BITCOIN BOX SCORE

Exchange Rate: $64,970
Market Capitalization: $1.30T
Hash Rate (90 days): 930.9 EH/s
Transactions (30 days): 20,195,665
Network Fees (economy): 1 sat/vB
Bitcoin Dominance: 59.52%

What do these numbers mean?

"Uncertainty rules!" writes Rabobank's Elwin de Groot this week. Businesses and households face "an overlapping set of disruptions: trade disputes, geopolitical conflict, policy uncertainty" — and the uncertainty itself does the damage, freezing investment and hiring before any shock even lands.

But where does the uncertainty come from? Increasingly, from the people managing it. This week the United States and Japan propped up the yen by hand — the first joint intervention since 2011, with Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent promising more: "We will not hesitate." On Friday the jobs report showed the economy shed 23,000 jobs when economists expected it to add 80,000 — and markets rallied, because bad news means easier money. When every price depends on guessing the intervener's next move, uncertainty isn't a bug in the system. It is the system.

James Dale Davidson and Lord Rees-Mogg saw it in 1997's The Sovereign Individual: "The state has grown used to treating its taxpayers as a farmer treats his cows, keeping them in a field to be milked. Soon, the cows will have wings."

They wrote that twelve years before the genesis block. The wings exist now — a monetary system with no committee to guess, no peg to defend, and no intervention mechanism at all. bitcoin doesn't manage uncertainty. It retires the manager.

NEWS

Bitcoin's immune system responds: 16 researchers, 27 hours, 4,962 bug reports

In direct response to the Coldcard exploit — whose estimated losses have climbed past $130 million across thousands of addresses — a volunteer "Bitcoin Red Team" co-led by AnchorWatch CEO Rob Hamilton and Bitchat maintainer Calle audited 390 open-source bitcoin repositories in 27.5 hours, filing 4,962 security findings, including 85 critical vulnerabilities, all responsibly disclosed to maintainers before announcement. OpenSats backed the sprint with a new "Code RED" initiative, covering roughly $40,000 in AI model costs as researchers paired frontier AI models with human domain experts to verify every finding.

Attacks make bitcoin stronger

No bank has ever responded to a breach by inviting the world to audit everything it runs — closed systems bury their flaws; open-source money hunts them down in public. The Coldcard bug cost users $130 million; the immune response it triggered will protect the other $1.3 trillion.

Warsh wants to tear up the fed's playbook

The Fed held rates at a contentious 9–3 vote in late July as Chairman Kevin Warsh pushes a fundamental rethink of the institution itself — against forward guidance that locks committees into yesterday's promises, against the staff-model conformity he calls out bluntly ("The most common forecasting error is groupthink"), and against the $9 trillion balance-sheet footprint that distorts the very prices policymakers read for signal: "We should not encourage the financial markets to be the handmaiden of the central bank." The reform mood extends to the Treasury, where Secretary Bessent publicly torched the WSJ's famed Fed-whisperer Nick Timiraos:

The best reformer is still a single point of failure

Credit where due: these are corrective instincts, and Warsh's diagnosis — groupthink, distorted prices, an institution that moves markets by leaking to favored reporters — is the soundest heard from a Fed chair in decades. But that's exactly the tell. The dollar's quality now depends on one man's convictions surviving political pressure, and on his successor sharing them; bitcoin's monetary policy doesn't improve when the right person takes the chair, because there is no chair.

The great custody migration: 210,000 bitcoin on the move

Glassnode data shows roughly 210,000 bitcoin left long-term holder wallets in the week after the Coldcard breach — the largest such drop since December 2024, with onchain analyst James Check counting 233,000 coins spent from long-term holdings. But this wasn't capitulation: spot bitcoin ETFs absorbed roughly $754 million over the same week, led by BlackRock's IBIT, as holders rotated into fresh wallets, multisig, and regulated custody.

The coins moved; the conviction didn't

Watch what price did while a tenth of a million coins changed addresses at the fastest pace in twenty months: nothing — bitcoin held near $65,000 through the largest custody reshuffle in years. A $130 million breach triggered an orderly, self-directed migration with no bailout, no trading halt, and no deposit freeze; try to imagine a bank absorbing the same shock with the doors open the whole time.

The CLARITY act sleeps until september

The Senate left for its August recess without voting on the CLARITY Act, as the ethics standoff over official token ventures outlasted the calendar. "We're getting that queued up first thing when we come back," promised Majority Leader John Thune, with the Senate returning September 14.

