BITCOIN BOX SCORE

Exchange Rate: $63,020
Market Capitalization: $1.30T
Hash Rate (90 days): 930.9 EH/s
Transactions (30 days): 20,260,140
Network Fees (economy): 1 sat/vB
Bitcoin Dominance: 58.84%

What do these numbers mean?

In Liar's Poker, Michael Lewis wrote that the worst fate a Salomon Brothers trainee could imagine was exile to “equities in Dallas” – finance's Siberia. Oh my, how things change.

This summer the Texas Stock Exchange began live trading in Dallas, and Goldman Sachs is finishing a $500 million campus there for 5,000 employees – which will make it the largest Goldman Sachs office outside of New York. Equities in Dallas is now a career move. Wall Street, the place, is packing boxes.​

Capital goes where it’s treated well, and it’s on the move. Lyn Alden identified bitcoin’s next marginal buyer in exactly these terms this week: “Anyone paying attention to New York right now… people with their fairly large investment properties got kind of doxxed, and are facing potentially selective taxation on them.”

Add to that the marked uptick in migration of capital out of California, as well as Europe's own experiments in confiscation and capture, and, as Alden puts it, “the whole West is pretty much in fiscal dominance.”

Fiscal dominance is a key concept for understanding macroeconomics today. It denotes an environment in which unsustainably high public debt and deficits force central banks to follow policies that maintain the government’s ability to spend, regardless of whether that does or doesn’t cause inflation. Tools that central banks may use include monetizing the debt and other methods of money creation.

Here's the thing about mobility: real estate can't flee, and moving a stock exchange takes a decade and a billion dollars. But, bitcoin moves at the speed of block production – once every 10 minutes, no matter the amount that is being moved. “Not every millionaire in the world can have one bitcoin,” Alden notes. “That is a gigantic bid that has not really shown up” yet.

The next marginal buyer is anyone who has noticed the fence being erected around them – and the one asset that clears it.

NEWS

Goldman Sachs pays $2.25 billion to buy its way into bitcoin

Goldman Sachs agreed to acquire ETF issuer NEOS Investments for up to $2.25 billion in cash and equity, picking up roughly $30 billion in assets across 19 options-based funds. The crown jewel is BTCI, a bitcoin covered-call ETF with over $1 billion in assets and distributions in the mid-20% range – a deal Forbes says could let Goldman “leapfrog” BlackRock in bitcoin income products.

The vampire squid buys the orange coin

Goldman didn't build a bitcoin product. It instead paid 10 figures for one – in the middle of a bear market!

Riot Platforms lands $9.1 billion deal with Anthropic

Bitcoin miner Riot Platforms signed a 20-year, 191-megawatt lease with AI company Anthropic worth $9.1 billion – up to $16.1 billion with extensions through 2048 – sending its stock up 17% in a day. Riot holds a grandfathered position in the Texas grid queue, where regulators have frozen 474 gigawatts of pending data center requests.

Bitcoin mining is energy R&D for civilization

For a decade, miners were mocked for chasing stranded megawatts in the middle of nowhere; now that grid access is the scarcest asset in America (Texas again – notice a theme?), the AI industry is paying billions for what bitcoin built. Bitcoin monetized the energy frontier first, and everyone else is renting it.

Tether passes its first full audit with $6.8 billion to spare

KPMG issued an unqualified opinion on Tether's fiscal 2025 financials – the first full audit in the company's history, confirming a $6.8 billion reserve surplus behind the $180 billion USDT. Auditors counted the gold bars by hand; the reserves also include one of the largest corporate bitcoin positions on Earth.

A decade of FUD retired in a day

“Tether will collapse” was one of the longest-running short thesis in bitcoin’s history, and, if it wasn’t dead already, it certainly is now. The dollar’s largest export channel is now audited, over-collateralized, and stacking bitcoin with the surplus.

BITCOIN ADOPTION CONTINUES

Israel's largest bank, Leumi, partnered with Galaxy to put bitcoin trading directly into its banking apps – a first for any Israeli bank – starting in early 2027.

Swiss banking giant UBS more than quadrupled its stake in BlackRock’s bitcoin ETF to $90 million during the first half of 2026, per its latest 13F filing.

