Bitcoin Roundup

Weekly market commentary covering macro economics, geopolitics, and Bitcoin-specific developments.

August 21, 2026
U.S. bond intervention is like ‘paying your mortgage with your credit card,’ JPMorgan’s Sullivan says
The Treasury announced that it will at least double its long-duration debt buybacks beginning September 9. In plain English, the government is buying longer-...
August 21, 2026
Bitcoin surges 12% in two days as Trump, crypto execs lead last ditch effort for Clarity Act
The White House brought together executives from Coinbase, Kraken, Robinhood, Ripple, and Chainlink this week to push a “fair version” of the CLARITY Act thr...
August 21, 2026
Strategy sits on $1.4 billion profit on bitcoin holdings as price surges
Buried beneath the Strategy headline is one of the more interesting signals of the week. SATA, Strive’s perpetual preferred stock, briefly returned to its $1...
August 14, 2026
Inside Wave 1: Tracing the Attacker’s Steps Through the 1,082 BTC Coldcard Drain
Praveen Perera’s forensic work on the first Coldcard theft wave is both impressive and unsettling. He traced 1,195 drained addresses, reconstructed 328 seeds...
August 14, 2026
Bitcoin’s BIP-110 fork is 300 blocks behind BTC and six years from fixing itself
We gave a full presentation on BIP-110 at Bitcoin Charlotte a few weeks ago, and we genuinely wrestled with whether to platform it at all. I thought it was a...
August 14, 2026
Strategy sells 1,690 bitcoin, raises $653 million from MSTR shares
Strategy sold another 1,690 bitcoin last week for $108.6 million and used the proceeds to repurchase STRC preferred stock. Combined with the prior week, Stra...
August 7, 2026
Hackers steal over $130M by exploiting bug in offline hardware wallets
The Coldcard incident does not prove self-custody is too difficult. It proves that serious self-custody should probably not depend on outsourced entropy. Col...
August 7, 2026
Strategy sold another $105 million of bitcoin last week, repurchased $81.2 million of STRC
Strategy sold 1,638 bitcoin last week for about $105 million, below its average cost, to fund preferred dividends and repurchase STRC. At roughly the same ti...
August 7, 2026
Situationship
Arthur Hayes argues that the AI boom resembles the 2008 housing bubble more than the dot-com bubble. The dangerous part is the credit financing data centers,...
July 31, 2026
The Coldcard Failure Is the Only Thing Worth Talking About This Week
Roughly 594 bitcoin, worth about $38 million, was swept from around 500 wallets in less than half an hour. That number is almost certainly going to grow. The...
July 24, 2026
Bitcoin settles near $65,000 as oil's march toward $100 fails to spook the market
The Strait of Hormuz is effectively closed again. IMF PortWatch recorded only 15 transit calls on July 19, with the seven-day moving average falling to 12.14...
July 24, 2026
BlackRock, Coinbase, Strategy Among Nine Firms Launching the Bitcoin Security Consortium, Pledging $15 Million To BTC Security Development
Open-source projects survive because the people and businesses that benefit from them fund the work. BlackRock, Coinbase, Strategy, Block, Fidelity, and four...
July 24, 2026
Bitcoin Slumps But These Mining Stocks Are Up Thanks to AI Deals
Hut 8, CleanSpark, and MARA rallied between 3% and 7% while Bitcoin and the Nasdaq fell. Hut 8 signed a second 15-year lease for 352 megawatts of AI capacity...
July 17, 2026
Consumer prices rose 3.5% annually in June, less than expected as energy prices eased
The headline writers got their first monthly CPI decline since April 2020 and immediately reached for the confetti. June CPI fell 0.4%, largely because energy...
July 17, 2026
so how do we save our farm land and stop all these dumb data centers?
This isn’t an article, it’s a tweet, from a growing popularity WNBA star Sophie Cunningham. She’s having a nice run lately in social status. Went viral for being a...
July 17, 2026
China's Moonshot unveils world's largest open AI model, closing in on US rivals
Speaking of China, they are crushing the open source AI model development lately. Last week, Chinese open source models were considered to be roughly 6 months...
July 10, 2026
Strategy (MSTR) Sells 3,588 Bitcoin to Cover Preferred Dividends
I do not view Strategy’s sale of 3,588 bitcoin as a change in conviction. I view it as the next step in the financial architecture Michael Saylor has been building around the...