Bitcoin remains unlegislated and unbothered

This is the fourth straight week we've tracked the bill's stall, so here's the scorecard that matters: during the five weeks Washington spends on recess, bitcoin will settle roughly 5,000 blocks — its rules passing unanimously, every ten minutes, without a single senator present.

BITCOIN ADOPTION CONTINUES

France's Capital B, Europe's first dedicated bitcoin treasury company, listed on Cboe Europe on August 5 and saw trading volume double within two hours, unlocking institutional access on its march toward 210,000 coins by 2033.

Nasdaq-listed miner PowerCompute refinanced $18 million of 12% debt down to roughly 2% APR by posting 307 bitcoin as collateral with Arch Lending — without selling a single coin.

US spot bitcoin ETFs pulled in $626 million over the first three trading days of August — more than all of July combined — led by BlackRock's IBIT with $479 million.

SpaceX's first-ever earnings report disclosed 18,712 bitcoin worth $1.1 billion — held through a 33% drawdown without selling a coin.

Block reported Cash App's bitcoin gross profit grew 31% year-over-year in Q2, as everyday Americans kept stacking through the bear market.

Three US credit unions with over $10 billion in combined assets — St. Cloud Financial, Canvas, and Blaze — went live with bitcoin services built directly into their core banking systems through Circuit and DaLand's hybrid-custody model.

Strategy pledged $1,000 at birth plus $250 a year to its US employees' children's new Trump Accounts — the savings program President Trump says bitcoin "could one day play a role in."

Wiz, operator of mempool.space, filed a community application with ICANN for a .bitcoin top-level domain — the first new domain window since 2012.

HOW BITCOIN WORKS

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

What Is a Currency Intervention?

This week, for the first time since 2011, the United States and Japan jointly intervened in currency markets — selling dollars, buying yen — to lift the yen off 40-year lows. What exactly does that mean?

A currency intervention is a government trading against the market's verdict on its own money. When the market prices your currency lower than you'd like, you spend reserves buying it back, hoping to scare off sellers. It is the monetary equivalent of a company buying its own stock to prop up the price — except the "company" can also arrest short sellers, cap deposit withdrawals, and print the competition.

History grades interventions harshly. The 1985 Plaza Accord successfully weakened the dollar — so successfully that two years later the same governments signed the Louvre Accord to stop the slide they started. In 1992, Britain spent billions in a single day defending the pound's peg, raised rates twice before lunch, and lost by dinnertime; George Soros walked away with roughly $1 billion. In 2011, the G7 intervened to push the yen down. This week, the same governments intervened to push it up. The direction reverses; the dependence never does.

The pattern: interventions buy time, not trends. Reserves are finite, and markets know it. Worse, every intervention manufactures uncertainty — once prices depend on surprise government action, everyone must guess the next one.

Now consider bitcoin. There is no peg to defend, no reserve to deplete, no committee empowered to act. The supply schedule is fixed through the year 2140, and every participant knows it to the coin. Intervention isn't prohibited; it simply isn't in the protocol's vocabulary. The only way to move bitcoin's price is the way available to everyone equally: buy it or sell it.

Money that no one can rescue is money that never needs rescuing..

COIN CHECK

Government intervention in markets is far older than the Federal Reserve. Historians' earliest well-documented financial bailout came in 33 AD, when a credit panic gripped Rome and land prices collapsed. How did Emperor Tiberius respond?

A. Debased the denarius to flood the market with new coin
B. Distributed 100 million sesterces of interest-free loans through Roman banks
C. Canceled all private debts by imperial decree
D. Seized the estates of the wealthiest lenders

Check your answer at the end of the page.

FROM THE MEME POOL

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ANSWER

Answer: B. As Tacitus records, Tiberius injected 100 million sesterces into the Roman banking system as three-year, interest-free loans, secured by land collateral — history's first documented credit-market bailout, and a playbook any modern central banker would recognize instantly. The crisis itself was government-made too: abrupt enforcement of an old usury law forced lenders to call in loans all at once, cratering land prices. Nearly two thousand years of interventions later, the tools have new names — discount windows, quantitative easing, joint yen operations — but the pattern is unchanged: the state disrupts, then rescues, then takes credit for the rescue. bitcoin is the first monetary system in those two thousand years with no emperor to appeal to — and no emperor needed.

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