Exchange Rate $82,450 | Block height 970668

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"Certain levels of inflation will also pay off that debt very rapidly. Very rapidly,” said President Trump about a national debt that has passed $40 trillion. This statement is fantastically blunt, even for him. The President is right, of course – inflation does shrink the national debt because every dollar paid back is worth less than the dollar that was borrowed. The cost doesn't vanish, though. It lands on whoever is holding the debt – and whoever saves their money in dollars.

There are two alternatives to debasement: Austerity, which is politically infeasible, and dramatically higher productivity, which may happen after all if and when superintelligence accelerates the economy to unfathomable heights.

But hope is not a plan, and so the plumbing for systematic debasement is being built proactively. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent calls his purchases of long-term government bonds a "Treasury twist" and has said the Treasury and the Fed will work together. The two haven't been this close since a 1951 agreement ended the Fed's wartime job of holding down the government's borrowing costs. Rabobank's Michael Every unpacks the significance of the unusual time in which we live:

Lenders are beginning to price this in. On Wednesday, the Treasury paid 5.3% to sell 10-year notes, the most at a 10-year auction since 2000. On Thursday, a 30-year bond auction cleared at the highest yield since August 2000, and the Congressional Budget Office put this year's deficit near $2 trillion. Also on Wednesday, Iraq cut the value of its dinar by about 13% overnight to cover a budget squeezed by war. That's the fast version of what Trump described. The slow version just takes longer to show up in your grocery bill.

Every government with unsustainable debt eventually reaches for the same tool. Bitcoin is the one savings account that tool can't reach: there's no treasury to issue more of it and no central bank to call for help. The only way bitcoin can relieve pressure caused by a liquidity flood is for its price to increase.

On Monday, FinCEN withdrew two long-pending proposals. The 2020 rule would have required banks to collect ID and keep records on transactions over $3,000 with self-custody wallets. The 2023 rule would have required reports on "mixing," a way of making payments harder to trace, with no dollar threshold. FinCEN said it could have had a "chilling effect on legitimate activity." Exchanges' existing reporting duties don't change.

Holding your own money was never suspicious. The irony is that the Treasury now says mixing has legitimate uses, while Samourai Wallet developers Keonne Rodriguez and William Hill are still in federal prison for building a bitcoin privacy wallet.

Charles Schwab's 2026 Modern Wealth Survey, released Wednesday, found that 60% of Americans who own crypto plan to buy more in the next year, compared with 52% of stock owners and 42% of bond owners. About one in five Americans owns crypto, and Millennials own it at four times the rate of Boomers. Non-owners' top reasons for staying out were fear of scams (48%) and not understanding how it works (39%).

With most investments, the most excited people haven't bought yet. With bitcoin, it's the people who already own it, and what keeps everyone else out is something education fixes.

On Wednesday, Ethereum researcher Justin Drake urged holders to move their coins to fresh, never-spent-from addresses, warning that AI-discovered math could break bitcoin's signatures "in the worst case in months not years." Cryptographers pushed back: Coinbase's Yehuda Lindell called it "a really bad take" with no evidence of a break. Glassnode estimates over 6 million bitcoins already sit at addresses whose public keys are exposed.

Nobody has shown they can break bitcoin's signatures today. The habit that protects you anyway is free: receive every payment to a fresh address, which most modern wallets already do for you. Arthur Hayes makes a good point, framing this debate in historical context:

Robinhood has added $25 million of bitcoin to its corporate balance sheet, its first holding for itself. Johann Kerbrat, its head of crypto, disclosed the purchase on Wednesday at Digital Asset Summit Asia, saying, "We care deeply about bitcoin and the ecosystem around it." He added that the amount is "not going to change a lot of the current trajectory of the company." BitcoinTreasuries.net estimates the buy at about 294 bitcoins. Robinhood's customers already hold roughly $25 billion in crypto across 28 million funded accounts.

Twenty-five million dollars is a rounding error for a $100 billion company, and Robinhood said as much. But the app that taught a generation to trade on their phones has now picked the one asset it wants to hold itself.

Russia's central bank licensed its first four crypto exchanges and five custodians, including Sberbank, the country's largest bank, which plans to offer bitcoin to customers from December 1. The Moscow Exchange plans to open bitcoin trading the same day.

Strike now pays 3.6% interest on U.S. cash balances, paid out in bitcoin, with no minimum. The dollars are held at an FDIC-insured bank.

Standard Chartered is expanding its digital-asset custody to Singapore, letting institutional and corporate clients there hold bitcoin with a global bank.

Hong Kong's government reaffirmed it will introduce a bill by year-end creating licenses for firms that trade, hold and manage bitcoin for customers.

Strategy bought 334 bitcoins to bring its holdings to a record 848,000 and reported a $20.9 billion third-quarter gain, while Strive bought 2,000 to reach 29,462.

Wells Fargo is in talks with Kraken's parent company to supply bitcoin and crypto trading for the bank, one more sign that big U.S. banks are moving in.

Meanwhile, a bitcoin life insurer backed by Sam Altman, raised $37.5 million in a round led by Bain Capital Crypto. Its policies pay death benefits in bitcoin.

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

In 1787, an Anti-Federalist writing as Brutus warned that the new Constitution gave Congress a borrowing power that was "general and unlimited." In "The Anti-Federalist Warning About America's Debt Crisis" for The Daily Economy, Logan Tantibanchachai argues that the warning deserves a second look now that the national debt has passed $40 trillion.

Brutus feared Congress could "create a national debt, so large, as to exceed the ability of the country ever to sink." His fix was the rule already in the Articles of Confederation: no borrowing without the consent of nine of the thirteen states. The framers didn't keep it, but they did agree on one limit. They struck the power to "emit bills," or print paper money, after Gouverneur Morris called it "unjust and useless." Federal debts were meant to be repaid, not inflated away.

For about a century, that held, mostly through habit rather than law. Congress approved loans one at a time, tariffs often covered the budget, and war debts were paid down once the fighting stopped. In 1835, Andrew Jackson paid off the national debt entirely. The habit began to fade in 1917, when Congress replaced loan-by-loan votes with broad borrowing limits, and it never really came back. Lawmakers tried to bind themselves again with Gramm-Rudman-Hollings in 1985, pay-as-you-go rules and the 2011 spending caps. But each was an ordinary statute that a simple majority could undo. Today, the debt held by the public is about as large as the entire economy.

That's the difference between a rule and a limit. A rule lasts until the people it binds decide to change it. Bitcoin's 21 million cap is enforced by everyone who runs its software, and raising it would take near-unanimous agreement from holders who have every reason to say no. That's closer to Brutus's supermajority than anything Congress has passed.

A limit you can vote away is only a suggestion. In contrast, bitcoin's isn't up for a vote.

Bitcoin's supply will never exceed 21 million coins. Roughly how many have already been mined?

A. 15.2 million B. 18.0 million C. 20.1 million D. 20.9 million

A. 15.2 million
B. 18.0 million
C. 20.1 million
D. 20.9 million

Check your answer at the end of the page.

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Answer: C. About 20.1 million bitcoins have been mined, roughly 96% of all that will ever exist. The last 900,000 or so will trickle out over more than a century, because the reward for mining a block is cut in half about every four years. The next cut is due in spring 2028, and the final fraction of a bitcoin should be mined around the year 2140. No vote required.

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