Saifedean Ammous argues mining has stopped growing for good. This desk checked his four load-bearing figures against the sources he names. The difficulty stretch is longer than he says — 324 days now, against his 305. The epoch subsidy multiple is 21 percent, not 28. But the peak he nominates as the empirical test is not where Cambridge’s own series puts it: the high was 227 TWh in October 2025, not 190 in December, and December was already the decline.
Since June, the Treasury says, Iran’s mandatory “insurance” for ships crossing the Strait has been paid partly in bitcoin and routed through a Tehran exchange to the Revolutionary Guards. Wednesday’s designation names a street address, two websites, a developer and three men — and, across four OFAC actions against this network, not one bitcoin address. A sanction reaches what has an address. The chain does not, and the Treasury does not pretend it does.
The Federal Reserve raised rates on Wednesday for the first time since July 2023, twelve to nothing, undoing its December cut; the Bank of Japan followed a day and a half later, and both named the Middle East. A coin held in your own keys has no coupon and no creditor. Strategy’s own filing puts its expected preferred dividends and interest at $1.76 billion a year — about $2,083 for each of its 845,050 coins — paid by selling stock, at a rate its board reviews monthly against “market yields.” That is the bill a rate rise arrives at.
Governments: El Salvador National Bitcoin Office only
0.03%
Unclassified
88.74%
Parts are rounded down, so they add to slightly less than the total.
Holders that disclose nothing are left out; one that sold since its disclosure could hold less. The unclassified remainder is not evidence of self-custody.
Cloture failed 49 to 50 — eleven votes short of the sixty required, not one. The final text everyone argued about was never before the Senate; by its sponsors' own terms it would only have been offered if that vote had carried. What goes unsettled is a question worth naming plainly: who is allowed to earn on money they hold.
The recent security incidents did not demonstrate a break in Bitcoin’s rules. They exposed the promises surrounding them: that a wallet would generate sound keys, a provider would protect your records, and a claim on bitcoin could be redeemed. Self-sovereignty begins by separating those promises from Bitcoin itself.
Costed from the Census count and read against the Treasury's own ledger: the tariffs meant to pay for it have run negative since May, the ten-month deficit already beats last year's, the pledge would use every dollar of room under the debt limit, and the newest lender to this company is the stablecoin in your phone.
Attackers used a newsletter provider’s access to send convincing wallet warnings. The failure was outside the hardware wallet—but the message tried to get inside it.
Bitcoin's automatic recalibration, every 2,016 blocks, of how hard a block is to find, so blocks keep arriving about every ten minutes whatever the hashrate does.