July 10, 2026
GPT‑5.6: Frontier intelligence that scales with your ambition
OpenAI’s general release of GPT-5.6 is important for reasons that extend well beyond another round of benchmark charts. Frontier AI has been moving toward permissioned access,...
July 10, 2026
U.S., Iran trade fresh strikes as Trump says he’s ‘not sure’ he wants deal
Traffic through the Strait of Hormuz is recovering from the near-zero levels reached in June, but the waterway remains severely impaired. Before the war, the strait routinely...
July 3, 2026
Exclusive-Meta's Zuckerberg says AI agent tech progressing slower than expected
This is a little shocking coming from an organization as large and sophisticated as Meta, but it also makes perfect sense. The agentic AI space is moving so...
July 3, 2026
World's Largest Data Center Project On Verge Of Collapse After Blackstone Unexpectedly Pulls Out
The American public hates data centers right now. The propaganda has worked. Getting angry at businesses for driving up electricity demand is completely back...
July 3, 2026
House Democrats accuse Trump of 'hijacking' America's 250th birthday for his own gain
God forbid the sitting president push for a large celebration for our nation's Semiquincentennial. Being angry about this is loser mentality. Happy Fourth of...
June 26, 2026
Apple raises hardware prices; AI gets the blame
Apple raising hardware prices because of AI-driven memory demand is a clean example of how fast the AI capex cycle is bleeding into the real economy. This is...
June 26, 2026
Strategy's STRC Preferred Stock Hits Record Lows as Leverage Cascade Deepens
The STRC and SATA selloff looks like a pretty serious leverage unwind event. These instruments were being treated (and marketed) like high-yield, low-volatil...
June 26, 2026
Trump Says Iran Violated Ceasefire With Hormuz Drone Attack On Cargo Ship
The Strait of Hormuz situation looked like it was starting to move in the right direction. Shipping data showed traffic rebounding to the highest level since...
June 19, 2026
Israel and Hezbollah agree to ceasefire as continued strikes in Lebanon reported
The word “ceasefire” is doing a lot of work here. The BBC reports that Israel and Hezbollah have agreed to stop shooting, while also reporting that Israeli...
June 19, 2026
Illinois Taxed Every Crypto Transfer. The Blockchain Doesn't Care.
Illinois just gave the rest of the country a preview of the next phase of financial surveillance. The state’s new Digital Asset Tax Act imposes a 0.2% tax...
June 19, 2026
Fable 5 ban: 4 open models responded before Anthropic could restore access
The Fable 5 ban is a supply-chain story. Anthropic had one of the best models in the world, and then the U.S. government reportedly ordered access be restr...
June 12, 2026
Iranian State Media Claims Draft US Deal Includes Nuclear Ban
Trump says there is a “great settlement” with Iran. Iran says nothing is final. Meanwhile, US forces reportedly shot down two Iranian one-way attack drones n...
June 12, 2026
Strategy (MSTR) CEO Says Bitcoin Sale Was About Market ‘Inoculation,’ Not a Retreat
The Strategy & Strive vs bitcoin in cold storage debate is classic bear market tribalism. In bitcoin land, when the price is down 50% for a year or so, we st...
June 12, 2026
It's not SpaceX. Bitcoin ETF outflows may be an arbitrage story
The past few weeks, the narrative has been “investors are selling bitcoin to raise cash for SpaceX and AI IPOs”. I do not really buy it. If this were a clean...
June 5, 2026
Zcash plummets 38% as Shielded Labs reveals a major bug that went undetected for four years
Zcash is the shitcoin story of the week. A critical vulnerability in its Orchard privacy pool reportedly sat undetected for four years. A researcher using An...
June 5, 2026
Peace Talks Stall: U.S. Denies Iranian Claims Of Warning Shots At Destroyers
ZeroHedge ran a piece this week on Iran warning that American bases in the region are “legitimate targets” if they are used in aggression against Iran. Sure ...
June 5, 2026
Bitcoin price just tagged 200-week trend line that defined 2022 bear market
Bitcoin is doing that thing again, crashing 50% before running up 10x. I was certainly wrong last fall expecting bitcoin to never go below $100k again. But i...
