Bitcoin Magazine

OranjeBTC Goes Public on Brazil’s B3, Driving Latin America’s Bitcoin Push

Brazil witnessed something new today on its B3 stock exchange — a company going public not for its products, but for its Bitcoin.

OranjeBTC, a Brazilian firm founded by former Bridgewater Associates executive Guilherme Gomes, began trading today on B3, the São Paulo–based exchange that anchors Latin America’s capital markets. 

Backed by some of the biggest names in global crypto, the company enters public markets holding 3,675 BTC instantly becoming the region’s largest corporate Bitcoin holder. At current prices, its holdings are worth more than $444 million.

Their haul dwarfs the 605 bitcoin held by fellow Brazilian fintech Méliuz, which last year became the country’s first listed firm to adopt a Bitcoin treasury strategy.  

The company’s model mirrors Strategy’s playbook in the United States: issue convertible debt, raise capital, and buy Bitcoin. 

Earlier this year, OranjeBTC secured a $210 million investment from Brazil’s largest bank, Itaú, through its investment arm Itaú BBA, positioning its BTC reserves as a long-term strategic asset.

That financing round also attracted heavyweight backers including Tyler and Cameron Winklevoss, Mexican billionaire Ricardo Salinas, FalconX, and Adam Back of Blockstream, alongside U.S. funds Off the Chain Capital and ParaFi Capital.

Bitcoin education for future investors

But Gomes insists OranjeBTC’s vision goes beyond balance sheets. The company is launching an educational platform designed to teach shareholders and institutional investors about Bitcoin’s monetary properties — what it calls a “learning layer” for Brazil’s next generation of savers.

“We want to be an information center and help Brazilians and Latin Americans understand what money is, the role of a tangible asset, and how Bitcoin works,” Gomes told WIRED en Español in September.

The mechanics of the listing will follow a reverse IPO, with OranjeBTC merging into Intergraus, already listed on B3.

After the transaction, about 85% of shares will be in free float—opening the door for both institutional and retail investors to gain direct exposure to a company whose only real product is bitcoin accumulation.

This post OranjeBTC Goes Public on Brazil’s B3, Driving Latin America’s Bitcoin Push first appeared on Bitcoin Magazine and is written by Micah Zimmerman.

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Bitcoin Price Pulls Back from Record High to $122,000 Range, Momentum Remains Strong

Bitcoin slipped today, retreating from a record high as the U.S. government shutdown entered its seventh day. Bitcoin edged down to the $121,000 range, and remains below Monday’s all-time peak of $126,296, per Bitbio data.

Despite the minor pullback, Bitcoin has surged roughly 30% since the start of the year and is up about 9% over the past week.

Gold, meanwhile, continued its historic rally, briefly topping $4,000 per ounce overnight, with futures trading at $3,980 early Tuesday, reflecting a 50% gain for the year.

At the time of writing, bitcoin is trading at $122,096. 

Markets appear largely unfazed by the shutdown, even after the Senate failed to pass a Republican bill on Monday to reopen government operations.

Bitcoin dips are for buying 

Analysts say Bitcoin’s recent correction — from its all-time high down to around $122,000 — is healthy and may be setting the stage for further gains. The $120,000 level currently acts as key support, while resistance is seen near $135,000. 

“Overall, dips are for buying,” said market analyst Mags on X, noting that a daily close above $123,300 could trigger additional upside. 

Onchain data underscores strong buying momentum. Glassnode reports that Bitcoin’s relative strength index has risen from 44 to 66 over the past week, signaling growing market confidence. 

Glassnode also noted that bitcoin futures open interest surged as traders added longs during the breakout to new highs. The current pullback is testing these positions, and watching where buyers step in will reveal if support levels can attract renewed demand.

The ongoing U.S. fiscal impasse may be further fueling demand for perceived safe-haven assets. 

Geoffrey Kendrick, head of digital assets at Standard Chartered, suggested last week that Bitcoin could reach $135,000 soon and possibly $200,000 by year-end if current conditions persist. 

As mentioned earlier, gold continues its surge, supported by central bank purchases, dollar weakness, and expectations of future Fed easing.

Investors appear to be positioning for an extended period of policy uncertainty, with both bitcoin and traditional safe havens benefiting from market jitters.

This post Bitcoin Price Pulls Back from Record High to $122,000 Range, Momentum Remains Strong first appeared on Bitcoin Magazine and is written by Micah Zimmerman.

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Strategy Reports $3.9 Billion in Bitcoin Gains for Q3 2025 

Strategy, the world’s largest corporate holder of Bitcoin, reported $3.9 billion in fair value gains for the third quarter, according to a company press release. 

Strategy holds roughly 640,000 Bitcoin, with an average purchase price of $73,983 per coin. At current prices near $124,500, its holdings are valued at approximately $78.7 billion, representing unrealized gains of about $31.4 billion.

“For every $10,000 change in BTC price, we generate $6 billion in unrealized gains on our BTC holdings,” noted Chaitanya Jain, a Bitcoin Strategist at Strategy. 

The company has also issued several types of preferred shares this year to access additional funding beyond convertible debt and common stock. Three of these preferred share classes carry an annualized dividend rate of 10%. 

Strategy disclosed in an SEC filing that payouts on its STRC and STRD shares included accrued interest, totaling $22.4 million and $37.6 million for the quarter, respectively.

Shares of Strategy rose roughly 3% to around $364 on Monday, extending a year-to-date gain of roughly 25% and reaching a high of $450 in July.

All this comes as Bitcoin surged past short-term resistance last week, entering a “blue sky breakout” as bulls regained control and pushed the price to a record weekly close of $123,515.

With no prior highs to guide resistance, technical analysis suggests potential barriers at $131,000, $135,000, and $140,000. 

Strategy did not purchase Bitcoin last week

The company also did not make any purchases of bitcoin last week. The move coincided with $140 million in dividend payments, marking the first time the company halted Bitcoin accumulation since the end of July.

The pause in Bitcoin purchases is part of a pattern the company has previously followed. This year, Strategy issued three weekly updates in which it did not buy Bitcoin, two of which aligned with the ends of its first and second fiscal quarters.

Last week’s announcement coincided with the close of the third quarter.

Over the weekend, Strategy co-founder and Executive Chairman Michael Saylor hinted at the company’s halt in purchases via X, noting there would be “no new orange dots this week,” a reference to the chart used to track past Bitcoin acquisitions.

Strategy’s long-term vision  

Michael Saylor envisions Strategy building a trillion-dollar Bitcoin balance sheet, using it to transform the global credit system. 

He expects Bitcoin’s historical long-term appreciation, around 21% annually, to supercharge the firm’s capital stock. On top of that, Saylor proposes issuing Bitcoin-backed credit with yields higher than traditional fiat debt, creating a dual flywheel of growing collateral and expanding digital credit markets.

He predicts that as corporations, banks, and sovereign funds adopt Bitcoin, traditional financial instruments and equity indexes would become indirect Bitcoin vehicles, benefiting from its compounding growth. 

Ultimately, he sees Bitcoin treasury companies as central to a new financial architecture, enabling higher-yield savings, Bitcoin-based money markets, reimagined insurance, and global adoption by tech giants.

This post Strategy Reports $3.9 Billion in Bitcoin Gains for Q3 2025  first appeared on Bitcoin Magazine and is written by Micah Zimmerman.

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Bitcoin Price Skyrockets to All-Time High of $125,750 — What Comes Next?

The Bitcoin train seems to never, ever stop.

Bitcoin reached an all-time high today, surging past its previous all-time high of $124,466. Bitcoin climbed more than 13% over the past week, quickly rebounding from $109,000 at the end of September to touch $125,750 today, according to Bitcoin Magazine Pro data.

The last time bitcoin was close to these levels was in August. 

There are several key drivers for the bullish reversal. Macroeconomic uncertainty — including the ongoing U.S. government shutdown — has led investors toward alternatives like bitcoin, historically seen as a hedge against traditional financial risks. 

Geoffrey Kendrick, head of digital assets at Standard Chartered, believes that bitcoin’s role as a safe haven is being amplified by the fiscal gridlock in Washington.

This rally has also been bolstered by so-called “Uptober” seasonality — a term traders use to describe bitcoin’s typical pattern of strong October gains. 

Over the past decade, the month has produced average returns exceeding 21%, often setting the stage for outsized fourth-quarter performance.Since 2015, bitcoin has averaged a gain of nearly 58% in the fourth quarter, outperforming every other three-month period.

Institutions appear to be playing a role in this jump as well, with increased flows into exchange-traded funds and digital custody services signaling renewed appetite from both retail and professional investors. 

Where is Bitcoin headed? 

Bitcoin has traded sideways in recent months, but key liquidity indicators suggested this breakout was coming. Global M2 growth, stablecoin supply trends, and gold’s rally — which bitcoin has closely tracked with a 40-day lag — all pointed upward.

JPMorgan analysts think bitcoin is undervalued relative to gold, estimating a theoretical upside to $165,000 if the “debasement trade” — investing in assets that hedge fiat currency risk — continues. 

Market watchers, like Kendrick, are raising their targets in response to bitcoin’s rally, with some forecasts calling for prices to exceed $135,000 in the near term and possibly reach $200,000 by year’s end if current trends continue. 

At the time of writing, bitcoin is trading at $123,319.82.

This post Bitcoin Price Skyrockets to All-Time High of $125,750 — What Comes Next? first appeared on Bitcoin Magazine and is written by Micah Zimmerman.

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Samsung Brings Bitcoin Access to 75 Million People via Coinbase Partnership

Samsung has partnered with Coinbase to give 75 million of its Galaxy device owners in the U.S. access to Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies.

The union brings Coinbase One’s premium features — including zero trading fees and boosted staking rewards — directly into Samsung Wallet, allowing users to explore Bitcoin and crypto without downloading any additional apps or moving funds across different platforms, Coinbase said. 

The integration will also connect Samsung Pay to Coinbase accounts, allowing Galaxy users to make purchases with Bitcoin and other crypto holdings in the same place they already store payment cards, transit passes, and IDs. 

For the millions of everyday Americans who own Galaxy devices, this is a major step toward mainstream crypto adoption.

For now, the pairing will start in the United States, but could soon expand globally. 

“We’re pairing their global scale with Coinbase’s trusted platform to deliver the best value for people to access crypto — starting with more than 75 million Galaxy users in the U.S., and soon expanding globally,” said Shan Aggarwal, Chief Business Officer at Coinbase.

The move highlights a growing trend in mobile finance: bringing Bitcoin and other digital assets directly to users’ fingertips. 

By embedding Bitcoin trading, staking, and payments into a device most Americans already carry, Samsung and Coinbase are removing barriers that have historically kept retail, every-day users from entering the crypto ecosystem.

For example, earlier today, OnePay, the fintech venture majority-owned by Walmart, said it will soon allow its customers to buy, sell and hold bitcoin directly in its mobile app. This access will also help bring bitcoin access to mainstream U.S. retail consumers.

Coinbase’s updated stock rating

It seems like Wall Street is taking crypto more-and-more seriously, and Coinbase is benefiting from the bitcoin adoption trend. 

Rothschild & Co Redburn upgraded Coinbase (Nasdaq: COIN) from Neutral to Buy today, raising its stock price target to $417, citing the company’s diversification beyond retail trading fees. 

Transaction fees now make up ~50% of revenue, while institutional adoption, crypto derivatives via Deribit, USDC distribution, and custodial services provide additional growth. 

Coinbase serves over 200 financial firms and is less reliant on transaction volume than before. Shares have gained 50% this year and closely track Bitcoin.

This post Samsung Brings Bitcoin Access to 75 Million People via Coinbase Partnership first appeared on Bitcoin Magazine and is written by Micah Zimmerman.

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Bitcoin Price Explodes to $121,000 as Q4 Begins — All-Time Highs Up Next?

Bitcoin surged past $121,000 today, pushing towards its all-time high as the fourth quarter of 2025 kicked off with renewed momentum for Bitcoin.

The rally follows a strong September finish, when Bitcoin gained about 5% to close around $114,000 — a performance that somewhat defied Bitcoin’s reputation for seasonal weakness. 

Historically, when September has ended in the green, Bitcoin has often gone on to post outsized fourth-quarter gains. Data from Bitcoin Magazine Pro shows that in years such as 2015, 2016, 2023, and 2024, fourth-quarter rallies averaged more than 50%.

That seasonal trend has already earned October the nickname “Uptober” among traders. Since 2015, the month has produced average gains of 21.8%, with November adding another 10.8%. 

If history rhymes, Bitcoin could be on track to clear $150,000 before the end of the year.

Bitcoin all-time high coming?  

According to Bitcoin Magazine Pro data, Bitcoin has climbed nearly 3% in 24 hours, advancing from around $117,500 to just over $121,000. Over the last month, Bitcoin has notched a gain of more than 9%, rising from roughly $110,700.

On a year-to-date basis, Bitcoin has delivered a return of 27%, underscoring its resilience despite ongoing volatility across broader markets.

With prices now less than 3% away from the all-time high of over $124,000, it looks like the stage is set for a breakout if buying pressure continues.

Bitcoin’s bullish momentum 

This latest surge came as traditional economic metrics reeled from the U.S. government’s shutdown at midnight after Congress failed to pass a funding bill. With Wall Street under pressure and economic data releases now on hold, investors flocked to hard assets. 

This year’s gains also build on April’s halving event, which cut Bitcoin’s new supply in half — a milestone that has historically preceded significant upward pressure on price. At the same time, key liquidity signals are flashing green. 

Global M2 money supply growth, stablecoin issuance, and a rally in gold — which Bitcoin has often tracked with a lag — all point to strengthening demand.

Citigroup analysts this week set a 12-month projection for Bitcoin at $181,000, citing robust inflows that could reach $7.5 billion by December.

“We are more positive on Bitcoin compared to Ether, as it captures an outsized portion of incremental flows into crypto markets,” Citi analysts wrote, adding that a friendlier regulatory environment could sustain momentum into 2026.

With Bitcoin already logging record highs in 2025, the fourth quarter now looms as a decisive stretch.

This post Bitcoin Price Explodes to $121,000 as Q4 Begins — All-Time Highs Up Next? first appeared on Bitcoin Magazine and is written by Micah Zimmerman.

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Your COVID Stimulus Check Would Be Worth 1,700% More If You Bought Bitcoin

It’s been over five years since the U.S. government issued its first $1,200 COVID-19 stimulus checks. For many Americans, the money was used for bills, groceries, or other necessities.

But if you invested those funds into Bitcoin and held on without selling, you’d now be sitting on a sum worth roughly $21,617 today — a staggering 1,701% gain.

This figure is based on the initial handout provided under the Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security (CARES) Act. Had you invested your $1,200 on April 15, 2020, when Bitcoin was trading around $6,642, you would have acquired about 0.18 BTC. 

Today, with Bitcoin price surpassing $120,000, that same holding has grown exponentially and will probably keep going higher. 

The story gets even more interesting when factoring in subsequent stimulus payments. Some Americans received two additional checks — $600 in January 2021 and $1,400 in March 2021. 

If someone had invested all three payments for a total of $3,200 near the days they arrived, their Bitcoin holdings today could easily surpass $50,000, depending on timing and BTC’s price movements.

Regardless of where you bought, those who held through market volatility — including multiple price dips and spikes — have been handsomely rewarded.

Bitcoin to $150,000?

The surge in Bitcoin’s value over the past five years was a combination of institutional adoption, growing mainstream acceptance, and macroeconomic conditions that pushed investor interest into crypto and Bitcoin. 

It’s now October and seasonal patterns suggest early-quarter strength may be particularly important for higher Bitcoin price action. Since 2015, October has delivered average gains of 21.8%, while November has added 10.8%, according to Bitcoin Magazine Pro data.

If similar patterns repeat this year, Bitcoin could clear past $150,000 before the end of the year. 

On top of that, Citigroup analysts reinforced a positive 12-month outlook for Bitcoin in a note to clients this week, setting a Bitcoin target of $181,000 while revising their year-end forecast to $132,000. 

The bank cited robust inflows — estimated at $7.5 billion through year-end — and growing demand from institutional investors.

“We are more positive on Bitcoin compared to Ether, as it captures an outsized portion of incremental flows into crypto markets,” the Citi analysts wrote. 

This post Your COVID Stimulus Check Would Be Worth 1,700% More If You Bought Bitcoin first appeared on Bitcoin Magazine and is written by Micah Zimmerman.

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Bitcoin Price Roars Past $118,000 as U.S. Government Shuts Down

The U.S. government officially shut down at midnight after lawmakers in Congress failed to pass a new funding bill. 

While Wall Street dumped in early trading, Bitcoin’s price surged to fresh highs above $118,000.

At 12:01 a.m., the funding bill that kept the government running expired, leaving large parts of the federal apparatus shuttered. Social Security recipients, federal workers, and travelers will feel the immediate effects, but markets are already showing signs of stress.

Bitcoin has traded sideways in recent months, but key liquidity indicators suggest a breakout may be near. Global M2 growth, stablecoin supply trends, and gold’s rally — which Bitcoin has closely tracked with a 40-day lag — all point toward upward momentum, with some analysts eyeing $150,000 in early November. 

Futures on the three major U.S. indexes pointed lower today ahead of the opening bell in premarket trading: the S&P 500 was down 0.58%, Dow futures off 0.52%, and Nasdaq futures lower by 0.67%.

Meanwhile, along with Bitcoin’s price, gold spiked to an all-time record above $3,900 an ounce as investors fled into safe-haven assets. 

Government black out?

Markets are also contending with a sudden blackout of government statistics. The shutdown means the Bureau of Labor Statistics will not release weekly jobless claims or the September payrolls report. Inflation data slated for mid-October could also be delayed if the standoff drags on.

This week’s economic outlook is murky, with no jobs report on Friday, leaving the Federal Reserve to make rate decisions in the dark. Economists warn that each week of a government shutdown could trim GDP growth by 0.1–0.2 percentage points, with a quarter-long closure potentially shaving 2.4 points off Q4.

Amid the uncertainty, Bitcoin is stepping into gold and Wall Street’s traditional role. 

The cryptocurrency has rallied sharply, rising more than 25% year-to-date, driven by institutional adoption and growing perception as a hedge against inflation and political risk. 

The key question is how long the momentum will last. Historically, markets rebound quickly from shutdowns, with equities ending positive in over half of the 20 shutdowns since 1976. But threats of benefit cuts and layoffs could heighten risks this time. 

