Exchange Rate: $77,160
Market Capitalization: $1.55T
Hash Rate (90 days): 911.7EH/s
Transactions (30 days): 20,052,882
Network Fees (economy): 1 sat/vB
Bitcoin Dominance: 59.24%

What do these numbers mean?

The 20th century ended on September 11, 2001.

Those of us who watched it happen remember the feeling: the world we knew was gone, and nobody could tell us what would replace it.

A quarter century later, we are still finding out.

One of the defining features of the 21st century that differentiates it from the 20th is that people, capital, and ideas now move across borders with a fluidity that the institutions of the last century were never built to handle. Different civilizations encounter one another constantly, intimately, and sometimes violently.

The great challenge of the present era is to make those encounters produce more than they destroy. It has taken us 25 years even to get our bearings – and we are finally emerging from a long sojourn into pathology, timidity, and confusion, and finally beginning to build a better world.

Bitcoin, perhaps unintuitively, is deeply entwined with this story.

Although you can trace the antecedents of 9/11 through the politics of the 1980s and ’90s, those links are weaker than the chain of consequences that followed. The blast radius of one terrible morning – the intensity of the attack, the spectacle, the grief, the humiliation – changed what Americans would accept from their government, and what their government believed it could get away with. The mythology of 9/11 is that it united Americans sharing in the same trauma. But the years that followed revealed how little we agreed about the country we were defending.

There is a persistent myth that terrorism doesn’t work. What people mean when they say that is really, “terrorism shouldn’t work, and so if anyone does it, we must ensure they aren’t rewarded.” These are not the same thing. “Must ensure” requires agency. “Doesn’t work” is an (inaccurate) statement of fact.

By any measure, the attackers on 9/11 succeeded in one of their primary goals – to cause America to retreat from its dedication to the freedom of its own citizens. In response, the federal government built an immense apparatus to monitor communications and financial flows while treating privacy as suspicious and restraint as weakness. We were sold the idea that preserving our way of life demanded that we surrender pieces of it.

Moreover, the trauma of the day engendered a “whatever it takes” mentality that persisted for 25 years. Fight wars, attempt to rebuild alien cultures in our own image, borrow and print incomprehensible sums of money to do so, and leave the bill for later.

The Global Financial Crisis was a manifestation of this same contempt for restraint and long-term thinking: take the risk today, collect the reward, make the consequences somebody else’s problem.. When it all broke in 2008, the answer from the government was yet more money printing. Ordinary Americans were expected to absorb the damage and keep trusting the people who had presided over it.

Then came Bitcoin. Here was a project with the audacity to advance individual liberty with hard engineering rather than persuasion or politics. Bitcoin’s success didn’t rely on a campaign to rein in the surveillance state, elect better central bankers, or beg for the powerful to exercise better judgment. Instead, it quietly built an alternative system – one that can be used by anyone on planet earth that shares the same passion for liberty, prosperity, privacy, and respect for property rights.

Bitcoin gives people the means to hold their own wealth and transact across borders, even with people whose beliefs they will never share. It facilitates peaceful dealings among men without requiring they agree about everything else. Ayn Rand said it best:

If you are searching for a way to commemorate 9/11 that is commensurate with the gravity of what happened that day, you could do worse than to simply and humbly teach the next generation about the people we lost, the country we were, and the choices that brought us here. And, teach them about bitcoin. When you do, you are helping build a future in which peace and individual liberty make a comeback.

On Sunday, a bug in Elements, the software behind Blockstream's Liquid sidechain, let an attacker mint about 4,000 L-BTC with no bitcoin behind them and redeem them for real, physical bitcion, in 36 minutes. Blockstream paused the network; the attackers returned 3,400 BTC on Monday but kept 598.5, about $47 million, and demanded 10% as a “bounty.” Blockstream's answer on Thursday: “Return the bitcoin.” Liquid is producing blocks again, with the peg suspended until reserves are whole. The bitcoin network itself is unaffected.

L-BTC, though part of a well-intentioned project, is an IOU from a “federation” – it is not bitcoin and never could be. Bitcoin’s base layer, re-verified constantly by every node, remained calm and composed throughout this ordeal. This is why real, physical bitcoin - not sidechains, not financial products built on top of it - is the least risky way to protect your property.

The Mises Institute’s Ryan McMaken reports that the Rothbard-Salerno “true money supply” grew 8.62% year over year in July, its fastest pace since August 2021, while M2 rose 5.42%, a 49-month high, to a record $23.1 trillion. The broader measure now stands at $19.71 trillion, up $1.5 trillion in a year; roughly 30% of all dollars in existence were created after January 2020, and about 70% since 2009. The Fed’s balance sheet grew $124 billion over the past year despite talk of normalization, with core PCE inflation at 3.7% in its 65th straight month above target.

Rates went up. The money supply went up anyway. For a saver, the number that matters isn’t the funds rate – it’s how many dollars are chasing the same 21 million bitcoins.