Corporate bitcoin holdings hit a record 1.15 million coins – more than 5% of the total supply – even as prices fell.

BlackRock Canada launched a Toronto-listed portfolio ETF with a built-in 3% bitcoin allocation, making bitcoin a default ingredient in an ordinary balanced portfolio.

Coinbase brought more than 170 derivatives contracts, including bitcoin futures and options, to UK professional investors under its MiFID license.

Japan's Metaplanet opened the yen bond market to bitcoin with its debut ¥200 million "BitBonds" issuance, the country's first bitcoin-treasury bond program.

A new Gemini report predicts countries may begin shifting gold reserves into bitcoin in 2026, citing its portability and auditability advantages over bullion.

HOW BITCOIN WORKS

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

The Triffin Dilemma

An old clip went viral this week of then-Senator JD Vance asking if the dollar’s reserve currency status is beneficial to the United States.

When he testified before Congress, Robert Triffin explained that a national currency doing the world’s reserve job faces an impossible arithmetic. Under Bretton Woods, every currency was pegged to the dollar and the dollar was pegged to gold at $35 an ounce. For global trade to grow, the world needed an ever-larger supply of dollars. But there was only one way to get them circulating: America had to export more dollars than it took back, running persistent deficits.

Triffin's insight was that this arrangement destroys itself. Run the deficits, and foreign-held dollars pile up against a fixed stock of gold until the $35 promise becomes unbelievable. Refuse to run them, and you starve the world of reserves and strangle trade. Serve the world and wreck your currency, or save your currency and wreck the world. There is no third option. This concept is now referred to as the Triffin Dilemma.

Congress nodded politely and did nothing. Eleven years later, foreign dollar claims dwarfed the gold at Fort Knox, France and others were lining up to redeem, and on August 15, 1971 – fifty-five years ago this week – Nixon closed the gold window. Triffin's prediction had arrived on schedule.

But the dilemma didn't die with Bretton Woods; it mutated. The reserve asset became the Treasury bond, of which foreigners now hold more than $8 trillion. The world still needs dollars, so America still ships them out through deficits by importing goods and exporting paper. The subsidy Vance described is real. The U.S. enjoys cheaper imports and cheaper borrowing, but fewer of them realize the ‘tax’ that comes along with it – a structurally overvalued dollar that prices American factories out of world markets.

Note what the dilemma actually requires: a national currency doing a neutral job. Swapping in the euro or yuan merely relocates the problem. The cure is not a new fiat currency, or trying to impose spending discipline that will never – can never – come. Instead, what is needed to solve the Triffin dilemma is a reserve asset that is no nation's liability. This is why central banks have hoarded record amounts of gold since 2022 when they watched dollar reserves get frozen by their issuer.

But gold moves by ship, not at the speed of light. Audits of gold reserves are extremely expensive and easily corrupted, not instant, cheap, and mathematically certain. And although we are a couple of decades away from mining the asteroid belt in earnest, the scarcity of gold is a local phenomenon in the Earth’s crust, and will not hold once the inner planets are industrialized.

Bitcoin can achieve final settlement in a few minutes, can be audited in seconds, and requires no one's deficit to supply it. Its schedule is fixed, forever, for everyone. This week Goldman Sachs bought a bitcoin business while Russia’s central bank opened bitcoin trading to its citizens. Rivals don’t agree on much. Neutral assets don’t ask them to – and that’s why bitcoin, beyond even its impressive technical qualities, is a force that propels peaceful dealings among men.

COIN CHECK

The dollar’s reserve-currency status is famously called the “exorbitant privilege.” Which Frenchman actually coined the phrase in 1965?

A. President Charles de Gaulle
B. Finance Minister Valéry Giscard d’Estaing
C. Economist Jacques Rueff
D. President Georges Pompidou

Check your answer at the end of the page.

FROM THE MEME POOL

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ANSWER

Answer: B. The phrase is almost universally misattributed to Charles de Gaulle, but it was his 39-year-old finance minister, Valéry Giscard d’Estaing, who coined “privilège exorbitant” in February 1965 to describe America’s ability to buy the world’s goods with money only it could print. De Gaulle earned the misattribution honestly – he acted on the complaint, converting France’s surplus dollars into gold and helping trigger the run on Fort Knox that ended with Nixon closing the gold window in 1971.

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