Bitcoin is trading at $118,193 at the time of writing.

This post Bitcoin Price Roars Past $118,000 as U.S. Government Shuts Down first appeared on Bitcoin Magazine and is written by Micah Zimmerman.

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FOMC Rate Cuts Loom as Bitcoin Holds Above $109,500 EMA

Bitcoin Price Weekly Outlook

As highlighted in last week’s analysis, bitcoin had a big drop last Sunday night, down to $111,800. The price then bounced back to retest the $113,800 resistance level and the 21-day EMA at $114,000, but was rejected there, falling back down to the $111,300 support level. This level produced another bounce for the bulls back to the 21-day EMA, but was denied access again above the $113,800 resistance level, dumping down just below the weekly support at $109,500 on Thursday. Price rallied from that Thursday low to close the week out at $112,225.

Key Support and Resistance Levels Now

Since the price closed above the 21-week EMA at $109,500 to finish the week, the bulls will look for this support to hold going forward. $109,500 should be the floor heading into this week if the bulls are to produce a weekly higher low and turn things around. $105,000 is the next support level down, and there is potential for a major reversal from there down to about $102,000. Losing $102,000 opens the door down to major long-term support, at $96,000.

On the upside, bulls will look for the price to close above the $115,500 resistance level to re-establish the uptrend. This would provide confidence for the bulls to tackle the $118,000 resistance once again and likely move above it. $121,000 sits above here as the gateway to new highs, but likely won’t hold for long if we get a weekly close above $118,000.

Outlook For This Week

Look for price to re-test the $109,500 low early in the week, with potential to secure this level as support for a bullish move back up to $113,800. It would likely take very strong buying pressure to push above the $115,500 resistance level this week, so expect this level to keep a lid on things if $113,800 can be conquered. Bulls will look to put in a green candle this week to confirm last week as a higher low.

Bias is still bearish on the weekly chart, however, so we should anticipate the $113,800 resistance level to hold over the short term. Losing $109,500 on the daily chart could lead to another big price drop this week, down to new lows, testing the $105,000 to $102,000 support zone.

Market mood: Bearish — with a big red candle to close the week out, the bears are firmly in control. The bulls will need to come out strong this week to defend the 21-week EMA support.

The next few weeks
The weekly chart is still bearish until proven otherwise. Bulls must tilt the bias back in their favour to foster more positive price action going forward; it is possible for them to do that with a strong close to end this week.  With September’s interest rate cut now behind us, markets will be looking for more rate cuts into the October and December FOMC meetings to keep capital flowing.  Investors will be eyeing US financial reports closely over the coming weeks for data supportive of further cuts.  Any impediments to further cuts in the data will likely result in more bearish price action and further selling.

Terminology Guide:

Bulls/Bullish: Buyers or investors expecting the price to go higher.

Bears/Bearish: Sellers or investors expecting the price to go lower.

Support or support level: A level at which the price should hold for the asset, at least initially. The more touches on support, the weaker it gets and the more likely it is to fail to hold the price.

Resistance or resistance level: Opposite of support.  The level that is likely to reject the price, at least initially. The more touches at resistance, the weaker it gets and the more likely it is to fail to hold back the price.

EMA: Exponential Moving Average. A moving average that applies more weight to recent prices than earlier prices, reducing the lag of the moving average.

This post FOMC Rate Cuts Loom as Bitcoin Holds Above $109,500 EMA first appeared on Bitcoin Magazine and is written by Ethan Greene – Feral Analysis.

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Billionaire Tim Draper Predicts Future Where Retailers Accept Only Bitcoin Payments

Billionaire venture capitalist Tim Draper, a long-time Bitcoin advocate, believes that one day retailers will only accept bitcoin as a payment. 

“There will be a moment when all the retailers say ‘I accept bitcoin’ and then there will be a moment when retailers will say ‘I only accept bitcoin,” Draper said on Bloomberg Television. 

Tim Draper’s support for bitcoin goes far beyond words. In 2014, he made headlines by spending $19 million to purchase 30,000 bitcoins seized from the shutdown of the Silk Road marketplace.

Today, those coins are valued at roughly $3.5 billion. Draper has also backed major crypto firms, like Coinbase and Robinhood Markets, cementing his reputation as one of the sector’s most influential investors.

In the interview with Bloomberg, Draper acknowledged that for now, bitcoin is primarily being held, not spent — a trend fueled by its consistent value growth, which makes it a favored store of value and a hedge against inflation.

But Draper sees change on the horizon. He said that eventually, retailers will start accepting bitcoin as a primary payment method.

Tim Draper’s new fundraising round

Draper is also raising fresh capital for his venture firm, Draper Associates. 

According to a Tuesday SEC filing, the firm has secured $200 million for its eighth fund, with its website hinting at the official launch. Draper Associates, which manages $2 billion in assets, focuses heavily on crypto investments.

This latest fund follows the 2022 raise of nearly $124 million for Fund 7.

The timing coincides with a strong crypto market rally. The total cryptocurrency market recently surpassed $4 trillion for the first time, buoyed by congressional legislation regulating stablecoins and Bitcoin surging past $120,000 in recent months.

Draper, 67, began his venture capital career in 1985 with a $6 million loan and quickly became known for early investments in companies like Skype, Baidu, Tesla, SpaceX, and Robinhood. 

Draper has predicted in the past that bitcoin could hit $250,000 — a forecast that, while not yet realized, is seeming more and more likely as Bitcoin sits above $113,000. 

This post Billionaire Tim Draper Predicts Future Where Retailers Accept Only Bitcoin Payments first appeared on Bitcoin Magazine and is written by Micah Zimmerman.

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World’s ‘Highest IQ Holder’ Says He Converted Entire Wealth to Bitcoin, Predicts 100× Surge

YoungHoon Kim, a South Korean figure who calls himself the “world’s highest IQ record holder,” says he has converted all of his assets into bitcoin.

Kim also predicted that bitcoin will grow at least 100-fold within the next decade, eventually becoming the world’s “ultimate reserve asset.”

Kim made these bold declarations in recent posts on X, identifying himself as both a “Grand Master of Memory” and the person with the highest IQ ever recorded — a claim somewhat disputed by experts. 

“I believe that Bitcoin is the only hope for the future economy. Therefore, I have converted all my assets into Bitcoin,” Kim wrote on X.

At the time of his remarks, bitcoin was trading at about $114,000. If his forecast were realized, each coin would top $10 million by the mid-2030s.

He also shared a photo of himself meeting Matt Prusak, president of American Bitcoin, a firm tied to the Trump family. 

Questions about the messenger

Kim’s assertions rest on his reputation as an intellectual prodigy, but that status is far from universally accepted. He has claimed an IQ score of 276 — far beyond the limits of standard psychometric scales, which typically lose reliability past the 160–200 range.

Independent verification of the score is lacking. While organizations such as the GIGA Society and the United Sigma Intelligence Association (which Kim himself helped found) have touted his record, major psychologists and high-IQ communities have dismissed the figure as implausible. 

VICE and other outlets have also reported difficulty tracing credible evidence of Kim’s claimed test results.

Financial analysts are equally cautious about Kim’s Bitcoin forecast. While crypto adoption has expanded in recent years, few institutional projections call for a 100× increase in the next 10 years. Even bullish forecasts from major investment firms typically project 5× to 20× gains under favorable conditions.

Beyond finance, Kim is outspoken in his Christian faith, declaring in mid-2025 that “Jesus Christ is God, the way and the truth and the life.” 

His posts, blending religion, high-IQ branding, and crypto evangelism, have generated both attention and controversy on social media.

This post World’s ‘Highest IQ Holder’ Says He Converted Entire Wealth to Bitcoin, Predicts 100× Surge first appeared on Bitcoin Magazine and is written by Micah Zimmerman.

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Stablecoins: Genius Act Paves Way for Bitcoin to Dominate Global Infrastructure

As the world shifts from a U.S.-dominated unipolar order to a multipolar landscape led by BRICS nations, the U.S. dollar faces unprecedented pressure from declining bond demand and rising debt costs. The Genius Act, passed in July 2025, signals a bold U.S. strategy to counter this by legalizing Treasury-backed stablecoins, unlocking billions in foreign demand for U.S. bonds.

The blockchain hosting these stablecoins will shape the global economy for decades. Bitcoin, with its unmatched decentralization, Lightning Network privacy, and robust security, emerges as the superior choice to power this digital dollar revolution, ensuring low switching costs when fiat inevitably fades. This essay explores why the dollar must and will become digitized via blockchains and why Bitcoin must become its rails for the U.S. economy to have a soft landing from the highs of being a global empire. 

End of the Unipolar World

You might have heard that the world is transitioning from a unipolar world order — where the United States was the only superpower and could make or break markets and dominate conflicts across the globe — to a multipolar world, where a union of Eastern-allied countries can organize despite U.S. foreign policy. This eastern alliance is called BRICS and is made up of major countries like Brazil, Russia, China and India. The inevitable consequence of the rise of BRICS is the restructuring of geopolitics, posing a challenge to the hegemony of the U.S. dollar system.

There are many apparently isolated data points that signal this restructuring of the world order. Take, for example, the United States’ military alliance with a country like Saudi Arabia. The U.S. is no longer defending the petrodollar agreement, which saw Saudi oil sold only for dollars in exchange for military defense of the region. The petrodollar strategy was a major source of demand for the dollar and was considered pivotal to the strength of the U.S. economy since the ’70s, but has effectively ended in recent years — at least since the start of the Ukraine war, when Saudi Arabia began accepting currencies other than the dollar for oil-related trades.

The Weakening of the U.S. Bond Market

Another critical data point in the geopolitical change of the world order is the weakening of the U.S. bond market. Doubts about the long-term creditworthiness of the U.S. government are growing. Some have concerns about the country’s internal political instability, while others are skeptical that the current government structure can adapt to the rapidly changing, high-tech world and the rise of BRICS.

Elon Musk, reportedly the richest man in the world and arguably the most effective CEO in history, capable of running multiple seemingly impossible companies simultaneously — such as SpaceX, Tesla, The Boring Company and X.com — is one of these skeptics. Musk recently spent months with the Trump administration figuring out how to restructure the federal government and the country’s financial position via DOGE, the Department Of Government Efficiency, before an abrupt exit from politics in May.

Musk recently shocked the internet in an All-In Summit appearance where he commented on his experience on the matter, saying, “I haven’t been to DC since May. The government is basically unfixable. I applaud David (Sacks’) noble efforts… but at the end of the day, if you look at our national debt.. .if AI and robots don’t solve our national debt, we’re toast.”

If Elon Musk can’t get the U.S. government to pivot away from financial doom, who can?

Doubts of this sort are reflected in the low demand for long-term U.S. bonds, as evidenced by the need for higher interest rates to attract investors. Today, the US30Y is at 4.75%, a 17-year high. Demand in long-dated auctions of U.S. bonds, like the US30Y, has also trended downward with “disappointing” demand in 2025, according to Reuters.

The weakening demand for long-dated U.S. bonds has significant consequences for the U.S. economy. The U.S. Treasury has to offer higher interest rates to entice investors, in turn increasing the payments the U.S. government has to make on the interest of the national debt. Today, the U.S. interest payments are close to one trillion dollars a year, more than the whole military budget of the country.

If the United States fails to find enough buyers for its future debt, it may struggle to pay its immediate bills, having to rely instead on the Fed to buy that debt, which expands its balance sheet and the money supply. The effects, though complex, would likely be inflationary on the dollar, further harming the U.S. economy.

How Sanctions Wounded the Bond Market

Further weakening the U.S. bond market, in 2022, the United States manipulated the U.S.-controlled bond market rails against Russia in response to its invasion of Ukraine. As the Russians invaded, the U.S. froze Russian treasury reserves held overseas, which were intended in part to pay its national debt to Western investors. In what looks like an attempt to force Russia into a default, the U.S. also reportedly began blocking all attempts made by Russia to pay off its own debt to foreign bondholders.

A U.S. Treasury spokeswoman confirmed at the time that certain payments were no longer being allowed.

“Today is the deadline for Russia to make another debt payment,” the spokeswoman said.

“Beginning today, the U.S. Treasury will not permit any dollar debt payments to be made from Russian government accounts at U.S. financial institutions. Russia must choose between draining remaining valuable dollar reserves or new revenue coming in, or default.”

The U.S. effectively weaponized the bond market against Russia through a novel use of its foreign policy sanctions regime. But sanctions are a double-edged sword: Since then, foreign demand for U.S. bonds has weakened as nations not aligned with U.S. foreign policy looked to diversify their risk. China has led this trend away from U.S. bonds, its holdings peaked in 2013 at over 1.25 trillion dollars and has accelerated downward since the beginning of the Ukraine war, sitting today at close to 750 billion. 

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While this event demonstrated the devastating effectiveness of sanctions, it also deeply wounded confidence in the bond market. Not only was Russia blocked from paying off its debts under the Biden administration sanctions, also harming investors as collateral damage, but the freezing of its foreign treasury reserves showed the world that if you, as a sovereign nation, go against U.S. foreign policy, all bets are off — and that includes the bond market.​

Following the arguable overreach of sanctions from the previous administration, the Trump admin has backed off from sanctions as a strategy, since they harm the U.S. financial sector, and pivoted to a tariff-based approach to foreign policy. These tariffs so far have had mixed results. While the Trump administration boasts record revenue and infrastructure investments by the private sector in the country, Eastern nations have accelerated their collaboration through the BRICS alliance.

The recent SCO summit in Tianjin, China, brought together world leaders, including Chinese President Xi Jinping, Russian President Vladimir Putin and Prime Minister of India Narendra Modi, among others. The most notable news to come out of the SCO summit was a joint pledge by India and China to be “partners not rivals,” a further step toward the multipolar world order.

The Stablecoin Playbook

While China has divested from U.S. bonds in the past decade, a new buyer has emerged, quickly entering the top echelons of power. Tether, a financial technology company born in the early days of Bitcoin and originally built on top of its network through the Mastercoin layer-two protocol, today owns $171 billion worth of U.S. bonds, close to a quarter of the amount China owns and more than most other countries.

Tether is the issuer of the most popular stablecoin, USDT, with a market cap of 171 billion dollars in value in circulation, equivalent to its reported bond holdings. The company reported $1 billion in profits for Q1 of 2025, with a simple yet brilliant business model: buy short-dated U.S. bonds, emit USDT tokens backed 1-for-1, and pocket the coupon interest payments from the U.S. government. With 100 employees at the beginning of the year, Tether is said to be one of the most profitable companies per employee in the world.

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Circle, the issuer of USDC and the second-most popular stablecoin in the market, also holds close to $50 billion in short-dated treasuries. Stablecoins are used all over the world, particularly in Latin America and developing nations, as an alternative to local fiat currencies, which suffer far deeper inflation than the dollar and are often hindered by capital controls.

The volume processed by stablecoins today is beyond a niche, nerd financial toy; it is in the trillions of dollars. A 2025 Chainalysis report states, “Between June 2024 and June 2025, USDT processed over $1 trillion per month, peaking at $1.14T in January 2025. USDC, meanwhile, ranged from $1.24T to $3.29T monthly. These volumes highlight the continued centrality of Tether and USDC in crypto market infrastructure, especially for cross-border payments and institutional activity.”

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Latin America, for example, accounted for 9.1% of total crypto value received between 2023 and 2024, with year-to-year usage growth rates of 40-100%, of which over 50% were stablecoins, according to a 2024 Latin America-focused report by Chainalysis, demonstrating the strong demand for alternative currencies in the developing world.

The U.S. needs new demand for its bonds, and that demand exists in the form of demand for the dollar, given that most people throughout the world are locked into fiat currencies that are far inferior to those of the United States. If the world transitions to a geopolitical structure that forces the dollar to compete on even terms with all other fiat currencies, it nevertheless may continue to be the best among them. The United States, for all its faults, remains a superpower, with incredible wealth, human capital and economic potential, particularly when compared to many smaller countries and their questionable pesos.

Latin America has demonstrated a deep hunger for the dollar, but there’s a supply problem as local nations resist legacy banking dollar rails. Getting access to dollar-denominated accounts in many countries outside of the United States is not easy. Local banks are often tightly regulated and serve at the behest of local governments, who also have an interest in defending their peso. The U.S. is not the only government that understands the value of printing money and defending its value, after all.

​Stablecoins solve both problems; they create demand for U.S. bonds and can deliver dollar-denominated value to everyone, anywhere in the world, despite the interests of their local governments.

Stablecoins, leveraging the censorship-resistant qualities of their underlying blockchains, can provide individuals plausible deniability and privacy from their local state, a feature that local banks cannot provide. As a result, the U.S., through the promotion of stablecoins, can access foreign markets it has yet to reach, expanding its demand and user base, while also exporting dollar inflation to nations that do not have a direct influence on American politics — a long tradition in the history of the USD. From a strategic perspective, this sounds ideal for the United States, and it is a simple extension of how the USD has worked for decades, just on top of new financial technology.

The U.S. government understands this opportunity. According to Chainalysis, “The stablecoin regulatory landscape has evolved significantly over the past 12 months. While the GENIUS Act in the U.S. (which legalized U.S. bond-backed stablecoins) has not yet taken effect, its passage has driven strong institutional interest.”

Why Stablecoins Should Ride On Top of Bitcoin

The best way to make sure Bitcoin benefits from the elevation of the developing world out of mediocre fiat currencies is to make sure the dollar uses Bitcoin as its rails. Every dollar stablecoin wallet should be a Bitcoin wallet as well.

Critics of the Bitcoin dollar strategy will say that it goes against Bitcoin’s libertarian roots, that Bitcoin was supposed to replace the dollar — not enhance it or bring it into the 21st century. However, this concern is largely U.S.-centric. It is easy to condemn the dollar when you get paid in dollars and your bank accounts are denominated in USD. It is easy to critique a 2-8% dollar inflation rate (depending on how you measure it) when that’s your local currency. In too many countries outside of the U.S., 2-8% yearly inflation would be a blessing.

A large portion of the population of the world suffers from fiat currencies far worse than the dollar, with inflation rates in the low-to-high double digits and even triple digits, which is why stablecoins have already gained massive adoption throughout the third world. The developing world needs to get off the sinking ship first. The hope is that once they are on a stable boat, they might start looking around for ways to upgrade to the Bitcoin yacht.

