Bitcoin Podcast Digest

Key Developments

• Nasdaq tightens listing oversight for share-for-crypto deals. Certain companies must now obtain shareholder approval before issuing new shares to purchase crypto; failure to comply can trigger trading suspension or delisting 32 The report indicated that Nasdaq is now requiring certain companies to obtain shareholder approval before issuing new shares for crypto purchases, potentially slowing the recent trend of firms transforming themselves into crypto focused stock. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_Ta8hzAQFq4 31 This increased oversight could delay deals and introduce uncertainty into the market's crypto boom. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_Ta8hzAQFq4 30 Going further, according to the report, Nasdaq can now delist stocks or suspend trading if companies fail to comply with these requirements. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_Ta8hzAQFq4 . Hosts noted this could shape the playbook for “bitcoin treasury companies,” with MicroStrategy cited as the largest corporate bitcoin treasury today and discussion that stricter approvals might entrench its lead by raising hurdles for competitors 29 Right now they're the biggest corporate Treasury, Bitcoin, corporate Treasury company, basically, period. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_Ta8hzAQFq4 28 Now, there is the other flip side of the coin, which is this could be a play to essentially protect strategies moat here. So, like, maybe this is strategy is going to get added into the S P500 later today. And then any new company that's trying to either be listed on Nasdaq or get added to the S P500, now there's, you know, an obligation for Nasdaq to Be like, actually, you know, you guys can't be added because you guys are doing things without your shareholders approval. And that would essentially create a regulatory, well, not a regulatory mode. It would essentially create a moat around micro strategy so that they would be the superior bitcoin treasury company. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_Ta8hzAQFq4 .

  Source: Simply Bitcoin — Hosts

• U.S. Bank resumes institutional bitcoin custody using NYDIG as sub‑custodian, framing the restart as enabled by greater regulatory clarity and complementing ETF‑era services 26 U.S. bank announced today that it has resumed offering cryptocurrency custody services. Originally announced in 2021 as an early access program to global fund services client. The services are intended for institutional investment managers with registered or private funds who seek a secure safekeeping solution for Bitcoin. Nydig, a bitcoin company basically backed by bitcoiners and bridging the gap. And in Wall street and institutions, a vertically integrated bitcoin financial service and power infrastructure firm will act as the Bitcoin sub custodian. Quote, we're proud that we were one of the first banks to offer cryptocurrency custody for fund and institutional custody clients back in 2021. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_Ta8hzAQFq4 25 And in Wall street and institutions, a vertically integrated bitcoin financial service and power infrastructure firm will act as the Bitcoin sub custodian. Quote, we're proud that we were one of the first banks to offer cryptocurrency custody for fund and institutional custody clients back in 2021. And we're excited to resume the service this year. Following greater regulatory clarity, we've expanded our offering to include Bitcoin ETFs which allow us to provide full service solutions for managers seeking custody and administration admin. Nate Nydig is honored to partner with US bank as its primary provider for bitcoin custody services. Together we can bridge the gap between traditional finance and the modern economy by facilitating access for global funding services clients to Bitcoin as sound money delivered with the safety and security expected by regulated financial institutions. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_Ta8hzAQFq4 24 Again, I have this whole theory that I think since ETFs got launched, it's fundamentally shifted the market structure of Bitcoin and we are in a new paradigm ever since they launched the ETFs. But it's basically this quote right here. Following greater regulatory clarity, we expanded our offerings to include ETFs, which allow us to provide full service solutions. Now, of course, I wouldn't be trusting banks with my custody solutions. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_Ta8hzAQFq4 . Hosts added that large banks are moving to “meet customer demand,” even if some executives remain publicly skeptical 23 All the banks are trying to get into Bitcoin, whether that's trying to get microstrategy exposure or whether that's trying to essentially get their foot in the door and become a, quote, crypto adjacent company with custody or offering these services to clients, of course they want their fees, they want to make money. But it does seem like we, we are entering an era where we're no longer going to get fought here, that since they are embracing our industry, all the biggest players are embracing this industry as well. Whether they want to or not is besides the point. I think Jamie Dimon is like the best example of this. He's like, look, I don't like this thing, but if my customers want to buy this, I guess I will offer it to you guys. So this could be a bending of the knee moment where, look, they're realizing there's something on the horizon. If we do get a sense of regulatory clarity here, if the rules of the road are laid out so that they can feel that they can come into bitcoin in bulk. I think we're, we're slowly but surely just taking over the world. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_Ta8hzAQFq4 .

  Source: Simply Bitcoin — Hosts

• Developer protections and market structure under the Clarity Act. Capitol Gains highlighted draft language to protect non‑custodial software developers from unlicensed money transmission liability (18 U.S.C. §1960), and noted material differences between House and Senate approaches to defining securities vs. commodities (decentralization “maturity” test vs. rights‑conferred test) 52 So the two main things I think people are looking for when it comes to clarity, so the first one, protections for software developers under section 1960, which is unlicensed Money transmission. So basically saying that anyone creating non controlling, that's the language they use in the bill. Non custodial technology or purveying that technology is not responsible for money transmission. That's the number one thing that we're doing, paying attention to. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VEySREc2CEk 91 What I think most Bitcoiners should be paying attention to is obviously protection for software developers. This will include wallet manufacturers, wallet makers, all this stuff. And I'm, I'm excited, I think that, you know, even with what happened, I think two weeks, three weeks ago now with Lola, Lola looking, you know, looking into potentially Google, we never really found out for sure, but whether or not Google was actually going to delist, I don't know, non custodial wallets in their store. You know, we just want to see all this kind of stuff stop and have, and have people creating non custodial tech stop feeling nervous around whether or not they're going to go to jail for it, whether they'll be listed because of what they be delisted because of what they, whatever it is, we just want this, this tech to be protected. And as of right now, the language from the Blockchain Regulatory Certainty act that was put into the Clarity act is going to be ideally the language that protects these developers. I would just say also. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VEySREc2CEk 51 They had this test which was a maturity chest, you know, inverted commas. Maturity, how. So the question is how mature is the blockchain, the, the token and in other words, how decentralized is it? And so depending on if it's, if it's really decentralized great commodity in the, in the CFTC world. If it's not, you know, Security sec, that was the House, the Senate, the Senate Banking Committee has come up with are applying a different test which is, has nothing to do with figuring out how decentralized something is, but it's more just looking at which rights are conferred on beholders of certain assets. Do they give you certain rights? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VEySREc2CEk 50 Okay. It was understood. This is, this is how the SEC side of it is going to work. Then the two will be merged. But of course I suppose a couple of issues there which we've, we've touched on. Certainly regular, regular viewers of capital gains will have heard us talk about this before, but the, the draft that we do have for the Clarity act so far in the Senate differs materially from what was passed in the House. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VEySREc2CEk .

  Source: Bitcoin Magazine — Capitol Gains (hosts)

• SBA guidance on debanking remediation. Following a White House executive order, the SBA instructed lenders to identify prior debanking practices and make reasonable efforts to reinstate affected customers 54 I don't know if it's official guidance, but it's kind of a press release of sorts that was precipitated by the executive order from the White House from A few weeks back on debanking and what they have, basically there was a requirement like that. You know, the EO from Trump said a bunch of things, including directing the SBA and some other agencies to, I don't. Clean up their act, basically implement a bunch of practices that are going to bring debanking to an end in one way or another, and also kind of make restitution for it in some ways. So the SBA last week has ordered lenders around the country to end a bunch of debanking practices. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VEySREc2CEk 53 So pursuant to this executive order, the SBA's letter has required lenders to take a bunch of actions, including. So they have to identify any past practices, you know, informal, formal or informal policies that influence their decisions to debank people. They have to make reasonable efforts to identify and then reinstate those clients. So if you had kicked someone, you know, bank of America or kick people off its services, they have to kind of go and make good, find those folks and offer them the services back. So this is interesting. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VEySREc2CEk .

  Source: Bitcoin Magazine — Capitol Gains (hosts)

• State‑level risk for miners. A Wisconsin bill offering tax exemptions to data centers explicitly excludes crypto mining facilities, creating a discriminatory carve‑out against bitcoin miners 45 What the bill concerns is tax exemptions for data centers. And it's a, it's a, it's ostensibly a pro business bill. This is a Republican sponsored, you know, tax exemption bill. It's like saying we're going to reduce taxes on a number of different data centers. However, there's one quirky part of this, which is that it exempts, does not apply to anyone using with kind of, what do they call it, cryptocurrency facilities used to process and verify and secure crypto transactions. Miners, in other words. So what this is, is a bunch of types of data centers are all going to get tax exemptions except for bitcoin miners, for example. So in a way it's a kind of. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VEySREc2CEk 43 And, and you never know why these types of exemptions get thrown into pieces of legislation. Right. One person has the idea in a drafting committee and then the language gets in there somehow. But I guess why I also wanted to highlight it was to show that it's, it's often hard to pass the details of legislation. It's like a general point. Okay, One of the things I'm trying to do with bitcoin laws, for example, is to, is to make it easy to say, all right, these are, these are maybe good bills and bad bills. And you know, if there's a partisan element to it, it's like this, you know, Republicans are sponsoring these great bills and Democrats are sponsoring these bad ones or vice versa. But I guess it's, it's complex. And so I don't know, maybe this is me just whining about how hard it is for me to figure this stuff out. But yeah, I, I guess folks in Wisconsin maybe pay attention to this and I don't know, I, I kind of, I'm a little bit perplexed by it. I don't know why, it doesn't make sense to me at all why you would just have this kind of carve out almost discriminatory thing applied to, to bitcoin miners. So hopefully it doesn't kind of get passed in this form, but there you go. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VEySREc2CEk .

  Source: Bitcoin Magazine — Capitol Gains (hosts)

• Tokenized SEC‑registered shares launch on public chains; opportunity flagged to settle such assets over Bitcoin L2s so fees/gas accrue in BTC rather than “walled gardens” 39 Last thing on the last thing on the docket had an announcement from Galaxy. So Galaxy has launched tokenized SEC registered shares on. On public blockchains. So this is somewhat breaking new ground. Any, I don't know if you had a chance to chat to Alex, but any, any kind of thoughts on this news and the significance of it? Yeah, I, I actually I think I put this on the agenda and I was pumped. So this really doesn't have anything directly to do with Bitcoin, but it ca, it could or it can. So this is, I think they tokenized and put this on Solana if I'm not mistaken. So great. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VEySREc2CEk 37 So for those who don't understand that you're actually using Bitcoin on Ethereum, which sounds like a little bit kind of weird. So ETH is technically different or Ether is different from Ethereum. But to my point, let's say microstrategy or Strategy or NACA decided to tokenize their stock. It would be cool in my opinion if that stock traded on a Bitcoin layer two and then we were using Bitcoin for the actual gas fees to, you know, to, to trade that stock. I, I, I, I think that would make me happier than seeing all of this stuff traded in walled gardens. It feels a bit antithetical to the purpose of Bitcoin. So if we are moving in this direction. My, my, my. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VEySREc2CEk .

  Source: Bitcoin Magazine — Capitol Gains (hosts)

• Tornado Cash case watch. The government may seek a retrial on hung counts (money‑laundering and sanctions violations); appellate steps on the money‑transmission conviction are also in view 41 Also, something to keep in mind, there's going to be some action happening around the Tornado Cash trial that I'll be paying attention to. So I think we're going to find out soon whether or not the government wants to retry the two, the two counts on which the jury was hung. So the first count, which was the money laundering count, and then the other one which was the sanctions violations count. We're going to hear more about that and I'm hoping to speak with Jake Stravinsky about that to get a little bit more insight as to what we might expect. I don't know whether we'll be getting information about the, the, the money transmission charge for which Storm was found guilty, whether or not they're going to be moving that to the appellate courts anytime soon. But looking into that, I should say, other than that, I don't know. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VEySREc2CEk .

  Source: Bitcoin Magazine — Capitol Gains (hosts)

• Release watch — Bitcoin Knots v29.1 (2025‑09‑03) was announced for users tracking Knots builds 33 I just got notified in the chat that Bitcoin knots V29 1 point knots 20250903 got released. So how much review went into that release? I haven't looked through it. There's a bunch a bunch of release notes. But if you're on bitcoin knots, you can go check it out. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZALtLBpSeic .

  Source: TFTC — Rabbit Hole Recap (#373)

• Ecosystem event — Mining Disrupt (Dallas) billed as the largest bitcoin mining expo, with manufacturers and mining leaders participating 84 And if you haven't already got your tickets to the largest bitcoin mining expo in the world, Mining Disrupt conference, happening in Dallas, Texas, then you should join 3,000 people. Some of the world's top manufacturers and leaders in bitcoin mining, and some of the top thought experts and people in bitcoin, like the Simply Bitcoin crew, get 20% off your ticket by using the promo code Simply Bitcoin. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hj5rqYmr2eE .

