BITCOIN BOX SCORE

Exchange Rate: $62,640
Market Capitalization: $1.25T
Hash Rate (90 days): 959.1 EH/s
Transactions (30 days): 19,612,375
Network Fees (economy): 1 sat/vB
Bitcoin Dominance: 58.75%

What do these numbers mean?

It's easy to lose sight, in a week like this one, of how astonishingly good the world is getting. This week, Midjourney, the AI image company that bootstrapped to $200 million in revenue in year one with zero outside investors, unveiled a full-body ultrasonic CT scanner. It has no radiation, no magnets, and is 60 times faster than an MRI and 10 times cheaper. It amounts to the first new whole-body imaging modality in roughly 50 years and was developed with no venture capital, no government grant, and no permission – just capital, deployed with craft, by people free to build.

The pace of technology development can feel dizzying, as if the world is accelerating away from you with nothing to do but hold on. But there is something to do, and Pierre Rochard named it back in 2012: working and saving are revolutionary acts.

Every dollar of capital set aside funds the technology and specialization that quietly strip the state of its monopolies, with no formal protest required.

The catch is that saving is challenging. On the fiat hamster wheel, inflation eats your savings faster than you can stack them, so you sprint just to stay in place, looking around for the next big investment opportunity, taking on risk.

That is precisely what bitcoin fixes: money no one can print or debase. Work, save, and store it in the one asset built to hold its value.

NEWS

Illinois enacts tax on storing or transferring digital assets

Governor J.B. Pritzker signed a $56 billion budget carrying a last-minute 0.2% tax on "exchanging, transferring or storing" digital assets for any business with at least $100,000 in gross receipts that serves state residents. Industry groups note there is no comparable transaction tax on stocks, bonds, or derivatives anywhere in the country, and with the legislature out of session until fall, their likeliest path to killing it is a lawsuit.

Taxing the rails until businesses leave

This isn't a tax on profit or money flows – it's a 0.2% toll on the act of moving or custodying an asset, charged transaction by transaction, that will crush the margins of any exchange, custodian, or bitcoin business serving Illinois customers and hand the work to competitors one state line away.

Illinois can least afford the self-own. It already bled more than 56,000 net residents to other states in 2023 and 2024, which is the third-largest exodus in the nation, while business departures have tripled since the pandemic, with Boeing, Citadel, and the NYSE's 143-year-old Chicago floor already gone. Singling out digital-asset firms for a levy that spares stocks and bonds will just accelerate the migration and push bitcoin businesses to route around the state entirely.

Strategy's STRC preferred stock slips to a record low

Strategy's "Stretch" preferred stock (STRC), engineered to hold a stable ~$100 price while paying a 12.9% variable dividend, closed Wednesday at $89 and has since slid to roughly $84.59, its lowest levels since the instrument debuted in 2025. With STRC below par, Strategy has paused the at-the-market program it normally uses to issue new shares and buy bitcoin.

A soft peg is only as strong as belief

STRC's "$100" is a soft peg that exists mostly in the minds of its holders. There is no protocol-level mechanism forcing the price back, which is precisely what makes it such a tempting short. As one analyst outlines in detail:

Oman makes its state-run national mining pool mandatory for all licensed miners

Oman's Ministry of Transport, Communications and Information Technology launched Omanhash, a state-backed pool that every licensed bitcoin miner in the sultanate is now required to join, consolidating roughly 10 exahashes per second and giving the government direct visibility into mining revenue, energy use, and newly minted coins.

Permissioned hashrate is a contradiction in terms

That sovereign states now compete to host and corral mining is itself a bullish signal about bitcoin's strategic value. But the protocol doesn't care which pool finds a block, and hashpower can relocate at will — which is exactly why geographically distributed, independent pools and solo miners matter more, not less, as governments try to centralize the hash they host.

The Fed is quietly building a wholesale CBDC despite an executive order banning one

Despite President Trump's executive order barring development of a central bank digital currency, the New York Fed remains an active participant in the BIS's Project Agorá, which tokenizes central bank reserves and commercial bank deposits for cross-border payments – a "tokenized reserve" that critics argue is a wholesale CBDC by another name.

