Count the people between you and your money. We built a tool that does it. Give it a rough split of your net worth (percentages, no balances) and it puts each piece on a ladder by how many counterparties stand in the way. We ran a made-up saver: home 40%, 401(k) 30%, bank 10%, brokerage 10%, bitcoin on an exchange 10%. 90% of it sits on rung 1. The 401(k) alone has 10 counterparties, from the plan administrator to the clearing house. Where does yours sit? Link in the reply.

The Bitcoin IRA by Bitcoin Well Is Live: Real Bitcoin, in a Tax-Advantaged Account, Starting Now

Canada’s inflation hit 3.1% in September. The number that’ll get quoted is the other one: 2.2%, “excluding gasoline.” Gasoline rose 27.8% in a year. Fuel oil rose 57.8%, and StatCan says it hit Atlantic Canada hardest, where more homes heat with it. StatCan ties the oil price to “ongoing uncertainty about the wars in the Middle East.” Nobody gets to heat their house with the excluding-gasoline index. Your savings don’t get an “excluding” option either. Keep some of your paycheck in money nobody can print more of.

Every custodian can show you a number on a screen. Worth asking what the number is made of. In the Bitcoin Well IRA, your dashboard links to the on-chain address where BitGo holds your bitcoin, in an account titled to Heritage IRA for your benefit. Click it, and a public block explorer shows the balance. Not our database. The chain. That's what holding actual bitcoin in a retirement account buys you. You can check it on a Sunday without calling anyone.

1/In June 2022, Celsius paused withdrawals. That November, FTX halted them. Same lesson both times: the company holding the bitcoin was also the company deciding whether you could leave. That's the problem we designed the Bitcoin Well IRA around. How it works, in five posts:

Most bitcoiners we talk to save in bitcoin with after-tax dollars. Their most tax-advantaged account, the 401(k) or the IRA, holds none of it. That's the gap the Bitcoin Well IRA fills. Real bitcoin, not a fund share, in a Traditional or Roth IRA, with the on-chain address in your dashboard. Rollovers from a 401(k) have no annual cap. Keep your cold storage. This is the retirement slice. Mark Furmanek of Heritage IRA walks through it live today at 2:00 PM ET. Link in the comments. Not tax advice. Please consult a tax professional about your situation.

We launched the Bitcoin Well IRA this morning. Tomorrow, the founder of the company that administers it walks you through it. Mark Furmanek of Heritage IRA, live at our Lunch and Learn, Friday at 2:00 PM ET. How bitcoin IRAs work now, what the setup looks like, and the parts people skip: security, custody, fees, beneficiaries. Bring the hard questions. Custody included. Link in the first reply.

Yes, we're the self-custody company. And yes, we just launched an IRA where you don't hold the keys. Here's why. In McNulty v. Commissioner (2021), the US Tax Court held that holding IRA assets yourself at home is treated as a distribution. Keys in your drawer means the tax wrapper is gone. So the real question is which custody respects the owner most. Ours: Three separate companies with three jobs: Bitcoin Well, Heritage IRA, and BitGo with your on-chain address in the dashboard, checkable any time. No fee to transfer out, and in-kind distributions to your own wallet are allowed (tax rules apply). Keep your cold storage. This is the retirement stack that sits next to it. Not tax advice. Please consult a tax professional about your situation.

The Counterparty Ladder - How the Bitcoin IRA by Bitcoin Well helps your bitcoin journey

Bank of America just paid $1.21 billion, the third-largest penalty in Treasury’s history, for failing to report more than $5 billion in suspicious transactions. It admits it “willfully” broke the law. It “prioritized its revenues” over compliance. It “knew for years.” It was already under an order to fix this from 2024. Every few months one of these lands and we call it a scandal. Stop. A thing that keeps producing the same output isn’t malfunctioning. That output is what it’s for. Banks are for taking your money. Governments are for taking your freedom. Both only work while they can convince you they exist for the opposite, which is why the fine goes to the Treasury and not to a single customer whose account ever got frozen by the same program. Bitcoin doesn’t need you convinced. Holding your own keys is the only way out. - Zach