  Source: Simply Bitcoin — Hosts

Technical Insights

• Soft‑fork debate: what a new opcode set could unlock — and the risks. Janusz explained that soft forks are backward‑compatible changes to Bitcoin that could extend Script functionality while maintaining chain compatibility 97 So first, what's a soft fork? So it's essentially a way that we can change Bitcoin and it's backwards compatible. And kind of what that means is it ensures that nodes who have not upgraded their software to adopt the software can remain on the same blockchain as those that have kind of adopted the fork. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OGrRMT40NI0 83 And what are we trying to change about Bitcoin will potentially trying to add more functionality to Bitcoin script. So what's Bitcoin script? It's essentially a scripting language, for lack of a better term, the execution environment that, that dictates the rules that transactions have to be abide by to be considered valid transactions. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OGrRMT40NI0 . Bitcoin Script’s deliberate limits help avoid certain attack surfaces (e.g., malicious MEV), but constrain complex on‑chain contracts today 82 And it's intentionally limited, so it's not really expressive like other scripting languages used in other blockchains. And that lack of expressiveness is a feature because it can, you know, prevent kind of things like malicious forms of MEV and things of that nature. So it's intentionally limited. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OGrRMT40NI0 81 So I can't verify something called a zero knowledge proof or a validity proof within a single bitcoin script that fits in the block size limit due to like the limitations in the scripting capabilities. And the, the contracts that we can build on chain are not really expressive and they're typically limited to like two party contracts. So DLCs, lightning channels, state chain multi sigs, et cetera. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OGrRMT40NI0 . Proposed changes like CTV could simplify user vaults and reduce interactivity for some L2 protocols 96 These like we talked about on the CTV panel vaults. So we can build things like vaults today by doing these huge pre signed transactions like emulate them. But if we add CTV we can decrease the complexity and make it a lot more user friendly and give users the ability to just dictate the way that UTXOs can be spent in the future. Add like a safety, like a safety feature, like if, if you want to have like a fallback undo button. CTV makes this a lot easier and reduces the complexity to build these things to make it easier for users. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OGrRMT40NI0 95 Things like L2s like arc where users have to come on periodically to join in something called a batch output transaction to maintain custody of their funds. CTV can limit some of the interactivity requirements and make it easier for users to participate in these types of transactions. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OGrRMT40NI0 , while OP_CAT/native proof verification could let L2 state be verified via on‑chain contracts instead of federated assumptions 94 Roll up bridges, roll ups work today on Bitcoin they exist and we can rely on things like bitvm. They give us this like permissioned one of n assumption, but it's still a federation in the sense that not anybody can participate. And this becomes much better if we have something like opcat where we can have state carrying covenants and things like called native proof verification. So we can use an on chain smart contract to verify the state of the L2 system instead of relying on a kind of permission system that executes that off chain. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OGrRMT40NI0 . Programmatic slashing via CTV is discussed for “bitcoin staking” schemes securing certain L2s, with fees/revenue dynamics for stakers and miners if L2s post data to L1 93 And then things like Bitcoin staking which are now being used today to help secure some L2 networks. They work today. You can enter into bitcoin staking scripts but because you're working with a, a pre. A CTV emulation committee, malicious stakers can actually collude with the committee signers to avoid slashing and CTV can better and like enforce programmatic slashing into Bitcoin. Staking. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OGrRMT40NI0 80 So if you have something like bitcoin staking, if you do commit, if you add like CTV for example, this is actually a lot more attractive for L2. So for Bitcoin staking to work there needs to be an application demand on the other side. So the fees that these applications generate are paid to the stakers for their security. So there's like two, two way side of it. And so there's more customers now because if we have this committee less bitcoin staking, for example, the, the applications now know that if someone's malicious they'll get slashed and they'll get penalized. So does the stronger guarantee create more customer customers for staking and then does that generate more revenue for the stakers? So this idle bitcoin that institutions are holding can now be used in protocols to help secure layer twos and provide more economic security them and stronger guarantees. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OGrRMT40NI0 79 In an L2 environment, the app devs can make money because they're running sequencers and can accrue value and then the fees will still go to miners. Because to build a trust minimized L2 we need to post the data to Bitcoin. That's like a requirement of that. So we can still put transactions on Bitcoin that pay fees to miners and we kind of have this like the, the, the, the degens get what they want, the app devs get what they want and the miners are still getting paid. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OGrRMT40NI0 . Speakers cautioned about unintended consequences (e.g., MEV surfaces, miner centralization) and the growing difficulty of social consensus as institutions enter; timing any upgrade before ossification is a central strategic question 78 Like why aren't we going to add all these fancy opcodes to verify snarks and do better bitcoin staking and improve a lot of the assumptions with self custody? Social consensus is just really, really, really hard. People want different things. Roll ups want snark verification. People building potentially on ARC want different types of opcodes. So these conflicting wants between different application teams means that everyone in the space has different priorities. And now we're getting into a situation where nation states and institutions and everybody are coming into the space. So we kind of have this last point where this might be the last time that we can actually kind of coordinate a upgrade to the Bitcoin protocol. And failure to move on that right now means that we're closer to ossification. And I would recommend that we don't do that. And I'm going to present some data as to why. But before we get there, there's also this other consideration that the knock on effects of doing a soft fork could. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OGrRMT40NI0 77 But before we get there, there's also this other consideration that the knock on effects of doing a soft fork could. Yeah, there's maybe unintended consequences. So for example, if we implement something like opcat, are we able to build expressive enough scripts to introduce things that by a product of that do things like mevl, where there's. Which can increase minor centralization. What if we coordinate this huge effort for these applications and then there's this massive lack of adoption and it kind of feels like, well, that was a waste of time and we could have spent it better elsewhere. And we also have to like contend with all these different proposals, like which fork is the right one and which kind of roadmap for scaling Bitcoin is the better one to go with. So there's like all these competing interests and people and everything. So what if we don't fork? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OGrRMT40NI0 .

  Source: Bitcoin Magazine — “Can Bitcoin Succeed Without Another Soft Fork? w/ Janusz” (Janusz)

• Mempool relay policy vs. consensus: what’s actually in dispute. TFTC outlined that the current fight is over node relay policy (mempool rules), not consensus rules — i.e., what your node relays mostly affects you and fee‑estimation quality 47 The current debate is over policy rules, specifically mempool transaction relay rules. It's not actually over consensus rules. And in that situation it's very much what your node is running mostly affects yourself. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZALtLBpSeic . Core maintainers worry that valid but historically non‑standard transactions (e.g., very large inscriptions/OP_RETURNs and sub‑1 sat/vB fees) are increasingly sent directly to miners, degrading the open mempool’s visibility and introducing competitive/centralization risks if broad relay is bypassed 46 The current debate is over policy rules, specifically mempool transaction relay rules. It's not actually over consensus rules. And in that situation it's very much what your node is running mostly affects yourself. The core maintainer's argument is that valid transactions that have historically been considered non standard bitcoin core and have not been relayed by bitcoin core are getting confirmed anyway and they're going directly to miners. And the result is you have potential centralization risks where, where transactions are going out of band and no one sees those transactions until after they're mined and other miners can't compete with them and node operators can't do accurate fee estimation. If we actually have a high fee environment which we obviously do not have right now. And two examples of those are the incredibly large inscriptions or three examples incredibly large opera turns, the incredibly large inscriptions and then also Most recently the sub1 SAP per byte transactions. Right? Those by default are not relayed by notes. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZALtLBpSeic 44 And two examples of those are the incredibly large inscriptions or three examples incredibly large opera turns, the incredibly large inscriptions and then also Most recently the sub1 SAP per byte transactions. Right? Those by default are not relayed by notes. So on a technical basis that's what the argument's over. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZALtLBpSeic . Hosts emphasized the value of an open public mempool as an anti‑permission feature and noted user options like blocks‑only mode or switching implementations/configs via tools like Start9 38 I will say that I do Think we are fortunate that we've gotten to this point with a pretty open relay network in Mempool. The idea that you're able to just run a node on a cheap computer and see what the transaction queue looks like is not a given in the Bitcoin consensus protocol. That is an amazing capability that we have. The alternative would be something like if you want to know what transactions are going to be confirmed, you have to hit the APIs of F2 pool and ant pool and all these other miners and that would be a completely permission basis. Maybe they charge for it, maybe they block you out. There's a very real situation where we could end up in that point. So I think people should appreciate that we have a relatively open transaction queue for Bitcoin. So those are my opinions on the matter. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZALtLBpSeic 40 So if you are using these things in production and you, you know, you really need like reliable uptime or whatnot, you do have the option of running Bitcoin core in blocks only mode and just doing no Mempool whatsoever. And then you're not relaying any transactions, you're just simply downloading mined blocks, which is not necessarily a bad option, depending on how you fall on this stuff. But yeah, users have many options. That's the cool part. But I would like to see more options available. And I will say that Start nine makes it really easy to to choose if you want to run knots or core, or if you want to run core blocks only mode. And they make it really easy to update your config file. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZALtLBpSeic .

  Source: TFTC — Rabbit Hole Recap (#373) — Marty Bent & Matt Odell

• Protocol posture from Bitcoin Asia: data carriage is unavoidable; focus on useful upgrades. Eric Wall reviewed that arbitrary data can be encoded into the chain in ways that are impractical to ban short of banning addresses/keys, and that fees/mempool pressure receded sharply (less than 1 sat/vB seen) after the surge from ordinals/BRC‑20s 99 So Bitmex research Johnny, shout out to Johnny finally did a write up and tried to be as articulate and as pedagogical as is possible to show you guys that it is not possible to prevent arbitrary data from getting inserted into the blockchain. You can literally invent encoding schemes that puts the image data in private keys and makes those private keys vulnerable such that you can still embed images into the blockchain. If you want to stop image data, arbitrary data from getting into the blockchain, you're going to have to ban bitcoin addresses, you're going to have to ban bitcoin private keys and you're harassing people like Kalle. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BTMVvoQSm4w 71 This is today. Today there's basically no transactions in the mempool. This little red here. That's not. That's. That's not a bad thing. For people that want to get their transactions in, that means that people are paying less than 1 Satoshi per V byte. This is what the mempool looks like today. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BTMVvoQSm4w 98 0.18. That means that the minimum fees now to get a transaction in are 80% lower than what was even possible by the filter rules back when we started. So the fees are less than when we started, 80% lower than when we started. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BTMVvoQSm4w . He argued the real risk is an “ossification camp” winning the narrative; energy spent fighting “spam” should be redirected to constructive protocol work 69 So they've got different prongs of how they're attacking bitcoin all at once. And one of those is to blame taproot so that they hope that the ossification camp kind of takes over. So in Luke Dasher's most conspiratorial, cartoonish, you know, idea of me as a, as a villain in this ecosystem, the worst thing, the worst effect that I could have on the bitcoin ecosystem is that the ossification camp wins. And if you look at what is happening in bitcoin development right now. That is what is happening. There's general distrust against bitcoin developers. The exact problem that Luke warned you about, that he said that I was causing, is happening now. Listen to Luke. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BTMVvoQSm4w 68 The biggest issue that could possibly happen is that you let the ossification camp win. I am tired of winning. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BTMVvoQSm4w 67 The problem is that when you fight spam, that's how we win. The reason that I'm on this stage right now is that you gave a fuck about what we were doing in the first Place. The reason that a taproot wizard image is $20,000 or more at this point is because you pay attention to it. Ignore the problem and it will go away. And yes, I will admit I have caused some problems on purpose, but we got a fucking focus on what matters now. If you fight us, we win. That's the only reason that this whole spam problem exists is because you gave enough attention to it to make that spam valuable. Ignore the spam, price goes down, problem goes away. And it's already, it has already happened. There is no problem here. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BTMVvoQSm4w .

  Source: Bitcoin Magazine — Eric Wall

• Privacy and wallet tooling updates. Wasabi Wallet 2.7 shipped a stabilization release and improved coordinator UX; updates now distribute via Nostr relays, Tor is bundled, and running a coordinator is significantly simpler, including prune/blocks‑only operation modes 92 Software update here From Wasabi version 2.7 has been released. Stabilization update that boosts reliability while bringing a fresh look and smoother performance. Performance enhanced node integration, refreshed UI one config slash network, smarter coordinators and many bug fixes. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZALtLBpSeic 36 Those updates were getting sent by a centralized server. I think GitHub was involved in the process and now it's all being delivered via Noster relays. So they've distributed that out. I think that's a very clever mechanism. Clever usage of Noster to use it to notify and distribute new releases. The second piece is they made it even easier to launch coordinators. So coinjoin protocols obviously. Well, not all of them join market doesn't rely on one. But historically Wasabi and Whirlpool have used decentralized coordinators. The coordinators pass sign message between each other and basically Set up the multi party transaction coordinator is a central point of failure. It's also a trust issue. There is some trust in terms of privacy, but not fun loss when using a coordinator if the coordinator is malicious and tries to attack you. So they made it easier than ever to launch your own coordinator. You could run a coordinator in prune mode and blocks only without a mempool, which I thought was a timely release. And it's Tor by default. So Tor is bundled into the coordinator package and it's basically as easy as possible to run a coordinator now. Actually, I see McCoy in here. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZALtLBpSeic . Sparrow Wallet was highlighted for robust PGP signature verification and strong personal‑node integration; users were warned that Sparrow is desktop‑only and to avoid fake mobile apps 35 Sparrow Update Verify feature led the way. That feature actually came out after Wasabi implemented theirs and it was because I asked Craig on a podcast to implement it into Sparrow. But I love Sparrow. Sparrow is my probably. I mean it's, it's. I'm so reliant on that software. My family, my company is open sats. Like I really rely on Sparrow heavily and so if you haven't used Sparrow Wallet, great piece of open source software, you can use it with your favorite hardware. Wallets, you can easily do multi sig. You can easily do hot wallets. And Sparrow Wallet is awesome and Craig is a legend and I'm very grateful we have him. Also, really easy to use with your own node. Yeah, cosign all that shout out to Wasabi. I mean, I think the Wasabi team is a story of perseverance and grind. We used to have Wasabi Wednesdays back on this podcast way, way back in the day. And they've had their ups and downs. And I think this latest release is a testament to people who truly care about privacy and giving Bitcoiners the best user experience when using Bitcoin. It's great to see they're still pushing it forward. You didn't put one in the chat. But oh yeah, wait, real quick. Sparrow is only available on desktop. It's not available in app stores. There's fake Sparrow wallets and app stores. Don't download those. Those are fake. The only Real Sparrow is sparrowwallet.com and best practice on first install is to do a PGP signature verification. There is a guide there on how to verify it, but then after you do it the first time, or you can just. You're probably fine if you just download and don't verify it. So don't let that hold you back. But you should learn how to verify software. But once you do that, then from that point forward, not only can you use existing installations to verify Sparrow, but you can actually use it to Verify other drag and drop and verify other major bitcoin open source projects which is just useful feature in general. That's a beautiful thing. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZALtLBpSeic .

  Source: TFTC — Rabbit Hole Recap (#373)

• NPUB Cash and Cashu: instant Lightning addresses via Nostr, with safer custody options. NPUB Cash gives any Nostr npub a Lightning address without signup by using Nostr keys for auth; sats can be sent immediately and redeemed later 20 The idea basically is a lightning address for everyone based on NASA and Cashew. So if you ever like had a different lightning address, you know that it's like you need a web service of some sorts to like host it, right? Usually that is done via custodian. That's probably where most people get their lightning addresses. You can do it yourself, but you require like an LN URL server. It's. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NJIihWy_iAA 19 So that's basically unpub of cache. It's a lighting address that does not require signup that just is based on your nostril identity that uses NASA public keys and private keys for authentication. And if you have an OSTER account, you have an NPUP cache lighting address because it's your npup at npub cache is already your lighting address. So if I know your endpub, I can, I can zap you and you can redeem the set later on. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NJIihWy_iAA . In the base model the mint is the primary custodian while NPUB Cash temporarily holds bearer proofs; “pay‑to‑public‑key” can lock tokens so the service itself cannot spend them 90 So, so right, like in the, in the, in the base case, because the mint is the real custodian. I mean, it also depends on like, how do you define custodian with the base setup that is like the most compatible setup, Endpoint cache, the server is in possession of the cache approves. So it. Okay, it's holding the bearer IO. Yes, exactly. So it is not technically like the mint is still the custodian, but like Endpoint cash is the next in line custodian. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NJIihWy_iAA 18 Then with, with cashier there's pay to public key, for example, where you can like lock tokens to a certain public key. So whoever holds the token will not be able to redeem it with the mint without actually signing for it as well. So with that NPOD cash can actually like not be in the like the next in line custodian anymore, basically. So if the token is locked to your public key, even NPOP cash couldn't spend it and it's actually very good for NPOP cash as well, because it's not in honeypot anymore. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NJIihWy_iAA . The NPUB X (v2) design stores mint quotes rather than pre‑minting fixed denominations so wallets control denomination/coin‑selection; a planned batch‑mint API will redeem many small receipts in one call 89 There's even more nuance because now there's NPUB X cache, which is the nightly version of npub cache v2. Basically the reason why we build it on a different or I build it on a different domain is because obviously I didn't want to break it for people that currently use it. But there's the experimental NPOPX cache that works in a completely different way. Like from the outside it still works. It looks like the exact same thing, but on the inside it is actually not even creating tokens, cash tokens. It is just like creating a Mint quote with the Mint. So basically requesting an invoice and then storing the secret that is used to redeem that invoice with the Mint. And then a cache wallet can actually go there and redeem the token themselves. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NJIihWy_iAA 17 Well, the cool thing about NPABEX is the cool thing about NPOP X cache, it leaves this decision up to the client because the server doesn't actually like choose the automation. It just like stores the. The minquote. So the wallet that implements NPOP cash can actually choose the denomination. So if your goal is to have one massive token, you can get that. But if your wallet's like a little bit smart and maybe wants to optimize its local proof storage for better payment flows and other stuff, it can even like mint smallest things and choose denominations and optimize its own coin selection by that. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NJIihWy_iAA 16 So with the first version, whenever you receive a payment, the server will mint a cache token for you and that has that denomination. And when you. So if I receive like 10 sats, like I'm getting a 10 SAT cashew token. Yeah. So you can think about it a little bit like, like dollar bills. Right? There's just like with cashier there's like fixed denominations of stuff you can build. So if you receive 10 zaps, 10 sats, that will be a 8 sat bill and a 2 sat bill mushed together in a token. And these like single denominations are what are being stored and input cache. So if you after a week of heavy zapathon come back to input cache and want to redeem all your stuff, it's going to be a lot, a lot, a lot. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NJIihWy_iAA 15 There's going to be a protocol level fix to this because it's something in cashew that we thought about a lot if people want to do a lot of what we call minting. So basically you can always do one mint per HTTP request with a mint. And we thought that's kind of limitation that doesn't need to be there. Let's create something called batch mint. And once we have batch mint, NPUB cache or like NPUB X cache is literally going to change to like you. Doesn't matter how many stuff, how many sats, how many like different zaps you received, you're going to click one button, it's going to make one call and it's all there. That's. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NJIihWy_iAA . NPUB Cash can be self‑hosted (Docker + DB) and already supports multiple mints; ecosystem work includes mint discovery/auditing via Nostr (NIP‑87) and aggregators like Cache Kom, plus POS demos and a BTCPay plugin to use Cashu as the Lightning backend 14 So basically, if you hosted your own NPUB crash instance, you could give out lighting addresses running that service. And then in the wallet app you could just like. It could be like npubitldispatch.com for example. Right. And so npub accept cache is literally just, it's just a web server. So it has like a Docker file and you can run the docker file and then it's there. It doesn't require any infrastructure, it requires a database connection. It's not written for SQLite yet, but like other than that, there's no lightning, there's no whatever. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NJIihWy_iAA 88 It runs on multiple mints as well. So that's a cool new feature. You can like choose your own mint as a user. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NJIihWy_iAA 13 So he was in, in Riga, he was talking about the concept of know your mint, basically discovering mints, seeing who's using that mint or who would recommend that mint and also getting some stats about the mint. And we actually already have tools for that. Right. There's a nostri that I don't know the number out of my head, but there is a noster. I think it's 87, but yeah, not too sure. That lets people recommend cashew and fedimints on noster. So you can use your web of trust basically to see which mints would your friends or friends of friends recommend. So that's pretty cool. So you can go to bitcoin mints.com Nip87. Nip87, yeah. Awesome. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NJIihWy_iAA 12 So with Cache Kom, I combined the two basically. So you run a single command, Basically it's a JavaScript library. You run a single API and then it will aggregate all the events from NASA with the recommendations and we'll look for like mint auditor data and then it will like put them all together and give you a list of mints. Will they say like this mint was recommended by like 10 people, but its speed index compared to others is only like 60 out of 100. And its success rate is only like 81%. So you can like have all this information at one single. In one single UI element, basically. So the idea is like if you go to Cache me in the future, you will not see that big admin button, but instead it will be like, hey, here's a list of like 20 mints I found on Oster. And here's some like, neutral data about it, so you can make your own informed decision about this. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NJIihWy_iAA 9 During the hackathon in Riga, I built a POS system on Cashew called Peanut Pal. And actually I used all lighting in there as well. Like it was all based on Cashew but like all the invoices that were visible and so only lightning. You don't have to apologize Soap Miner. You make the best SOAP in the business. I just want to answer your question properly. That's why I said it. So Miner said he doesn't understand, Matt. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NJIihWy_iAA 8 Sorry, I just wanted to say that there's actually like a BTC pay plugin for cash, you know, so you can. You can. So basically it. First of all it offers the thing that we just talked about that doesn't make too much sense like off like actually paying with the cash token. But the idea, and I'm not sure if it's in yet, but I know that that is one of the things that it should do at some point is you should be able to like host the BTC pay server and use cache as your lightning backend. I think. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NJIihWy_iAA . Bolt12 client support exists; broader utility depends on mint/LN backend upgrades 11 Getting bolt 12 in is just a super cool thing. The velocity of the protocol. I mean, like I said this before is insane. We're working super, super, like, not, not, not. I'm. I'm not working on that, but like, team is working on. On getting CDK everywhere. And we're talking about CDK summer here. Building. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NJIihWy_iAA 10 Yes. I mean like the client side is very, very easy. I think Mint support is, is what will take a bit longer because the Mint actually needs to do the lighting stuff. Right. So the Mint support is probably going to take a bit longer, but it's there and it's, it's working. So with backends that if, if Mints actually upgrade, they would be able to support it and it would work. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NJIihWy_iAA .

  Source: Citadel Dispatch — Matt Odell & Egge

Market & Adoption

• How institutions are getting exposure — and why treasury companies matter. Bitwise sees most allocators starting at ~1% and laddering to 2–5%, implying roughly $1.5T in additional BTC demand over a decade on a $100T institutional base 27 Well, every day at Bitwise we talk to institutional investors. These are RIAs, hedge funds, family offices, high net worth individuals. And the pattern continues to emerge that more and more of these investors are starting with a 1% allocation to Bitcoin as they build their portfolio. And then what we've seen time and time again is those 1% allocations ladder up to 2, 3, 5%. Now many investors that we're speaking to have a much larger allocation than that. But we believe that investors will allocate somewhere between 1 to 5% of their portfolios to Bitcoin. If you just take a step back and think about how Bitcoin has a 21 million supply or how Bitcoin has a 21 million fixed supply. If you think about what a 1 to 5% allocation would be for the 100 trillion institutional investment space, that's 1.5 trillion of additional buying pressure for Bitcoin over the next 10 years. And that's why we think there will be a continued sustained supply and demand imbalance that will drive the price higher. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_Ta8hzAQFq4 . ETF inflows remain strong as another on‑ramp 34 Yeah, ETF inflows still strong. On that point brought up Michael Saylor. He is the executive chairman of strategy and MSTR. Will it be added to the S&P4 Bitcoin Summer people Summer is coming to an end. I can feel the cold autumn winds rolling into town. Is paper Bitcoin summer officially over? If you look at the stock prices of these companies, it seems like it wasn't the best summer ever. But people are speculating. Is strategy going to be added to the S P tomorrow. I think they're going to be added. I don't care. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZALtLBpSeic . Joe Burnett explained that many institutions are constrained from owning spot bitcoin directly and instead buy securities (equities/fixed income), making “bitcoin treasury companies” a bridge product; those companies use long‑duration credit (convertible notes, preferred equity) to avoid forced liquidations while acquiring more BTC 7 Saylor had an interesting slide in one of his presentations where he basically just showed that 97% of institutional capital in the United States can't buy or is mandated to only buying equities and fixed income. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NFBDl8yvSSs 6 But one is the idea of this intelligent leverage. Right before, if you wanted to buy more Bitcoin than you could afford, you would have to deposit your Bitcoin as collateral, borrow against it, buy Bitcoin on another exchange and then hold the Bitcoin. But when you use Bitcoin as collateral directly as an individual, you might be on a leveraged Bitcoin exchange like Bitmex. And if Bitcoin falls a certain amount, you get liquidated. You might be using something like Unchained, where you bought a Bitcoin as collateral, borrow against it, Bitcoin, Bitcoin falls a certain amount. You also can get your loan closed out and get liquidated. And so there's always a problem trying to get leveraged bitcoin exposure because if Bitcoin falls a certain amount, your position will get closed out and you'll be a for seller at the worst possible time. And so what strategy has done is they've pioneered this long duration credit and paired it with this long duration asset like Bitcoin. And kind of like we're talking about Bitcoin, I don't know what it's going to be over the short term, but I'm fairly confident over the long term it's going to perform very well. That's why I think it's long term savings technology. And so whether it's convertible notes or preferred equity, where you're effectively creating this long duration fixed income product, using that capital to buy more Bitcoin, you kind of prevent the problem of okay, Bitcoin falls in the short term. Well, for a public company, if it's just convertible debt or preferred equity, that's not necessarily any Liquidation price, which is very attractive, which means you can weather short term drawdowns, which bitcoin obviously has had in the past. And so it's potentially one of the most efficient ways to get an intelligently leveraged long duration Bitcoin position. The second or. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NFBDl8yvSSs 5 Yeah, the second way that I think people are buying these bitcoin treasury companies is because one, there's a lot of institutional capital out there that can't buy Bitcoin directly. Saylor had an interesting slide in one of his presentations where he basically just showed that 97% of institutional capital in the United States can't buy or is mandated to only buying equities and fixed income. So they can't buy commodities. And it kind of makes sense because there are no good commodities to arguably gold could be a good commodity, but still debased every year forever. And all the other commodities are incredibly debased forever. We're getting more efficient and more productive at producing all of them. So historically has made a lot of sense to not buy commodities and obviously buy productive assets. Now we have this Bitcoin thing, which is like a super commodity that's living through the monetization phase. So there's kind of like a unique dynamic where a lot of this capital is trapped. You can't buy Bitcoin. It's, it's bid equities and fixed income way too high because the money is broken. So we have to keep buying all this stuff regardless of valuation. And now we have a new form of money that's like, hey, you know, this form of money exists because your current form of money is really bad and you're, you're monetizing everything. And so Bitcoin is just now sucking the monetary premium out of all those asset classes. And Bitcoin treasury companies and the securities that they issue are basically just providing a product to the institutional capital that starting to recognize that bitcoin is important and deserves an allocation, but they're not able to necessarily change their investment mandates to buy Bitcoin directly. And again, like, you know, treasury companies can be seen as amplified Bitcoin because they borrow money to buy more Bitcoin. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NFBDl8yvSSs 4 And so what strategy has done is they've pioneered this long duration credit and paired it with this long duration asset like Bitcoin. And kind of like we're talking about Bitcoin, I don't know what it's going to be over the short term, but I'm fairly confident over the long term it's going to perform very well. That's why I think it's long term savings technology. And so whether it's convertible notes or preferred equity, where you're effectively creating this long duration fixed income product, using that capital to buy more Bitcoin, you kind of prevent the problem of okay, Bitcoin falls in the short term. Well, for a public company, if it's just convertible debt or preferred equity, that's not necessarily any Liquidation price, which is very attractive, which means you can weather short term drawdowns, which bitcoin obviously has had in the past. And so it's potentially one of the most efficient ways to get an intelligently leveraged long duration Bitcoin position. The second or. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NFBDl8yvSSs .

