Exchange Rate: $81,330
Market Capitalization: $1.63T
Hash Rate (90 days): 918.9EH/s
Transactions (30 days): 20,470,250
Network Fees (economy): 1 sat/vB
Bitcoin Dominance: 59.26%

What do these numbers mean?

For a year, one of the biggest open questions hanging over bitcoin (and even moreso over altcoins) and its perceived value has been whether Congress would pass the CLARITY Act. On Tuesday afternoon, the Senate answered not now, and probably not this year.

The cloture motion got 49 votes, 11 short of the 60 it needed, after 7 Democrats who had spent months at the negotiating table decided the bill’s ethics rules for public officials didn't go far enough. Senator Lummis, who had folded more than a hundred of their requested changes into the final text, wrote the day before that “there's nothing left to give.”

Irregardless, events on Wednesday brought their own form of clarity. The Federal Reserve raised rates a quarter point to 3.75–4%, its first hike since 2023, on a unanimous vote from a committee that had split 9–3 on the same question in July. The same statement conveyed that the Fed’s Treasury bill purchases would continue as well. This means a balance sheet already up about $150 billion this year will keep growing, even as rates rise.

Bitcoin’s response to both was smaller than you might expect. It dipped to $75,850 on Tuesday night, its lowest since August 21, then held near $76,000 through the Fed's press conference while the 10-year Treasury yield returned to 5% and the S&P 500 fell to a six-week low.

It’s worth pausing on what the CLARITY bill was actually supposed to do. Its 600-plus pages are about exchanges, brokers, stablecoin issuers, and which agency supervises them. That matters to the companies that spent years supporting it, and a settled framework would have helped the pension consultants and compliance desks who say they’re waiting on one. 

But there is no clause in it that a saver needed in order to buy bitcoin, hold it in a wallet they control, or send some to a family member. Each of those things worked on Tuesday morning, and each of them worked on Tuesday night in just the same way.

The bitcoin and crypto industries asked Washington for permission this week and was told to wait. Regardless, if you’re an individual who wants to save the fruit of their labor in the most inflation-resistant money ever invented, nothing changed.

AIER’s Everyday Price Index, which tracks the things people buy often, like groceries, fuel and utilities, and leaves out big-ticket items like cars and houses, rose 0.33% in August and 5.59% year over year, with motor fuel up 2.74% on the month as the main driver. The government’s headline CPI for the same month, published September 11, showed 3.4% for the year and 2.4% excluding food and energy, with energy up 16.3%.

The gap between 5.6% and 3.4% is the gap between the number the Fed targets and the number at the register, and it is the number a fixed supply of 21 million was designed to answer. How are citizens responding?

The House Financial Services Committee voted 28–21 on Wednesday to advance the American Reserve Modernization Act, which would codify the reserve, require annual audited proof-of-reserve reports, and bar sales for 20 years. Arkham estimates government-linked holdings near 325,000 bitcoins, about $24.7 billion, though no official audit has ever confirmed it.

A statutory promise not to sell for 2 decades would be a fundamentally different posture from the one that government took when it auctioned 29,656 seized Silk Road coins to Tim Draper in 2014 at a market price near $600 each; at this week’s prices that lot is worth about $2.4 billion.

Revolut disclosed on Saturday that a fraudulent data request sent from a legitimate government email domain got it to hand over identity documents, selfies, home addresses, account statements and full transaction histories, including bitcoin transactions, for a “limited number” of customer accounts.

By Thursday a group calling itself IAmNotAVillain was demanding 6,000 monero, worth about $3 million, within 24 hours or it would sell the records on. A rival group claimed the same data and asked for 10,000 bitcoins, and Italian prosecutors opened an investigation into whether a government email account was breached or cloned. Revolut says it has had no direct contact from either group now demanding ransom.

Nick Szabo wrote in 2001 that trusted third parties are security holes. A private key can't be phished out of a compliance department, but a KYC file can, and it is the file that gets you followed home.

BlackRock’s iShares Preferred and Income Securities ETF (PFF) increased its position in Strive's SATA preferred stock by 133% since June to 236,159 shares, adding a second bitcoin treasury preferred to a fund that already holds Strategy’s.

JPMorgan analysts led by Nikolaos Panigirtzoglou wrote that short interest in BlackRock’s IBIT sits near its 2026 high while gold ETF shorts are below average, a “coiled spring” that could let bitcoin outperform gold as those hedges unwind, since every short covered turns into a buy order.

