BITCOIN BOX SCORE

Exchange Rate: $77,800
Market Capitalization: $1.56T
Hash Rate (90 days): 975.2 EH/s
Transactions (30 days): 17,278,278
Network Fees (economy): 1 sat/vB
Bitcoin Dominance: 60.66%

What do these numbers mean?

"Power projection" is a military term. It describes a state's ability to apply economic, political, or military force beyond its borders. For a century, the dollar has been one of America's primary tools of power projection.

This week, the four-star Admiral running U.S. Indo-Pacific Command told the Senate under oath that bitcoin is a tool of that same kind — and disclosed that INDOPACOM is running a live bitcoin node to stress-test the protocol for military network security. Hours later, across the Senate, a pro-bitcoin Fed Chair nominee with personal bitcoin investments began his confirmation hearing to run U.S. monetary policy.

Keep in mind that the military and the central bank do not coordinate their testimony. When a four-star Admiral names bitcoin as strategic infrastructure in one hearing and a pro-bitcoin Fed Chair nominee is elevated in another on the same day, the conclusion is that bitcoin’s relevance is growing simultaneously across many contexts.

While that was playing out in Washington, the "decentralized" alternatives to bitcoin confirmed in real time what they actually are. An Ethereum L2 froze tens of millions in user funds by multisig committee, and a Trump-family-backed token project stood accused of freezing its own investors' $1 billion position to extract more capital. Every "crypto" system with admin keys eventually uses them. Bitcoin does not. That is the entire point.

NEWS

Arbitrum Security Council freezes $71 million in stolen ETH

The Arbitrum Security Council executed an emergency onchain action to freeze 30,766 ETH tied to the KelpDAO bridge exploiter, citing input from law enforcement. The underlying $292 million exploit cascaded into a $13.2 billion TVL drawdown across DeFi.

Decentralization theater

A dozen insiders signed a multisig and moved funds at the protocol level — the same operational primitive a bank uses. Bitcoin has no admin key, no foundation override, and no committee that can freeze a UTXO.

Indo-Pacific commander tells Senate bitcoin is a tool of American "power projection"

Admiral Samuel Paparo, Commander of U.S. Indo-Pacific Command, told the Senate Armed Services Committee that bitcoin is "a valuable computer science tool as a power projection" with "really important computer science applications for cybersecurity," and disclosed that INDOPACOM is running a live bitcoin node to conduct operational network security testing. It is the first time a sitting combatant commander has publicly characterized bitcoin as a national security asset in open congressional testimony.

The Pentagon says the quiet part out loud

With the Chinese Communist Party's monetary think tank already circulating its own bitcoin reserve asset paper, Paparo's testimony shows that bitcoin has become part of the national security posture of superpowers.

Pro-bitcoin Fed chair nominee Kevin Warsh begins Senate confirmation hearing

President Trump's Fed Chair nominee Kevin Warsh appeared before the Senate Banking Committee on Tuesday, pledging Fed independence and laying out plans for "regime change" at the central bank — a smaller balance sheet, fewer policy meetings, and a new inflation framework.

Warsh is the first Fed Chair nominee in history with meaningful personal bitcoin exposure and is on the public record calling bitcoin "a sustainable store of value, like gold".

A bitcoin believer as Chairman of the Federal Reserve?

The Fed has presided over a century of steady currency debasement. If a bitcoiner were to preside over the Fed’s balance sheet and monetary policy, we could see bitcoin become more deeply integrated with the American banking system. Still, it is important to remember…

Justin Sun sues Trump family's World Liberty Financial over $1B in allegedly frozen tokens

Tron founder Justin Sun filed suit Tuesday in California federal court against World Liberty Financial, the Trump-family-backed crypto venture, alleging it froze his WLFI tokens, once worth over to $1 billion, after he refused to invest hundreds of millions more to mint its “USD1” stablecoin. Sun claims WLFI secretly rewrote its rules to grant itself "blacklisting power" over token transfers; WLFI has dismissed the suit as "entirely meritless."

Play stupid games, win stupid prizes

Whatever the merits of this particular lawsuit, the structural lesson is identical to what Arbitrum taught the same week: when a "crypto" system has admins, foundations, or multisigs that can freeze tokens, those mechanisms eventually get weaponized — against strangers, former allies, and the President's business partners alike.