  Source: Blockware — Joe Burnett; TFTC — Rabbit Hole Recap (#373)

• Feedback loop: equity issuance → more BTC. When treasury companies trade at a premium, they issue shares and buy more bitcoin, turning speculative equity flows into BTC demand; potential inclusion of such firms in major indices/ETFs can amplify this via passive flows 3 And now that bitcoin treasury companies exist, where, okay, you have this high beta bitcoin exposure that is actually buying bitcoin too. It's not like it's just worthless air. These companies hold thousands of Bitcoin on their balance sheet. And so when these companies trade at a premium like they have in the past and many still do today, they issue common equity and buy more Bitcoin. And so it kind of creates like this weird synergy between Bitcoin and Treasury companies to where whenever speculative capital flows into these more leverage bitcoin plays the bitcoin treasury companies, you know, it's in their incentive to convert that excess speculative capital into more Bitcoin. And then, you know, maybe some people decide to buy Bitcoin at some point or maybe people, you know, for whatever reason keep buying treasury companies. Well, a lot of the capital actually just ends up flowing to Bitcoin. Either way, will people rotate out of treasury companies and into Bitcoin? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NFBDl8yvSSs 2 These companies hold thousands of Bitcoin on their balance sheet. And so when these companies trade at a premium like they have in the past and many still do today, they issue common equity and buy more Bitcoin. And so it kind of creates like this weird synergy between Bitcoin and Treasury companies to where whenever speculative capital flows into these more leverage bitcoin plays the bitcoin treasury companies, you know, it's in their incentive to convert that excess speculative capital into more Bitcoin. And then, you know, maybe some people decide to buy Bitcoin at some point or maybe people, you know, for whatever reason keep buying treasury companies. Well, a lot of the capital actually just ends up flowing to Bitcoin. Either way, will people rotate out of treasury companies and into Bitcoin? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NFBDl8yvSSs 1 And that's why I think strategy potentially getting added into the S&P 500 will be like a huge deal strategy. And similar scientific and other bitcoin treasury companies are included in various index funds like strategies in qqq, which is in a pretty significant one, similar as in a few small cap index funds as well. And so as these companies grow or as bitcoin continues being NGU technology, you know, these companies that are in these index funds that are weighted by the market cap relative to all of the other market caps of all the other equities that these index funds hold, these index funds are going to increase their allocation to these companies over time as long as bitcoin keeps going up and as long as these companies keep, keep going up, which means like we already have kind of created, you know, this, this cruise liner that's like rescuing people. Most people just have no idea that it exists. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NFBDl8yvSSs .

  Source: Blockware — Joe Burnett

• Japan signals. Meta Planet, described as Japan’s premier bitcoin treasury company, helped normalize BTC as an investable asset; it was 2024’s top‑performing stock before retracing ~50% 62 So Meta Planet, for those who don't know, is the premier bitcoin treasury company in Japan. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VEySREc2CEk 61 Metaplanet has surely made bitcoin seem legitimate in the eyes of most Japanese people, I think, in terms of it being an investable asset. And I say that more broadly, not just people there, because I did ask some of my quote unquote, normie friends if they knew what Meta Planet was and what it does, and they do. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VEySREc2CEk 60 It was the most, it was the best performing stock of 2024. It's since down about 50 from the highs, but it seems to be sort of finding a water level. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VEySREc2CEk . Its president is accepting payment in bitcoin for some condo units 59 I was kind of happy that Simon Garovich brought it up, but he talked about Eric Trump now accepting payment for some of the units in the buildings he's buying. So I guess some of the condos, the buildings he's building, accepting payment in bitcoin. So quite interesting. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VEySREc2CEk . High capital‑gains tax (~55%) is cited as suppressing direct adoption; officials are reportedly weighing a cut toward ~20% and a spot bitcoin ETF in response to market demand 58 So one of the main reasons that people say bitcoin adoption hasn't happened much in Japan is because the capital gains rate on it is 55%. One of the reasons micro metaplanet has done well there is because the secure, you know, it's. It's been essentially the proxy ETF vehicle and capital gains on Meta Planet are only 20. So anybody who is buying, you know, looking for bitcoin exposure, whether an institutional investor or just somebody who's looking to sort of, I don't know, get more yen for. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VEySREc2CEk 57 So it looks like the government now is sort of taking more seriously. And again, this is based on some conversations I've had with those in the know. There can't say who, but they're taking more seriously this idea of cutting the cap gains on bitcoin down to 20 and also issuing a spot bitcoin ETF there. And this is in sort of direct response to the success of Meta Planet, which would obviously detract from Meta Planet to some degree. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VEySREc2CEk . Grassroots education and Lightning payments (e.g., Tokyo Bitcoin Base, a local food truck) illustrate peer‑to‑peer usage 56 But I actually find this really interesting because I also visited the Tokyo bitcoin base, which is where they actually teach like grassroots bitcoin adoption. You know what bitcoin is, how to custody it, how to use it. The guy outside of the Tokyo bitcoin base, there's a food truck that accepts lightning. So it's much more like, it's a bit of a different. It's not really thinking about bitcoin as an investable asset, but about bitcoin as peer to peer money, what it was intended to be. So in a really weird way, Meta Planet may be catalyzing more people to actually go over and get exposure to bitcoin. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VEySREc2CEk 55 The guy outside of the Tokyo bitcoin base, there's a food truck that accepts lightning. So it's much more like, it's a bit of a different. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VEySREc2CEk .

  Source: Bitcoin Magazine — Capitol Gains (hosts)

• Banks “meeting the market.” U.S. Bank’s custody relaunch with NYDIG is positioned as a full‑service institutional solution alongside ETFs; even vocal skeptics acknowledge servicing client demand 26 U.S. bank announced today that it has resumed offering cryptocurrency custody services. Originally announced in 2021 as an early access program to global fund services client. The services are intended for institutional investment managers with registered or private funds who seek a secure safekeeping solution for Bitcoin. Nydig, a bitcoin company basically backed by bitcoiners and bridging the gap. And in Wall street and institutions, a vertically integrated bitcoin financial service and power infrastructure firm will act as the Bitcoin sub custodian. Quote, we're proud that we were one of the first banks to offer cryptocurrency custody for fund and institutional custody clients back in 2021. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_Ta8hzAQFq4 25 And in Wall street and institutions, a vertically integrated bitcoin financial service and power infrastructure firm will act as the Bitcoin sub custodian. Quote, we're proud that we were one of the first banks to offer cryptocurrency custody for fund and institutional custody clients back in 2021. And we're excited to resume the service this year. Following greater regulatory clarity, we've expanded our offering to include Bitcoin ETFs which allow us to provide full service solutions for managers seeking custody and administration admin. Nate Nydig is honored to partner with US bank as its primary provider for bitcoin custody services. Together we can bridge the gap between traditional finance and the modern economy by facilitating access for global funding services clients to Bitcoin as sound money delivered with the safety and security expected by regulated financial institutions. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_Ta8hzAQFq4 24 Again, I have this whole theory that I think since ETFs got launched, it's fundamentally shifted the market structure of Bitcoin and we are in a new paradigm ever since they launched the ETFs. But it's basically this quote right here. Following greater regulatory clarity, we expanded our offerings to include ETFs, which allow us to provide full service solutions. Now, of course, I wouldn't be trusting banks with my custody solutions. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_Ta8hzAQFq4 23 All the banks are trying to get into Bitcoin, whether that's trying to get microstrategy exposure or whether that's trying to essentially get their foot in the door and become a, quote, crypto adjacent company with custody or offering these services to clients, of course they want their fees, they want to make money. But it does seem like we, we are entering an era where we're no longer going to get fought here, that since they are embracing our industry, all the biggest players are embracing this industry as well. Whether they want to or not is besides the point. I think Jamie Dimon is like the best example of this. He's like, look, I don't like this thing, but if my customers want to buy this, I guess I will offer it to you guys. So this could be a bending of the knee moment where, look, they're realizing there's something on the horizon. If we do get a sense of regulatory clarity here, if the rules of the road are laid out so that they can feel that they can come into bitcoin in bulk. I think we're, we're slowly but surely just taking over the world. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_Ta8hzAQFq4 .

  Source: Simply Bitcoin — Hosts

• Network snapshot. RHR reported block height 913,191 with an estimated +5.4% difficulty adjustment; average block time ~9m29s; a relatively small mempool was observed by the referenced dashboard 49 Our pets heads are falling off and the bitcoin price is currently at $110,060 we got a palindrome sats per cuck buck. At 99 sats per cuck buck. We are at market cap and 2.2.19 trillion. We're currently at block height. Oh, I was, I was loving that we were recording today we're a block height 913, 191. Which means we are only 57 blocks away from the next difficulty retarget. I looked at my block clock last night and it said 26 hours or yeah, 20, 23 hours at like 7pm. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZALtLBpSeic 48 Sats per dollar time between time till the next difficulty adjustment and the estimated difficulty adjustment and the estimated difficulty adjustment for later tonight is 5.4 upwards adjustment. Hash Rate coming on the network. Blocksman coming in at 9 minutes and 29 seconds on average. Clark's teeny weeny mempool which isn't recognizing sub one sat per V byte transactions has 5,975 transactions in it. Man pulled out space 94, 501. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZALtLBpSeic . Separately, Eric Wall noted a period of very low on‑chain fees (often <1 sat/vB) 71 This is today. Today there's basically no transactions in the mempool. This little red here. That's not. That's. That's not a bad thing. For people that want to get their transactions in, that means that people are paying less than 1 Satoshi per V byte. This is what the mempool looks like today. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BTMVvoQSm4w 98 0.18. That means that the minimum fees now to get a transaction in are 80% lower than what was even possible by the filter rules back when we started. So the fees are less than when we started, 80% lower than when we started. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BTMVvoQSm4w .

  Sources: TFTC — Rabbit Hole Recap (#373); Bitcoin Magazine — Eric Wall

• Custodial concentration and “economic node” influence. Speakers warned that ETFs, wrapped/custodial BTC and large institutional treasuries concentrate economic power in entities whose business models may prefer custodial pathways and resist upgrades that improve self‑custody usability 76 So if you kind of look at some of the data behind this, like the Bitcoin ETFs and their on chain holdings are like exceeding 11 million bitcoins. That's quite a bit. This is how normal people are now being onboarded into it. If you look at kind of Bitcoin, L2 is the majority. All of these are the biggest, these things on the right are all the biggest bitcoin wrappers that people use on different blockchains. They're all completely custodial. The people using Bitcoin on Ethereum and different types of blockchains actually don't custody the real Bitcoin. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OGrRMT40NI0 75 And then these are, these are all the Treasuries. The company's now buying Bitcoin in their Treasuries. So the kind of issue with this and the byproduct is that these people are facilitating a lot of economic value. So in practice they hold some type of influence in the network and they're called economic nodes. And what they're doing is they can, they can kind of sway these discussions. And because their business model relies on them providing these custodial services, they have an incentive to potentially kind of block proposals that make Bitcoin easier to use in a self custodial form. So the top holders of Bitcoin, if you look at this at Strategy ibit, which is an ETF issuer, Fidelity Grayscale tether, Bitco wptc which is a custodial wrapped Bitcoin and, and more centralized institutions. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OGrRMT40NI0 74 So in practice they hold some type of influence in the network and they're called economic nodes. And what they're doing is they can, they can kind of sway these discussions. And because their business model relies on them providing these custodial services, they have an incentive to potentially kind of block proposals that make Bitcoin easier to use in a self custodial form. So the top holders of Bitcoin, if you look at this at Strategy ibit, which is an ETF issuer, Fidelity Grayscale tether, Bitco wptc which is a custodial wrapped Bitcoin and, and more centralized institutions. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OGrRMT40NI0 73 So now we have this social consensus problem. Now we're involving governments and large institutions and custodial wrappers like I mentioned, that have a business incentive to potentially not allow people to use Bitcoin in a self custodial way. That is Coinbase CBBTC is really good for Coinbase's business model and having like a trustless roll up on bitcoin would be bad for them because users might prefer that over the custodial option. And then they'll use adopt, lose adoption and lose fees, et cetera. And there's varying success metrics. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OGrRMT40NI0 .