Unfortunately, most stablecoins are not on top of Bitcoin today, despite having started on Bitcoin, a technical reality that is a big source of friction and risk for users. The majority of the stablecoin volume today runs on the Tron blockchain, which is a centralized network run on a handful of servers by Justin Sun, a Chinese national who can be easily targeted by foreign states that dislike the spread of dollar stablecoins inside their borders.

Most of the blockchains on top of which stablecoins move today are also totally transparent. Public addresses, which serve as account numbers for their users, are publicly trackable, often linked by local exchanges to the user’s personal data, and easily accessible by local governments. That’s a lever foreign nations can use to push back on the spread of dollar-denominated stablecoins.

Bitcoin does not have these infrastructure risks. Unlike Ethereum, Tron, Solana, etc., Bitcoin is highly decentralized, with tens of thousands of copies of itself throughout the world and a robust peer-to-peer network used to transmit transactions in a way that can easily route around any bottlenecks or choke points. Its proof-of-work layer provides a separation of powers that other proof-of-stake blockchains do not have. Michael Saylor, for example, despite his massive stack of bitcoins, 3% of the total supply, does not have a direct vote on the consensus politics of the network. The same can not be said for Vitalik, and the proof-of-stake consensus politics of Ethereum, or Justin Sun and Tron.

Furthermore, the Lightning Network on top of Bitcoin unlocks instant transaction settlement, which benefits from Bitcoin’s underlying blockchain security. While also providing users significant privacy, as all Lightning Network transactions are off-chain by design, and do not leave an eternal footprint on its public blockchain. This fundamental difference in approach to payments grants users privacy from those they send money to, as well as from third-party observers who do not run Lightning wallets or high-liquidity Lightning nodes. This reduces the number of threat actors that can invade user privacy from anyone who feels like looking at the blockchain, to a handful of highly competent entrepreneurs and technology firms, at worst.

Users can also run their own Lightning nodes locally and choose how they connect to the network, and plenty of people do, taking their privacy and security into their own hands. None of these qualities can be seen in the blockchains that most people use for stablecoins today.

Compliance policies and even sanctions could still be applied to dollar stablecoins, their governance anchored to Washington, with the same analytics and smart-contract-based approaches used today to stop criminal use of stablecoins. There’s no fundamental way to decentralize something like the dollar; after all, it is centralized by design. However, if most of the stablecoin value were to be transferred over the Lightning Network instead, user privacy could also be maintained, protecting users in developing nations from organized crime and even their local governments.

Ultimately, what users care about is transaction fees — the cost of moving their money around — which is why Tron has dominated the market so far. However, with USDT coming online on top of the Lightning Network, that could soon change. In the Bitcoin dollar world order, the Bitcoin network would become the medium of exchange of the dollar, while the dollar would remain, for the foreseeable future, as the unit of account.

Can Bitcoin Survive This?

Critics of this strategy are also concerned about the impact the Bitcoin dollar strategy may have on Bitcoin itself. They wonder if putting the heavy incentives of the dollar on top of Bitcoin can distort its underlying structure. The most obvious way in which a superpower like the U.S. government might want to manipulate Bitcoin is to bend it into compliance with sanctions regimes, something they could theoretically do at the proof-of-work layer.

However, as discussed earlier, the sanctions regime has arguably already peaked, giving way to the era of tariffs, which seek to control the flow of goods rather than the flow of funds. This post-Trump, post-Ukraine war shift in U.S. foreign policy strategy actually relieves pressure off Bitcoin.

Furthermore, as major Western corporations, such as BlackRock, and even the U.S. government, continue to adopt bitcoin as long-term investments, or, in the words of President Donald J. Trump, a “Strategic Bitcoin Reserve,” they too start to align with the future success and survival of the Bitcoin network. Attacking Bitcoin’s censorship resistance qualities would not only undermine their investment in the asset but would also weaken the network’s ability to deliver stablecoins to the developing world. 

The most obvious compromise that Bitcoin would have to make in the Bitcoin dollar world order is to give up the unit of account dimension of money. This is bad news for many Bitcoiners, and rightfully so. Unit of account is the mecca of hyperbitcoinization, and many of its users live in that world today, as they calculate their economic decisions based on the ultimate impact on the amount of sats they hold. However, nothing can really take that away from those who understand Bitcoin as the most sound money to have ever existed. In fact, the conviction of Bitcoin as a store of value and a medium of exchange will be reinforced with this Bitcoin dollar strategy.

Sadly, after 16 years of attempts to make bitcoin a unit of account as ubiquitous as the dollar, some are recognizing that in the medium term, the dollar and stablecoins will likely fulfill that use case. Bitcoin payments will never go away, and bitcoiner-led companies will continue to rise and should continue to accept bitcoin as payment to build up their bitcoin treasuries — but stablecoins and dollar-denominated value will likely dominate crypto trade in the coming decades. 

Nothing Stops This Train

As the world continues to adapt to the rising powers in the east and the emergence of the multipolar world order, the United States will likely have to make difficult and pivotal decisions to avoid a long-lasting financial crisis. The country could, in theory, lower its spending, pivot, and restructure in order to become more efficient and competitive in the 21st century. And the Trump administration is certainly trying to do just that, as seen by the tariff regime and other related efforts, which attempt to bring back manufacturing of essential industries into the United States and bolster its local talent. However, in the now legendary words of Lyn Alden, nothing stops this train.

While there are a few miracles that perhaps could solve the United States’ financial woes, such as the science-fiction-like automation of labor and intelligence, and even the Bitcoin dollar strategy, ultimately, even putting the dollar on the blockchain won’t change its fate: to become a collectible for history buffs, a rediscovered token of an ancient empire fit for a museum.

The dollar’s centralized design and dependence on American politics ultimately doom the dollar as a currency, but if we are realistic, its demise might not be seen for another 10, 50 or even 100 years. When the time does come, if history repeats, Bitcoin should be there as the rails, ready to pick up the pieces and fulfill the prophecy of hyperbitcoinization.

BM Big Reads are weekly, in-depth articles on some current topic relevant to Bitcoin and Bitcoiners. Opinions expressed are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect those of BTC Inc or Bitcoin Magazine. If you have a submission you think fits the model, feel free to reach out at editor[at]bitcoinmagazine.com.

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This post Stablecoins: Genius Act Paves Way for Bitcoin to Dominate Global Infrastructure first appeared on Bitcoin Magazine and is written by Juan Galt.

Source: Bitcoin Magazine – Read More

Bitcoin Magazine

How MSTR Could Have Gained 50K Extra Bitcoin with MVRV BTC Strategy

Bitcoin treasury companies have become one of the most important demand drivers in this cycle. Collectively, 86 publicly traded firms now hold more than 1 million BTC on their balance sheets. What began with MSTR (Strategy) in 2020 has since spread across the corporate landscape, with new entrants joining seemingly every week. But a closer look at their purchase history reveals a surprising insight that many of these companies could be holding considerably more Bitcoin today if they had followed a simple, rules-based strategy for accumulation.

MSTR Leads the Current State of Bitcoin Treasury Holdings

MSTR (Strategy) remains the clear leader among corporate Bitcoin holders, with almost 640,000 BTC. Across all Top Public Bitcoin Treasury Companies, over 1 million BTC is now effectively locked away, a dynamic that permanently reduces liquid supply and strengthens Bitcoin’s monetary premium (assuming, of course, they never sell!) While this has been a huge net positive for Bitcoin’s supply-demand economics, the data shows that a large share of these purchases occurred during overheated market conditions, particularly at local peaks.

MSTR’s Example: Buying the Top in Bitcoin Cycles

Take MSTR’s (Strategy) activity as an example. The company made some of its heaviest allocations during late 2024, as Bitcoin surged above $70,000 following ETF approvals. This was far from unique, as the broader treasury sector showed the same pattern of front-loading purchases during euphoric phases.

While understandable (capital is easiest to raise when prices are rising and sentiment is high), the result is that treasury companies are often overpaying. In fact, backtesting shows that waiting for even modest pullbacks could have saved firms 10–30% on average compared to their actual entry prices. Of course, nobody has a crystal ball to predict price action, but at the very least, not buying immediately after triple-digit percentage gains in a few weeks would probably help!

A Simple MVRV Data-Driven Fix for MSTR and Treasuries

One straightforward adjustment could have made a massive difference: using the MVRV Ratio as a filter. This approach is not complex. It doesn’t attempt to time exact bottoms, nor does it rely on subjective judgment. Instead, it uses a rolling MVRV percentile threshold to avoid allocating during the most overheated phases of bull markets.

By avoiding purchases when the MVRV ratio was in its top 20% of historical readings (a proxy for overvaluation) and simply deploying that capital during cooler periods, MSTR (Strategy) alone would be holding almost 685,000 BTC today, nearly 50,000 BTC more than it currently owns.

At current prices, that’s over $5 billion in additional Bitcoin. To put that in perspective, the “missed” Bitcoin is roughly equivalent to the combined lifetime holdings of the other Active Bitcoin Treasury Companies (except Marathon Digital).

Similar frameworks have been tested on other markets such as altcoins, equities, and even the S&P 500, and they consistently outperform blind dollar-cost averaging. Strategic dollar-cost averaging beats emotional dollar-cost averaging pretty much regardless of market conditions.

Implications for MSTR, Treasuries, and Individual Investors

For treasury companies, implementing this model could mean billions in extra value over time. For individual investors, the same principle applies of simply avoiding chasing rallies during euphoric phases, and instead let the market come to you.

Of course, we must acknowledge the nuances. Corporations face constraints in raising capital, executing large block trades without slippage, and managing shareholder expectations. But even within those limits, a simple data-driven filter could materially improve outcomes.

Conclusion: MSTR’s Path to Smarter Bitcoin Accumulation

Bitcoin treasury companies have been an enormous net positive for the network. Their combined 1 million BTC holdings reduce supply, increase the money multiplier effect, and highlight the growing institutional adoption of Bitcoin. But the data shows that most of them could almost certainly be doing better. A simple strategy of avoiding purchases during overheated conditions would have netted MSTR (Strategy) alone an extra 50,000 BTC, worth more than $5 billion today.

For both corporations and individuals, the message is the same: discipline outperforms FOMO. Treasury accumulation has reshaped Bitcoin’s supply landscape, but the next evolution may be smarter accumulation strategies that maximize returns and limit the markets downside volatility without increasing risk.

For a more in-depth look into this topic, watch our most recent YouTube video here:
This Simple Bitcoin Strategy Would Have Made Them Billions

For deeper data, charts, and professional insights into bitcoin price trends, visit BitcoinMagazinePro.com.

Subscribe to Bitcoin Magazine Pro on YouTube for more expert market insights and analysis!

Disclaimer: This article is for informational purposes only and should not be considered financial advice. Always do your own research before making any investment decisions.

This post How MSTR Could Have Gained 50K Extra Bitcoin with MVRV BTC Strategy first appeared on Bitcoin Magazine and is written by Matt Crosby.

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Bitcoin Magazine

Bitcoin Gives Me Hope, Says Knut Svanholm in Bitcoin Magazine Exclusive Interview

Knut Svanholm, the Swedish author, Bitcoiner, podcaster and educator, is a prolific writer and eccentric, charismatic persona in Bitcoinland. We don’t have royals in Bitcoin and we routinely slay our heroes, which means that anybody who sticks around for a long time has Lindy-proven integrity. Svanholm is one such character: If you’ve attended the conference circuit in recent years, you’re likely to have encountered Svanholm’s enchanting voice and scruffy beard — cowboy hat included for fashion and good measure. 

I’ve always had a weak spot for this fellow Scandinavian, whether it be his uncompromising words or impressive output, his funky demeanor or funny personality. In a recent interview with Bitcoin Magazine, we chatted about publishing books in the modern age, writing, praxeology — the arcane science underpinning Austrian economics — spirituality, nation-states, the cooperative nature of Bitcoin, how Bitcoin wins and why leaning into “the fun” makes for a better path to the brilliant, bright, orange future we both see. 

Together with his sidekick and co-author Luke de Wolf, Svanholm has incorporated the publishing house Lemiscate Media in Estonia, which allowed them to accept sats and keep bitcoin on the balance sheet — a bitcoin treasury company, the old-fashioned way. It also offered a convenient way around Amazon’s book publishing gatekeeping and meant that all books became print-on-demand. (All of Knut Svanholm’s previous book — including “Everything Divided by 21 Million” and “The Inverse of Clown World” — are available via Lemiscate.)

JB: Knut, tell me about your publishing company. Are you trying to copy Saifedean Ammous and make Lemiscate Media be like his The Saif House?

Knut: Yeah, I’ve always been a little bit Saifedean-like, or rather: Saif with a pirate hat. But it’s not because I’m copying Saif on purpose, but rather that things have just played out this way… There’s a reason why that happens. The same thing happened with my book “Praxeology: The Invisible Hand That Feeds You” — I re-wrote it this year and turned it into a full course for Plan ₿ that’ll be released this winter. It was all a very Saifedean-like approach, echoing what he did with his “Principles of Economics” textbook. Mine is much less dense: The chapters are shorter and a bit more accessible than in Saif’s book. 

JB: One question I had for us sitting down was about your book “Praxeology,” your attempt to connect Bitcoiners with Austrian economists. When it came out, I saw almost nobody writing about it (I did!) — what happened? “Everything Divided by 21 Million,” massive success; “Praxeology,” almost nothing. What gives?

Knut: Generally speaking, I think people read less and it’s hard to follow up on a hit. Plus, there are a little too many Bitcoin books right now as well; people don’t know what to choose. The more long-term goal here is to assemble all of the books into one, a “collected volumes” type of thing, leatherbound etc. The podcast I run with Luke de Wolf, Bitcoin Infinity Show, is more for hardened Bitcoiners — conviction-deepening rather than orange-pilling… 

JB: …then why are you clowning about so much on the show?

Knut: Haha… it doesn’t matter what you do, the absolute most important thing is that what you deliver is entertaining in some way. That can be because it’s interesting or because it’s passionate — or because it’s fun! And fun can be a shortcut to entertaining: If it’s fun, people stick around. If you keep your humor about, that becomes a tool for making people listen. We think about this when it comes to Satoshi Rockamoto [the pop-up concert events that Svanholm runs together with Mike Jarmuz, Samson Mow, Martti Malmi etc., eds. remark]. It started way back, at an event in Mexico and we all just borrowed some instruments and were all surprised at how good it sounded… Wouldn’t it be a good idea to do this at different conferences?!

JB: Yeah, those shows are amazing, and you can really tell that you guys are having fun. Is it all planned and rehearsed, or do you guys just wing it?

Knut: No, it’s completely improvised. This time in Helsinki at BTCHel was the first time we rehearsed together — once. I often gotta pinch myself… Am I really in a band with Martii Malmi and Samson Mow?! What everyone who is anyone in Bitcoin have in common is that they’re just themselves, and that just works. 

Knut: I’m trying to live by my words, practice what I preach… and I’ve long had this idea that we are our satoshis. 

JB: I remember the first time I heard you say that, on stage in Prague 2023 — and you just looked completely out of your mind!

Knut: The entire distinction between satoshis and personhood is pretty blurry: All there is to Bitcoin is keeping a secret from someone else… All nodes, all miners, etc., have a person behind them. They’re not “backed by energy,” but by human action (…which, technically, is also backed by energy). At the end of the day, I always say that Bitcoin is an agreement on a fixed set of rules, and the reason we agree on this specific set of rules is that they are costlier to try to break than to just follow. And that’s what allows for resistance, irreplicability and finiteness. 

JB: There’s a quote in economics and game theory to the effect of “trading is cheaper than raiding,” but still world history is littered with wars. What do you make of that?

Knut: Yes, but if the aggressor thinks that he has enough to profit from violence, there’s a risk he will. Where Bitcoin is different is that I can threaten you with a gun — Joakim, give me all of your sats! — but there is no way for me to know how many sats you have. So game-theoretically, it’s better for me to offer you something of value and trade with you… Bitcoin has moved the point at which aggression pays further out, and this aspect of Bitcoin is so underappreciated.

But let’s return to this idea that we are all our satoshis. Everybody wants to pump their bags, and we all benefit from number-go-up, which means all companies and everybody in Bitcoin have an incentive to help each other. 

With Lemiscate and Bitcoin Infinity Show we’re really trying to put that in practice right now, by giving as much as we can because, in the end, it all comes back to us! Why not cooperate? Take Vexl, the peer-to-peer trading platform out of Prague; they’re not paying us a dime to say this, but I still want everyone to be on Vexl — it’s an excellent service. 

Bitcoin jobs in general is so completely different than fiat jobs; you don’t even need to, or can expect, to be paid anything to begin with. Rather, you must provide value first and then reap rewards later. That’s so powerful, and most people don’t get that: All I want is for you to flourish. 

JB: The connection to Praxeology is so obvious: We’ve sort of fiat-ized what “work” is. A job is: you’re employed by someone, you do something and you’re paid by the hour… And there are laws around this, it’s your right as a laborer to receive this money. And nobody thinks about how working is about creating value for someone else.

Knut: And that doesn’t stop being true just because someone — the state, labor unions — is trying hard to make that not true. Still, an employer won’t hire anybody if it’s too costly. Say you want to hire somebody in Sweden. Then you have to consider that you can’t fire them very easily, you gotta pay payroll taxes, and income taxes etc., if they’re ill, you have to pay for their recovery, and blah-blah-blah. 

It leads to this entitlement idea, a culture or I deserve all this. Most people don’t understand how Bitcoin is different here: What happens when there is a way to signal value that’s deflationary, absolutely finite, such that all prices — including salaries — fall over time, while purchasing power rises. 

If you hire someone, and that someone gets the same amount of satoshis every month, their real salary is effectively increasing… You never need to readjust salaries. Micropayments is such a fiat idea… The entire model of velocity of money is a Keynesian idea.. I think subscription models will increase in popularity. On a deflationary standard, a company has every incentive to receive one larger payment early over many smaller payments later, because it will receive fewer and fewer satoshis every time. 

JB: Uh, ok…

Knut: I think people just underestimate what deflation is. That’s the main thesis in “The Inverse of Clown World”: Everything that’s true in fiat, the inverse of that is true in Bitcoin. 