This week a court in London is deciding whose name goes on 61,000 bitcoin, eight years after the police took the keys. Most of us will never face that version. All of us face the small one: whose name is on your bitcoin, and what happens to it when you’re not here. That’s Friday’s Lunch and Learn. Mark Furmanek, founder of Heritage IRA, walks through holding bitcoin inside a retirement account: the rules that made it possible, what the Bitcoin Well IRA setup actually looks like, and the four things people skip until it’s too late. Security, custody, fees, beneficiaries. Friday, October 16, 2:00 PM ET. Bring questions. 👇Link in the first reply👇

This is what the Ledger implant looks like from the inside. A Reddit user opened a Nano X bought on a Russian marketplace, not from Ledger, and found a thin extra board wedged between the screen and the main circuit board, with its own antenna. Ledger confirmed the mechanism overnight: the board reads the screen, waits for the 24 words to appear during setup, and sends them out over LTE on its own eSIM. The secure chip was never touched. It didn’t need to be. This is why you always buy straight from the manufacturer. If you are worried and want to check, Ledger’s own guide is in the replies. (labels in the photo: u/cheerful_afternoon on Reddit.)

52 years ago this week, the Nobel committee gave the economics prize to Friedrich Hayek. Two months later, at the banquet, he told them he would have advised against creating it. His reason is on the card. The prize "confers on an individual an authority which in economics no man ought to possess," because an economist's real influence isn't over other economists, it's over "politicians, journalists, civil servants and the public generally." Fifty-two years on, that authority has a building. One chair, twelve votes, and the price of money for 340 million people, set by the kind of credentialed expert the prize taught everyone to defer to. Bitcoin's answer is Hayek's, written in code: nobody is competent enough to hold that job, so the job doesn't exist. The supply is a number, not an opinion. He asked for an oath of humility. Satoshi shipped one.

American Express was fined $350,000,000 this week. Not for moving dirty money. For not watching its customers closely enough. The regulator's own words: a failure to "sufficiently report approximately $13 billion of suspected" activity and "to provide important information to law enforcement." The fine goes to the Treasury. That's your bank's job description in one document: watch you, report you, and pay the government when it doesn't. Bitcoin was built so that holding money didn't require being watched by whoever holds it for you.

80 bitcoin went into a hardware wallet bought from a reseller last week. All 80 left in one transaction this morning. Just a reminder that the device isn't the key, your seed phrase is. If anyone touched it before you, it was never really yours. Stay salty out there.

Netflix is making the FTX series. We fixed the poster. Nobody in that building broke into anything. A million people handed it over, one login at a time. Premieres November 19. The sequel premieres every time someone leaves their coins on an exchange.

Untakeoverable: The 1992 Nightclub Scene That Explains What Bitcoin Is For

Quantum fear is back on the timeline, so here's the calm version. Use a fresh address for every transaction. You should have been doing that already. It's hygiene, not a shield. If a computer ever shows up that can break a bitcoin key, a new address isn't what saves you. The upgrade is. And no such computer exists. Europol's cybercrime centre put out a whole report on this yesterday and its conclusion was one line: "Cryptocurrencies will not collapse due to quantum computing." The accounts telling you to panic this week are selling you panic. Buy on a schedule. Hold your own keys. Don't reuse addresses. Ignore the countdown. That strategy was right before the fear and it's right after it.

The U.S. government moved about $470,000,000 of seized bitcoin and stablecoins today. Arkham tracked it to addresses it says are likely Coinbase Prime deposits. Probably not a sale. Probably just the custodian: since July 2024 the U.S. Marshals Service has had Coinbase under contract to hold and trade the coins it confiscates. So the honey pot got bigger. Coinbase already held $330,000,000,000 for clients by its own count. The ETFs sit there. Now the government's confiscated stack does too. Here's the thing nobody at Coinbase will tell you. They don't have any technology you don't. Same keys, same cold storage, same multisig you can set up on a kitchen table. What they have that you don't is a pot about 10,000,000 times larger.

This morning we posted Dr. Jeff Ross on why bitcoin exists: whoever controls the money controls your purchasing power. Yesterday the Bank of Russia described what its newly registered custodians do. They "grant clients access to address identifiers where such assets are recorded." In plain English: the bank holds the coins. You get a login. The bank is Sberbank, majority-owned by the Russian state and under Western sanctions since 2022. A bitcoin balance there is a claim on Sberbank, and a claim on Sberbank is a claim on the state. Every custodial balance is a claim on someone. Most people never look up who. The whitepaper's first sentence was about money that moves without going through a financial institution. Russia's first regulated step was to put one back.