A CBDC by any other name

A tokenized central bank reserve is programmable money an authority can surveil, freeze, or expire by design. bitcoin is the opposite architecture: no issuer, no smart-contract kill switch, no central ledger to reprogram. Whatever you call Agorá, the choice it clarifies is between money someone controls and money no one does.

BITCOIN ADOPTION CONTINUES

BlackRock launched a new ETF pairing spot bitcoin exposure with a covered-call overlay to generate income, widening the menu of yield-bearing bitcoin products from the world's largest asset manager.

Kraken launched CFTC-regulated bitcoin and crypto perpetual futures for U.S. traders, bringing onshore a product American retail had long been pushed offshore to access.

Mexican billionaire Ricardo Salinas revealed he now holds roughly 70% of his investment portfolio in bitcoin and urged ordinary investors to convert home equity into bitcoin exposure, up from a 10% allocation in 2020.

Strive (ASST) added another 73 bitcoins for $4.7 million, lifting its treasury to 19,105, and shifted its SATA preferred dividend to a daily schedule.

Cashu released a WooCommerce plugin in the official WordPress store, letting an estimated 3 million online shops accept bitcoin Lightning and privacy-preserving ecash payments.

Bitcoin Core developer Sjors Provoost opened a pull request adding MuSig2 multi-signature support with BIP388 wallet policies to Bitcoin Core's wallet software.

Peach Bitcoin launched Peach Web, letting users trade bitcoin peer-to-peer directly in a desktop browser while keys stay secured on their phone.

Nunchuk launched a phased inheritance rollout, letting users split a bitcoin inheritance across multiple heirs with custom payout schedules over time.

HOW BITCOIN WORKS

Learn one key idea about bitcoin each week. This week:

How markets price the future — and how they price bitcoin

This month, the SpaceX IPO made Elon Musk the world's first trillionaire on paper. Economist Peter C. Earle's takeaway is the part worth keeping: a $2.5 trillion valuation is not a price on today's rockets and revenue. It is the market assigning probabilities to a set of uncertain, long-duration futures – orbital data centers, interplanetary transport, AI that does not yet exist. SpaceX equity is effectively a call option on outcomes where failure is common but success is civilization-altering.

Bitcoin gets priced the same way, through two different lenses.

The first is the saver's. Pierre Rochard argues that the utility of a monetary system is an inverse function of the uncertainty its users face — and that bitcoin, through its fixed supply, halvings, and proof-of-work, minimizes monetary uncertainty more completely than any money in history. On this view you hold bitcoin for the same reason you hold any money: to hedge an unknowable future. Bitcoin simply does the job better.

The second is the investor's. If bitcoin is the best savings technology ever built, then over time it should absorb demand currently parked in fixed income, equities, gold, and real estate, which are assets people hold in part because they have nowhere better to store value. Buying bitcoin today is a call option on that migration, the same way buying SpaceX is a call option on space.

The two lenses are not in tension. The investment case is just the savings case priced forward. Markets fund SpaceX because a probability of a transformed future is worth a great deal now. Bitcoin offers the same asymmetry, backed by the most certain monetary policy ever written.

COIN CHECK

At its peak, the Mt. Gox exchange handled the majority of the world's bitcoin trades, but the site was originally built for something completely unrelated to bitcoin. What was "Mt. Gox" first created to do?

A. Trade Magic: The Gathering cards like stocks
B. Host an online poker room
C. Auction rare physical gold coins
D. Run a peer-to-peer file-sharing network

Check your answer at the end of the page.

FROM THE MEME POOL

Follow us on X for more fresh content

ANSWER

Answer: A.

Programmer Jed McCaleb registered mtgox.com in January 2007 as "Magic: The Gathering Online eXchange," a marketplace for trading Magic: The Gathering cards like equities. The card-trading idea fizzled, and in 2010 McCaleb repurposed the dormant domain into a bitcoin exchange after reading about bitcoin on Slashdot. He sold it to Mark Karpelès in 2011. The name that came to define an era of bitcoin history started life as a card-game side project.

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