May 29, 2026
Anthropic raises $65B in Series H funding at $965B post-money valuation
A single privately held AI startup is now valued at roughly two thirds of the entire market capitalization of bitcoin. That is utterly insane. AI companies a...
May 29, 2026
Treasury Department prepares $250 bill with Trump's face on it
This story is almost too on the nose. The Treasury Department is preparing for a proposed $250 bill featuring the sitting president's face, pending congressi...
May 29, 2026
Ships Attacked in Strait of Hormuz This Week, Chevron CEO Says
The Strait of Hormuz is still so incredibly closed. The political jawboning cannot warp reality. There is no meaningful traffic through the Strait of Hormuz....
May 22, 2026
U.S. Lawmaker Unveils Bill to Codify Strategic Bitcoin Reserve, Draws Bipartisan Support
This was exciting momentum in DC. Bipartisan support for codifying a strategic bitcoin reserve would help make permanent bitcoin’s current political tailwind...
May 22, 2026
SpaceX Heads Into Historic IPO With a $1.45 Billion Bitcoin Treasury on Its Books
Don’t look now, but one of the most anticipated IPOs for one of the most ambitious companies in history has “a little” bitcoin on the balance sheet. SpaceX h...
May 22, 2026
Mark Cuban Sells Most of His Bitcoin, Calls It a Failed Hedge
We all get bitcoin at the price we deserve. Mark has clearly not done the work to understand bitcoin yet. His take here will age like a glass of milk on a ho...
May 15, 2026
US And China Agree To Establish Trade And Investment Boards As Trump-Xi Summit Delivers Modest Wins
President Trump and like two dozen of the business world’s most powerful people visited Beijing to meet with President Xi this week for a two-day summit that...
May 15, 2026
Strategy’s STRC hits $1.53B volume amid fresh Bitcoin treasury push
Strategy’s STRC preferred stock is starting to look like a capital-markets machine purpose-built to vacuum bitcoin off the market. Yahoo reported STRC doing...
May 15, 2026
It’s a More Secret Version of Bitcoin and It’s on a Tear
The Gell-Mann Amnesia Effect is a cognitive bias where a person reads a news article about a topic they are deeply familiar with, recognizes numerous errors...
May 8, 2026
OpenAI Valuation Doubts Loom As Softbank Scales Back Margin Loan
OpenAI’s valuation issue is not a referendum on whether AI is useful. AI is obviously INCREDIBLY useful. The mistake is assuming “useful” automatically means...
May 8, 2026
AI Is Causing A Tidal Wave Of Job Cuts At Crypto Firms
I am skeptical of the “AI caused crypto layoffs” framing. Maybe AI is part of it at the margin. Every company is trying to look leaner, faster, and more auto...
May 8, 2026
Bitcoin Price Rockets Past $81,000 for the First Time Since January
Bitcoin bumped back above $81,000 this week, up roughly 35% from the ~$60,000 bottom back in February. That is a hell of a move in any environment. It is eve...
May 1, 2026
Strategy and Blockstream CEOs Paint Vision of Bitcoin’s Financial Future
At the conference this week, a lot of the discussion was about Strategy’s preferred stock, STRC. The product targets a $100 par and pays a discretionary divi...
May 1, 2026
Core inflation rate hit 3.2% in March as first-quarter growth disappointed at 2%
Core PCE came out this week at 3.2%, headline at 3.5%, gas above $4, and federal spending up 9.3%. This very much feels like the calm before the storm on con...
May 1, 2026
Fed holds rates steady but with highest level of dissent since 1992
This meeting likely was the last with Chair Jerome Powell at the helm. He is due to step down from the top job in mid-May, although his term as a Fed governo...
April 24, 2026
Saylor's Strategy Holdings Top 800,000 Bitcoin After 3rd Biggest Purchase In History
Michael Saylor’s company, Strategy, just crossed 800k bitcoin on the balance sheet, after acquiring $2.54B worth (34k coins at $74k average price). This was ...
April 24, 2026
Charles Schwab to Launch Spot Bitcoin Trading for Retail Clients
It has been quite entertaining watching all of Wall Street go from calling bitcoin “worthless” an “index of money laundering” the “very definition of a bubbl...
