BITCOIN BOX SCORE

Exchange Rate: $64,080
Market Capitalization: $1.29T
Hash Rate (90 days): 940.0 EH/s
Transactions (30 days): 20,193,999
Network Fees (economy): 1 sat/vB
Bitcoin Dominance: 59.28%

What do these numbers mean?

Bitcoin's bottoms aren't marked by the sellers giving up – they're marked by the overextended getting flushed. In 2018, it was miners who capitulated into the November crash. In 2022, it was a cascade of credit destruction: entanglement among Celsius, Three Arrows, FTX, and others brought about the “crypto nuclear winter” that broke the industry, an event so cataclysmic that it has yet to fully recover.

Business cycles are similar. A recession isn't over until bad credit is cleared out. Many analysts are now calling that the current crypto market has found a local minimum, and the flush is well underway. As VanEck's Matthew Sigel catalogs:

Many DATs borrowed at last cycle's highs to buy an asset with no plan beyond hoping it went up. Using leverage that way is foolish no matter how great the asset. Stranger still was expecting equity premiums for companies whose entire strategy consisted of “buy bitcoin” is one anyone with an ETF app can copy. That arbitrage, once real when corporations and entire countries couldn't touch bitcoin, is mostly gone.

So is this truly the bottom? That would be nice. We can't say for sure – though macro points bitcoin's way, with the Fed's "higher for longer" inflation refusing to leave.

What we can say is that, while the leverage graduates out, a new class of holders graduates in. Long-term holder supply just hit an all-time high of 16.8 million bitcoins, which is 83.7% of all coins ever mined – five out of every six – unmoved through a 50% drawdown in exchange rate with U.S. dollars. Every cycle mints a class of holders who bought the excitement, survived the test, and learned the value of bitcoin as distinct from its price.

Credit cycles are a feature of the fiat world, not a bug in bitcoin. As long as easy money exists, someone will borrow it to buy hard money, get themselves overextended, and eventually be forced to sell it back. That’s why the purchasing power of bitcoin will always be volatile as long as the economy runs on fiat.

As Lyn Alden famously says, “Nothing stops this train” – meaning that there is nobody and no institution with the power or desire to actually stop printing money, no matter what politicians promise. The train doesn't stop, but it does run over the over-leveraged. Mind the tracks.

NEWS

Wall Street pledges $15 million for bitcoin's quantum defense

Nine institutional heavyweights, including BlackRock, Coinbase, Fidelity Digital Assets, and Strategy, formed the Bitcoin Security Consortium, pledging $15 million for bitcoin security research and post-quantum cryptography work. The funding is not pooled. Instead, each member writes its own checks to developers of its choosing. The consortium explicitly renounces any role in making decisions about what to change, if anything, about the bitcoin protocol. Brink's Mike Schmidt will coordinate the effort as a volunteer.

Checkbooks, not steering wheels

Institutions with billions in bitcoin exposure just found a way to fund the network's defense without buying a seat at a table that doesn't exist. The long-feared story of institutional capture is running in reverse: bitcoin is changing Wall Street's behavior, not the other way around.

India orders takedown of Jack Dorsey's bitcoin-linked messaging app

India's cybercrime agency ordered GitHub to disable three Bitchat repositories as Delhi protesters use the Bluetooth mesh app to keep communicating through repeated government internet shutdowns. Bitchat, released as open-source software by Dorsey in July 2025, relays encrypted messages (and bitcoin transactions) phone-to-phone with no internet, no servers, and no accounts.

You can't switch off what has no switch

The takedown order is the best product review Bitchat could receive. All throughout the weekend, the app is still downloadable, the code is mirrored across hosts, and bitchat messages are still hopping phone to phone. Censorship-resistant money needs censorship-resistant rails, and both just passed a live-fire test.

The Clarity Act runs out of runway as Washington argues over Trump's conflicts

The Digital Asset Market Clarity Act will likely miss its window before the Senate's August recess, as Democrats reject the ethics language President Trump agreed to as too flimsy. The provision would temporarily ban senior officials from issuing or sponsoring tokens, which sounds good – but it expires in 2029, excuses past activity, and leaves enforcement solely with Trump's own Justice Department, which Senator Warren says the president will "simply ignore."

The protocol has no conflicts of interest

Washington's stalemate over which officials may profit from which tokens is an inadvertent advertisement for bitcoin – the one monetary network with no issuer, no sponsor, and nothing to negotiate. The Clarity Act may or may not pass in August, but bitcoin's mathematical rules are reinforced every time a block is produced (about every 10 minutes) without a vote!