  Source: Bitcoin Magazine — “Can Bitcoin Succeed Without Another Soft Fork? w/ Janusz” (Janusz)

Notable Perspectives

• What is bitcoin's core innovation? It is the creation of a digital bearer asset. Now, what does that mean? So we talk about peer to peer transfers. A peer to peer transaction is where I give you something, you take it and you walk away. We don't need a third party to monitor that. I don't give that same thing to somebody else. So if I took a gold bar and I handed it to you, Danny, you took it from me, you turned around and you walked away. You have absolute assurance that that gold bar which you're holding in your hand is with you. And there is no way that I can give that same gold bar to somebody else. Why is that? Because the laws of physics prevent that gold bar from existing in more than one place at the same time. Unless you're some kind of magician or I'm some kind of magician, let's put that aside. But, you know, it's the laws of physics that prevent that from happening, right? That's the physical world. And that's why we can have peer. We can. Throughout history, peer to peer transactions were possible. Now, if I sent you a photograph over email or WhatsApp, right, I could turn around and send that same photo to a thousand other people and they would have identical copies of that. Why? Because the photo is just informational. It is just zeros and ones. And information by nature is infinitely replicable at virtually no cost. And so the only way to ensure that I don't send that same photo that I sent you to a thousand other people is by having a trusted third party monitoring my WhatsApp or my email and confirming to you that, yes, Vijay has not sent that to anybody else. Right. And that's how it has been for decades, like whatever, since we had online digital information and so on. What Satoshi solved was that he enabled you and I to transact digitally, with you in Australia and me in London, as if we were physically present. It's as if I gave you a gold bar and you took it and you took it from me and you turned around, walked away. You can do the same thing digitally right now. That is a paradigm shifting invention. It has implications in the realms of economics, politics, philosophy and everything else.

  Source: What Bitcoin Did — Vijay Selvam

  “There’s one property … a little bit more important … and that is the absolute scarcity.” 64 You know, there's so many attributes of, you know, there's permissionlessness, censorship, resistance, unconfiscatability and absolute scarcity, right? These are, these are the four core properties of Bitcoin, right? And they're all very, very valuable. But I think I'm one of those people that would say that the one property that is a little bit, everyone's created equal, but some are more equal than others. There's one property more that little bit ahead of everyone else and that is the absolute scarcity. It's more important. It's a little bit more important than censorship, resistance. It's a little more important than unconfiscatability, permissionless. It's a little bit more important because that is at the core of it. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OLfNeRyhYjA 63 There's one property more that little bit ahead of everyone else and that is the absolute scarcity. It's more important. It's a little bit more important than censorship, resistance. It's a little more important than unconfiscatability, permissionless. It's a little bit more important because that is at the core of it. And as long as that cannot be corrupted, bitcoin cannot be co opted. Like I don't care. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OLfNeRyhYjA

• The cause of the fourth turning, the whole concept is manipulated money that gets worse and worse and worse, or cause of inflation, doesn't exist in a free market. And so. So what your. Your question about the fourth turning? If bitcoin stays decentralized and secure, that will never happen again, ever.

  Source: Simply Bitcoin — Jeff Booth (quoted)

• Can you please move on with your lives and do something that improves the bitcoin protocol? That's all I had.

  Source: Bitcoin Magazine — Eric Wall

• “The idea that you’re able to just run a node on a cheap computer and see what the transaction queue looks like is not a given … people should appreciate that we have a relatively open transaction queue for Bitcoin.” 38 I will say that I do Think we are fortunate that we've gotten to this point with a pretty open relay network in Mempool. The idea that you're able to just run a node on a cheap computer and see what the transaction queue looks like is not a given in the Bitcoin consensus protocol. That is an amazing capability that we have. The alternative would be something like if you want to know what transactions are going to be confirmed, you have to hit the APIs of F2 pool and ant pool and all these other miners and that would be a completely permission basis. Maybe they charge for it, maybe they block you out. There's a very real situation where we could end up in that point. So I think people should appreciate that we have a relatively open transaction queue for Bitcoin. So those are my opinions on the matter. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZALtLBpSeic

  Source: TFTC — Matt Odell

• “All the banks are trying to get into Bitcoin … they’re embracing this industry … if we get regulatory clarity, they can come into bitcoin in bulk.” 23 All the banks are trying to get into Bitcoin, whether that's trying to get microstrategy exposure or whether that's trying to essentially get their foot in the door and become a, quote, crypto adjacent company with custody or offering these services to clients, of course they want their fees, they want to make money. But it does seem like we, we are entering an era where we're no longer going to get fought here, that since they are embracing our industry, all the biggest players are embracing this industry as well. Whether they want to or not is besides the point. I think Jamie Dimon is like the best example of this. He's like, look, I don't like this thing, but if my customers want to buy this, I guess I will offer it to you guys. So this could be a bending of the knee moment where, look, they're realizing there's something on the horizon. If we do get a sense of regulatory clarity here, if the rules of the road are laid out so that they can feel that they can come into bitcoin in bulk. I think we're, we're slowly but surely just taking over the world. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_Ta8hzAQFq4

  Source: Simply Bitcoin — Hosts

• “Pro‑filter: spam reduction significant; miner centralization minimal. Anti‑filter: spam reduction negligible; miner centralization substantial … quantify both.” 42 And so look and pull up this tweet Neil said, What was this? September 2nd? So two days ago, the intractability of Bitcoin's filter debate boils down to this. Pro filter spam reduction is significant. Minor centralization effects are minimal. Filters are worth the trade off. The anti filter spam reduction is negligible. Minor centralization effects are substantial. Removing filters worth the trade off. No one likes spam or minor centralization. But both sides will continue to talk past each other until more effort is made to quantify the filter's effect on spam and the filter's effect on minor centralization. So I think Neil sort of summed it up nice here. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZALtLBpSeic

  Source: TFTC — Marty Bent (reading Neil’s framing)

• “There is no spam on the bitcoin blockchain today. We lost.” 70 There is no spam on the bitcoin blockchain today. We lost. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BTMVvoQSm4w

  Source: Bitcoin Magazine — Eric Wall

Emerging Themes

• Upgrades vs. ossification: Multiple shows stress the narrowing window for protocol changes (CTV, OP_CAT) amid institutional entry and coordination challenges; others argue to stop “fighting spam” and focus on pragmatic improvements 78 Like why aren't we going to add all these fancy opcodes to verify snarks and do better bitcoin staking and improve a lot of the assumptions with self custody? Social consensus is just really, really, really hard. People want different things. Roll ups want snark verification. People building potentially on ARC want different types of opcodes. So these conflicting wants between different application teams means that everyone in the space has different priorities. And now we're getting into a situation where nation states and institutions and everybody are coming into the space. So we kind of have this last point where this might be the last time that we can actually kind of coordinate a upgrade to the Bitcoin protocol. And failure to move on that right now means that we're closer to ossification. And I would recommend that we don't do that. And I'm going to present some data as to why. But before we get there, there's also this other consideration that the knock on effects of doing a soft fork could. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OGrRMT40NI0 77 But before we get there, there's also this other consideration that the knock on effects of doing a soft fork could. Yeah, there's maybe unintended consequences. So for example, if we implement something like opcat, are we able to build expressive enough scripts to introduce things that by a product of that do things like mevl, where there's. Which can increase minor centralization. What if we coordinate this huge effort for these applications and then there's this massive lack of adoption and it kind of feels like, well, that was a waste of time and we could have spent it better elsewhere. And we also have to like contend with all these different proposals, like which fork is the right one and which kind of roadmap for scaling Bitcoin is the better one to go with. So there's like all these competing interests and people and everything. So what if we don't fork? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OGrRMT40NI0 69 So they've got different prongs of how they're attacking bitcoin all at once. And one of those is to blame taproot so that they hope that the ossification camp kind of takes over. So in Luke Dasher's most conspiratorial, cartoonish, you know, idea of me as a, as a villain in this ecosystem, the worst thing, the worst effect that I could have on the bitcoin ecosystem is that the ossification camp wins. And if you look at what is happening in bitcoin development right now. That is what is happening. There's general distrust against bitcoin developers. The exact problem that Luke warned you about, that he said that I was causing, is happening now. Listen to Luke. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BTMVvoQSm4w 68 The biggest issue that could possibly happen is that you let the ossification camp win. I am tired of winning. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BTMVvoQSm4w 67 The problem is that when you fight spam, that's how we win. The reason that I'm on this stage right now is that you gave a fuck about what we were doing in the first Place. The reason that a taproot wizard image is $20,000 or more at this point is because you pay attention to it. Ignore the problem and it will go away. And yes, I will admit I have caused some problems on purpose, but we got a fucking focus on what matters now. If you fight us, we win. That's the only reason that this whole spam problem exists is because you gave enough attention to it to make that spam valuable. Ignore the spam, price goes down, problem goes away. And it's already, it has already happened. There is no problem here. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BTMVvoQSm4w . Source: Bitcoin Magazine — Janusz; Eric Wall.

• Node relay policy matters: The mempool/relay dispute is about policy, not consensus, yet has real centralization and fee‑estimation implications if miners receive large classes of transactions out‑of‑band 47 The current debate is over policy rules, specifically mempool transaction relay rules. It's not actually over consensus rules. And in that situation it's very much what your node is running mostly affects yourself. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZALtLBpSeic 46 The current debate is over policy rules, specifically mempool transaction relay rules. It's not actually over consensus rules. And in that situation it's very much what your node is running mostly affects yourself. The core maintainer's argument is that valid transactions that have historically been considered non standard bitcoin core and have not been relayed by bitcoin core are getting confirmed anyway and they're going directly to miners. And the result is you have potential centralization risks where, where transactions are going out of band and no one sees those transactions until after they're mined and other miners can't compete with them and node operators can't do accurate fee estimation. If we actually have a high fee environment which we obviously do not have right now. And two examples of those are the incredibly large inscriptions or three examples incredibly large opera turns, the incredibly large inscriptions and then also Most recently the sub1 SAP per byte transactions. Right? Those by default are not relayed by notes. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZALtLBpSeic 44 And two examples of those are the incredibly large inscriptions or three examples incredibly large opera turns, the incredibly large inscriptions and then also Most recently the sub1 SAP per byte transactions. Right? Those by default are not relayed by notes. So on a technical basis that's what the argument's over. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZALtLBpSeic . Source: TFTC — RHR.

• Institutional on‑ramps are multiplying: ETFs, bank custody (U.S. Bank/NYDIG), treasury companies and potential index inclusion collectively broaden access; many institutions still can’t buy spot BTC directly, sustaining demand for compliant wrappers 34 Yeah, ETF inflows still strong. On that point brought up Michael Saylor. He is the executive chairman of strategy and MSTR. Will it be added to the S&P4 Bitcoin Summer people Summer is coming to an end. I can feel the cold autumn winds rolling into town. Is paper Bitcoin summer officially over? If you look at the stock prices of these companies, it seems like it wasn't the best summer ever. But people are speculating. Is strategy going to be added to the S P tomorrow. I think they're going to be added. I don't care. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZALtLBpSeic 26 U.S. bank announced today that it has resumed offering cryptocurrency custody services. Originally announced in 2021 as an early access program to global fund services client. The services are intended for institutional investment managers with registered or private funds who seek a secure safekeeping solution for Bitcoin. Nydig, a bitcoin company basically backed by bitcoiners and bridging the gap. And in Wall street and institutions, a vertically integrated bitcoin financial service and power infrastructure firm will act as the Bitcoin sub custodian. Quote, we're proud that we were one of the first banks to offer cryptocurrency custody for fund and institutional custody clients back in 2021. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_Ta8hzAQFq4 25 And in Wall street and institutions, a vertically integrated bitcoin financial service and power infrastructure firm will act as the Bitcoin sub custodian. Quote, we're proud that we were one of the first banks to offer cryptocurrency custody for fund and institutional custody clients back in 2021. And we're excited to resume the service this year. Following greater regulatory clarity, we've expanded our offering to include Bitcoin ETFs which allow us to provide full service solutions for managers seeking custody and administration admin. Nate Nydig is honored to partner with US bank as its primary provider for bitcoin custody services. Together we can bridge the gap between traditional finance and the modern economy by facilitating access for global funding services clients to Bitcoin as sound money delivered with the safety and security expected by regulated financial institutions. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_Ta8hzAQFq4 7 Saylor had an interesting slide in one of his presentations where he basically just showed that 97% of institutional capital in the United States can't buy or is mandated to only buying equities and fixed income. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NFBDl8yvSSs . Sources: Simply Bitcoin; Blockware.