April 24, 2026
Trump's "Sock Puppet"
“Warsh wants a robust reform of the inflation framework”. This is likely a little way’s out, but expect an adjustment to the historical 2% inflation target a...
April 17, 2026
You Say Ceasefire, and I Say Escalation: Ten31 Timestamp 944,597
The Strait of Hormuz being closed continues to be the only macro factor that matters for markets. It is impossible to calculate the potential impacts of an...
April 17, 2026
No Trade Zone
Arthur Hayes agrees, the Strait of Hormuz is the only thing that matters in macro, for the time being. He lays out 4 possible paths forward, none of which...
April 17, 2026
Ceasefire-Squeeze Morphs Into 'Spot Up, Vol Up' Panic-Buying In Stocks; Bonds, Credit, & Crude Ain't Buying It
The irony of how much provably “fake news” has come out from this administration about progress (or lack thereof) in the manufactured conflict on the Middl...
April 9, 2026
Trump Says Iran ‘Better Stop Now’ If It’s Charging Oil Tankers Fees To Go Through Strait Of Hormuz
If the reporting is right and Iran is charging transit fees in bitcoin for passage through Hormuz, that is one of the most on-the-nose stories imaginable f...
April 9, 2026
Hormuz Hope Sparks Stocks’ Longest Win Streak In 6 Months; Bonds, Bullion, & Bitcoin Bid
This is the kind of tape that tells you nobody believes the surface narrative. If a ceasefire headline were truly de-risking the world, you would not see b...
April 9, 2026
China’s PBOC Aggressively Buys March Gold Dip
China buying the dip in gold for the seventeenth straight month is not a commodity trade. It is a geopolitical statement. When a central bank keeps accumul...
April 3, 2026
To Hike or Not to Hike: Ten31 Timestamp 942,634
I’m not sure why John Arnold chooses to publish this awesome content on Saturdays, but I am grateful for it, nonetheless. This is the follow-up from Ten31 ...
April 3, 2026
Morgan Stanley Enters the Bitcoin ETF Race at 0.14%
Morgan Stanley is pricing its upcoming spot bitcoin ETF (ticker MSBT) at 14 basis points annually, undercutting BlackRock's IBIT at 25 bps and Grayscale's ...
April 3, 2026
Cash Is King: Dowd Sees $10,000 Gold As The Credit Market "Is Starting To End The Party"
Ed Dowd has been warning about private credit for months, and the situation continues to deteriorate. Blue Owl gated investors. Apollo gated investors. Bla...
March 27, 2026
OpenClaw is taking the tech world by storm. Here's what you need to know about it.
I have mentioned OpenClaw previously on this platform, but I feel it is worth calling attention to again. OpenClaw is an open source project that uses a cl...
March 27, 2026
Escalation On All Fronts As Iran Says Never Requested US Energy Strike Pause; Israel Goes After Industrial Targets
Is it just me, or does it feel like we are not winning this war? The Strait of Hormuz remains entirely closed. Not sort of closed, not slowed down, not del...
March 27, 2026
Bitcoin Charlotte
For those that don't already know, I help out with the Bitcoin Charlotte community by running workshops and meetups from time to time. We are one of the ol...
March 20, 2026
Wall Street Reacts To 'Neutral' Fed Hold
The Fed held rates at 3.5–3.75% this week and tried to say absolutely nothing. Powell's presser was a masterclass in calculated ambiguity. He likely doesn'...
March 20, 2026
The Global Capital Circuit
The Ten31 team published one of their best pieces this week. The thesis: capital has always operated within a stack of claims, with senior debt at the top,...
March 20, 2026
Oil prices fall after Brent briefly touches $119 as Netanyahu says Israel helping to open Strait of Hormuz
Brent touched $119 this week before pulling back to $109 after Netanyahu claimed Israel was helping reopen the Strait of Hormuz. The intraday swings have b...
March 13, 2026
Why Constant Talk Of TACO Is Likely Wrong, With Both Sides Escalating
The "TACO" crowd keeps expecting geopolitical de-escalation because escalation feels too costly. The article's key point is straightforward: trade pressure...
March 13, 2026
Coinbase Is Quietly Trying to Kill Bitcoin's De Minimis Tax Exemption
Fuck Coinbase. Avoid this Shitcoin Casino at all costs. They have been a net positive for the bitcoin movement over the past 15 years, but they are working...
