BITCOIN BOX SCORE

Exchange Rate: $63,410
Market Capitalization: $1.27T
Hash Rate (90 days): 961.1 EH/s
Transactions (30 days): 19,318,427
Network Fees (economy): 1 sat/vB
Bitcoin Dominance: 59.06%

What do these numbers mean?

Risk capital has somewhere louder to be this week: SpaceX prices its record IPO today, more AI companies are lining up behind it, PPI came in hot, the Iran conflict is trending toward peace (for now), and almost nobody is looking at bitcoin.

Rapha Zagury has a name for this: a murmuration. Thousands of starlings folding across an evening sky, no bird in charge, each one reacting only to its nearest neighbors. The turn of one becomes the turn of all. Markets do this all the time. The flock turned south in May, and everyone is busy inventing intent. But as Zagury observes, birds flying the “wrong” direction are often just following the coastline. Bitcoin sits roughly 50% below October’s all-time high, yet barely above a 200-week moving average that hasn’t had a single down day in twelve years. Animal spirits in full force; fundamentals unchanged.

Not every eye has wandered, though. The full text of the Strategic Bitcoin Reserve bill landed, which would lock up every federally-held coins for 20 years. U.S. Senator Cynthia Lummis, who has spent years pushing Washington to stack a million of them, gets it.

So does Wall Street. BlackRock just filed its fourth amendment for a yield-generating bitcoin ETF, racing Goldman Sachs to market with a July 1st deadline looming. While the flock chases the shiny new listing, patient buyers accumulate.

Another thing worth remembering while the spotlight is elsewhere: As Marty Bent reminds us, it takes just a drop of ink to add a zero to a $100 bill. In the past few weeks, Washington has begun floating the concept of a $250 bill. Bitcoin doesn’t work like that, and that’s the point.

NEWS

Sam Bankman-Fried formally applies for a Trump pardon

Two years into a 25-year sentence for the $10 billion FTX fraud, the fried bankman, Sam Bankman-Fried, filed a clemency petition with the Justice Department's Pardon Attorney Office. The man who vaporized the wealth of millions of working Americans has spent months working conservative-leaning media from his low-security California prison, recasting himself as a political prisoner and praising the President. Trump told the New York Times in January he has no plans to grant SBF his wish.

SBF: Still an unrepentant criminal

SBF's rehabilitation tour rests on one claim: customers got everything back. That arithmetic only works because his bankruptcy estate froze claims in November 2022 dollars, the time of a bottoming-out of digital asset prices that his fraud helped cause. Depositors holding bitcoin on FTX were force-converted at a price per coin near $16,000, and repaid in fiat – while the asset quadrupled. SBF didn't make anyone whole; he confiscated the recovery. If there’s a silver lining to SBF’s crime spree, it’s that he educated millions of people about the importance of self-custody.

See Caitlin Long’s post for a good throwback reminder of what things were like when Sam was an active industry participant:

Singapore’s biggest bank will sell tokenized gold to retail customers

DBS, Singapore’s largest bank, will offer tokenized physical gold through its ‘digibank’ app in the second half of 2026 – each token backed by one gram of vaulted gold in Singapore, tradable around the clock, and redeemable for metal. It’s the first single-platform retail offering of its kind in the city-state, and it follows physical gold holdings among DBS wealth clients more than doubling in three years as gold touched a record $5,600 an ounce.

The debasement trade is just getting started

Gold and bitcoin are two expressions of the same trade: out of paper promises, into assets that can't be printed. DBS productizing gold for retail is evidence the trade is broadening. Roughly $500 trillion sits in bonds and money earning a negative real return, and it's beginning to rotate. Gold catches the first wave because it's familiar. But bitcoin is the harder asset — fixed supply, no vault, no counterparty, final settlement — and as the rotation matures, the money flows from bonds to gold and bitcoin.

Schwab: bitcoin is trading below its cost of production, and the AI pivot isn’t a threat

Charles Schwab’s Jim Ferraioli published a deep dive on mining economics, Schwab’s preferred framework for valuing bitcoin. Bear-market bottoms have historically formed near the production cost of efficient miners and the 200-week moving average – both around $60,000 – while long-term fair value gravitates toward inefficient miners’ cost, now near $95,000. Bitcoin currently trades at roughly 0.8 times that level, below its historical 0.75x–2x range floor. On the industry’s pivot to AI, Schwab’s view is that fears for network security are exaggerated. Mining is the rational baseload use of power, with AI inference overlaid during peak hours – and hybrid models make miners more resilient, not less.

The $11.77 trillion brokerage is doing proof-of-work math

Read past the price framework and notice what’s happening: one of America’s largest brokerages is teaching retail clients to value bitcoin off energy costs, rating it more favorably than every other crypto asset, and musing that federal support for mining “would not come as a surprise.”