U.S. Bank, the country’s fifth-largest lender, completed a live cross-border payment with USBDC, its own dollar stablecoin, moving money between its North American and European entities on the Stellar blockchain. The bank says the pilot proved minting, redemption, freezing and clawback on its in-house digital-asset platform, and that it is exploring treasury, liquidity and collateral uses for institutional clients. A separate group of 21 banks including Bank of America, Citi and Goldman plans a joint dollar stablecoin in the first half of 2027.

Read carefully. The reason banks are investing in their own stablecoins, rather than moving existing ones through their pipes, is that banks are individually incentivized to maintain ultimate control of fund flows, and to monetize that control in various ways. Bitcoin is different, and uniquely useful, because no banks or governments have a freeze button.

The Senate will finally hold a cloture vote on the CLARITY Act, the market-structure bill dividing oversight between the SEC and CFTC. Senator Lummis warned, “if they fail to pass it next week, we will not get another realistic shot at this before the end of the decade.” On Thursday Republicans circulated a revised 630-page draft with more than 100 Democratic requests folded in, though the ethics provisions are largely unchanged and Politico reported no Democrats had yet signed on. The White House’s Patrick Witt says he’s “feeling pretty good,” while a Fairshake-linked group is running national TV ads. Cloture needs 60 votes.

Jack Dorsey’s Block applied for a national trust bank charter from the OCC for “Builders Bank & Trust,” which would custody bitcoin under federal supervision, take no deposits and make no loans.

Steak ‘n Shake said franchise same-store sales are up 19% this quarter, extending double-digit growth since it began taking bitcoin over Lightning in May 2025 and cutting card-processing costs roughly in half.

Amboss and Aureo connected the Lightning Network to Mexico’s banking system, so a bitcoin payment from anywhere lands as pesos in a Mexican bank account in seconds.

Singapore Exchange won CFTC authorization to open its bitcoin perpetual futures to U.S. institutions, a contract that has traded $5.8 billion since launching in November.

Iran’s central bank eased foreign-exchange controls to let exporters bring overseas earnings home in bitcoin and USDT, the Financial Times reported.

CoinCorner launched Vault, a Lloyd's-insured multisig custody service with keys split between the Isle of Man exchange and U.S. partner AnchorWatch, for a 1.5% annual fee.

Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong told CNBC "I personally believe that the bottom is in on Bitcoin in this most recent cycle" and that $400,000 by 2030 remains a "reasonable target."

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

Buy a coffee with dollars and the government asks nothing of you. Buy it with bitcoin and you've just sold an asset – you owe capital-gains tax on the difference between what the sats cost and what they were worth at the register, and you're supposed to find the cost basis, report it on Form 8949, and keep the records. For a $4 latte!

That's why almost nobody spends bitcoin in the U.S. on small transactions, and why Senator Lummis's S. 2207 includes a “de minimis exclusion”: purchases under $300 would be exempt from capital-gains tax, with up to $5,000 of excluded gains a year. Big gains still get taxed, but the pointless friction added to small everyday purchases would finally be gone.

Opponents might object that this scheme would materially reduce tax receipts. But a new paper from Cornell's Tech Policy Institute, Fiscal Effects of a De Minimis Exclusion for Personal Digital-Asset Payments, says the opposite. On paper, a $100 purchase with a 25% embedded gain owes $3.75 in tax. But only 32% to 56% of U.S. digital asset owners report gains at all, so the government actually collects about $1.50 per $100. Meanwhile the rule deters spending: the tax, the paperwork, and the unreported liability all signal to Americans that they should leave their coins sitting in their wallet.

With a de minimus exclusion, some of that immobilized money starts moving, and the government takes about 15.6 cents of every dollar of economic activity in income, payroll and corporate taxes. In the paper's central case, new spending would be expected to bring in $4.68 per $100 against the $1.50 lost to the exclusion, which is a net gain of $3.18 accruing to the federal government. This amounts to roughly $859 million over ten years. It breaks even if just one dollar in ten of the new spending is genuinely new.

The rule that makes bitcoin awkward to spend collects almost nothing, and repealing it would likely pay for itself. And with this friction removed, we would likely see massive investment in bitcoin payment infrastructure which could finally trigger the long-awaited transition of bitcoin’s role from being a store of value to also serving as a medium of exchange.

According to the Mises Institute's latest money supply data, roughly what share of all U.S. dollars in existence today were created after January 2020?

A. 10%
B. 20%
C. 30%
D. 50%

Check your answer at the end of the page.

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Answer: C. About 30% of the current money supply was created after January 2020, and roughly 70% since the end of 2009, according to Ryan McMaken's tally of the Rothbard-Salerno measure. Growth re-accelerated to 8.62% in July, the fastest in 59 months. Bitcoin's supply grew by about 3.125 coins every ten minutes over the same stretch, exactly as scheduled, and will do the same next week regardless of what happens on Wednesday.

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