On a bitcoin standard, we’ll have fewer transactions — not more. It’s a pet theory I have, and it was in a Bitcoin Magazine article (“The Real Scaling Solution for Bitcoin”) a few years ago: With a richer society, you’ll have fewer transactions. Say ten rich people and ten poor people are having dinner. Among the rich people, at the end of the night, someone picks up the tab, so over time there’ll be ten transactions — one per dinner. But for the poor people, who don’t have enough wealth, everyone has to pay for their own meal on every occasion, meaning a hundred transactions. 

If we focus on quality instead of quantity, which is what happens in a deflationary economy, what happens is fewer transactions but more significant, valuable transactions. 

“Will give everyone a reason to save rather than overconsume, giving more people access to whatever they want over time because of the falling prices. If you postpone your spending, your bitcoin will buy you more in the future. In other words, fewer transactions. Quality before quantity. The necessity for transactions per second will diminish.”

This article really didn’t pull any punches. In a hundred years, you won’t pay for coffee anymore; the barista will give it to you for free, since he has built up this entire chain of trust over generations, which will ensure that you want to give him something of value. 

JB: Like that quote you referred to on stage here at BTCHel, know-your-customer laws are economically illiterate; trust is the opposite of money. Trading partners only need to use money when they don’t trust someone. The difference is, you use credit money with those you trust, and commodity money with strangers. 

Knut: Precisely! You only need money in trade when you don’t trust the people you’re trading with. That’s the problem with credit money altogether: It isn’t money. Even if you have debt notes or credit money, it has to be denominated in something — and that something is what constitutes money. 

I learned this in Murray Rothbard’s excellent book “What Has Government Done to Our Money?” There’s no doubt about it: Credit money is not money. Money represents something valuable; even if that’s a debt, it has to be denominated in something — and it’s that thing that is money. When you accept a receipt for something and you don’t receive the thing back, that’s theft. 

And that’s what banknotes are.

JB: You write something to that effect in the beginning of your 2020 book “Independence Reimagined”, about how collective imagination is one of our greatest strengths as humans — but also our worst weakness. Natural law, property rights, money etc, aren’t out there, in nature, right; we don’t discover them, but invent them, no…?

Knut: No, all the way down to molecular biology or complex societies like ant hills, I think, where we find examples of what looks like cooperation and herd behavior, but in reality, you’re backstabbing them — the black sheep of the herd, etc. What’s evolutionarily good for the herd isn’t always the same as what’s good for the herd. 

JB: This is something monetary scholars often talk about, what is it that money does in a society? Large-scale cooperation, overcoming Dunbar’s number etc. It’s these collective delusions that let a billion Catholics cooperate, or 330 million Americans to all believe in their shared stories — not that America is doing extraordinarily well, but that’s beside the point — the belief that we are one unit is what lets us cooperate so we’ll create bigger things.

Knut: Organized religion and, after that, nation-states, might be good for your tribe, for convincing people that they go to heaven if you murder members of this other tribe. And to do that, we have to cooperate, so we need to tax citizens this or that much and then demand that you give your life for the herd. That’s rarely good for the individual soldier. And some of these units have created pretty destructive things, too. 

For some of these topics — like the question of God — I’m perfectly comfortable not knowing certain things, if I know these are questions we can’t answer. If you were to order the great Austrians in order of religiosity, I think we’d get Mises -> Rothbard -> Hoppe. 

What I’ve changed my mind about is that I nowadays believe democracy to be the most dangerous religion. It’s better that people believe in a fake friend in the sky than an earthly friend who swindles them. Religion is a tool for managed control, the best way to fool 18-year-olds into war — and psychopaths will use it!

JB: What’s the connection to economics or praxeology?

Knut: Well, economic thought was actually better before the Enlightenment than after. At that time, all economists were also theologians grappling with the basic question, What does God want? Many of them are opposed to the phenomenon of interest, unethical practices and turning people into debt slaves

JB: … like Jeff Booth said in his lecture at BTCHel “No They. Only We”…

Knut: Precisely, and it’s not until we get Austrian economics that we actually can explain how interest is ethical —  That it’s just the price of tomorrow, to quote Booth. 

And prices and interest rates fall in a free market. 

JB: Everything we talk about here is so in the weeds, so deep, so spiritual. Praxeology itself is a bit like that, making us wonder what in the world is this thing we call consciousness, choice, economics?

Knut: The basic tenet is that science cannot derive an ought from an is — but with praxeology, we can get pretty darn close! Hans-Hermann Hoppe explains it best, but if I were to try, I’d say, “All communications and interaction between humans are the result of some sort of conflict.” We perceive value in communicating rather than attacking, which means all language is for resolving conflict; we have human language so that we can comprehend one another. 

From there, you’re very close to absolute property rights. And here’s argumentation ethics: 

If I say every human owns their own bodies, you cannot rebuke that without proving my point.

And from there, we can derive so much knowledge from that, if you only accept those axioms. But they are still pretty darn sound axioms. 

JB: So why isn’t this sexy? Why doesn’t it sell? I think this is, big-brain gigachad boom stuff… but nobody cares. 

Knut: …and it’s so goddamn simple that it’s better to cooperate than to use violence. People don’t understand how much they’re being robbed today; everybody underestimates their own value. It’s tragic, but not that hard to explain: You have an institution — public school — entirely funded by theft. You learn math and English and whatever, but you also learn social science, which is nothing but opinions and bullshit. We’re taught obedience rather than providing value. 

Everything that at some level is supported by government money is corrupt and unethical. These ideas have existed for centuries, but it’s so hard for normies to get past this: 

If there’s one thing public education shoves down our throats more than anything else, it’s that democracy is the most important and most beautiful thing we have. It’s not. It’s a system that says, because of a popularity contest, you have the right to take others’ stuff; it’s completely wrong, beginning to end.  

JB: How do you see this fixed? How do we win?

Knut: The more we use bitcoin, KYC-free, between each other without paying taxes, and without inflation, the more we disarm the psychopaths. 

JB: Very, very slowly, one person at a time?  

Knut: Yes: Sooner or later, everyone wakes up to this. Anyone who attends these Bitcoin conferences can see for themselves how freakin’ superior bitcoin is to fiat money. 

JB: We went on a Bitcoin Walk in Helsinki yesterday. We stopped at a café — cute, small, two people working there, and 50 Bitcoiners show up. Obviously, everyone was gonna try to orange-pill this poor barista: wallets, zapping, the whole ordeal. Just think about it for a minute, 50 people, 5,000-10,000 sats zapped each, that’s a good couple of hundred bucks. Easy money, right? No, the dude had zero interest; he just wanted to serve coffee and get on with his day. 

Knut: Well, at dinner last night, we met a server who was exactly the other way around. She was super interested, “Oh yes, I’ve heard about bitcoin but I’ve never tried it, don’t know how it works.” From just a handful of us, she got some $50 — super happy about it!

JB: So the guy we met yesterday just didn’t have curiosity awakened yet, whereas your server from last night did…? You think that’s the difference? 

Knut: Yes! The biggest reason for this is that to even grasp what Bitcoin is or what it does, you need to spend 100 hours on self-education… and most people aren’t willing to do that! The biggest hurdle to adoption is that people don’t have time; they don’t have 10,000 hours or whatever to invest into Bitcoin in order to fully understand it. 

JB: But we do have that time — certainly in a country like Finland. At least in the West, we work fewer hours, we have higher real wages, more leisure time. You can devote your time to whatever.

Knut: Sure, but most people want to go to work, then go home and feel like they made a living for themselves when actually they worked three out of five days for the government, and another for the banks.

That we still have money and time left is a testament to how strong the free market is: Everything good in the world comes from the free market. It’s a more powerful force than any totalitarian, self-pompos leader ever could be. 

Despite democracy, taxes and inflation, things move forward. We have progress. 

JB: Alright, wrapping up. What gives you hope? Where do you see the light? I don’t think the future is dark — it’s bright af — but the more you look out into fiatland, the worse things look.

Knut: That’s because the future isn’t in fiat — it’s in Bitcoin. The future is bitcoin. It’s definitely this “Which Way, Western Man” meme. Either we’re in a world where everyone cooperates — like Booth says, eight billion people in service of eight billion people — or we’re going further down totalitarian oppression, darker and darker. 

If we didn’t have Bitcoin, I’d be much less hopeful for the future. 

Bitcoin exists, it’s easy to learn, and when a system is better, people make the change — put like that, why wouldn’t Bitcoin win? 

The world with Bitcoin is beautiful. 

This post Bitcoin Gives Me Hope, Says Knut Svanholm in Bitcoin Magazine Exclusive Interview first appeared on Bitcoin Magazine and is written by Joakim Book.

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Bitcoin Core vs. Bitcoin Knots: Actions Speak Louder Than Words

Let’s look at two things that Bitcoin Knots users claim to be proponents of and champions for in their crusade against Bitcoin Core: 

• Mining decentralization
• Bitcoin’s use as money

They claim to fight for mining decentralization, with OCEAN mining pool held out as a primary example of this. OCEAN’s DATUM protocol is ostensibly designed to further mining decentralization, specifically the actual template construction process that decides what transactions go into a block. 

They also claim to fight for Bitcoin’s use as a monetary network, i.e. a network that facilitates the transmission of bitcoin in economics transactions, ensuring security for those transactions. 

These are both incredibly important goals. Bitcoin’s mining network remaining decentralized is absolutely critical in order to maintain its censorship resistance. A clear majority of miners must exist and operate in a state free from the possibility of coercion from the state (or any other party) to engage in censorship. Without existing in this state, a simple majority of miners coerced in such a fashion would be capable of perpetually preventing any transaction from confirming in the blockchain, completely undermining Bitcoin’s core value proposition. 

Scaling Bitcoin’s use as money is also incredibly important. The only mechanisms to transact with bitcoin in a censorship resistant fashion are ones that are truly anchored to the blockchain itself in a manner where the end user can on their own enforce ownership of their current balance of bitcoin. 

Both of these things are absolutely necessary for Bitcoin to meaningfully contribute to any positive change in the world. 

So let’s look at what they claim to stand for versus what they are actually doing. 

Actions Versus Words

So firstly, developers have been working on a protocol called Stratum v2, a replacement for the current Stratum v1 protocol miners use to interact with mining pools. This has been a massive project, all completely open source, to allow individual miners to select transactions that are included in blocks themselves as opposed to the pool operator (the pool still controls payouts). 

Block’s new Proto mining rig supports Stratum v2, Braiins Pool and DMND Pool have integrated support. 

What did OCEAN (run by the largest Knots supporters) do to support Stratum v2? Nothing. They created their own proprietary alternative DATUM (they have pledged to open source everything in future but have not yet done so). In both solutions the pool operator is capable of rejecting proposed blocks from individual miners, which would leave the miner continuing to do work they are not getting paid for. Stratum v2 supports immediately switching to another pool in such a case to ensure the miner continues getting paid, OCEAN does not. It simply defaults to solomining. 

Given that it is not even open sourced yet, no other pool can adopt it. It is essentially a vendor lockin for OCEAN pool, who can still reject any template a miner proposes, with no way to trivially opt out if a miner’s block template is rejected and switch to another pool. 

To top it off, the practice of filtering transactions slows down the propagation of blocks across the network. When a miner finds a block, they don’t relay the whole block, they relay the header with a compressed “list” of all the transactions in it for a node to reconstruct and verify the block with the transactions in their mempool. When nodes do not have those transactions, it takes longer for them to fetch them from peers, validate the block, and relay it onward.

This disproportionately hurts smaller miners. If a large pool has a block orphaned because of this, i.e. another miner finds a block before the other one propagates across the network, that larger miner has a very high chance of finding the next block building on their orphan, thus “saving it” to be included in the blockchain. 

Smaller miners do not have those high odds of finding the next block in this situation. This disadvantages them, making the highest fee paying transactions something that could actually lose them money, as opposed to larger miners who will likely find the next block and not have their first one orphaned. 

In multiple ways OCEAN (and Knots supporters) are actively harming mining decentralization while proclaiming themselves defenders of it. 

Now let’s look at the use of Bitcoin as money. Ephemeral anchors are an optimization to make Lightning function more efficiently, for a deeper explanation of them you can read this, but the important point is they allow Lightning users to be much more efficient with fees they pay to close channels on-chain. 

The latest release of Knots by default filters these transactions, and will not relay them across the network. When a Lightning user has to non-cooperatively close, they are doing so in order to protect their funds. Lightning implementations are all in different phases of shifting over to using them. Knots actively attempts to prevent these transactions relaying to miners. 

How does that help advance the use of Bitcoin as money? Again, just like with mining decentralization, they act in a complete opposite manner than what they say. Citrea is yet another example, a Bitcoin Layer 2 designed to scale financial transactions. The Knots OP_RETURN filter will not relay the transactions needed to enforce correct operation of the Layer 2. 

What They Do Matters, Not What They Say

Knots supporters proclaim themselves defenders of Bitcoin, here to ensure it remains a decentralized censorship resistant money. But their actions push towards the exact opposite goal. 

The things they do to “champion” mining decentralization actually create dynamics that worsen its centralization. 

While proclaiming Bitcoin is money, and defending its use as such their chief goal, the software they release and run actively undermines multiple Layer 2s whose entire purpose is to scale Bitcoin’s use as money. 

They are literally fully engaged in a campaign with the end goal of preventing certain kinds of Bitcoin transactions from being made, while proclaiming themselves defenders of Bitcoin. 

At the end of the day, this is an open network, and people can run whatever software they want to interact with that open network. That is a critical and important aspect of Bitcoin. This is not about software, this is about people. 

This is about the stated goals, the stated values of people in this space, being the complete opposite of the actions they engage in. I hope that Bitcoiners are smart enough to eventually see the Orwellian newspeak that has been dominating the entire dispute around Bitcoin Core and Knots over the last few years. 

“The party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential command.”

This post Bitcoin Core vs. Bitcoin Knots: Actions Speak Louder Than Words first appeared on Bitcoin Magazine and is written by Shinobi.

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Tether In Talks To Raise $20 Billion — But What Does That Mean for Bitcoin?

Tether Holdings SA, the issuer of the world’s largest stablecoin, is reportedly in talks with investors to raise as much as $20 billion in new capital, a deal that could propel the firm into the ranks of the world’s most valuable private companies.

According to people familiar with the discussions, Tether is seeking between $15 billion and $20 billion in exchange for roughly a 3% stake through a private placement. 

That would imply a valuation near $500 billion, putting the company in the same league as SpaceX and OpenAI. 

Talks remain in the early stages and details may shift before any deal closes, according to Bloomberg reporting.

Cantor Fitzgerald is said to be advising on the transaction, which would involve new equity rather than existing shareholders selling their stakes. 

Tether and Bitcoin’s relationship

The fundraising effort comes as Tether has steadily expanded beyond stablecoin issuance, building itself into a broader reserve-backed financial powerhouse.

Earlier this year, CEO Paolo Ardoino revealed that Tether now holds over 100,000 BTC — worth more than $11 billion — alongside more than 50 tons of gold as part of its reserves.

Those holdings make Tether one of the largest corporate owners of Bitcoin globally, a fact that further ties the fate of its business to the world’s leading digital asset.

Earlier this year, the company also began minting its stablecoin on the Bitcoin Lightning Network. 

Tether announced it will launch its stablecoin on RGB, a next-generation protocol that enables native stablecoin issuance directly on Bitcoin. This move made Tether more Bitcoin-native, underscoring its bet on Bitcoin as the base for everyday global money.

The company has reaped massive profits by investing its reserves into U.S. Treasuries and other cash-like instruments, booking $4.9 billion in profit during the second quarter alone. 

Ardoino has claimed Tether operates with a 99% profit margin — figures that, while unaudited by public market standards, highlight the firm’s cash-generation engine.

Tether already holds over 100,000 BTC and is moving to issue stablecoins directly on Bitcoin. A successful raise would tie its future even closer to Bitcoin, making BTC the backbone of one of the world’s most valuable private companies.

This post Tether In Talks To Raise $20 Billion — But What Does That Mean for Bitcoin? first appeared on Bitcoin Magazine and is written by Micah Zimmerman.

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Federal Reserve Rate Cut Fails to Lift Bitcoin Price Past $118,000

Bitcoin Price Weekly Outlook

Bitcoin price closed last week at $115,333, rejecting the $118,000 resistance level. After three straight weeks of gains, Bitcoin bulls finally lost steam — and the Fed’s rate cut wasn’t enough to break $118,000.

The U.S. Federal Reserve cut the key interest rate by 25 basis points as anticipated, which provided a boost for markets to close out the week, but it wasn’t enough. Bitcoin price made a move to $118,000 on Thursday after the Fed’s announcement, but was pushed back just shy of this critical resistance level. Sunday’s close gave us a shooting star doji candle for the week, signaling a likely reversal in price action heading into this week. The bears have finally stepped in to limit bitcoin’s gains after a 3-week rally by the bulls. We may see some renewed strength by the bears this week as they attempt to push the price down to test the recent support levels.

Key Support and Resistance Levels Now

Looking downward, we are eyeing the $111,300 level as a potential support level. Bitcoin nearly hit that support level already after the big sell-off Sunday night. Below a bitcoin price of $111,300, we will once again look to the 21 EMA, which is currently at $109,500, entering this week. If the price closes below the 21 EMA, it is unlikely the $107,000 low will hold, and we should look to the $105,000 level to act as support.

Price crashed straight through the $113,800 support level on Sunday night, but we will look for bitcoin to close above this level to give some renewed strength to the bulls this week. The next resistance level above here is $115,500. If we can manage to establish these levels as support, we will look to make another attempt at the critical $118,000 resistance level.

Outlook For This Week

Bitcoin saw a massive sell-off just after the weekly close on Sunday night, which brought the bitcoin price all the way down to $111,800.

There are two ways to view this action. Rapid price corrections like this often occur in bullish environments, so it is possible the low this week is already in, and we could expect to see more bullish price action through the remainder of this week. The other possibility is that this is just the beginning of a renewed downtrend, in which case we would anticipate a slight bounce from the lows over the next day or so, followed by continued bearish price action to close out the week. So, to maintain bullish bias this week, we want to see price regain the $113,800 level, while the bears will attempt to push price down past the $111,300 support level to maintain bearish bias.

Market mood: Bearish — after rejecting $118,000 with a shooting-star doji candle, the bears are back in control for the time being.

The Next Few Weeks

Expanding our view on bitcoin price action into the next few weeks, we will look to establish a higher low on the weekly chart. If we can get any type of reversal before the price gets down to the $107,000 low, the bulls will get this higher low and will look to take over once again from the bears.