• Custody, risk and UX: Shows reinforced self‑custody best practices (wallet verification, coordinator trust assumptions) while highlighting exchange/counterparty risks and the role of proofs‑of‑reserves and vaults 35 Sparrow Update Verify feature led the way. That feature actually came out after Wasabi implemented theirs and it was because I asked Craig on a podcast to implement it into Sparrow. But I love Sparrow. Sparrow is my probably. I mean it's, it's. I'm so reliant on that software. My family, my company is open sats. Like I really rely on Sparrow heavily and so if you haven't used Sparrow Wallet, great piece of open source software, you can use it with your favorite hardware. Wallets, you can easily do multi sig. You can easily do hot wallets. And Sparrow Wallet is awesome and Craig is a legend and I'm very grateful we have him. Also, really easy to use with your own node. Yeah, cosign all that shout out to Wasabi. I mean, I think the Wasabi team is a story of perseverance and grind. We used to have Wasabi Wednesdays back on this podcast way, way back in the day. And they've had their ups and downs. And I think this latest release is a testament to people who truly care about privacy and giving Bitcoiners the best user experience when using Bitcoin. It's great to see they're still pushing it forward. You didn't put one in the chat. But oh yeah, wait, real quick. Sparrow is only available on desktop. It's not available in app stores. There's fake Sparrow wallets and app stores. Don't download those. Those are fake. The only Real Sparrow is sparrowwallet.com and best practice on first install is to do a PGP signature verification. There is a guide there on how to verify it, but then after you do it the first time, or you can just. You're probably fine if you just download and don't verify it. So don't let that hold you back. But you should learn how to verify software. But once you do that, then from that point forward, not only can you use existing installations to verify Sparrow, but you can actually use it to Verify other drag and drop and verify other major bitcoin open source projects which is just useful feature in general. That's a beautiful thing. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZALtLBpSeic 86 Your assets, if they're held on an exchange regardless of whether you're nefarious like Justin sun or or not, they can be seized by people who don't have your best interests in mind with the World Liberty Financial Coin. They actually freeze his tokens because there was a backdoor scheme showing that on his own exchange he was going to offer a 20% coupon or yield for issuing this sort of token. And as they come to find out this was just a mechanism to provide exit liquidity for him to unleash his 3% of the total supply of tokens back onto the market and drop the price. It's reported that he would have walked away with hundreds of millions to a billion dollars worth of profits from scheme and now he's going to twitter and saying that every true great brand must be built on fairness and this isn't a good look for you and for your shareholders. Well try not rugging people, but you don't have to be one of the people to get rugged because you can just remove your bitcoin from exchanges. You can do this privately, safely and securely by getting a Coach@the BitcoinWay.com don't be like Justin sun because there will be a day when some exchange is going to say you can't move your coins. Schedule a free 30 minute consultation with their team at thebitcoinway.com/simply Bitcoin every week. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hj5rqYmr2eE 85 They do a proof of reserves to show that they have all of the bitcoin that they say that they do. Get your account funded in less than six hours and the application takes just two minutes. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hj5rqYmr2eE 96 These like we talked about on the CTV panel vaults. So we can build things like vaults today by doing these huge pre signed transactions like emulate them. But if we add CTV we can decrease the complexity and make it a lot more user friendly and give users the ability to just dictate the way that UTXOs can be spent in the future. Add like a safety, like a safety feature, like if, if you want to have like a fallback undo button. CTV makes this a lot easier and reduces the complexity to build these things to make it easier for users. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OGrRMT40NI0 . Sources: TFTC; Simply Bitcoin; Bitcoin Magazine — Janusz.

• Policy clarity trendlines: The Clarity Act’s developer protections and SBA’s debanking remediation signal movement toward clearer rules and operational fairness, while state‑level bills can still disadvantage miners 52 So the two main things I think people are looking for when it comes to clarity, so the first one, protections for software developers under section 1960, which is unlicensed Money transmission. So basically saying that anyone creating non controlling, that's the language they use in the bill. Non custodial technology or purveying that technology is not responsible for money transmission. That's the number one thing that we're doing, paying attention to. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VEySREc2CEk 54 I don't know if it's official guidance, but it's kind of a press release of sorts that was precipitated by the executive order from the White House from A few weeks back on debanking and what they have, basically there was a requirement like that. You know, the EO from Trump said a bunch of things, including directing the SBA and some other agencies to, I don't. Clean up their act, basically implement a bunch of practices that are going to bring debanking to an end in one way or another, and also kind of make restitution for it in some ways. So the SBA last week has ordered lenders around the country to end a bunch of debanking practices. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VEySREc2CEk 45 What the bill concerns is tax exemptions for data centers. And it's a, it's a, it's ostensibly a pro business bill. This is a Republican sponsored, you know, tax exemption bill. It's like saying we're going to reduce taxes on a number of different data centers. However, there's one quirky part of this, which is that it exempts, does not apply to anyone using with kind of, what do they call it, cryptocurrency facilities used to process and verify and secure crypto transactions. Miners, in other words. So what this is, is a bunch of types of data centers are all going to get tax exemptions except for bitcoin miners, for example. So in a way it's a kind of. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VEySREc2CEk . Source: Bitcoin Magazine — Capitol Gains.

• Tokenization and rails selection: Galaxy’s tokenized shares spurred discussion about migrating settlement to Bitcoin L2s so fees accrue in BTC, not alternative “walled gardens” 39 Last thing on the last thing on the docket had an announcement from Galaxy. So Galaxy has launched tokenized SEC registered shares on. On public blockchains. So this is somewhat breaking new ground. Any, I don't know if you had a chance to chat to Alex, but any, any kind of thoughts on this news and the significance of it? Yeah, I, I actually I think I put this on the agenda and I was pumped. So this really doesn't have anything directly to do with Bitcoin, but it ca, it could or it can. So this is, I think they tokenized and put this on Solana if I'm not mistaken. So great. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VEySREc2CEk 37 So for those who don't understand that you're actually using Bitcoin on Ethereum, which sounds like a little bit kind of weird. So ETH is technically different or Ether is different from Ethereum. But to my point, let's say microstrategy or Strategy or NACA decided to tokenize their stock. It would be cool in my opinion if that stock traded on a Bitcoin layer two and then we were using Bitcoin for the actual gas fees to, you know, to, to trade that stock. I, I, I, I think that would make me happier than seeing all of this stuff traded in walled gardens. It feels a bit antithetical to the purpose of Bitcoin. So if we are moving in this direction. My, my, my. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VEySREc2CEk . Source: Bitcoin Magazine — Capitol Gains.

• AI and scarcity narrative crossover: A mainstream AI voice framed bitcoin as the only provably scarce digital asset, reinforcing the “digital gold” thesis under accelerating technological change 22 It's the only scarce resource. Nothing else has scarcity. Everything else, if price goes up, will make more. I can make as much gold as you want, given a proper price point. You cannot make more Bitcoin. Some people say bitcoin is just this thing on a computer that we all agreed was valuable. We are a thing on a computer, remember? Okay, so, I mean, not investment advice, but investment advice. It's hilarious how that's one of those things where they tell you it's not, but you know it is, immediately your call is important to us. That means your call is of zero importance. And investment is like that. Yeah, yeah. When they say, no investment advice, it's definitely investment advice, but it's not investment advice. Okay, so you're bullish on Bitcoin because it can't be messed with. It is the only thing which we know how much there is in the Universe. So gold. There could be an asteroid made out of pure gold heading towards us, devaluing it. Well, also killing all of us. But Bitcoin. I know exactly the numbers. And even the 21 million is an upper limit. How many are lost, passwords forgotten? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_Ta8hzAQFq4 21 Go balls deep into bitcoin? Did you not hear what I just said to you? Literally did a whole video about how AI is going to change the fundamental nature of our world. And he's like, the only thing that you can really do is buy bitcoin. So what should I do after this? Buy more Bitcoin. What are you talking about? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_Ta8hzAQFq4 . Source: Simply Bitcoin.

Key Developments

• U.S. Department of Commerce said it will post GDP prints on-chain across nine networks (including Bitcoin, Ethereum, Solana, Tron, Avalanche, Polygon, zkSync, Optimism, Arbitrum, plus Stellar) via Chainlink and Pyth, with plans to expand to PCE and real final sales; panelists questioned the utility given a single oracle posting identical data to multiple chains 51 So the US Department of Commerce has recently announced that it is now going to be posting GDP prints on chain. Now which chains? There's nine chains that they're posting it on. Bitcoin, Eth, Sol, Tron, Avalanche, Polygon, zk, Sync, Optimism, Arbitrum. Stellar. Using chainlink and pif. Apparently they got some help from Coinbase, Gemini and Kraken, I guess because Department of Commerce doesn't know how to use an rpc. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iuGezuOQ9qc 50 People are very upset about this, but other than that, apparently they are going to be expanding this beyond just GDP to also post PCE and real final sales. According to Secretary Lutnick, we are making America's economic truth immutable and globally accessible like never before. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iuGezuOQ9qc 49 What problem does this solve? Like, I love that this is happening because it shows that you have bureaucrats somewhere in the Commerce Department using blockchains, which is good. It means there's more people testing a technology, working with partners to do this. It's awesome. But like, I don't think anyone asked for this. I don't think, like, anyone's like, man, I don't know what GDP is. If only there was eight different immutable records of what GDP was. Also, if you post it on eight blockchains, what if they Disagree. Which one? No, it's the same Oracle. It's the same Oracle posting on all the chains. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iuGezuOQ9qc . (Source: Unchained — The Chopping Block; Speakers A/B)

• CFTC revived the Foreign Board of Trade (FBOT) registration path, creating a route for overseas exchanges to gain CFTC licensing and offer derivatives to U.S. users under strict oversight; firms need not be U.S.-domiciled but must provide market-surveillance access to U.S. regulators 48 CFTC is reviving the FBOT Foreign Board of Trade registration path for overseas exchanges. So the announcement was I think a little bit mangled by a lot of reporters who claimed that this was Binance and Bybit and whatever can now come back into the US market. It's not quite what it means. What it does mean is that according to Carolyn Pham, CFTC interim head, the CFTC has opened up US markets to the rest of the world. Firms now have a path back after being driven offshore by regulation, by enforcement. This means that you can apply under FBOT rules to be CFTC licensed and offer derivatives and other asset classes to Americans, but you have to undergo very, very pretty strict CFTC oversight, market surveillance, all this other stuff. So it's not a walk in the park and it's probably not trivial for somebody like Binance or Bybit to do this on day one, but possib possible that they could decide to accept this regulatory regime and open themselves back up to the US market. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iuGezuOQ9qc 47 So my understanding is that FBOT applies to exchanges like URX or I think for something like Elmax or something like that. It's relatively Straightforward for them to get this designation, an FBOT designation, but it's not something you can easily get out of the box. But it doesn't require you to be domiciled in the US is my understanding. But it does require you to expose your trading surveillance stuff to US regulators so that CFTC can pull records anytime they want, if they want to do an investigation or whatever. That makes sense then. So you have to onshore to US regulation and US and ex US businesses can do that by submitting to US jurisdiction. That's right. So again, is this something that Binance is going to do out of the box? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iuGezuOQ9qc . (Source: Unchained — The Chopping Block; Speakers A/B)

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• Headline chatter suggested major venues like CME/Nasdaq could be allowed to offer spot crypto; panelists flagged it as a fresh, unclear headline that just hit the tape 46 Else being equal, no real opinions, but there was also some other SEC and CFTC news that hit the ticker right before we did this where, like they're allowing other exchanges to sell spot Crypto. Like the cme. Like spot on cme. What? Or it's maybe not just cme, but like CME and nasdaq. It was like, certain crypto assets are safe for equity and futures exchanges. It was like, just came out. It was like a kind of weird news headline. And so like. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iuGezuOQ9qc . (Source: Unchained — The Chopping Block; Speakers C/B)

• Expectation that spot Bitcoin ETFs remain entrenched due to liquidity and very low fees, making them a simple, familiar instrument for traditional funds 57 I think the ETFs are not dead because probably they just have kind of a liquidity moat. Right? Like, if you're buying spot bitcoin on one venue versus another, what does it take to move it from one venue to another? That's actually. If you're a traditional hedge fund, it's probably not the kind of thing that you're used to dealing with. Okay, I have to provide an address from NYSE to go move it over to this other exchange over here. My guess is that they'll probably just keep trading the ETF for a while. The ETF is super low fees, right? So relative to simplicity and the liquidity that it already has, my guess is that the ETF probably just remains entrenched for a while. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iuGezuOQ9qc . (Source: Unchained — The Chopping Block; Speaker A)

• Texas legislature move: allowing entities to custody Bitcoin on their balance sheets was highlighted as a state-level development 40 Look what, look what Texas just voted on, right in their legislature, literally being able to custody bitcoin on their balance sheets, right? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xjfI0aqAGTw . (Source: Simply Bitcoin — Why You Need to Prepare for Bitcoin to Go PARABOLIC!; Speaker B)

• PayPal enabled U.S. merchants to accept Bitcoin (flow: crypto → PYUSD stablecoin → USD to merchant); fees ~1% in year one, ~1.5% in year two 13 Then PayPal enabled US merchants to accept Bitcoin and a hundred plus cryptocurrencies via PayPal's online payments platform for transactions. So fees are 1% basically for the first year and 1.5% in year two. And it's converted to PayPal stablecoin, PayPal USD P YUSD, then to USD and then finally sent to the merchant. So that is what it is gross pretty much. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o1w_9tlF0-0 . (Source: Guy Swann — Roundtable_012; Speaker A)