Bloomberg senior ETF analyst Eric Balchunas told Bitcoin Magazine TV that as younger investors “grow up with bitcoin as their store of value,” he believes bitcoin ETFs will triple gold ETFs in assets, from roughly $100 billion today.

Ric Edelman, founder of the $337 billion Edelman Financial Engines, said buying bitcoin now is like buying Amazon in 1999 and that a 1% allocation from every portfolio in the world “translates to a $500,000 price — it's really that simple.”

Stack BTC, the Nigel Farage-backed UK bitcoin treasury company, plans to acquire precious-metals dealer Direct Bullion for $16 million and use its gold sales to fund bitcoin purchases.

Foundation released Legacy Mode, a beta that lets Ledger owners move to its open-source KeyOS without resetting accounts or moving a single coin on-chain, so the swap from closed firmware to code anyone can inspect costs no fee and exposes no new address.

Deutsche Bank will custody bitcoin, ether and select stablecoins for asset managers, hedge funds and sovereign institutions in Europe later this year, pending regulatory approval, joining Standard Chartered and BBVA among European banks already in the business.

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

Congress spent Wednesday writing a law to audit the government’s bitcoin, opening up an opportunity to ask what, exactly, an audit of bitcoin is auditing, and why the answer separates bitcoin from everything that calls itself “bitcoin but better.”

A worthwhile read comes from investor Eric Yakes, in a piece called Zcash is not “private bitcoin”after a wave of coverage promoted a 10-year-old privacy coin as bitcoin with a feature added. His argument isn't really about Zcash. It's about the one property bitcoin has that nothing else does: immutability – the quality of being extremely hard to change.

That matters to everyday people because money is a promise about the future, and history is full of broken promises. By the spring of 1781 it took 168 Continental dollars to buy one silver dollar, which is where the old expression “not worth a Continental” comes from. 21 million coins is only worth something if nobody can vote it to 22 million. Yakes offers 4 tests for how hard a network is to change.

Scale. The bigger the network, the more it costs to attack or coerce. Zcash's mining revenue today is a fraction of what bitcoin’s was at the same age, and renting enough power to control Zcash for an hour costs about $90,000, roughly 5% of bitcoin's figure. Size is security.

Concentration. Decentralization is a spectrum, and somewhere far enough along it, a network becomes permissionless. This means no company, foundation or sovereign can approve or block a change. Bitcoin is the only network that grew up without competition pulling it toward the center, and on every concentration metric Yakes measures, from nodes to miners, it is more spread out than Zcash.

Governance. Bitcoin has no single non-profit foundation that supports it, no trademark, no treasury, and no board of directors. Zcash has all four, and 20% of every block reward goes to organizations rather than miners until 2028. Whoever controls the money printer controls the roadmap.

Track record. The most honest measure of immutability is how often the rules actually changed. By Yakes’ count, Zcash has rewritten its consensus rules 10 times to bitcoin's 3, and this year shipped an emergency fork in 3 days, without a proposal, a vote or miner signaling, and retired its original node software so that everyone had to upgrade. Bitcoin's changes are backward compatible; you can run software from years ago and still follow the chain.

Then there’s the deal-breaker. Zcash's privacy means its supply can’t be fully audited; its own cryptographers wrote that “undetectable counterfeiting vulnerabilities are only possible in Zcash because of its strong privacy.” Every bitcoin node, by contrast, recomputes the total supply from the first block every time it starts. That’s why the House bill can demand a proof-of-reserve report at all. If the government publishes its addresses, anyone with a laptop can check the balance in seconds, no auditor required.

Privacy is real and valuable, and bitcoin is getting it the way cash got it: at the payment layer, through Lightning, Ark, ecash and similar tools, with the same auditable asset underneath. Cash payments are private and bank payments aren't, and both use the dollar.

Satoshi’s white paper cites just 8 references. Which of these early digital-cash designs is among them?

A. Nick Szabo's bit gold (2005)
B. Wei Dai's b-money
C. David Chaum's ecash (1982)
D. Hal Finney's RPOW (2004)

Check your answer at the end of the page.

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Answer: B. b-money is reference number one in the white paper, and Adam Back’s Hashcash is the only other digital cash project Satoshi cited.

In August 2008, Satoshi emailed Wei Dai to say he was “getting ready to release a paper that expands on your ideas into a complete working system,” after Back noticed the similarities and pointed him to Dai’s page. Szabo’s bit gold, the closest cousin of bitcoin, appears nowhere in the paper, which remains one of the enduring curiosities of bitcoin’s origin story. All four designs are preserved in the Satoshi Nakamoto Institute’s library.

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