The MACD oscillator is still in a slightly bearish position after crossing bearish at the end of August. This should assist the bears in keeping the price subdued while it is in place. Bulls will be looking for the MACD to cross back bullish in the coming weeks to give them a bit more strength and help to overcome the $118,000 resistance level.

Terminology Guide:

Bulls/Bullish: Buyers or investors expecting the price to go higher.

Bears/Bearish: Sellers or investors expecting the price to go lower.

Support or support level: A level at which the price should hold for the asset, at least initially. The more touches on support, the weaker it gets and the more likely it is to fail to hold the price.

Resistance or resistance level: Opposite of support. The level that is likely to reject the price, at least initially. The more touches at resistance, the weaker it gets and the more likely it is to fail to hold back the price.

EMA: Exponential Moving Average. A moving average that applies more weight to recent prices than earlier prices, reducing the lag of the moving average.

Oscillators: Technical indicators that vary over time, but typically remain within a band between set levels. Thus, they oscillate between a low level (typically representing oversold conditions) and a high level (typically representing overbought conditions). E.G., Relative Strength Index (RSI) and Moving Average Convergence-Divergence (MACD).

MACD Oscillator: Moving Average Convergence-Divergence is a momentum oscillator that subtracts the difference between two moving averages to indicate trend as well as momentum.

​

This post Federal Reserve Rate Cut Fails to Lift Bitcoin Price Past $118,000 first appeared on Bitcoin Magazine and is written by Ethan Greene – Feral Analysis.

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Lawmakers Push SEC to Adopt Trump’s 401(k) Crypto Plan — Is Bitcoin Retirement Coming?

A coalition of House Republicans are urging the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) to swiftly implement President Trump’s recent executive order that could allow millions of Americans to gain exposure to Bitcoin and other alternative assets through their 401(k) retirement accounts.

Executive Order 14330, signed on August 7, directs the SEC and Department of Labor (DOL) to update regulations so that retirement savers can diversify beyond the narrow confines of traditional stocks and bonds. 

The policy explicitly backs the idea that “every American preparing for retirement should have access to funds that include investments in alternative assets” where plan fiduciaries deem it appropriate. 

In other words, for everyday savers, the order could mean finally having the freedom to put part of their hard-earned retirement money into assets they believe in — including Bitcoin.

House Lawmakers Push for Retirement Bitcoin

In a letter to SEC Chairman Paul Atkins, Chairman French Hill, Rep. Ann Wagner, and seven other lawmakers praised Trump’s order for the potential to democratize investing. 

They urged regulators to revise existing guidance that currently blocks roughly 90 million Americans from allocating to asset classes long reserved for the wealthy.

“Given these directives, we encourage the SEC to provide swift assistance to the Secretary of Labor and to make any necessary revisions to its current regulations and guidance,” the letter stated. “We also request the SEC review bipartisan legislation being advanced in the 119th Congress concerning accredited investors. We are hopeful that such actions will help the 90 million Americans that are currently restricted from investing in alternative assets to secure a dignified, comfortable retirement.”

While “alternative assets” broadly include private equity and venture capital, the order also creates a potential regulatory pathway for Bitcoin exposure inside tax-advantaged retirement plans. 

Several committee members, including Rep. Warren Davidson, have been vocal advocates for adding Bitcoin into existing mainstream financial infrastructures, framing it as both a hedge against monetary debasement and a tool for long-term savings.

The lawmakers also pointed to bipartisan legislation advancing in the 119th Congress that would modernize the definition of “accredited investor,” another longstanding hurdle preventing ordinary Americans from accessing private markets and digital assets.

If carried through, the executive order could mark a watershed moment for Bitcoin adoption in the United States. 

For decades, Americans saving for retirement have had little choice but to hold assets denominated in fiat currency — a system that, by design, loses purchasing power over time. Opening 401(k) plans to Bitcoin would offer savers a way to directly align their long-term wealth with a provably scarce, non-sovereign asset.

SEC Chair Paul Atkins is slated to appear on Fox Business tomorrow, where he may address the executive order and its implications for retirement savers.

This post Lawmakers Push SEC to Adopt Trump’s 401(k) Crypto Plan — Is Bitcoin Retirement Coming? first appeared on Bitcoin Magazine and is written by Micah Zimmerman.

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A Response to Sir Tim Berners-Lee: We Can Fix the Web Without Regulation

Sir Tim Berners-Lee, computer scientist, inventor of the web and an all-round good guy, wrote some words in The Evening Standard earlier this week, arguing that polarization, conspiracy and mental health crises online stem from design flaws that must be corrected — even if that requires regulation. 

The piece draws directly from chapter 13, “Design Issues,” of his recently released book “This Is for Everyone: The Unfinished Story of the World Wide Web,” which I encourage everyone to read.

I agree with Berners-Lee’s diagnosis. But regulation is not the cure. The web’s decline is not merely a design failure; it is also an economic one. Design choices follow incentives, and those incentives have been distorted by fiat money and the advertising model it props up. Cheap credit from the fiat-fuelled venture capital system pushed Silicon Valley away from hacker-led engineering and toward surveillance-driven profit extraction.

To fix the web, we need open source protocols and open source money. 

The internet can be fixed without regulation. But we cannot engineer a solution while ignoring the monetary headwinds that shape design. The economic system — quarterly shareholder primacy and fiat inflation — pressures companies to prioritize engagement, outrage and surveillance advertising. Bitcoin changes this equation. It removes inflationary pressure, potentially breaks the ad model by enabling new forms of monetization that align with user interests rather than exploit them. Combined with open protocols, Bitcoin is the enabler of a freer, more ethical web.

What Went Wrong With World Wide Web

Berners-Lee highlights two main symptoms: polarization and mental health damage. He’s right. 

1. Polarization and Collapse of Shared Reality 

Berners-Lee says:
“The most egregious symptom is polarisation. Social media, as currently built, leads users to take extreme political positions and demonise the opposing side. This makes constructive engagement difficult, allows outlandish conspiracy theories to flourish, and promotes demagoguery over deliberation.”

Polarization is real. But amplification cuts both ways. The same algorithms that surface conspiracy theories also amplify truths that the mainstream media suppresses. In an age of censorship and propaganda, this amplification has sometimes been the only way truth surfaces. 

The deeper issue is that people no longer share the same reality. A breaking story fractures into irreconcilable narratives depending on whether it spreads via Twitter, TikTok, Bluesky or Reddit; whether filtered through left-leaning fact-checkers or right-leaning commentators; whether summarized by Grok or ChatGPT. Each tribe outsources “truth formation” to its own authorities, who are incentivized to deliver emotionally convenient facts. LLMs can also generate synthetic personalities to disrupt discourse at scale. Regulation will not restore trust here — because the problem is not just what flows, but how trust is established in the first place.

That said, algorithms are optimized for outrage because outrage is profitable. Regulation will not change this, as it’s as much an economic problem as it is a technical one.

As Neal Howe and William Strauss describe in “The Fourth Turning,” we’re in a crisis era: Consensus frays, power realigns and old arrangements give way. In practice, that means more friction online — tribal feeds, narrative knife fights and rising coordination costs. In other words, we should expect to see some of the carnage we are seeing today, and we can do something about it. 

2. Mental Health and Addictive Algorithms 

Berners-Lee says:
“Many social media users report suffering mental health issues after prolonged usage. The catalogue of ills related to social media is alarming: anxiety, depression, jealousy, inadequacy, feelings of isolation, body image issues.”

I agree, social media is liberating and destructive in equal measure. Search queries for anxiety rise in parallel with usage, and the catalogue of harms is long: depression, inadequacy, body image issues, isolation. This is certainly something that needs fixing. 

Berners-Lee says:
“Social media companies are using machine-learning techniques to make users addicted to their platforms. These systems are designed to be addictive, feeding people more and more extreme content, making them alternately angry and sad.”

This is not accidental. Twenty-plus years ago, Silicon Valley execs and engineers were taught how to design addictive systems at BJ Fogg’s Persuasive Technology Lab at Stanford (his book, for anyone interested, is called “Persuasive Technology”), with some even attending retreats at his home where these ideas were explored further. The *Like* button, infinite scroll and red notification badges all came from his teachings and were engineered to hijack dopamine pathways. 

Jack Dorsey, speaking at the Oslo Freedom Forum in 2024, spoke about the damage caused by the algorithms designed by these companies: 

“The real debate should be about free will. We are being programmed based on what we say we’re interested in, and we’re told through these discovery mechanisms what is interesting — and as we engage and interact with this content, the algorithm continues to build more and more of this bias.”

Dorsey has previously spoken about how Twitter began as a protocol vision before venture capital steered it toward growth, control and ad monetization. Having seen the corruption of that vision, it’s no coincidence that Dorsey now backs open source protocols like Nostr, Bitchat and previously Bluesky. His investments are a confirmation that platforms cannot be reformed from within. Only protocols, open by design, can protect free will from algorithmic capture.

Berners-Lee has suggested that algorithms could be rebuilt to maximize joy rather than outrage. It’s a noble vision, one I wish were realistic — but under current incentives, it is not. Research shows that high-arousal emotions, especially anger, spread faster than calm or positive emotions.

Attempts to pivot have proven costly before. For instance, when Facebook adjusted its News Feed in 2018 to reduce harmful content, users spent 50 million fewer hours per day on the site and publishers saw traffic collapse. More recent audits confirm the same pattern: Platforms that downrank divisive content see measurable drops in engagement and revenue. (You can find related studies here, here, here and here.)

As long as companies are bound by their fiduciary duty to maximize shareholder value, regulators cannot force them to deliberately make less money so long as outrage remains more profitable than joy.

Regulation of the Internet

Berners-Lee has long been one of the web’s strongest defenders. He fought for net neutrality, encryption and decentralization. He warned of surveillance long before it was fashionable. He has stood on the side of open participation and user empowerment.

So it comes as somewhat of a surprise when Berners-Lee concedes that regulation might be necessary. He even quotes bad-faith actor Yuval Noah Harari to support this case: 

“If a social media algorithm recommends to people a hate-filled conspiracy theory, this is the fault not of the person who produced the conspiracy theory, it is the fault of the people who designed and let loose the algorithm.” 

While I begrudgingly agree with Harari in this instance, let’s not lose sight of who we’re dealing with. He is a World Economic Forum favorite, a consistent advocate of technocratic solutions and someone who has described bitcoin as a currency of distrust. His worldview defaults to centralization, surveillance and state power. His arguments are dressed in reason but advance less autonomy and more control.

Berners-Lee admits: “While I generally oppose the regulation of the web, in this instance I agree.” I’m sorry, but regulation is a slippery slope that we should do our utmost to avoid.

It’s because Berners-Lee has been such a defender of the internet that his concession to regulation feels a little defeatist. Has the relentless rise of algorithmic capture, misinformation and addictive design worn him down? Perhaps. But regulation is not the answer.

Another word on regulation… When governments regulate, they entrench incumbents and weaponize “safety” to justify censorship. They are also hopelessly incompetent — the EU’s cookie law is a perfect example: It protected nobody, achieved nothing and left users dealing with annoying pop-ups.

True democracy online should be crowdsourced and built with open protocols — rules without rulers.

The Economic Headwind of a Free and Flourishing Internet

Now let’s get to the crux of the matter. The biggest issue is fiat money. Its full implementation in 1971 marked a fork in the road: productivity kept climbing, but wages stagnated in real terms. WTF Happened in 1971? shows the divergence clearly — inequality, debt, housing costs and social decay all accelerating after Nixon severed the final tie to gold.

Before 1971, prices and wages remained relatively stable. For centuries, under hard money, there was equilibrium. During the short-lived classical gold standard, the Belle Époque delivered a golden age of invention and relative prosperity. Prices stayed stable, and by most accounts, life flourished. That stability vanished once fiat money became the norm.

Since then, and at an accelerating pace, people have had to work harder for less. Companies have been forced to extract more productivity while becoming less ethical. Remember Google’s “Don’t be evil” motto? This is likely the malevolent force that caused Sergey, Larry and Eric to lose their innocence.

Speaking of Google, its ad model killed traditional media’s business model, leaving it dependent on state subsidies and corporate sponsorships. Governments now use media as PR machines, which is a large part of the polarization problem we are witnessing online. 

The venture capital model, fuelled by cheap fiat credit, warped Silicon Valley incentives from hacker-led engineering to surveillance-led profit extraction. Centralization and monopolization are hallmarks of easy credit and the Cantillon effect. 

Jeff Booth estimates technology applies a natural deflationary force of ~5% per year, while Saifedean Ammous argues that real inflation — not CPI, but monetary expansion — runs closer to 15-16%. Governments offset deflation with money printing; companies respond by extracting more from users in an ever-increasing race to the bottom. 

The outcome is visible in equity markets: the Mediocre 493 firms listed on the S&P 500 are structurally failing, and the S&P, powered by the Magnificent 7, basically mirrors the money supply.

And layered on top of fiat, fiduciary duty and quarterly reporting locked companies into a head-on battle with inflation. Fiduciary duty, codified in 19th-century U.S. law, simply required directors to act in shareholders’ best interests. But the SEC’s 1970 mandate for quarterly 10-Q reporting — combined with Milton Friedman’s 1970 essay in the New York Times proclaiming that the sole responsibility of business is to increase profits — hardened the culture of “quarterly capitalism.” 

This convergence — fiat money, shareholder primacy, quarterly reporting and venture-funded adtech — created the perfect storm. Companies are structurally incentivized to fuel outrage, addiction, and mine user data. Regulation cannot change this so long as the underlying money system is broken. Until we change course and return to sound money, design fixes will always fail under economic pressure. 

Tim Berners-Lee, Bitcoin is the Panacea!

Bitcoin is both a cure for broken money and a foundation for new business models online. It is not an app or a company — it is a monetary base layer that resets incentives at the root. 

I don’t know where Berners-Lee stands on Bitcoin specifically. Publicly, he’s dismissed crypto as a speculative casino. On that, I agree. Bitcoin is different: no insiders, no venture fund, no foundation, no mutable rules. If he sees that distinction, good; if not yet, maybe soon.

Fixing money

Bitcoin combines the best properties of gold — durability, scarcity, uniformity, unforgeable costliness — with the best properties of fiat — divisibility, portability. The result is unequivocally the best money ever designed: It’s also borderless, censorship-resistant, decentralized, openly programmable, bound by thermodynamics and internet-native.

In contrast to Bitcoin, it’s becoming clearer with each passing year that the fiat system is crumbling beneath our feet, as bitcoin monetizes in its shadow. Bitcoin offers a way to diffuse the global debt bubble rather than let it implode, correcting the course of monetary history by placing global money back on a sound footing.

The implications are enormous, if/when bitcoin becomes fiat’s successor. For the first time in living memory, society would no longer have to swim against the tide just to stay still. With sound money, the natural deflationary benefits of technological progress can accrue to all, not be siphoned away by those closest to the spigot.

Jeff Booth, in “The Price of Tomorrow,” makes the point that technology is inherently deflationary, i.e., it delivers more for less. But under fiat money, this deflation is papered over with inflation, debt and growth targets. Bitcoin harmonizes money with technology. Its fixed supply means the gains of technological deflation accrue to everyone, rather than being siphoned away. 

Fixing incentives online

“If you consider the internet to be the equivalent to a nation state, it will have a currency native to itself, and there is not going to be any one party or institution that makes this happen, and there’s not going to be any one party or institution that can stop it from happening.” – (Jack Dorsey, Quartz)

Now that we have an internet native currency, the question is… what can it enable?

Well, first of all, bitcoin can reshape incentives online. It can do this by enabling micropayments, streaming sats and peer-to-peer monetization, meaning users can support creators directly. Platforms can earn money without selling their users’ data to advertisers. This could lessen the effect or even do away with an ad-driven, data mining model that forces platforms to optimize for outrage.

It will also upend the venture capital model, as presently those who are closest to the money spigot benefit in greater proportion. As Bitcoin has no central bank to create more money, everyone has a relatively equal footing, and thus investment should become more decentralized, once again.

From there, entirely new dynamics can emerge. Protocols and applications won’t be beholden to growth-at-all-costs models dictated by venture funds; they can scale organically, funded by the very users who rely on them. Value becomes the metric, not quarterly growth or ad impressions. Developers can ship products that solve real problems, and be rewarded directly in sats. Communities can pool capital without intermediaries, seeding projects from the bottom up rather than waiting for approval from the top down.

In this environment, the internet can finally align with its original ethos — open, interoperable and user-driven — because the monetary layer itself is open, interoperable and user-driven. Bitcoin clears the ground for that alignment. 

Bitcoin is not limited to fixing the web — it is upstream of it. Without sound money, design fixes will always be bent back toward exploitation. With sound money, platforms can adopt models that are ethical by default. With internet-native money, creators can be paid directly. Bitcoin is the fulcrum where broken incentives give way to healthier systems — online and off.

“The internet, our greatest tool of emancipation, has been transformed into the most dangerous facilitator of totalitarianism we have ever seen.” – Julian Assange

Fixing this does not require government regulation. It requires realigning incentives — with open protocols and Sound Money.

Open Source Solutions

Berners-Lee points to open source tools like Polis, Mastodon and Fora as promising experiments in healthier online discourse. Building on these efforts, a new wave of protocols combines the same open ethos with a native internet money, aligning incentives in ways that advertising-driven models never could.

With Bitcoin as the economic base, protocols can address the design layer. These systems are live, early and need broader adoption and a killer application — but they already show how to realign incentives without regulation.

Mastodon demonstrates what’s possible with open source federation and timelines built from people you choose to follow, rather than engagement-driven algorithms. And while its refusal to rely on advertising is a strength, the absence of a native payments system is a limitation.

Enter Nostr

Launched in late 2019 by Fiatjaf, Nostr (“Notes and Other Stuff Transmitted by Relays”) is a simple protocol that decouples identity and content from any single app. Keys identify users; relays transmit signed events. Multiple clients (Damus, Amethyst, Primal, Iris, Alby) read and write to the same social graph, delivering real interoperability — the kind of cross-client, cross-app portability Berners-Lee calls for.