• New Bitcoin-specific risk product: Anchor Watch launched a kidnap & ransom insurance policy integrated with a multisig setup and Lloyd’s of London coverage 12 But Anchor Watch has launched kidnap and ransom insurance policies. So they're doing a multi sig setup with like an ongoing fee and they're doing the Lords Lloyds of London is doing the insurance policy and they have set up their system so that they believe that it is secure enough that they can get insurance with Lloyd's of London and they believe that basically you can prove that the setup is secure enough that you don't have to worry about kidnapping, being kidnapped and having ransoms. And thus you can have insurance for being that covers kidnapping, extortion, detention, ransom reimbursement, 27, 247 crisis response, like this sort of, sort of stuff like hostage negotiators. And like that's just like that's a huge deal because I know there's, I at least know like in the back of my mind this is like an issue. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o1w_9tlF0-0 . (Source: Guy Swann — Roundtable_012; Speaker A)

• Government-level holdings and proposals: UAE reportedly holds ~$700M in mined Bitcoin (Citadel Mining wallet identified), and the Philippines is considering a 10,000 BTC reserve 10 Well, United United Arab Emirates, it's been, it came out they're holding $700 million in mind. Bitcoin, not seizure derived. Like they didn't, they didn't Seize it from people. They mined it. Arkham. Arkham. This was from Twitter. Post identified a government wallet holding 6,300 bitcoin mined via Citadel Mining. So sixth largest by country. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o1w_9tlF0-0 9 Philippines considers a bitcoin reserve. 10,000 bitcoin in Central bank's strategic reserve. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o1w_9tlF0-0 . (Source: Guy Swann — Roundtable_012; Speaker A)

Technical Insights

• CTV + Checksig from Stack (CSFS): case and mechanics. Bitcoin Script lets spenders predefine conditions; covenants constrain how coins can be spent; time locks (OP_CSV/OP_CLTV) are core primitives 67 That's Bitcoin's native scripting language. You could set certain conditions by which funds can be spent. Yeah. Basically needs to fulfill these conditions for a transaction to be valid, right? Yeah. Think about it like everybody thinks in terms of when you send your Bitcoin somewhere, you're sending it to an address. In reality, that's essentially a little computer program that says what you have to do to spend those bitcoins. So the most common case is just sign with the private key that matches the public key. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cGZS-jNOXIY 58 So I said earlier on that one of the core ingredients of Bitcoin is choosing who can spend your coins. And obviously that should be like me, if I'm the one that's receiving it. And then the additional factor of adding when can I spend my coins is a useful thing that lets us get to the Lightning Network. For example, the way to think about a covenant is also choosing how those coins can be spent and specifying ahead of time they can be spent this way, maybe going to this specific address, but they can't be spent any other way. I'm committing that I can only go this route or maybe multiple different routes, but they're all defined in advance. And you may think is that that useful? I don't know. But something to think about is what if this address was not just your address, but shared with someone else in some way. If, if you're counterparties you can set it up so that I don't have to trust you. I know that we've agreed in advance that the coins cannot be spent any other way than these three routes we've predefined, for example, and that's an extremely powerful little primitive maybe I don't know if any of you guys would correct any of that or if we're about right. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cGZS-jNOXIY 36 There's op, CSV, OP, CLTV and those do a relative time lock or an absolute time lock. So you can say that this bitcoin can't be spent until like a week after money was actually sent to this address. Or with the absolute time lock you can set a definitive time like this exact date in the future, say November 12th. The coins can't move till then. And that's to give a little bit of dynamism or dynamism in terms of how you can restrict like when that coin can be spent. Yeah, both are essential really for Lightning Network. Without those two sort of time locks we can't have lightning at all. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cGZS-jNOXIY . CTV commits to a transaction hash as if it were the address, removing heavy coordination for pre-signing; combined with CSFS, participants can re-authorize updated off-chain transaction commitments without on-chain fees (a floating signature) 37 All right, well to kind of start for context, like every scaling solution that exists for bitcoin except for sidechains, the Lightning network, state chains, arc, bit, vm, all of these rely on pre signed transactions. The entire security model of users funds is whatever set of keys are actually locking the coin. You sign transactions ahead of time, ensuring that funds are distributed how they should be from users. And so that's kind of the core technological bedrock that everything we are doing to try to make sure people can cost effectively transact with. Bitcoin is built on. CTV is essentially kind of a shortcut to creating those pre signed transactions like Doing things. Now you actually have to get all of the users involved together, coordinating to go through that signing process. What CTV would allow you to do is simply define the hash of the transaction that you want to pre sign and you just use that as the address essentially. So you get the exact same kind of guarantees that you would from everybody going through the process of pre signing. But you don't have to go through that coordination getting everyone online together at the same time and actually signing things. Checksig from Stack is kind of a variant of the op checksig code that I mentioned earlier. When you use opcheck sig what that is checking the signature against because you actually have to sign something, it just assumes the transaction that's being verified, that's what was signed, and that's what the signature is being verified against. With Checksig from Stack, you can arbitrarily sign and prove a signature against any data that you verify through the course of that program. And so with these two things together, you can have a massive optimization of the whole pre signing process with CTV and then combining that with checksig from Stack, you can have that hash that effectively commits to the pre signed transaction, be authorized by actually signing and getting everyone together to do that. And so that creates a situation if you structure a program right, you can have the key for checksig from Stack and then the call to verify against a CTV hash. And you can dynamically, without spending the coins on chain, create new CTV hashes that would be valid to spend that coin off chain just using the checksig from Stack signature to resign a new hash every time you need to do this. And so that creates the possibility of a floating signature essentially where that is not stuck committing to the exact transaction ID that you want to use. It can dynamically change over time. And so given that everything we're building is based on pre signed transactions, this is simultaneously making the whole process of pre signing things much more efficient with CTV and then when combined with Checksig from Stack, it's a lot more flexible in terms of changing things after the fact without having to move those coins on chain and pay blockchain fees for the process of doing that. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cGZS-jNOXIY . (Source: Bitcoin Magazine — We’re Not Breaking Bitcoin: The Case for CTV + CSFS; Speakers C/D/A)

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• What this enables: more efficient L2 onboarding (e.g., coin pools) and channel state handling; and, crucially, vaults that add a delay window to reverse/redirect suspicious withdrawals, improving self-custody and coercion resistance 35 Well, there's a lot of talk about what it can enable for L2s. So lightning specifically you could do things more efficiently with these constructs called coin pools where you could potentially onboard multiple people onto these L2s at the same time more cost effectively, especially when you are exiting the construct because you could put those constraints in place ahead of time. There's some things in terms of channel state backups with lightning, you only need the latest state so it could be effective there. There are benefits to systems like arc. There are, you know, tons of applications and new constructs that we can work with that both make it, you know, more flexible and more cost efficient. But the thing that gets me really most excited for Covenants is the application of vaults and vaults allows you to essentially, I would say make self custody for an individual much safer. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cGZS-jNOXIY 34 But the thing that gets me really most excited for Covenants is the application of vaults and vaults allows you to essentially, I would say make self custody for an individual much safer. You actually add this new element beyond the application of like, you know, a basic time lock that you could have for a transaction. You add time on your side in a brand new way. So a vault is basically where you could envision you would keep your long term savings. Right? And basically in a vault you can't go in right away, make a payment to an on chain address. You basically go into this lockup state where funds are pending, it's going out the door, but it's going to wait in a predefined period, say two weeks, four weeks, a year, whatever suits your use case the best. And then during that lockup period, at any time you decide, okay, no, I don't want to go forward with this transaction, you can reverse it or send it to a set of predefined addresses that belong to you. You. So like, let's say worst case scenario, like nightmare situation, you're self custodying your funds, this is your savings. Someone comes into your house, pulls a gun on you, forces you to give up your seed phrase, right? Well now the attacker can't just force you to send to an address, it has to go up through this lock period. So now you have this grace period which hopefully you can, you know, escape that situation and you could reverse course while it's still in that lockup period. So vaults I think are super, super important for making, you know, self custody more safe, right? You don't have to really rely on these third parties or you know, like lawyers or third party signing services like, like a casa or an unchained to be like a third party that has to sign off on every transaction for you. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cGZS-jNOXIY . Native opcodes simplify vault UX and avoid brittle pre-signed transaction chains and key-deletion pitfalls 66 Well it's just the complexity. Like when you, the whole, the whole point of a vault is worst case if somebody steals your money. Like you have this lockup period that Evan was talking about where you can send that back to an address you control so you can stop somebody from stealing your funds. When you try to do that with pre signed transactions, you have to essentially in a long chain of transactions, like define all of this ahead of time, the amounts that you are going to try to withdraw, how much is going to go back into the vault. And once you do that and set that up with pre signed transactions, you can never change any of it. And then another aspect of that is if you ever lose your copies of those pre signed transactions when you do this this way, you should ideally delete the private key that you use to sign those just so somebody can't take that and then like bypass the whole vault system. So if you lose those pre signed transactions you have lost your money. When you actually do this natively with opcodes in Bitcoin itself, you don't have to keep track of those pre signed transactions. There's no key that you have to delete and it's just a lot simpler for a user to manage. So the fact that people aren't doing this in this more complicated way that actually adds new risk to users, I don't think says anything about users desire or lack of a desire for this. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cGZS-jNOXIY . (Source: Bitcoin Magazine — We’re Not Breaking Bitcoin: The Case for CTV + CSFS; Speakers A/C)

• Adoption path and reservations: some developers see these opcodes largely as optimizations of what’s doable today and deprioritize activation; many non-technical users overestimate their power and fear unintended consequences. Suggested next step: more proofs-of-concept and an activation client target around 2026; follow Delving Bitcoin and media resources for education 65 Well, I mean I'd say there's two separate sources of a lot of pushback. There's actually a decent amount of developers not really excited or wanting to prioritize activating these things. And that's because you know, like we've kind of gone through most of what you can do with these things are optimize things that you can already do with pre signed transactions like the capabilities that they enable are already possible. Now this is just simplifying like what you need to do to actually implement these things or use these things. And so for a lot of developers, their thought process is this doesn't do enough to justify going through the work of implementing it and activating it on the network. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cGZS-jNOXIY 33 I don't want to say entirely, I don't think that would be fair. But I think the vast majority of pushback from users is just much more non technical, less sophisticated users who think that these opcodes are much more powerful than they actually are and that there's the potential they could enable unforeseen things that could come with negative consequences because they don't have a solid understanding of just how simple these are and that all they're doing is optimizing like things that are already possible now. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cGZS-jNOXIY 32 Next steps? Like to see some more proof of concepts. Although we've seen some great code for vaults, I think people messing around with L2s and developing like new applications like that, some proof of concepts would probably be good. But yeah, I mean really I'd like to see an activation client in 2026. I think, you know, ample time has passed, people have had time to voice their objections. Once we have a few more proof of concepts to really show the strengths of this upgrade, I really like to see something get out the door. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cGZS-jNOXIY 31 I mean I've personally written a decent amount on these subjects. If you look up my author page under Shinobi on Bitcoin magazine, Stefan Lavera is a great podcaster who frequently brings developers and technical people on to discuss things. As Evan said, Delving Bitcoin is kind of a forum that a lot of the developers talk and discuss these issues on. That's a great place. But it's, it's really, you just have to go out and find the information and actually take the time to, to try to digest it. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cGZS-jNOXIY . (Source: Bitcoin Magazine — We’re Not Breaking Bitcoin: The Case for CTV + CSFS; Speakers C/A)

• Mempool policy and relay debate: panelists criticized Core relay changes and highlighted node-operator pushback (cited ~18% opting out of relaying certain data); inscriptions were said to inflate the UTXO set materially; BitMEX demonstrated that filters can be evaded in principle, though impractical; speakers argued local node filtering is not centralized censorship 22 So I'm like, miserable in the trenches fighting the spam war because, you know, in my opinion, bitcoin core has gone rogue and they're ripping out tools that no people clearly want because why would you. This appears to be broken game theory. If the concerns they're levying at us about mining centralization and blocks propagation and stuff like that are true, and we need nodes to altruistically relay as much junk as miners feel like putting in the chain in order for bitcoin to work right then we have a problem because clearly a lot of bitcoiners don't want to relay this crap and they're not going to. We're up to 18% now that are saying screw this. Wow, 18. Now that's dope. Yeah, I didn't realize. Yeah, it is. And that's a. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o1w_9tlF0-0 21 If the concerns they're levying at us about mining centralization and blocks propagation and stuff like that are true, and we need nodes to altruistically relay as much junk as miners feel like putting in the chain in order for bitcoin to work right then we have a problem because clearly a lot of bitcoiners don't want to relay this crap and they're not going to. We're up to 18% now that are saying screw this. Wow, 18. Now that's dope. Yeah, I didn't realize. Yeah, it is. And that's a. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o1w_9tlF0-0 20 It was like 3x really huge. It's like we went from 4 gigabyte to 12 gigabyte UTXOS. It's freaking crazy, man. Yeah, it's horrible. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o1w_9tlF0-0 19 Bitmex actually has two things on their blog which I find interesting because one of them is a showing that filters don't work because they, they got together and figured out a way like using just the idea of information theory, which they rightfully point out that the idea that information theory just proves filters it. It's not that you can't like say that information theory is, is a, is a, is a broad spectrum of what we think about how we think about information theory, think about information itself. So they rightfully kind of like caveat the, the notion or the claim. But they say that, you know, basically you can't, you can't stop it because they were able to actually hide a JPEG in private keys, right? And what they did was they created a like kind of like a 15 signature or 15 key system where 14 keys to 14 addresses actually have the, if you, if you release your K value, your, your secret or whatnot, that anybody can actually pull the image from that set of UTXOs. And. But still, because it's locked with there's a 15th, you still have the private key where you're the only one who can move it on chain. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o1w_9tlF0-0 18 But the thing about the censorship argument is that it's completely confuses the point of why censorship is a problem and where censorship comes from. Like, if you have a hundred thousand miners in a decentralized way, all deciding individually what they want to include or not, and them all coming to a general consensus that they don't want to include this type of thing. That's not censorship. That's got nothing to do with censorship. It's got nothing to do with any of the problems that make censorship a problem. The reason censorship is a problem is when Twitter decides to censor something, and even when all of the users choose not to censor it, it still gets censored. But if every single Twitter user decides they want to block people who are posting porn or dick pics on Twitter, that's not censored censorship. That's the community deciding what they Value in their social environment. And it's not a risk of censorship because if you're saying that like, oh, they're going to like, think about it from the context of knots. It's like, oh, we're just putting in filters and now, now we can just censorship terrorists or whatever. So you're saying that when thousands and thousands of people are running their own nodes and deciding exactly. Individually, manually what they want to. To not have in their M poles that somehow there's going to be this mechanism for one dude to decide that this terrorist address doesn't get put into the blockchain and every one of these tens of thousands of people are all going to just decide, yeah, sure, we'll do that too. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o1w_9tlF0-0 . (Source: Guy Swann — Roundtable_012; Speakers B/A)

