Exchange Rate $75,990 | Block height 974886

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On Tuesday, Democrats flipped the Senate and took the House, riding frustration over promises the last majority didn't keep. The incoming majority has already promised more spending.

No election has changed that habit: as Onramp's Brian Cubellis pointed out, the federal debt has grown in every presidential term since 1969, from about $360 billion to $40.5 trillion.

Someone has to pay for it.

In September, David Zervos became a counselor to Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent. Years earlier, Zervos had a name for the quiet way governments shrink their debts: "slow moving financial repression against risk free savings." This week, Craig Tindale argued that Zervos is one of several new hires pointing toward exactly that.

Financial repression works because savings sit where policy can reach them: bank deposits, Treasury bonds, and the banks and pension funds that regulators steer into government debt.

Cap what those pay, let inflation run a little higher, and the debt shrinks one saver at a time.

Nobody has to vote for a tax, which is why both parties like it.

Bitcoin pays no interest, so there is no rate to cap. Repression needs a captive audience, people who save in bitcoin already left the room.

French deputies adopted amendment I-2701 150 to 44 on Tuesday, requiring taxpayers to report bitcoin holdings worth €100,000 or more in self custody. A day later, the Assembly rejected the budget's entire revenue section 458 to 0, voiding the amendment, though the Senate could still revive it.

After a string of kidnappings targeting French holders, a registry of large self-custody wallets would tell criminals where to look. Keeping your holdings private is part of keeping your keys safe.

Texas governor-elect Gina Hinojosa has promised a moratorium on new data center approvals until lawmakers set rules on power prices, water, taxes and union labor, though projects already permitted are expected to finish. Several bitcoin miners have bet heavily on AI hosting, including Riot, which sold 20,264 bitcoins this year mostly to fund data center construction.

Others have a more optimistic perspective about Governor-elect Hinojosa. See Gavin Baker:

Fidelity Digital Assets' Q4 Signals Report finds bitcoin's hash rate down 9% from a year earlier, only the second annual decline on record, as miners shift capacity to AI. With less competition, miners are earning roughly 22% more than they did from 2020 to 2024, when the block subsidy was twice as large.

When miners leave, bitcoin automatically makes mining easier for those who stay, so the network keeps paying for its own security. Fidelity already sees the 30-day hash rate up 5.5% from its July low.

Tether CEO Paolo Ardoino told the Plan ₿ Forum in Lugano that the company holds "give or take 150,000 bitcoin." Its third-quarter reserve report implies about 100,060 BTC, and Ardoino didn't say where the rest sits.

The largest dollar stablecoin issuer earns its profits in dollars and keeps a growing share of them in bitcoin. It knows the dollar's weaknesses better than most..

The Moscow Exchange, Russia's largest exchange group, will launch bitcoin trading on December 1, with non-qualified investors capped at 300,000 rubles of purchases a year per broker.

Tokyo payments startup Japan Bitcoin Industry raised 800 million yen, paid entirely in bitcoin, from Fulgur and ANAP Lightning Capital to expand Lightning payments for merchants.

Strategy disclosed a $65.5 million purchase of 811 bitcoins alongside a $208.2 million buyback of its STRC preferred shares.

Strive bought 124 more bitcoins, bringing its holdings to 43,124 coins.

Latin American bitcoin school Librería de Satoshi rebranded as ISMOS and launched a global platform, backed by Btrust and the Human Rights Foundation, that aims to train one million bitcoin and open-source developers.

Wizardsardine released Liana 16, adding multilingual support, standard encrypted backups, and taproot by default to its self-custody wallet.

Bull Bitcoin became the first exchange to offer Payjoin deposits and withdrawals, making every on-chain buy and sell from its BULL Wallet a privacy-preserving Payjoin by default.

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

Elon Musk has pledged to give one SpaceX share to "every kid in America" next year, and SpaceX president Gwynne Shotwell is sending more than 2 million shares to children's Trump Accounts in December. In a Wall Street Journal essay this week, Bank Hapoalim's Sharona Mazalian Levi argues that owning even one share gives people a reason to learn how markets work. The same logic applies to bitcoin. So what would it take?

Trump Accounts are tax-advantaged savings accounts for American children, created by last year's tax law and run by BNY, with Robinhood as the brokerage. Until the year a child turns 18, the law allows only low-cost funds that track an index of U.S. stocks. A Treasury rule in September made room for donated company shares, which is how SpaceX stock gets in. Bitcoin isn't a company share or a U.S. stock index, so neither bitcoin nor a bitcoin ETF qualifies.

Fixing that takes Congress. It would need to add bitcoin, held by a qualified custodian, to the list of eligible investments and let donors give it directly. The law already lets charities fund every account in a group equally, but that channel was built for dollars.

The cost is modest. There are roughly 73 million Americans under 18. A gift of 21,000 sats each, about $16 at recent prices, adds up to roughly 15,300 bitcoins. That's less than 2% of what Strategy holds.

A child who owns 21,000 sats has a reason to ask why nobody can make more.

In February 2014, which bitcoin exchange halted withdrawals and filed for bankruptcy after losing hundreds of thousands of bitcoins?

A. Mt Gox
B. Bitstamp
C. BTC-e
D. Bitfinex

Check your answer at the end of the page.

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Answer: A. Mt. Gox, based in Tokyo, suspended withdrawals and filed for bankruptcy protection in February 2014 after disclosing that hundreds of thousands of customer bitcoins were missing. Creditors waited about a decade for repayments to begin.

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