March 13, 2026
China's De-Dollarization Push Meets Washington's Defense Of The Dollar
This piece is a useful reminder that de-dollarization is a slow plumbing project that has been underway for years. Currency swaps, bilateral trade settleme...
March 6, 2026
Kraken Becomes First Crypto Firm to Win Access to Fed's Core Payments System
I guess this is a big deal, but I confess to not caring very much because I don't support these crypto casino businesses. For me, any service provider that...
March 6, 2026
First A China-Linked Ship, Now A US-Sanctioned Gas Tanker Transits Hormuz Chokepoint
I saw a post this week about the US potentially insuring or escorting tankers in “the Gulf” and I genuinely wasn't sure if it was in the Middle East or the...
March 6, 2026
Fast Takeoffs and Hard Landings: Ten31 Timestamp 938,757
The team at Ten31 is very high signal. I can confirm that John Arnold is, by my standards, a very smart guy. Highly recommend tuning in to this content and...
February 27, 2026
Private Credit Fears Deepen With UBS Warning of 15% Defaults
Blue Owl Capital permanently halted redemptions from one of its private credit funds last week. The stock fell for eleven straight days — the worst streak ...
February 27, 2026
Jack Dorsey just halved the size of Block’s employee base — and he says your company is next
Jack Dorsey cut Block's workforce nearly in half, from 10,000 to just under 6,000, and said AI "fundamentally changes what it means to build and run a comp...
February 27, 2026
Brookings experts on the Supreme Court’s tariff decision
The Supreme Court struck down Trump's IEEPA tariffs 6-3. Within hours he signed a new 10% global tariff under Section 122, then hiked that to 15%. The medi...
February 20, 2026
Geopolitical Tensions Fuel Massive Gold Reserve Accumulation
Central banks around the world have added nearly 2,000 tonnes of gold to their reserves since 2020, with China leading at over 350 tonnes followed by Polan...
February 20, 2026
Fed minutes show officials grappling with policy split, impact of AI on economy
The January FOMC minutes dropped this week, and buried in the usual bureaucratic language was an interesting comment: several officials suggested the Fed m...
February 20, 2026
Bitcoin sinks to $66,000, U.S. stocks lose steam as Fed minutes mention possible rate hike
Bitcoin is now staring at its fifth consecutive weekly loss, the worst streak since the 2022 bear market that bottomed in the $16k range. It has fallen rou...
February 13, 2026
Something Big Is Happening
Matt Shumer, an AI startup founder, published a piece this week comparing the current moment in AI to February 2020. He draws the analogy to the "this seem...
February 13, 2026
Microsoft AI CEO Warns Most White Collar Jobs Fully Automated "Within Next 12-18 Months"; Anthropic Fears Potential For 'Heinous Crimes'
Continuing on the AI topic, the impacts of AI are being speculated about constantly as of late. There are essentially two camps, as per usual in current ev...
February 13, 2026
Crypto lender BlockFills suspends withdrawals amid faltering bitcoin price
“Not your keys, not your coins.” Historically, when crypto companies “pause withdrawals”, they “go bankrupt” shortly after. The beauty, and pain, of bitcoi...
February 6, 2026
Tether Launches Open-Source Bitcoin Mining Operating System
Open source for the win. This is great to see. One of the perks of being the most profitable per-employee company in the history of the planet is that Teth...
February 6, 2026
Resources: BitcoinOneLiners.com
This is not an article but a resource I have been meaning to share. I forced myself to tinker with AI the other weekend so I could get a better handle on j...
February 6, 2026
Bitcoin price rebounds to $67,000, remains on track for worst week since 2022 amid 'fear and fatigue'
Wow, this week was brutal for the price of bitcoin. Yesterday was the steepest one-day decline since the FTX fraud was uncovered in 2022. It was incredible...
January 30, 2026
Straight From "Central Casting": President Trump Confirms Kevin Warsh As Next Fed Chair Nominee
Assuming confirmation, Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell will be replaced by Kevin Warsh. The Trump admin expects a dovish positioning from this pick, bu...
January 30, 2026
Odds of US government shutdown rise after funding deal stalls in Senate
Remember the last time the government shut down? Me neither. It was 43 days starting on October 1st, 2025. Makes you wonder, what are we paying all these t...
