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.

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 🧙‍♂️

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.

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.

Why Nobody Trusts the Bitcoin Rebound (And Why That Is the Point)

America: freezes Russia's reserves Russia: you know you can't freeze Bitcoin, right? America: no, you can't just opt out of the dollar Russia: oh yeah? hold my vodka

Everything humans make gets easier to make over time. Faster chips. Cheaper energy. More dollars, always more dollars. Bitcoin is the one exception ever engineered. The harder people work to produce it, the harder it becomes to produce. The supply is capped at 21 million and the issuance schedule answers to no one. That isn't a tech feature. It's the first time in history money got harder to make instead of easier. Everything around you is being quietly inflated. One thing can't be. Store your work in the thing no one can print more of.

Prefer audio? Every episode of the Bitcoin Well Podcast is on Spotify and Apple Podcasts too: same conversations, no screen required. This week's episode: Bitcoin's split-screen market, Japan's regulatory overhaul, and a China story everyone's about to be talking about. Subscribe now so it's already in your feed Thursday morning.

Nobody posts about it, but there's a quiet kind of peace in holding your own keys. The market can be red. The headlines can be loud. Some exchange can be melting down on your timeline. And none of it reaches what's yours, because there's no one in the middle who can freeze it, lend it out, or lose it on your behalf. You stop refreshing. You stop worrying about someone else's balance sheet. What you hold is simply yours, verified by you, answerable to no one. That's the part the price charts never show. Self-custody isn't only safer. It's calmer.

In 1976, two Stanford researchers solved a problem that had stumped cryptographers for centuries. Their fix is the reason you can own bitcoin at all. Before Whitfield Diffie and Martin Hellman, secret communication had a catch. To send someone a coded message, you both had to agree on the same secret key first. That meant meeting in person, or trusting a courier, or a bank, or some middleman to carry the secret for you. There was always a someone in the middle. Their paper, "New Directions in Cryptography," broke it open. They split the key in two. A public key you can hand to the entire world, and a private key you never share with anyone. One locks, the other unlocks. No prior meeting. No trusted middleman. That single idea is your bitcoin wallet. Your public key receives. Your private key signs. Nobody can forge it, and nobody has to vouch for you. Here's the lesson. The tools that end up protecting your freedom usually arrive as pure math, decades before anyone builds the thing that needs them. Diffie and Hellman weren't building money. They were making it possible to trust no one. Thirty-two years later, Satoshi proved that was the same thing.

The ultra-wealthy have always had a team. A family office quietly coordinating their wealth, taxes, legal, and estate so nothing slips through the cracks. Bitcoiners never had that. Until now. On July 24 we're introducing The Bitcoin Family Office Group: five independent, bitcoin-native firms working as one across wealth, tax, legal, acquisition, and mining. One coordinated team, and you still hold your own keys. Joining us: Wyatt O'Rourke, Basilic Financial Kyle Lawrence, Falcon Rappaport & Berkman Jordan Guess CPA, Satoshi Pacioli Beau Turner, Abundant Mines Chantel Lillycrop-Kostiuk, Bitcoin Well VP of Operations We'll cover how it came together, introduce each firm, and walk through what the client experience actually looks like, from first call to a team working in sync on your behalf. Bring your questions. There's a full Q&A. Bitcoin Well Infinite: Lunch and Learn. July 24, 12:00 PM. Register:

The ultra-wealthy have always had a team. A family office quietly coordinating their wealth, taxes, legal, and estate so nothing slips through the cracks. Bitcoiners never had that. Until now. On July 24 we're introducing The Bitcoin Family Office Group: five independent, bitcoin-native firms working as one across wealth, tax, legal, acquisition, and mining. One coordinated team, and you still hold your own keys. Joining us: Wyatt O'Rourke, Basilic Financial Kyle Lawrence, Falcon Rappaport & Berkman Jordan Guess CPA, Satoshi Pacioli Beau Turner, Abundant Mines Chantel Lillycrop-Kostiuk, Bitcoin Well VP of Operations We'll cover how it came together, introduce each firm, and walk through what the client experience actually looks like, from first call to a team working in sync on your behalf. Bring your questions. There's a full Q&A. Bitcoin Well Infinite: Lunch and Learn. July 24, 12:00 PM. Register:

They Knew the Strait Would Close. That Was the Point.

A gold analyst just made the best case for bitcoin I've heard all year. By accident. His whole thesis: "the beauty of gold is it's not used for anything." Send gold to $1,000,000 and nobody gets hurt. Send corn to $1,000 a bushel and people starve. Send oil there and the economy collapses. A reserve asset has to be useless, because money that doubles as something people need to consume punishes everyone the moment it goes up. He's right. He just stopped one step short. Gold still has day jobs. Jewelry, electronics, dentistry. Bitcoin is used for even less. It was built to be money and nothing else. No industrial demand fighting its monetary demand, nothing to melt down, no factory waiting on the supply. Gold is useless enough to be great money. Bitcoin is useless at everything except being money. Same principle, taken to its logical end. The purest reserve asset isn't the one with the fewest uses. It's the one with none.

Citadel Securities just paid $400 million for a piece of the exchange holding "your" crypto. CryptoDOTcom is now worth $20 billion. Sit with who just became your counterparty. You see, Citadel isn't a Bitcoin company. It's the market maker that stands between you and the price of almost everything you trade. The same firm at the center of the payment-for-order-flow fight, the one retail spent 2021 screaming about, now owns a slice of the on-ramp millions of people trust with their coins. This is the pattern, not the exception. The plumbing of "crypto" keeps getting bought by exactly the institutions Bitcoin was built to route around. First the ETF custodians. Now the exchange cap tables. Every layer between you and your keys is being consolidated by people who make money on the layer itself. Here's the part they can't buy. A coin in a wallet only you control has no cap table. No strategic investor. No market maker taking a spread on your sovereignty. Citadel can own the casino. It cannot own the money you took home. The whole point was never a better middleman. It was no middleman at all.

Your bitcoin isn't in your hardware wallet. It never was. Your coins live on a public ledger that thousands of computers each keep a full copy of. Your hardware wallet holds the keys, the secret that proves the coins are yours and lets you move them. The device is a keychain, not a vault. This is why "I lost my wallet" doesn't have to mean "I lost my bitcoin." Your twelve or twenty-four words can rebuild those keys on any device on earth. And it's why those words matter more than the gadget ever could. Protect the phrase, not the plastic. https://t.co/f4EaNJVSuP

How the West is Being Priced Out of the Starter Life

What Happens to Bitcoin If Saylor Gets Forced to Sell

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Bitcoin Well

What Happens to Bitcoin If Saylor Gets Forced to Sell

We're live. Episode 2 of the Bitcoin Well Podcast — the sell-off, the "never sell" reversal, and what it actually means for Bitcoin's biggest corporate bet, with @JoeConsorti and @ChrisAlaimo6. https://youtube.com/live/ryYKA9anKsg?feature=share

Michael Saylor made the biggest corporate bitcoin bet in history. Now the charts are red, and the question nobody wants to say out loud is getting louder: what happens if he's forced to sell? Today, 2 PM EST on the Bitcoin Well Podcast, we put it to two people who at least seem like they know what's going on! @ChrisAlaimo6 (Strategic Advisor at Simple Bitcoin) and @JoeConsorti (Horizon) dig into what's really going on with Saylor's position, whether the "forced seller" fear is real or overblown, and what it would mean for the rest of the market if it played out. No panic. No hopium. Just the mechanics, straight. No chaser. Watch live at 2 PM EST on this channel!