New analysis traces $11,000 World Cup tickets straight to the money printer

Writing at the American Institute for Economic Research, Attila Rebak traced World Cup ticket inflation back to 1971. For three decades the premium World Cup final seat held steady around $1,300 in today's dollars; the 2026 face value is $11,000, with listings on FIFA's own resale platform near $2.3 million. Premier League matchday prices are up sixfold since 1992 against a roughly doubled CPI. The mechanism is the Cantillon effect: newly printed money reaches asset owners first and wage earners las. Since 2008, M2 has grown more than 150% while real median weekly earnings rose less than 10%. Sovereign wealth funds buying soccer clubs as inflation hedges is the system working as designed.

Fix the money, fix the World Cup?

Pep Guardiola said it plainly: "Football is for the fans." The fans didn't get poorer because the game got better. Rather, their wages were diluted relative to the capital now bidding for their seats. CPI counts cheaper televisions; it doesn't count the rising price of attending the cultural events that define our society. Soccer is this week's example. Housing, education, and healthcare are the same chart.

BITCOIN ADOPTION CONTINUES

Better and Coinbase closed the first Fannie Mae-backed mortgage collateralized by bitcoin, letting an Ann Arbor couple pledge bitcoin for their down payment instead of selling it.

Strategy resumed its accumulation with a 1,550 bitcoin purchase for roughly $101 million, its first buy since a surprise 32-coin sale rattled markets, lifting its stack to 845,256 coins.

The full text of the Strategic Bitcoin Reserve bill appeared on Congress.gov, revealing a 20-year lock-up on federally held coins and quarterly proof-of-reserve attestations, with a path to accumulating 1 million bitcoins over five years.

Public companies added a net 43,557 bitcoins worth $3.2 billion in May, as SpaceX disclosed ahead of its IPO that it holds 18,712 coins.

Hungary moved to scrap criminal penalties for bitcoin trading, reversing rules that threatened up to eight years in prison, after the crackdown drove Revolut out of the country and triggered an EU probe.

El Salvador cut its residency requirement to just 90 days a year while maintaining 0% tax on foreign income and bitcoin gains, positioning itself as a top jurisdiction for bitcoin holders.

BitGo launched Lightning Earn, letting institutions earn bitcoin-denominated fees by providing Lightning Network liquidity through Amboss Rails, seeding the product with part of its own treasury.

Second launched Bark, its implementation of the Ark protocol, on bitcoin mainnet, enabling self-custodial payments without Lightning's channel management.

HOW BITCOIN WORKS

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

Bitcoin’s four ideologies

In Special Providence, historian Walter Russell Mead popularized the idea that American foreign policy has four distinct schools of thought: Hamiltonian, Jeffersonian, Jacksonian, and Wilsonian. These rival schools whose constant tension, not any one’s victory, is what keeps the Republic balanced. Michael Saylor’s new essay, The Four Ideologies of Bitcoin, gives bitcoin the same treatment at a conceptual level.

As bitcoin has grown from technical experiment to global monetary network, its community has differentiated into four schools.

Maximalists ask: what has bitcoin already proven? Their answer: digital scarcity is solved, and there is no second best.

Capitalists ask how bitcoin integrates with the global economy as digital capital embedded in balance sheets, credit, securities, and custody, the way steel or electricity created value once they were interwoven with the environment.

Technologists ask how bitcoin should improve, pushing on scaling, privacy, and quantum resistance, because protocols that ignore evolving threats stagnate.

Fundamentalists ask how to protect bitcoin’s core principles including self-custody, personal nodes, and censorship resistance from capture by the very institutions now adopting it.

Saylor’s thesis is that each school protects something real, and each becomes dangerous in isolation: Maximalists turn dismissive, Capitalists reckless, Technologists interventionist (he borrows medicine’s term iatrogenic harm — damage caused by the treatment itself), Fundamentalists exclusionary. Eight billion people will not all use bitcoin the same way, and bitcoin can serve many groups without belonging to any one of them.

Saylor’s argument is compelling. He is arguing that we treat the base layer protocol as sacred infrastructure, push innovation to higher layers, and preserve forever the individual’s right to hold keys and verify the timechain. Accordingly, the mission ensures bitcoin remains bitcoin while the world builds on it.

COIN CHECK

17 years ago this week, the word "cryptocurrency" appeared online. Satoshi wrote to an early collaborator that someone had come up with the word, musing "maybe it's a word we should use when describing Bitcoin." Who was the collaborator?

A. Hal Finney
B. Adam Back
C. Martti Malmi
D. Gavin Andresen

Check your answer at the end of the page.

FROM THE MEME POOL

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ANSWER

Answer: C

Martti Malmi, the Finnish college student who emailed Satoshi in 2009 asking how he could help, became bitcoin's second developer, and ran bitcoin.org. The whitepaper itself never uses the word "cryptocurrency," just "electronic cash." However, even after the word stuck, its meaning drifted; in 17 years since it was coined, it came to describe thousands of things that share none of bitcoin's properties. That’s why many people who understand bitcoin bristle at the word ‘cryptocurrency’ and prefer ‘bitcoin and crypto’ when speaking about digital assets generally.

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