Saylor overhauls Strategy's metrics for the bear market

Strategy replaced its gross bitcoin figures with net metrics that subtract the $22.3 billion in convertible debt and preferred stock ranking ahead of common shareholders, putting its new "Net Reserve" at $36.6 billion against 843,775 bitcoins. The framework also anchors its mNAV threshold at 1.0x and introduces a “BTC Breakeven ARR” of 3.22% – the minimum annual bitcoin appreciation needed to service all interest and dividends from bitcoin gains alone, in perpetuity.

Honesty is the best policy

This is the great unwind reaching the top of the food chain: the biggest treasury company of all now tells common shareholders exactly what's left after the leverage gets paid. Every treasury company that survives this bear market will be sturdier for copying the disclosure, and the ones that can't survive a 3.22% hurdle were never treasuries, just trades.

BITCOIN ADOPTION CONTINUES

Russia's State Duma passed a landmark law recognizing bitcoin as property and legalizing its use in international trade settlements, formalizing the sanctioned economy's bitcoin payment rails.

CoinShares listed Europe's first Bitcoin Mining UCITS ETF on Deutsche Börse's Xetra, opening the €26.3 trillion European regulated fund market to bitcoin mining exposure.

U.S. spot bitcoin ETFs strung together seven straight days of net inflows totaling nearly $1 billion through July 22, led by BlackRock's IBIT.

The Louisiana State Employees' Retirement System, a $17.2 billion public pension, increased its Strategy stake, quietly growing government workers' bitcoin exposure through the drawdown.

Strive added another 21 bitcoins to reach 19,921 coins, evidence that unleveraged treasury companies are still able to accumulate even as leveraged ones unwind.

Bitcoin miner Hut 8 saw shares jump on a $9.8 billion AI data center deal, as energy infrastructure built for bitcoin powers the AI buildout.

HOW BITCOIN WORKS

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

Financial privacy is desired by all

How much do Americans actually care about financial privacy? A new national survey of 2,200 U.S. adults from Cornell's Tech Policy Institute, the Bitcoin Policy Institute, and Fedi, puts hard numbers on it.

And the numbers are striking. 56% of Americans say only they should have access to their financial data. Fewer than 1 in 9 accept government access even with a warrant – and just 2% believe the government should have access to private financial records without a warrant. Forced to choose, 60% prioritize privacy over convenience, and 51% choose privacy even over crime prevention. The responses were remarkably bipartisan: Republicans, Democrats, and Independents land within four points of each other on every dimension tested. In a controlled experiment, a payment app keeping data private attracted users as powerfully as charging zero fees.

The data also sheds light on why this might be. 68% of Americans have already suffered a privacy or identity breach, and 6% report coercion, stalking, or physical harm as a result. The report's sharpest finding is that mandatory KYC/AML surveillance creates the very honeypots that hand criminals our financial profiles. (KYC, short for Know Your Customer, is a set of regulations that make banks and financial institutions de-factor arms of law enforcement. AML, short for Anti-Money Laundering, is likewise a set of regulations that put financial institutions on the hook to surveil their own customers.)

Despite these strong feelings, a curious gap: 77% took some privacy action last year, but use of specialized privacy tools barely break single digits. We surmise that people want privacy, but the system makes it hard to practice.

What does this have to do with bitcoin? Bitcoin's ledger is radically transparent – anyone can see every address and transaction. What bitcoin protects absolutely is permission: no one can freeze your account, block your payment, or require your papers before the network processes your transaction. What people are really telling this survey is that they want financial freedom. Freedom from surveillance, freedom to transact, and ownership over their data.

The reason could be evolutionary. Physicist Adrian Bejan argues in Freedom and Evolution that freedom is a natural condition. Systems that are free to change are the ones that survive and improve. Nobody has to be taught to want it.

Americans never consented to being watched. Now when someone finally thought to ask them what they think about having lost their financial privacy, they respond with vehement disapproval. There is untapped sentiment that politicians and institutional leaders can use to fuel a movement in favor of privacy and broad bitcoin adoption.

COIN CHECK

In 1970, Congress passed the Bank Secrecy Act, which requires banks to report transactions amounts higher than $10,000 to authorities. This amount was not indexed to inflation. Roughly what would $10,000 of 1970 purchasing power be in today's dollars?

A. $18,000
B. $35,000
C. $80,000
D. $250,000

Check your answer at the end of the page.

FROM THE MEME POOL

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ANSWER

Answer: C. Adjusted by the Consumer Price Index, $10,000 in 1970 is roughly $80,000–$85,000 today. Congress has never updated the threshold – meaning the financial surveillance net, sold in 1970 as a tool for catching large-scale money laundering, now automatically covers ordinary transactions like buying a used car. Every year of inflation quietly lowers the bar without a single vote being cast. It's a fitting companion to this week's survey: the surveillance expanded for 55 years while, the whole time, most Americans said their financial data should belong to them alone.

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