for it That they haven't been running a fractional reserve, planning that they can conceal the fact so long as enough people don't request withdrawals at one time Proof of Keys Day has the effect of lowering the tide for exchanges, so everyone can see who's actually been swimming naked. Participating in Proof of Keys Day is easy for you and I, easy for solvent exchanges, and a nightmare for fraudulent exchanges. All you have to do is, if you have bitcoin on an exchange, withdraw it into your own custody on January 3rd. The exchange says that you have 2 million sats, right? That's what they're showing you on their screen, anyway. Prove it! Send the sats. A caveat: be comfortable and confident in your self-custody setup prior to withdrawing your hodl stack to your own wallet. Even though it's Proof of Keys Day today, if you're not comfortable and confident in your self-custody setup, it's not advisable to send your hodl stack. Start with a small amount, and become comfortable and confident with your setup. Keep stacking skills and building confidence! If you've never withdrawn from an exchange before, this can be a learning experience for you as well. Does your exchange have a daily/weekly/monthly withdrawal limit? Are withdrawals free of charge, or do they charge a withdrawal fee? Going through the process teaches you about your exchange's processes. Next event is our monthly coffee meetup. January's cafe is Denim Coffee in Mechanicsburg. Come and join us at 1pm on Sunday, Jan 25th, 2026! Denim now accepts bitcoin, payable through any lightning enabled wallet. Keep stacking sats, keep stacking skills. @Lonelypumpkins Bitcoin in the Burg Provide value to others Spend less than you earn Save in a money that can't be printed by someone else for free