Users pick relays and shape their own feeds, putting algorithmic choice firmly in their hands. This echoes the idea Harvard professor Jonathan Zittrain proposed — and which Berners-Lee spotlights in his book — for fine-tuned controls to steer content away from conspiracy rabbit holes. Unlike that platform-driven vision, Nostr empowers users directly, with its algorithmic flexibility limited only by the protocol’s young age.

While payments aren’t part of the base design, Lightning “zaps” are now common — native, instant tipping and payments tied to posts and profiles. That pairing — open communication plus open money — enables bottom-up coordination and rapid iteration without gatekeepers. Deletion is advisory (clients/relays may honor it), so there’s practical permanence and accountability across the network.

Read more: Nostr: censorship-resistant communication

Protocols, Infused with Bitcoin

Chaumian Mints

Cashu by Calle brings Chaumian eCash to Bitcoin — private, bearer-style tokens that can run alongside Nostr or standalone. It enables fast, private micro-flows; Calle also co-founded BitChat with Jack Dorsey, taking these ideas into a user-facing chat context.

Reputation Systems

Community Notes proves cross-faction context can slow misinformation. Add transparent weighting, DIDs and Web-of-Trust primitives and you get a durable, portable reputation. Put sats as skin-in-the-game (bonds/slashing for dishonest signals) and the mechanism strengthens without central censors.

Spam Resistance

Spam isn’t new, and it isn’t purely online. Usenet has handled floods for decades as a decentralized, user-run network with no central regulator. Adam Back’s Hashcash showed the core principle: attach a small proof-of-work cost and abuse drops. The same economics apply now with bitcoin — sats-priced frictions via Lightning (or Ark Protocol) make bot farms and propaganda expensive while keeping honest participation cheap. 

Spam is basically a numbers game: When it’s free, it scales; add cost and you restore the signal. Think refundable per-post/per-DM deposits, PoW stamps or rate limits priced in sats— good-faith interaction stays sustainable while mass manipulation becomes uneconomic.

In Conclusion

Sir Tim Berners-Lee is right about the symptoms. Our opinions differ regarding the cure. Regulation cannot reverse centralization engineered by states and corporations; it merely entrenches governments into the problem it partly created.

The drift didn’t start with bad UX. It started with broken money (and all the problems therein) and the end of sound money (1971), in addition to shareholder-primacy dogma, bent incentives toward short-term nominal gains and surveillance advertising. From there, outrage paid the bills, while integrity fell by the way.

The remedy is Bitcoin returning the world to sound money, which will enable open protocols to better power the web.

Screw the regulators.

Fix the money, fix the world.

This post A Response to Sir Tim Berners-Lee: We Can Fix the Web Without Regulation first appeared on Bitcoin Magazine and is written by Conor Mulcahy.

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Bitcoin’s Quantum Risk Is Real – One Solution Might Start with Taproot

Roughly a quarter of all Bitcoin is exposed to the risk of a quantum attack, tied to public keys that have been revealed on the blockchain. But if that much of the supply is vulnerable, it raises a deeper concern: is trust in Bitcoin’s entire security model at risk?

Imagine waking up, checking your phone, and your bitcoin balance is zero. Not just your cold storage, your exchange balances too. Gone. Overnight, millions of UTXOs drained in a silent, coordinated attack.

It sounds extreme, but this kind of event would be more than just theft. It would be a direct attack on Bitcoin’s value, a public signal that its core cryptography is no longer secure. A state-level actor might attempt something like this, not just to steal coins, but to destroy trust and deliberately cause chaos.

Not every attacker would act so loudly. A more self-incentivized one might take the opposite approach. With access to a quantum computer, they could quietly target older UTXOs, draining coins from forgotten or inactive wallets. Their goal would be to siphon off as much as possible before the rest of the world catches on.

But whether the attack is loud or quiet, fast or slow, the end result is more or less the same. The assumptions that secure Bitcoin are no longer true in a post-quantum world. The math that secured Bitcoin from its beginning could be broken at any point, by a machine none of us have seen yet, but we know is theoretically possible.

What Quantum Computers Actually Break

A quantum computer isn’t just a faster version of computers we have today. It’s a fundamentally different type of machine. For most tasks, it wouldn’t be much faster than a regular computer. But for very specific problems, it would be powerful enough to break a lot.

Bitcoin’s digital signatures today, including Schnorr and ECDSA, rely on something called the discrete logarithm problem. Think of it as a kind of mathematical one-way street. It’s easy to go one direction, but extremely hard to go back. You can take a private key and generate a public key or signature, but doing the reverse, deriving the private key from the public key, is practically impossible. And this is why you can share your public key on the blockchain safely, because it’s infeasible for anyone to reverse it and derive your corresponding private key.

But with a large enough quantum computer, that assumption breaks. Using Shor’s algorithm, a quantum attacker could solve the discrete logarithm problem. And that “one-wayness” no longer holds. Given any public key on the blockchain, an attacker can derive its corresponding private key.

Hard Choices, Big Trade-offs

There are no perfect solutions here. Any plan to defend Bitcoin against these quantum attacks involves some big trade-offs. Some are technical. Some are social. All of them are hard.

One possibility is to introduce a new kind of output type that uses only post-quantum signatures. Instead of relying on discrete logarithms, which quantum computers can break, you would lock coins using quantum-safe signature schemes from the beginning. Anyone sending funds to that address knows they are choosing stronger, future-proof security.

A big trade-off here is size. Most post-quantum signatures are huge, often measured in kilobytes instead of bytes. This means post-quantum signatures can be 40-600 times bigger than current Bitcoin signatures. If an ECDSA/Schnorr signature fits inside a text message, a post-quantum signature could be as large as a small digital photo. They cost more to broadcast, and more to store on the blockchain. HD wallets, multisig setups, and even basic key management, become more complex or may not even work at all. Doing threshold signatures with post-quantum signatures is still an open research problem.

A related proposal for going fully post-quantum comes from Jameson Lopp, who proposed a fixed 4-year migration window. After the introduction of post-quantum signatures, give the Bitcoin ecosystem a few years to rotate into quantum-safe outputs. After that, coins that have not been moved are treated as lost. An aggressive approach, but it sets a clear deadline and gives the network time to adapt before any crisis hits.

Until the threat becomes more real, we’d prefer to rely on the cryptography we already trust. But if we all agree that Bitcoin needs a plan, what is it going to be?

No one wants to rush into chance Bitcoin with unproven assumptions. Rather than pushing in something entirely new, Bitcoin might already have a built-in starting point. Taproot!

Taproot’s Hidden Post-Quantum Safety

Taproot, introduced in 2021, is mostly known for improving privacy and efficiency. What many users don’t realize is that it could also be the basis for a smoother transition into a post-quantum world.

Every Taproot output contains an initially hidden set of alternative spending conditions. These alternative script paths are never revealed unless used. Right now, most Taproot coins are spent using Schnorr signatures, but those hidden paths can be used for almost anything. That includes post-quantum (PQ) signature checks.

The idea that Taproot’s internal structure could withstand quantum attacks goes back to Matt Corallo, who first propagated it. And recently, Tim Ruffing of Blockstream Research published a paper showing that this approach is in fact secure: fallback paths inside Taproot can remain trusted, even if Schnorr and ECDSA are broken.

This opens the door to a simple but powerful upgrade path.

Step 1: Add Post-Quantum Opcodes

The first step is to introduce support for post-quantum signatures in Bitcoin Script. This could be done by adding new opcodes that allow Taproot scripts to verify PQ signatures, using algorithms currently being standardized and evaluated.

That way, users could start creating Taproot outputs with two spending paths:

• The key-path would still use fast, efficient Schnorr signatures for day-to-day use.
• The script-path would contain a post-quantum fallback, only revealed if needed.

Nothing changes in the short term. Coins behave the same. But if a quantum threat appears, the fallback is already in place.

Step 2: Flip the Kill Switch

Later, if a large quantum computer is developed and the risk becomes real, Bitcoin could disable Schnorr and ECDSA spending.

This kill switch would protect the network by preventing coins in vulnerable outputs from being stolen. As long as users have moved their coins to upgraded Taproot outputs that include post-quantum fallbacks, those coins would remain safe and spendable.

The transition will unavoidably cause some friction, but hopefully it would be less disruptive than a last-minute scramble. And thanks to Taproot’s hidden script paths, most of this work could happen quietly in advance.

Prepping Without Panic

There is no countdown clock to the quantum threat. We have no idea when this breakthrough in quantum computing will happen. It could be a decade away, or it could be much closer. No one knows. 

None of this is simple. There are still open questions about which post-quantum algorithms we should use, how to make them efficient enough for Bitcoin, and how to preserve core features like threshold multisig and key derivation. But the most important thing is to start. Ideally not after the first cryptographically relevant quantum computer has been built, but now, while the system is still secure and upgrade paths are still available.

By enabling post-quantum signature support within Bitcoin Script today, we give users time to prepare. Education can happen gradually, without panic. And users can start to migrate coins at their own pace. If we wait too long, we lose that luxury. Upgrades done under stress rarely go smoothly.

Tim Ruffing’s work lays out a possible path forward. A plan that makes use of tools Bitcoin already has. Read his full paper to understand how this works in detail.

This is a guest post by Kiara Bickers from Blockstream. Opinions expressed are entirely their own and do not necessarily reflect those of BTC Inc or Bitcoin Magazine.

This post Bitcoin’s Quantum Risk Is Real – One Solution Might Start with Taproot first appeared on Bitcoin Magazine and is written by Kiara Bickers.

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Federal Reserve Cuts Interest Rates by 25 Basis Points; Bitcoin Climbs Above $116,000

The Federal Reserve cut interest rates by a quarter percentage point on Wednesday, lowering its benchmark federal funds rate to a target range of 4.00% to 4.25%. The move, widely anticipated by markets, marks the central bank’s first rate reduction in years and reflects growing concern over slowing job growth and heightened downside risks to the U.S. economy.

In its statement, the Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC) noted that “recent indicators suggest that growth of economic activity moderated in the first half of the year. Job gains have slowed, and the unemployment rate has edged up but remains low. Inflation has moved up and remains somewhat elevated.”

The Fed emphasized its dual mandate of maximum employment and stable prices but acknowledged that “uncertainty about the economic outlook remains elevated” and that “downside risks to employment have risen.”

The decision to cut rates by 25 basis points was backed by 11 committee members, including Chair Jerome Powell. One dissent came from Stephen I. Miran, who argued for a larger 50-basis-point reduction.

Bitcoin Reacts to the Fed Cut

Following the announcement, Bitcoin (BTC) rose slightly above $116,000, according to data from Bitcoin Magazine Pro. The move reflects investor sentiment that looser monetary policy could support risk assets, including cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin.

Market analysts pointed to Bitcoin’s quick reaction as a sign of its growing role as a macro-sensitive asset. While the S&P 500 and Nasdaq posted modest gains, Bitcoin’s price spike underscored how digital assets may benefit disproportionately from expectations of easier financial conditions.

Policy Outlook

The Fed stressed that further adjustments will depend on incoming data. “In considering additional adjustments to the target range for the federal funds rate, the Committee will carefully assess incoming data, the evolving outlook, and the balance of risks,” the statement read.

The FOMC also reaffirmed its commitment to quantitative tightening, continuing to reduce its holdings of Treasury securities and mortgage-backed assets.

Looking ahead, traders are now pricing in the possibility of additional cuts if inflation continues to moderate and the labor market weakens further, according to Bloomberg. Powell is expected to expand on the Fed’s outlook in his press conference later today.

With this latest move, the central bank has signaled a cautious pivot toward easing. For Bitcoin, the response suggests that digital assets may be among the early beneficiaries of the Fed’s first steps toward looser policy.

This post Federal Reserve Cuts Interest Rates by 25 Basis Points; Bitcoin Climbs Above $116,000 first appeared on Bitcoin Magazine and is written by Nik.

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Bitcoin Price Hits $117,000 as Treasury Stocks Like MSTR, NAKA Collapse

The hangover from the paper bitcoin summer delusion has arrived, swiftly and painfully. We see it, not in the bitcoin price, which is once more calmly and unremarkably ticking upward — pushing up against $117,000 Tuesday evening — but in the stock prices of bitcoin treasury companies. They’re all getting slaughtered: Look at the graphs of $MSTR, Metaplanet, $NAKA, H100, Smarter Web Company and they all look the same — shitcoin-style pump into the heavens, followed by a drawn-out decline back to where they started (or well below it). 

For a while there, we — and the rest of Wall Street — thought anyone could arbitrage financial markets. Issue shares at above their intrinsic value; buy bitcoin; repeat. For this vertiginous summer fling, Wall Street was paying more than a dollar for a dollar’s worth of bitcoin, and everyone’s eyes lit up with dollar signs; this is a trade that, if you’re able to, you’ll happily do all day long. 

But now that that’s over, there’ll be hell to pay — and the devil is already out kicking ass and taking names. 

Oh, and it’s not nice to kick a guy who’s already down (and certainly not when that guy is in some sense your boss…) but given that $NAKA fell a whopping 50% the other day after the S3 PIPE shares restriction period ended — having already collapsed some 87% from its May pump-and-dump peak — it’d be remiss of us price therapists not to take a second look.

So, with the outstanding, tradeable float of shares increased overnight some 50x — and, one would suppose, plenty of second-layer PIPE “insiders” wanna dump-dump-duuuuump — the formula was pretty simple: lots of extra supply meet no demand equals collapsing price. In bitcoin treasury company analyst Adam Livingston’s words: “And you get a perfect physics lesson here: add mass, you lose altitude.”

As usual, bitcoin didn’t care: It jumped almost 2% today, on no material news, after a brief fling downward off its current $116,000 stablecoin pattern. As Bitcoin Magazine Pro’s Matt Crosby says in a recent video, bitcoin price is “poised for breakout.”

The same cannot be said for the poor treasury companies.

Even best-in-class Saylor’s Strategy ($MSTR) is struggling — as it has since operation offload-on-retail began last year; Strategy is gobbling up coins by the hundreds, yet the mNAV compresses more and more, hitting an (unadjusted) yearly low of 1.27. We’re quickly getting to the point where the stock premium (i.e., the source of all treasury company magic) is gone, and the treasury companies become expensive, glorified ETFs.

“Always have been,” the meme world might retort.

Back to our beloved frog, Nakamoto. Baaaaaad things happened to it recently. This is a nasty chart: 

Printing infinite number of copiable paper against a non-credible bitcoin strategy could never have ended any other way. Congrats, NAKA leadership; you wasted six months (or more) of prime bull market real estate playing high finance, and now you’re punished for it.

The delusion that was bitcoin treasury strategy has ended, and the NAKA strategy — running the mNAV-squared treasury strategy — has squarely suffered because of it. (Though, as of this writing, $NAKA is up 20% on the day from its extreme crazy low… yah-yah, nobody cares.)

Livingston is, again, making beautiful sense of the madness: 

“The September 15 crash was not a mysterious market mood swing. It was the predictable result of half a billion discounting shares stampeding through an order book designed for a few million: supply floods, the price sinks, and the physics lesson is complete.”

The everlasting upward magic of (money-share printing) bitcoin treasury companies is gone. Good riddance. Now these companies have to prove real value-add with the corporate-wrapped coins they hold on to so dearly… or perhaps we can go back to de-financializing the economy — you know, that annoying, original reason for Bitcoin. 

This post Bitcoin Price Hits $117,000 as Treasury Stocks Like MSTR, NAKA Collapse first appeared on Bitcoin Magazine and is written by Joakim Book.

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Book’s Books: Matt Sekerke and Steve Hanke, “Making Money Work: How to Rewrite the Rules of Our Financial System”

Making Money Work: How to Rewrite the Rules of Our Financial System, by Matt Sekerke and Steve H. Hanke, Wiley, 368 pages, $34.95.

I’m about to do something I’ve never done before, something that’s borderline unforgivable for a book reviewer: review a book without reading it, or even remotely finishing it.

Suppose two well-regarded, established economists at Johns Hopkins University write a long, dense, detailed book on how to make money work better. In the year 2025, no less, the 17th year of our lord Bitcoin’s continued, flourishing existence, they flippantly dismiss this monetary newcomer in a single sentence. In that case, they deserve to have their own book similarly relegated to the dustbins… so I stopped reading Sekerke and Hanke’s book after 33 pages, concluding ceremonially that this title wasn’t worth my time — or indeed the attention of anybody concerned with building a monetary future to fix the monetary ills of our past and present.

“Behind every fiat money used in exchange lies a unit of account defined by a monetary standard [which is] underwritten by credible claims to future surpluses monetized by the government and/or the commercial banking system. […] Claims of a ‘Bitcoin standard’ or anything like it are completely indefensible” (p. 28).

The only reason they see bitcoin trading at a positive price at all — let alone all-time highs — is that malicious actors wishing to use it “must random a large enough quantity in U.S. dollar terms (usually) from existing holders” (p. 33), i.e., a holdup problem:

“Rises in the bitcoin price do not prove the intrinsic value (or network value, or whatever) of Bitcoin any more than a lack of homes for sale in a neighborhood makes those homes infinitely valuable” (fn 48, p. 33).

Like modern monetary theorists, Hanke and his coauthor observe that bitcoin isn’t issued, in the sense of created, by a government and not upheld by that government’s tax receivability, which therefore renders it unimportant and irrelevant for monetary analysis.

This is a crucial misstep, not at all a fault of Bitcoin’s monetary properties, but of the authors’ narrow field of vision.

Bitcoin is for anyone, but certainly not everyone. Some people are just too salty, too infected by Bitcoin derangement syndrome (BDS), too enamored by their own egos, or too stuck in the rapidly devolving status quo. Science progresses one funeral at a time.

BDS, a severe illness at the end of the fiat age, has taken better victims than Messrs Sekerke and Hanke, but it’s still tragic to see. A huge disappointment and missed opportunity for otherwise quite sharp minds to engage with the most interesting monetary phenomenon in our lifetimes.

This is a book review from The Lightning Issue of Bitcoin Magazine Print. Get your copy here.

This post Book’s Books: Matt Sekerke and Steve Hanke, “Making Money Work: How to Rewrite the Rules of Our Financial System” first appeared on Bitcoin Magazine and is written by Joakim Book.

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ZBD’s SDK Powers Bitcoin Earnings in Mobile Games, Driving 124% Revenue Growth

ZBD, Bitcoin payments gaming company, has integrated Bitcoin rewards into Idle Bank, a game title from TapNation with over 12 million downloads. TapNation is one of the world’s leading mobile game publishers with over 1 billion total downloads. The announcement comes weeks after ZBD launched what is possibly the first mobile app on Apple phones with bitcoin rewards.