January 23, 2026
Onramp Bitcoin Statutory Trust Shareholder Letter
The team at Onramp are top notch, and their shareholder letter this year makes a powerful real estate analogy around the distribution of old coins we have ...
January 23, 2026
Hard Negotiations with Allies
Michael McNair is quickly becoming a go-to for macro commentary for me. His assessment of the Trump strategy is intriguing. It’s not quite 4D chess, but pe...
January 16, 2026
War on the Cartels
McNair essentially predicted the Maduro kidnapping in an earlier piece. His assessment of the United States’ positioning on hemispheric defense / control i...
January 16, 2026
Frowny Cloud
Arthur Hayes is a gazillionaire from the crypto industry. While his takes on altcoins are largely awful, he understand the macro landscape better than all ...
January 16, 2026
Bitcoin To Hit $2.9M By 2050 As It Muscles Into Global Trade: VanEck
Wall Street is bullish bitcoin. The growing chorus of Patagonia vests calling for bitcoin to go to the moon seems to be largely ignored by the public. This...
January 9, 2026
The Venezuelan Drone Crisis
Last week was one of those weeks in history where decades happen. This article was written before Maduro’s capture, which makes it even more impressive of ...
January 9, 2026
Blackstone Craters After Trump Teases Institutional Ban On Single-Family Homes
The housing affordability crisis is a direct symptom of the money printer. Banning certain types of owners from the asset class is a bandaid over a bullet ...
January 9, 2026
A mysterious online gambler made $400,000 betting on the removal of Maduro
Prediction markets are an interesting new phenomenon and certainly have strong free market aspects. One interesting thing to consider is that for an outcom...
January 2, 2026
Taxation Is A Humiliation Ritual
Some people are surprised that there is fraud in the system. I encourage those folks to explore the concept of moral hazard. Economist Milton Friedman famo...
January 2, 2026
Bitcoin Limps Into New Year at $87,000, Down 30% From All-Time Highs
It has now been 87 days since bitcoin hit its most recent all-time-high of just over $126k. Based on sentiment in the space, you would guess that the most ...
December 26, 2025
Letter #1: Notes From The Inside
If you have been reading my content for a few weeks now, you are already aware of Keonne Rodriguez, a 37-year-old American software developer from Florida,...
December 26, 2025
Gross Domestic Product, 3rd Quarter 2025 (Initial Estimate) and Corporate Profits (Preliminary)
“Real gross domestic product (GDP) increased at an annual rate of 4.3 percent in the third quarter of 2025 (July, August, and September), according to the ...
December 26, 2025
Gold, silver and platinum sparkle at all-time peaks
A single ounce of gold surpassed $4,500 dollars this week. In 1971, under President Nixon, the U.S. “temporarily” suspended the gold standard. At the time,...
December 19, 2025
JPMorgan Launches Its First Tokenized Money Market Fund On Ethereum
Wall Street continues to miss the mark. Bitcoin is money without a centralized issuer or trusted third party. This is the only innovation of blockchain. “C...
December 19, 2025
China BTC miners shut down roughly 1.3 GW in Xinjiang amid CCP scrutiny
China banned bitcoin (mining) for the nth time this week. Here’s just a handful of the previous times they’ve done so: 2009, 2013, 2014, 2017, twice in 202...
December 19, 2025
Bitcoin Miner Hut 8 Secures Google-Backed Deal to Build Up to 2.3 GW of AI Capacity
This is an interesting trend that I believe will age poorly. Some bitcoin mining businesses are pivoting their business model to suit the rampant growth an...
December 12, 2025
Twenty One Capital Goes Live on the NYSE – Now What?
The concept of bitcoin treasury companies, more aptly called leveraged bitcoin equities, is bitcoin + leverage = amplified bitcoin performance. Amplified i...
December 12, 2025
The Fed is the most divided it’s been in more than six years
The Fed cut rates 25 basis points on Wednesday, which was expected, then not expected, then uncertain, then for sure expected by prediction markets over th...
December 12, 2025
Meet Bill and Keonne: Real People, Real Lives
This one is not an article, but a call to action. If you believe in freedom of speech, please consider signing the petition to pardon Bill and Keonne, inno...

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