BITCOIN ADOPTION CONTINUES

Austin-based Onramp launched Onramp Finance, a unified platform and bitcoin brokerage available in all 50 states.

Russia's State Duma advanced a sweeping bill 327-13 classifying bitcoin as property, as state-owned Sberbank confirmed it will offer trading to its 110 million retail customers.

Uzbekistan established "Besqala Mining Valley" by presidential decree, granting licensed bitcoin miners a tax exemption through 2035 in exchange for a 1% monthly fee.

Stratiphy launched three 21Shares crypto ETNs inside UK Innovative Finance ISAs, reopening a tax-free bitcoin route for UK retail.

Nomura and Laser Digital's 2026 Institutional Investor Survey found that 79% of Japanese institutional investors plan to allocate to bitcoin over the next 3 years.

Broadridge launched a bitcoin platform for Canadian wealth managers integrating custody with Anchorage and Tetra, on infrastructure that moves $8 trillion every month.

French-listed Capital B added 12 bitcoins, extending its treasury to 2,937 coins.

Block, BPI, and Bitcoin for Financial Services will host "Bitcoin as Everyday Money" at Bitcoin 2026 on April 28 to push a bitcoin de minimis tax exemption through this Congress.

HOW BITCOIN WORKS

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

Will AI outrun the money printer?

Last December, we addressed Elon Musk's prediction that AI and robotics will eventually make money "stop being relevant." This month, he has returned with a more specific and more consequential version of the claim: that AI-driven productivity growth will outpace money supply growth so dramatically that governments can issue "universal high income" payments without triggering inflation, and perhaps even produce deflation.

Economist Peter C. Earle has a careful response worth reading, because even though Musk’s claim is intuitively appealing, it is structurally wrong.

The appeal of Musk's argument is that it treats inflation as a simple ratio: dollars divided by goods. If the denominator grows faster than the numerator, prices must fall. But prices are not set in the aggregate. They are relative, and set at the margins — sector by sector, decision by decision — reflecting the interplay of supply, demand, expectations, and timing. As Earle observes, these relative price movements are the mechanism by which an economy coordinates what to produce, when, and for whom. Distort them, and the structure of production itself becomes misaligned, regardless of how abundant total output becomes.​

New money never enters the system evenly or instantaneously. It arrives through specific channels — government transfers, banks, asset markets — and whoever receives it first benefits most, while whoever is furthest from the spigot effectively pays the cost. This is the Cantillon effect, and no amount of AI-driven productivity growth makes it go away. A universal high income program financed by monetary expansion transfers real purchasing power from savers and wage earners to transfer recipients and the institutions closest to disbursement. The aggregate price level may or may not rise. The distributional distortion is guaranteed.

Bitcoin, as usual, offers a solution. Its supply is fixed, so new units cannot be generated and distributed through political networks. In a bitcoin-denominated economy, AI-driven productivity gains flow through as genuine purchasing-power increases — prices fall, and savers are rewarded rather than punished for delaying consumption.

Musk is right that AI can expand productive capacity by orders of magnitude. Earle is right that expanding the money supply alongside that growth obscures rather than clarifies the information markets rely on. Both arguments point in the same direction: if AI delivers anything close to the abundance Musk predicts, the only way that abundance flows through to ordinary people is to anchor our economy to a form of money that no one can print.

COIN CHECK

Which 18th-century economist is credited with the observation that newly issued money does not enter the economy evenly — benefiting whoever receives it first and effectively taxing those furthest from the source?

A. Ludwig bon Mises
B. Richard Cantillion
C. David Ricardo
D. Adam Smith

Check your answer at the end of the page.

FROM THE MEME POOL

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ANSWER

Answer: B. Irish-French banker and economist Richard Cantillon observed in his 1730s Essai sur la Nature du Commerce en Général that newly issued money expands prices sector by sector as it flows outward from its point of entry, benefiting early recipients and penalizing those furthest from issuance.

This "Cantillon effect" is the reason no amount of aggregate productivity growth — from AI or anything else — can neutralize the distributional consequences of money printing. Only a monetary standard that cannot be printed removes the problem entirely.

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