ZBD, a Bitcoin payments company launched in 2019, was founded by Simon Cowell, Andre Neves, and Christian Moss to address payment issues in the gaming industry using Bitcoin. Ben Cousens, a former venture capitalist and Bitcoiner, joined as an investor after being introduced to the founders, drawn in by their vision. In an exclusive interview with Bitcoin Magazine, Cousens recalled, “I got introduced to Simo, the CEO, by phone, and we jumped on the call, and he just said, ‘I have seen how the games industry’s got a payments issue and I think Bitcoin is the solution.’ And my ears pricked right up.”

Born out of the 2018-2019 growth of the Lightning Network, the company has developed a mature set of development tools that make it seamless for game developers to integrate Bitcoin rewards into their video games, including an API and an SDK (Software Development Kit). 

Today, the company is focused on the mobile gaming market. There are over 3 billion gamers worldwide, with a majority of them playing on mobile devices, and generating $95 billion in annual revenue. 

“What really made me bullish on the business was the commercial acumen of the team. A lot of Bitcoin startups are fighting the good fight for Bitcoin adoption, but consumer adoption outside of investing and saving has been a challenge. Blocks are still empty today in 2025. That usage problem is solvable when you build something consumers engage with, and I felt gaming was a powerful overlap. There are three billion gamers in the world. It’s a very large industry.” Cousens added.

Play Counter Strike, Earn Bitcoin 

The startup made headlines in the Bitcoin industry with an early test case of its payments technology. In 2021, ZBD launched a modded Counter-Strike server — a popular first-person shooter video game among PC gamers — which included Bitcoin drops for kills, creating a real-money competitive dynamic, described at the time as the ‘next generation of esports’. Cousens explained, “If I shot you, you dropped coins in the map, and if I ran and collected those coins, you’d pick them up instantly in the game.” 

The Counter-Strike demo was a major success, capturing the imagination of bitcoiners and grabbing the attention of gamers alike. In fact, it was such a successful demo that hackers and “try-hard” gamers started to play, finding ways to exploit the game and maximize Bitcoin reward payouts. “When we did Counter-Strike, the first thing that happened was obviously people farmed the servers and they just joined the games, killed everyone, took all the money and quit, using wall hacks and whatever. And it was ‘Oh yeah, forgot about that.’” Cousens recalled adding that “we then introduced actually, quite a simple mechanic for the Counter-Strike example that worked, which was you had to pay to join the server. That immediately deterred like 85-90% of the bad actors.”

The game “blew up” in Brazil, growing their discord community to over 100,000 people, some of whom volunteered to “sit on the server and watch for cheats” to manually boot bad actors, rewarding reports with 100 – 500 sats over the lightning network, depending on the situation. “it wasn’t scalable. It was like Mechanical Turk style.” Cousens noted.

Eventually, ZBD shut down the Counter-Strike demo. “We’re in the business of providing the tools to the game devs, not building games or running games ourselves,” Cousens explained. The company shifted focus to the massive mobile gaming market, but the experience led ZBD down a deep cyber security rabbit hole, which informed their developer tooling services. Game developers and advertisers alike should not have to worry about deep cyber security to integrate Bitcoin into their games, after all.

As an example of the lengths ZBD goes to prevent ad fraud in their games today, Cousens shared that they keep an eye on the phone’s accelerometer, a sensor that measures the device’s movement, to know if the phone is in a user’s hand. This is to protect against farms of devices running auto-clicking software to defraud advertisers. 

Reflecting on his experience working in the Bitcoin industry now for over half a decade in a highly adversarial niche, fighting off gamers who tend to be particularly tech savvy and cunning, Cousens noted that “bitcoiners are bloody good cryptographers. I mean, if you’re in the Bitcoin community, you always talk yourself down, right? ‘We don’t know what we don’t know’ or ‘nothing is ever risk-free’, blah blah blah. But this is an industry built around cryptography and encryption. And that is also cybersecurity. The overlap there is just insane. And as a result, Bitcoin engineers and bitcoiners tend to make quite good security people. We’re all quite paranoid by nature, right?” 

The ZBD SDK and API

The SDK, which was recently announced by ZBD and is being used in the latest partnership with the Idle Bank integration, is also available for game developers. Cousens told Bitcoin Magazine, “We just released the ZBD SDK, which packages together everything,  all of our security into a very simple and easy to use package, and that’s not sales hyperbole. People are able to integrate this in two or three days because it’s genuinely drag-and-drop. Create a little Bitcoin asset for your video game, drop it in the game, and choose how and where you want to pay people.”

ZBD is now actively working with close to 40 game developers, according to Cousens, all of whom are working to integrate bitcoin rewards into their video games, paid out using Bitcoin’s Lightning Network. Cousens, who is a big fan of the Lightning Network, defended the protocol, saying that “there’s still FUD about Lightning and I don’t get it… ZBD has no on-chain offering. Lightning is amazing.”

The integration of bitcoin rewards into mobile games is far from a gimmick; it is having measurable results on user retention for ZBD’s clients. Discussing the impact on Fumbgames’ “Bitcoin Miner” video game, Cousens said, “I’m not going to share their numbers because I can’t, but they’ve grown more than 10x as a business as a result of this. And we see this quite consistently, when you distribute Bitcoin to players, you’re paying them to play. The engagement goes through the roof. And we’ve done surveys of Gen Z and worked with gamers to validate what’s going on here.”

The model is simple. Advertisers pay game developers for views and clicks; a portion of that revenue gets turned into bitcoin and returned to players as rewards. The bitcoin rewards increase user retention, which increases advertising dollars. The same process plays out with in-game purchases as well. 

“We focused on the ad monetization side of the gaming industry, hence rewards and bitcoin payouts. Our proposition to the games industry was ‘hey, why don’t you take a small amount of your ad revenue and redistribute it to the players, and we bet you they’ll play more, especially if it’s bitcoin.” Cousens remarked.

SaraTobi’s Bitcoin Microtransactions on Apple Phones

Following the aftermath of the Epic vs Apple lawsuit in the EU, which ruled against Apple’s monopolistic app store practices, the door was now unlocked to do micropayments inside mobile apps without having to pay an exorbitant fee to the device manufacturer. ZBD walked right through that door, getting approval for the first mobile game with in-app bitcoin purchases and microtransactions, SaruTobi. The game features a cute little monkey that has to swing from tree to tree to collect bananas, which in turn can be traded in for satoshis.  “SaruTobi got through Apple’s review, where you could make purchases in Bitcoin. That was us doing some R&D,” noted Cousens. 

Idle Bank Integration – Bitcoin in Mainstream Gaming

Most recently, ZBD announced a partnership with TapNation, a leading mobile publisher with “over 1 billion total downloads,” according to the press release. Their flagship game is called Idle Bank, which already has over 12 million downloads. Idle Bank is the first mainstream mobile game to deliver native Bitcoin rewards to players via the Lightning Network. ZBD reports that since launch, the game has achieved a 355% increase in 30-day player retention and a 124% boost in revenue per player, demonstrating Bitcoin’s impact on engagement and monetization.

Commenting on the integration, Cousens said, “We’ve known Philippe at TapNation for quite some time. He’s very interested in looking for ways the games industry can adopt new technologies, and he had faith in us that this bitcoin rewards model is powerful and works, so his teams agreed to integrate the ZBD SDK. They did find it very easy. Idle Bank is a game where you print fiat money and mine Bitcoin secretly to screw over your customers. I recommend people play it because you can stack real sats, simulating being a real central banker.”

This post ZBD’s SDK Powers Bitcoin Earnings in Mobile Games, Driving 124% Revenue Growth first appeared on Bitcoin Magazine and is written by Juan Galt.

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A Circular Economy and the Four Archetypes of Bitcoiners

A few years ago, I made an unlikely bet: to build a Bitcoin circular economy in the heart of a fishing village in Brazil’s Northeast. No venture capitalists, no “crypto,” no empty promises. Only nodes, satoshis, in‑person education and plenty of sidewalk conversations. 

That is how Praia Bitcoin Jericoacoara was born: a radical experiment in financial sovereignty built with open source tools and feet in the sand.

In four years at Praia Bitcoin Jericoacoara, we turned a beach town into a living Bitcoin classroom: We onboarded families, shopkeepers and street vendors; taught self‑custody in small groups; installed reliable Lightning routes and point‑of‑sale tools; ran social programs paid in sats; and hosted meetups that made Bitcoin part of daily life.

Living on the Bitcoin standard, I began to see what is really happening at the technological edge. 

In August 2025, I published four short articles on X. Different in form and tone, they converged on the same question: What role should Bitcoin play, and what role should we play in building it? They came in fours:

• a field report on our work with the Bitcoin Community Bank in Jericoacoara
• a critique of bitcoin maximalism’s rigidity
• a diplomatic letter inviting Bhutan’s prime minister to consider the satoshi as a unit of account, and
• a public appeal to keep Bitcoin a peer‑to‑peer cash system. 

What they share is the desire to align practice, theory, and a future‑facing vision.

In the first piece, I shared the challenges and lessons from a real experiment: building a Bitcoin‑based circular economy in Northeast Brazil. Inspired by Bitcoin Beach in El Salvador, we rooted the Jericoacoara project in education, inclusion and local infrastructure. We installed servers, onboarded merchants and neighbors, created social programs and sought institutional recognition as a Community Bitcoin Bank.

We were rejected by the local authorities. Even in the face of the state’s legal and political unpreparedness, we moved forward with conviction. We believe that when Bitcoin is rooted in place, it can be more than money; it can be a tool for community transformation. Yet authorities struggled to understand this, and they denied our request to register what would have been the first Bitcoin community bank.

In the second piece, I confronted an ideological tension within the community itself. Maximalist rhetoric, which defends Bitcoin as the only legitimate project and treats the rest of “crypto” as scams, had its historical role. It helped protect the integrity of the ecosystem, exposed frauds and accelerated market maturation. But does it still serve the goal of large‑scale adoption? Does it help communicate Bitcoin’s value to newcomers? I caught myself ignoring relevant technological solutions simply because they were outside the maximalist bubble. 

After revisiting the discussion and reading every reply and quote, my conclusion was that other projects end up serving as funnels, sandboxes or distribution channels that drive people toward real Bitcoin adoption. Stablecoins, altcoins, memecoins, and centralized cryptocurrencies are moving toward Bitcoin, absorbing inflation and even helping to establish the prices of other commodities. Perhaps it is time for a new posture: not abandoning principles, but embracing a Bitcoin that keeps the focus on the essence while remaining willing to engage with a world in constant transformation, with skepticism and an open mind; by educating regulators that Bitcoin is the decentralized cryptocurrency and that all other projects are centralized cryptocurrencies.

In the third piece, I took this vision into the diplomatic arena. I wrote an open letter to Bhutan’s prime minister suggesting that the country consider adopting the satoshi as its national unit of account.

The proposal, more symbolic than technical, had a clear goal: to imagine how Bitcoin can engage with alternative development models that do not depend on the IMF or the dollar and that respect local culture and sovereignty. The reaction to the letter revealed something important: even within the Bitcoin ecosystem there are ideological lanes: conservatives, centrists and progressives, each trying to interpret the protocol through a distinct worldview.

This article is therefore a point of convergence. It ties together those three experiences (practical, ideological and diplomatic) to propose a fresh look at what we are really trying to build. More than repeating dogmas, this moment calls for discernment. More than talking about freedom, it is time to practice it where it is most needed — on the ground, in our language, in our institutions and in our relationships.

In the fourth piece, I distilled my open note to Bitcoin Core into a simple point: keep Bitcoin a peer‑to‑peer cash system, not a generic data host.

I argued that loosening default data‑carrying settings invites bloat, legal risk and reputational damage, and asked developers to think in centuries, not release cycles. I also noted that recent Core releases, v29 and v30, revisited how much extra data transactions may carry by default. That lives at the technical edge of the protocol — software defaults, not the monetary rules. Bitcoin is money. Like a banknote you can scribble on but not use to publish a book, transactions can include small notes but should not be hijacked for unrelated content.

This context raised a bigger question: What do we want Bitcoin to be? The exchange made the fault lines clear: different groups love Bitcoin for different reasons and accept different trade‑offs. In the next section, I name those lanes and show how they fit together.

Watching Bitcoin Knots gain visibility relative to Bitcoin Core, and hearing developers complain about its pull‑request process, reminded me of the First Follower lesson. Knots is largely maintained by a single developer. 

Movements do not scale because a lone leader is brilliant. They scale when early followers make participation visible and easy, lowering social risk and showing others exactly how to behave.

From inside the industry, spending countless hours analyzing geopolitics and future trends, I began to see Bitcoiners in four main categories, with the extremes on both sides clearly defined so let’s break them down. 

The Four Archetypes of Bitcoin

Bitcoin Database, Coordination Builders

Core belief: Bitcoin is a neutral public record. It can coordinate people and software. Money is one powerful use, not the only one.

What they prioritize: Time‑stamps and proofs; public records; identity attestations; new media on Bitcoin; social protocols like Nostr; building most features on upper layers so L1 stays stable.

What they get right: They attract builders and new users with fresh ideas and on‑ramps. More experiments mean more chances to find lasting utility.

Risks and blind spots: The spotlight can drift away from money. Too much nonmonetary data can waste block space and invite controversy. New systems sometimes reintroduce trusted middlemen.

Attitude to Lightning: Open, when it helps apps feel instant. Also explore other rails. Keep L1 simple.

North Star checks: Useful apps with real users; active developers; low, respectful footprint on L1.

Frequent examples: Casey Rodarmor and Ordinals; Muneeb Ali and Stacks; Burak and Ark research; Maxim Orlovsky and RGB; fiatjaf and Nostr; OpenTimestamps. (Note: this is illustrative, not endorsements.)

Tagline: “Bitcoin is a database.”

Bitcoin Central, Market Pragmatists

Core belief: Bitcoin is money and an asset. Price and liquidity drive adoption at scale and help fund security and development.

What they prioritize: ETFs and treasuries; compliant on‑ramps and off‑ramps; deep, healthy markets; education for investors and institutions.

What they get right: Liquidity brings the next wave of users and pays for builders, mining and education.

Risks and blind spots: Convenience custody and short‑term thinking. Distribution can concentrate in a few large hands.

Attitude to Lightning: Pragmatic. Use it when it helps reach more people.

North Star checks: Market depth and volumes; hashrate security budget; ETF and retail participation.

Frequent examples: Michael Saylor; iShares and Fidelity Bitcoin ETFs; market makers; on‑chain analysts. Edge Case: High leverage and over‑reliance on corporate treasuries.

Tagline: “We care about price.”

Bitcoin Conservatives, Monetary Purists

Core belief: Bitcoin is money. Protect the base layer. Scarcity, neutrality and self‑custody are nonnegotiable. Save first, then spend (e.g., in a circular economy).

What they prioritize: Simple, stable rules on L1; run your own node; education on keys, UTXOs, and fees; miner and client diversity; long time horizons.

What they get right: Clear incentives and strong culture. If money is broken, every price in the economy is wrong. Fix money first.

Risks and blind spots: UX and payments can lag. Newcomers may feel gatekept. Adoption can slow if everyday use is ignored.

Attitude to Lightning: Often skeptical. Prefer on‑chain finality and warn about complexity and custodial drift.

North Star checks: More coins in self‑custody; healthy node count; decentralized mining; growing long‑term holder supply.

Frequent examples: Saifedean Ammous; Pierre Rochard; proof‑of‑keys style campaigns; full‑node culture and cold storage. Edge Case: Never sell. Treat every altcoin as a scam.

Tagline: “Bitcoin is digital gold.”

Bitcoin Minimalists: Digital Gold and Digital Cash, Tool for Social Transformation

Core belief: Bitcoin should be digital gold for saving and digital cash for spending, with the smallest possible trust surface.

What they prioritize: Save on‑chain with final settlement; spend via noncustodial Lightning where possible; use ecash mints like Cashu for privacy with simple exit to keys; merchant flows that settle to self custody.

What they get right: Align savings and daily use without giving up sovereignty.

Risks and blind spots: Friction and slower distribution; reluctance to adopt UX abstractions; fragmentation across minimal stacks.

Attitude to Lightning: Yes, but strict. Prefer noncustodial or minimally trusted setups. Be cautious with large custodial hubs.

North‑star checks: Users who both save on‑chain and spend via non‑custodial L2; easy withdrawals to keys; high payment success without custodians.

Tagline: “Buy, spend, replace.”

Conclusion

Bitcoin’s culture includes four honest defaults that often talk past one another. Builders expand the surface area, market pragmatists prove everyday utility, monetary purists scale distribution and minimalists protect the base.

Together. they create a productive tension that keeps Bitcoin useful and resilient for real people.

After years of working in a circular economy and writing publicly about these debates, my view is simple. Bitcoin is money. Keep the base layer simple. Save in bitcoin on-chain. Spend in sats when it serves people, as it does in a circular economy. Support Lightning only when the exit to your own keys stays clear and simple. I do not support the “Bitcoin as Database” path, because turning Bitcoin into a general data host distracts from its monetary mission and invites waste, confusion, and reputational harm.

The way forward is practical and principled. Judge ideas by whether they grow self custody, make payments reliable without custodians, deepen liquidity that funds security and education and respect the limits of the base layer. If we hold to that standard, the lanes can complement one another and more people will share in the benefits of a free, neutral and credibly decentralized money.

BM Big Reads are weekly, in-depth articles on some current topic relevant to Bitcoin and Bitcoiners. Opinions expressed are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect those of BTC Inc or Bitcoin Magazine. If you have a submission you think fits the model, feel free to reach out at editor[at]bitcoinmagazine.com.

This post A Circular Economy and the Four Archetypes of Bitcoiners first appeared on Bitcoin Magazine and is written by Fernando Motolese.

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The End of Paper Bitcoin Summer

As summer now turns to fall in the northern hemisphere, the stonkcoiner dream of bitcoinizing finance is rapidly becoming a nightmare. The bitcoin paper summer of issuing shares to clueless financial markets at (extreme) overvaluations to thereby buy bitcoin on the cheap is ending, not with a bang of success but with a pretty unimpressive whimper.

The bitcoin treasury dream was nice; I even openly admit that it made some sense. 

For a few months, Wall Street merrily entertained the froth and fuelled the fires. But at last, financial gravity is reasserting itself: We’re all waking up from our summer fling with financial delusion, where things traded for more than what they’re objectively worth. It’s both wonderful and tragic to see standard corporate finance once more hold firm.

Earlier this year, our own David Bailey, CEO of BTC Inc, the owner of Bitcoin Magazine, told Bitcoin for Corporations, another arm of BTC Inc, that “if you can sell a dollar for more than a dollar, you do that trade all day long.”

Turns out, that free-lunch strategy(!) wasn’t free… wiping out investor money in the process has been a painful journey in learning that lesson.  

When you — the retail bagholder — are buying a security instead of real bitcoin, you’re typically doing so at a premium (e.g., an mNAV above 1). Perversely, this is both verifiably insane — why buy a dollar for more than a dollar…? — and the very force that animates these bitcoin treasury companies.

Those of us looking at this with justifiable criticism presumed that the mNAVs would come down to roughly 1 via shares falling or staying flat while bitcoin’s fiat price rose. Fate played a trick on us by crashing the bitcoin price instead. In consequence, quite a lot of these airy, financial-alchemy monstrosities fell by much greater multiples.

Bailey’s own NAKA, for which Bitcoin Magazine provides certain marketing services, has been the most amusing (and for many people around these parts, financially tragic). When NAKA announced a major, $5-billion program of share issuance last month, the stock collapsed downward some 30% on the news — and kept tumbling thereafter, down a neat 70% from its initial pump around the announcement of reverse-merging with KindlyMD; $NAKA has fallen a whopping 85% from its highest point in May, recently setting a new low of $3.28.

Market prices are truth, and the truth here at the dusk of treasury companies’ dreamy delusion is that stuffing corporate balance sheets with retail-amassed equity and debt to acquire bitcoin was no way to the promised land.

“The market price tells you whether you’re right or wrong,” said Moshe Shen, managing director at APAC Wintermute Trading, on Day 1 of the recently concluded Bitcoin Asia in Hong Kong. I guess that tells us enough about the dubious prospects of Nakamoto and other bitcoin treasury companies.

The bitcoin treasury magic ended

The recurring pump-and-dump effect of issuing more shares for a bitcoin treasury strategy no longer come with a great pump to the share price; it falls, as sanity and traditional corporate finance would suggest. It doesn’t matter how many thousands of coins Saylor’s Strategy is eating, the price of MSTR keeps falling, having returned the sum total of zero percent to common shareholders since November last year; Metaplanet, having recently passed 20,000 coins in hyped-upii celebrations has seen its stock fall all the way back to levels not seen before the paper bitcoin summer kicked off.

In a recent article chronicling the treasury phenomenon, Nikou Asgari from the Financial Times remarked sourly that, “The crypto-buying strategy largely relies on issuing shares or raising debt to buy bitcoin and other tokens, hoping that this fuels share price growth.” Understating the point, she continues, “Raising capital becomes harder to do as company valuations fall, however.”

When the share price falls, and the mNAV compresses toward 1, the free-money magic goes away. We’ll find out if the hundreds of treasury companies out there have (any?) viability once the magic money-printing era is over.

Even Tyler Evans of UTXO Management, another BTC Inc and Nakamoto-involved company, confessed as much to Asgari in that same FT article: The market “got irrationally overheated,” and that the paper bitcoin summer “was the peak for both hype and for the number of companies launching.”

At the tail end of paper bitcoin summer, we see reality reasserting itself, dramatically recovering from the collective delusion that market prices on the world’s most liquid markets could veer so far off mNAV course.

Here’s a bold prediction: In a year’s time, bitcoin treasury companies won’t be a thing. Most of the lower-tiered ones won’t survive, and will instead spit out the coins they so gluttonously and recklessly gobbled up. The ones with serious moat and competent management teams, like Strategy or Metaplanet, will survive, but see their mNAV shrink to a sliver above zero, where they logically belong.

The paper bitcoin summer has ended, and I for one couldn’t be more excited to see these nightmares go back to the ethereal dreamlands from whence they came.

This post The End of Paper Bitcoin Summer first appeared on Bitcoin Magazine and is written by Joakim Book.

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Africa’s Chipper Cash Adopts Lightning at Scale: 50% of Bitcoin Transactions Now Instant and Low-Cost

Chipper Cash, one of Africa’s leading fintech companies, announced today that more than 50% of all Bitcoin transactions on its platform now run over the Lightning Network, marking one of the most significant real-world deployments of Lightning to date.

The company, which serves millions of consumers and businesses across Africa, has been using Lightning through infrastructure provider Voltage to deliver faster, cheaper, and more reliable payments. This achievement well showcases the growing importance of Bitcoin’s Lightning Network as a viable everyday payment rail in markets where legacy systems often struggle.

“Lightning-enabled payments have the potential to empower and accelerate greater, more reliable financial access across Africa,” said Maijid Moujaled, Cofounder and President of Chipper Cash. “Voltage’s reliable infrastructure reduces the complexity of building on Lightning, allowing us to focus on scale. With Voltage, Lightning can truly become the backbone for global, real-time payments by delivering near-instant settlement at low cost for people and businesses that need it most.”

Founded in 2018 as a peer-to-peer remittance platform, Chipper Cash has since evolved into a fully licensed fintech provider, offering cross-border payments, virtual cards in partnership with Visa, stock investing, and stablecoin rails. Lightning has quickly become central to that expansion. What began as a weekend discovery by Moujaled himself has grown into continent-wide adoption, fueled largely by word of mouth.

One Chipper Cash customer described Lightning simply: “It’s like discovering fire,” highlighting the speed and reliability compared to traditional methods.

Across much of Africa, financial infrastructure is plagued by outages and delays, according to the company. Even after years of operation, fiat partners continue to experience downtime. Lightning, in contrast, delivers near-instant, always-on payments. For markets accustomed to unreliable systems, this represents a leap forward in financial accessibility.

Key success metrics from Chipper Cash’s Lightning rollout include:

• Over 50% of Bitcoin transactions are now powered by Lightning.
• Adoption fueled organically through customer referrals.
• Faster, smoother cross-border and domestic payment experiences.
• Stronger resilience compared to fiat rails.

The integration also enables interoperability with Strike, Cash App, and other Lightning-powered platforms, broadening Chipper’s reach globally. Recently, the company launched Chessa, enabling remittances via crypto rails with instant settlement into over 25 local fiat currencies. Lightning sits at the core of this offering.

“What Chipper Cash is doing with Lightning proves that emerging markets can leapfrog outdated payment rails,” said Graham Krizek, CEO of Voltage. “With Voltage powering certain parts of their infrastructure, they’ve unlocked instant, global, and low-cost payments that work every time, everywhere.”

By integrating Lightning as part of its payments infrastructure, Chipper Cash has positioned itself as a continental leader in Bitcoin adoption. With growing customer demand and support from Voltage, the company is showcasing how African fintechs can leapfrog outdated systems and deliver next-generation financial services today.

This post Africa’s Chipper Cash Adopts Lightning at Scale: 50% of Bitcoin Transactions Now Instant and Low-Cost first appeared on Bitcoin Magazine and is written by Nik.

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Saylor’s Bitcoin Treasury Strategy Inspires Global Corporations, But Not All See Premiums

Bitcoin treasury strategies are being adopted by corporations worldwide. Following the example of Michael Saylor, the founder of Strategy (formerly MicroStrategy), the company with the largest known stack of Bitcoin in the world, others have copied his playbook and are attempting to follow suit; some are even trying to catch up.

Recently, Bitcoin Treasuries announced that over 1 million bitcoin are now held by publicly traded companies, representing more than 5% of the total Bitcoin supply, marking a historic shift for a novel asset that, until recently, was primarily owned by enthusiasts.  

The Bitcoin Treasury playbook that inspired many of these corporations was pioneered by Saylor and developed as a response to the “melting icecube” problem in traditional finance. Strategy, a lucrative cashflow-rich ‘business logic’ software company, was struggling to grow or keep up with inflation at the time, while competing with giants like Microsoft, which fought for every inch of the market with massive resources. The company’s cash reserves were thus ‘melting’ under inflation, a situation exacerbated at the time by the COVID-19 pandemic and the resulting monetary policy.

In an interview with Bitcoin Magazine, George Mekhail, Managing Director of Bitcoin for Corporations, explained the playbook, noting it “goes back to Saylor’s origin story: he looked at his balance sheet, saw that his cash balance was eroding, and couldn’t keep up with inflation just by putting his money in bonds.”

After reviewing his options, including gold, Saylor decided that a bitcoin treasury strategy was the only way out that did not involve selling the company and retiring. On August 11, 2020, Strategy announced that the company would transition to a bitcoin standard.

Strategy “generously announced the company would buy out any shareholders at a premium if they did not like the [bitcoin] strategy. Shortly after, on December 7th, the company announced a proposed private offering of $400 million of convertible senior notes. This offering was oversubscribed and completed for a total of $650 million of senior notes due in 2025, with a 0.750% coupon. With this move, MicroStrategy borrowed over half a billion dollars at a negative real interest rate to buy the hardest money the world has ever known.” Dylan Leclair wrote in 2021. Leclair today leads a similar strategy for Metaplanet, Japan’s equivalent of Strategy in the U.S.

Fast forward to 2025, and “Non-endemic companies are coming to the same realization.” Mekhail said that of the many corporations not otherwise involved with the Bitcoin industry, many are now adopting Bitcoin into their treasuries in various ways.

The Problem

While the Bitcoin Treasury strategy has so far borne undeniable benefits to some, not all corporations have seen the same results. Some are even trading at a discount to their bitcoin holdings. Alex Wals -Membership Experience Lead  at Bitcoin For Corporations told Bitcoin Magazine that “It seems like many of the companies in the Bitcoin-sphere, seeing rapid market cap growth, are holding companies riding bull market hype. In contrast, companies like Fold and Murano, which focus on building active business operations and generating real revenue, are not receiving nearly as much attention. This is despite potentially being better positioned long term, especially in a bear market.”

Take, for example, a company like Fold Holdings Inc. (NASDAQ: FLD), which recently surprised the market with a massive bitcoin treasury of 1492 BTC, placing it as the 35th biggest company when measured by total BTC holdings. Fold is a U.S. Bitcoin-centric financial services company with high-tech capabilities, offering rewards, payments, and savings options to American users through an innovative Fold app and Fold prepaid debit card. The company had been quietly accumulating bitcoin and developing its business since 2014, until its recent IPO earlier this year through a merger with FTAC Emerald Acquisition Corp. Despite its prominence as a unique and successful Bitcoin company, its Market Net Asset Value (MNAV) is currently under 1, at 0.916. In other words, the company’s public stock is trading at a lower value than its total bitcoin holdings.

Another interesting example is Murano Global Investments PLC (NASDAQ: MRNO), founded in 1996 and headquartered in London with operations centered in Mexico, is a real estate company specializing in the development, ownership, and investment in luxury hotel, resort, and commercial properties across the country, including high-profile assets like the Hyatt-operated Andaz and Vivid Grand Island Cancun resorts, the Accor-managed Mondrian Hotel in Mexico City, and projects in Baja California that emphasize tourism-driven hospitality and urban developments to capitalize on Mexico’s robust travel sector.

Over its nearly three decades, Murano has achieved notable success, reporting annual revenue of approximately 730 million MXN (around $36.5 million USD) in its latest fiscal year, with a 155% year-over-year growth. However, it faced challenges, including a net loss of 3.57 billion MXN, amid expanding operations.

In July 2025, the company announced a strategic pivot to build a Bitcoin treasury, starting with the purchase of 21 BTC valued at over $2.1 million, funded through operating cash flows and a $500 million Standby Equity Purchase Agreement (SEPA) with Yorkville Advisors, while joining the Bitcoin for Corporations initiative as a Chairman’s Circle Member to accelerate corporate adoption. Looking ahead, Murano plans to allocate a significant portion of SEPA proceeds and real estate divestitures—like sale-leaseback transactions on assets such as Grand Island Cancun condominiums—toward accumulating a robust bitcoin stack, targeting a $10 billion treasury within five years through ongoing purchases from operating profits, integration of BTC payments and rewards in its hotels, and installation of crypto ATMs to enhance guest experiences and hedge against inflation.

Today, the company has an enterprise value of nearly one billion dollars, while its stock’s market capitalization is less than half of that at 432 million, according to Yahoo Finance. The company’s stock has also suffered a significant correction since the bitcoin strategy announcement, dropping from $10.41 to $5.45 per share, suggesting investors disagree with or perhaps misunderstand the company’s pivot to Bitcoin.

Update: Murano has now made an update to its filings announcing the pause of their Bitcoin treasury strategy.

Two Types Of Bitcoin Treasury Companies

The variation in results seen across the many Bitcoin treasury companies emerging so far has lead analysts to develop a framework that categorizes these companies into two essential types, ‘pure play’ accretive companies that follow the Strategy model of maximum bitcoin accumulation, and non-accretive sometimes non-endemic companies that add bitcoin to their balance sheet as a store of value, but optimize for other business metrics outside of the Bitcoin industry.  

On the two broad categories of Bitcoin treasury companies, Mekhail explained that “Accretive companies like MicroStrategy and MetaPlanet get the most attention because they have the most volatility in their stock and therefore they have the most speculation in the retail markets, especially.” Adding that “If you’re not accretive, these companies are still very interesting. Companies like Fold, which quietly IPOed… they’re just not announcing a new Bitcoin buy every week because it’s not a core part of their strategy.”

Mekhail dug deeper into market sentiment and how investors appear to be analysing these companies saying that  “The market really isn’t as interested in how much Bitcoin you have on your balance sheet. They are more interested in things like these new metrics that we’re seeing” referring to MNAV which compares total value of bitcoin holdings versus stock market capitalization, bitcoin per share which measures how much bitcoin each share purchase should represent, or bitcoin related yield.

Chaitayan Jain, Bitcoin Strategy Manager at Strategy, reinforced this idea in an interview with Bitcoin Magazine, saying that “If the company is not valued at a significant premium or even a reasonable premium to its MNAV, it is broadly down to the belief from most of the shareholders that they may not be able to outperform spot bitcoin. Be it because the underlying operating business is not generating cash flows that are being swept into Bitcoin, or the company doesn’t have the ability to access the capital markets at high velocity to raise equity or debt and buy more bitcoin to increase bitcoin per share.”

Investor Education and Market Opportunities

Companies seeking a more robust response from the market after integrating bitcoin into their treasury strategies will likely need to engage in targeted and ongoing investor education. They will have to clearly articulate their Bitcoin thesis and outline their plan to acquire more of it, particularly how they will leverage the benefits of being a cash flow-generating corporation, which can afford cheap access to credit. Jain made this very clear, noting that “It comes down to two simple ideas: access to credit in public markets, cheap credit, intelligent credit, and long-dated credit. And the second is the robustness of the operating business and the robustness of the cash flows and bitcoin not being a drag, not becoming a distraction for the company.”

Investors, on the other hand, may benefit from taking a closer look at some of these companies, which often have very long-term views on Bitcoin, presenting investors with a significant opportunity. Mekhail, speaking from his experience talking to corporations about their Bitcoin strategy, noted that “Once you understand Bitcoin, I think your expectations really are fairly long term. And you have this low time preference where you understand that this is a race. This is the digital gold rush, and it is all about speed. So expectations from companies adopting Bitcoin treasury strategies are fairly muted in that they’re here for the long haul.”

Bitcoin Magazine is wholly owned by BTC Inc., which operates Bitcoin For Corporations, a platform focused on corporate adoption of Bitcoin. BFChas a variety of relationships with Bitcoin businesses, including some of those mentioned in this article.

This post Saylor’s Bitcoin Treasury Strategy Inspires Global Corporations, But Not All See Premiums first appeared on Bitcoin Magazine and is written by Juan Galt.

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Metaplanet Raises $1.4 Billion to Expand Bitcoin Treasury in Upsized International Share Offering

Metaplanet Inc. (TSE Standard: 3350) has announced the successful pricing and upsizing of its international share offering, raising JPY 205 billion (~USD 1.4 billion) to fuel its ongoing Bitcoin-first treasury strategy.

The company confirmed that 385 million new shares will be issued at JPY 553 per share, generating a total issue price of JPY 212.9 billion. After deducting fees, the total amount paid in will reach JPY 205.3 billion, of which JPY 204.1 billion will be allocated directly to Bitcoin-related initiatives.

In a statement, CEO Simon Gerovich said: “Metaplanet has finalized its international offering, upsized from 180M underwritten to 385M shares. Total raise: JPY 205B (~USD 1.4B). More Bitcoin purchases incoming.”

Expanding the Bitcoin Treasury

According to the release, JPY 183.7 billion of the proceeds will be used to purchase Bitcoin between September and October 2025, significantly increasing Metaplanet’s holdings. As of September 1, 2025, the company already holds 20,000 Bitcoin, valued at approximately JPY 322 billion.

Metaplanet first announced its treasury transformation in May 2024, committing to adopt Bitcoin as its primary reserve asset. The move was designed to hedge against Japan’s prolonged negative real interest rates, high national debt, and ongoing yen depreciation.

Income Generation from Bitcoin

The remaining JPY 20.4 billion from the offering will be allocated to the company’s Bitcoin Income Generation Business, which generates yield through Bitcoin options trading. In Q2 FY2025, this segment produced JPY 1.9 billion in revenue, highlighting its role as a complementary revenue driver to Bitcoin accumulation.

Metaplanet stated that these allocations will help the company achieve sustained profitability while strengthening its Bitcoin-focused treasury model.

Strengthening Market Position

The offering also marks a substantial increase in Metaplanet’s capital base, with capital stock and capital surplus each rising by JPY 102.6 billion. Following the issuance, the company’s total outstanding shares will increase from 755.9 million to 1.14 billion shares.

By executing one of the largest Bitcoin-focused capital raises in Asia, Metaplanet positions itself as a leading corporate pioneer in Bitcoin adoption. The firm aims to set an example for other listed companies across Japan and Asia seeking to manage inflation risks and currency devaluation through digital assets.

For those interested in hearing more about Metaplanet, check out the video below where Gerovich explains how the company became the number one traded stock in Japan:

This post Metaplanet Raises $1.4 Billion to Expand Bitcoin Treasury in Upsized International Share Offering first appeared on Bitcoin Magazine and is written by Nik.

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