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• Lightning and wallets: Relay discontinued Lightning citing low usage and technical friction (about half of attempted users hit errors); Square integrated Lightning at POS, with panelists calling for a single default invoice/QR format; BitBit launched self-custodial tipping on X (Spark-powered); Nunchuck rolled out Miniscript support enabling complex timelocks/multisig templates 17 I think it's just supposed to be relay, but I could be wrong, but they discontinued Lightning Network because of a low user adoption and technical issues. They did a Twitter post. Apparently 5% of their active users tried lightning, and, like, literally half of them had some sort of a technical problem. Oh man, that's so disappointing. But part of it was poor integration quality. Some are saying, I think it's probably, you know, all the things that we've talked about is this invoice wasn't supported, this standard wasn't, you know, like if you don't kind of like mechanic what you're saying, if you don't go full in and just go all the way to the end, which is still going to have problems is it's, it just, you're not going to have a good time. But they did add Taproot support. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o1w_9tlF0-0 15 I'm super excited that for Square to integrate lightning checkout with their Point of sale system. I like that because it gives kind of a default or kind of a. What do you call it? Like, everyone kind of agrees. Selling point. Yeah. There's just so many formats and different wallets default to different formats. Like when I was buying food from a food truck at the Honey Badger conference, I could pay those invoices with Aqua or Phoenix, but I could not pay those invoices with Cash app because just whatever. Like the. And it wasn't a lightning channel issue. It was a. It's a wallet, you know, QR format code or whatever. Lightning address format. So it's like, like we can have all of these special ones, but like there has to be one that works and that one has to be the default one. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o1w_9tlF0-0 16 Then Bitbit launches self custodial tipping on X powered by Spark. So I saw this and I still don't understand how it is. I couldn't figure out, I didn't go deep enough to figure out how to like get it, but it apparently works. You can do it now and you can tip people's usernames. And self custodial. I don't, I, I don't, I don't, I'm telling you, I don't get it. I don't get it yet. And I'm questionable on some of the claims that they have because of that. But yeah, according to the article and some of the things that were posted, they this is what it is. It's self custodial tipping on X. It's powered by Spark. So Spark is the, it's basically like an LSP and a. They have like a SDK. It's a little bit like Breeze in that way you can tip to people's usernames and there's a, it says 21 day wallet creation window. So I think maybe the tip goes back or it expires or something like that. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o1w_9tlF0-0 14 Oh actually on that this isn't actually anything to do with Lightning, but I am super stoked and I got this like an hour ago was the new update for Nunchuck. Dude, I was so excited. So Nunchuck. Nunchuck has been my go to for a long time now. Yeah, my favorite wallet. I have tons of different multi sig setups and stuff and I've always dreamed about the. The different sort of like time lock and like hierarchical multi sig and all of this stuff. They have full support for miniscript. They just released it. I have it like right now. I haven't done anything with it. I haven't started a wallet but now I can totally do a. And they have like some built in templates that you can just select. But if I wanted to I could do a two of three multisig with a three month time lock for any other of this set of keys with like a five of seven and then two of three. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o1w_9tlF0-0 . (Source: Guy Swann — Roundtable_012; Speakers A/D/B)

• Mining and pools: a new modular miner design separates infrastructure from ASIC boards for hot-swap upgrades and air/immersion flexibility; NiceHash mined an Ocean pool block and pool hashrate reportedly jumped ~50%, taking Ocean to ~1.5% of network hash 64 Their project has now been unveiled and it looks awesome. So they have completely redesigned the entire thinking around how to model. Like your infrastructure is now separate from your asic. So your power block, your encasing, your fans, your, your inverter. Like all of the stuff is now separate from the chips modular. And you have boards that you can swap out and swap back in and in seconds you're running on the new asics. And like so they've, they've literally, they finally made it into infrastructure that can be where you can set up your entire enterprise and you can isolate one board and replace something without shutting anything down. Like without you like it's just like, like swap out to go. Just like you know, in any sort of big data center thing you gotta, you heart swap a hard drive, right? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o1w_9tlF0-0 8 An ocean block just got mined and it was a datum user that calls themselves Nice hash. That's very. That's quite an interesting development. I did not expect that. Wow. Hold on, let me just go and see who that is because, oh, ocean is like. We jumped up 5x ash yesterday, which was like a 50% growth. It broke something on the pool and like, you know, there was some overflow on the stats. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o1w_9tlF0-0 7 I think if we can get mining back on track, like the nice hash is now mining on ocean, it looks like. So that's massive because they appear to have 5x a hash which is just. Yeah, that's like a 50% increase in our pool hash rate. That's a lot. We're one and a half percent of the network now. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o1w_9tlF0-0 . (Source: Guy Swann — Roundtable_012; Speakers A/B)

Market & Adoption

• Publicly traded companies now hold over 1,000,000 BTC 68 Publicly traded companies now hold over a million Bitcoin. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xjfI0aqAGTw . (Source: Simply Bitcoin — Why You Need to Prepare for Bitcoin to Go PARABOLIC!; Speaker A)

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• Corporate treasuries + ETFs: hosts said corporations collectively hold >1M BTC and, combined with ETFs (~1M BTC), that’s roughly 2M BTC off the liquid float; ETFs were shown buying roughly 3× the new annual supply (~160,000 BTC/year); over the last year, presenters tallied ~640,000 BTC added by public companies 56 Firstly, we just saw, saw a new record pass literally hours ago because the corporations with bitcoin on the balance sheet now hold over 1 million bitcoin. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LRz6_wuxMM8 55 And that's not even counting the ETFs that also have a million bitcoins. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LRz6_wuxMM8 54 This is a little bit of an older chart, but I like it because visually it's showing you that ETFs alone are buying three times the new supply of bitcoin. Again, each year. There's about 160,000 bitcoin mined. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LRz6_wuxMM8 2 But look what they've done in the past year alone. So we're in Q3, 2025. If you look at Q3, 2024, we were at 360,000 Bitcoin. So in a year, just the corporations like strategy meta, planet 21 and all of the 120 odd new public companies with bitcoin on the balance sheet, they have bought around, what's that, 640,000 bitcoin in a year again, 160,000 bitcoin is mined here. So just the public companies with bitcoin in the balance sheet have 4x the amount of bitcoin that's mined every year. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LRz6_wuxMM8 . (Source: Simply Bitcoin — NEW DATA: Have Bitcoin Whales Lost Control of The Price?!; Speakers A/B)

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• Institutional penetration still early: about 10% of Bitcoin is held by institutions (governments and public companies), with only ~115 entities comprising the top ~7% of holdings 63 Yeah, I think, I think I saw recently that about 10% of Bitcoin is actually not held by institutions. These are governments and public companies for the most part. And when you double click on it, what's actually more fascinating is that there's only like 115 entities or so that constitutes the top 7%. So it's actually early in terms of the counts of institutions relative to the ownership of the bitcoin network, which signals something. There's still a lot of opportunity for more companies to come online and buy bitcoin. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QYhv40zxrG0 . (Source: Anthony Pompliano — Why Bitcoin Is Mispriced RIGHT NOW!; Speaker A)

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• Boardrooms are moving: hosts said banks and corporate teams are scrambling to figure out custody 39 Banks and boardrooms are scrambling. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xjfI0aqAGTw 38 Companies that laughed two years ago are now rushing to figure out custody. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xjfI0aqAGTw . A Trump-family-backed company listed on NASDAQ with 2,443 BTC in treasury 69 And yeah, like we said, the Trump family backed American bitcoin company went public on the NASDAQ with 2,443 bitcoin already in its treasury. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xjfI0aqAGTw . (Source: Simply Bitcoin — Why You Need to Prepare for Bitcoin to Go PARABOLIC!; Speakers A/B)

• MicroStrategy context: panelists said the firm’s issuance strategy created ~$26B of Bitcoin value for shareholders over the last six quarters; they also noted a policy shift on share issuance and observed MSTR could set a floor for NAV multiples 26 And this is how they created literally 26 billion worth of free Bitcoin for shareholders over the last six quarters. So we're very focused on figuring out what we can do there. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2OwBDCflHFI 11 Then Michael Saylor's they've shifted strategies equity issuance, allowing share issuance below 2.5 times net asset value. So basically they said we were not going to dilute shares this much to get more bitcoin. And now they are going to dilute shares this much to get more bitcoin. Which is funny. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o1w_9tlF0-0 27 The second thing is, is I personally feel once we get past this wave of supply that MSTR should be the floor in terms of MNAV. They're trading at like 1.6 right now. I say that because there should be some sort of embedded growth premium for a smaller company. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2OwBDCflHFI . (Source: Unchained — Bits + Bips LIVE (Sept 3); Speakers D/A)

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• Dominance and rotation: Bitcoin dominance cited around ~58%; panelists noted prior cycles saw dominance fall into the low 40s, implying potential room for alt rotation; some guests described Bitcoin as ‘saturated’ relative to smaller tokens 28 Bitcoin's market dominance is around 58% and change. Or so I know during like at the peak of the COVID driven boom, et cetera, it drops down to like the low 40s, even below 40. Not necessarily saying that history is going to repeat itself, but it does suggest that this rotation out of Bitcoin into alts has some more room to grow. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rLLqH4DRsuU 25 Bitcoin's market dominance is around 58% and change, or so. I know during like at the peak of the COVID driven boom, et cetera, it drops down to like the low 40s, even below 40. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2OwBDCflHFI 29 So I haven't been super close on other ecosystems, but my impression is that bitcoin has kind of become saturated. I think you're seeing some like imperi and seaquants that are trading at like 0.7, 0.8 of NAV. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rLLqH4DRsuU 24 So I haven't been super close on other ecosystems, but my impression is that bitcoin has kind of become saturated. I think you're seeing some like imperi and sequins that are trading at like 0.7.8 of NAV. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2OwBDCflHFI . (Sources: Unchained — Bits + Bips: DAT; Unchained — Bits + Bips LIVE; Speakers A/D)

• Seasonality and cycles: September has historically been weak for Bitcoin; one guest framed likely resistance to pushing above higher levels during this seasonal window and discussed four-year cycle timing around November 61 Historically, I think most people listening here know that September does not tend to treat bitcoin and crypto very well. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rLLqH4DRsuU 30 Right, well, that's where we left off, I believe on the last show where I was on is like discussing just the negative seasonality around bitcoin and shared that I thought bitcoin would struggle to get above 125k due to that and some other factors. You had a lot of enthusiasm around the passage of the Genius act, Stablecoin bill, and after that, it's hard for Marcus to see forward through that. You're also seeing just a softness in what I call animal spirits. So high momentum names that retail traders love have just been weaker, which generally also happens this time of year. So I think that's a part of this happened the last year and the year before that too. The Clarity act is something to stay focused on. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rLLqH4DRsuU 60 There are some concerns around bitcoin and the. And the four year cycle, which for those that follow the cycle says that bitcoin tops in November or so. And some people are saying the cycle's over. I don't think that's the case where we are now. So when people are excited. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rLLqH4DRsuU . (Source: Unchained — Bits + Bips: DAT; Speakers D/B)

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• Macro liquidity and gold: presenters tied global liquidity expansions (M2) to Bitcoin peaks and highlighted a fresh gold breakout; a guest argued BTC is below a liquidity-implied level now but could ‘make up for lost time’ into early 2026 if liquidity accelerates 4 Bitcoin and global liquidity. Now I also agree that these kind of four year cycles of liquidity look as if they're excited, expanding a little bit. You can see in the blue. I'm going to take the pink line off this chart. So we've just got the bitcoin price in white and then in the blue you can see that when we see these big massive expansions in the global liquidity that correlates really nicely with bitcoin peaks. Now again, I think we're just kind of warming up here. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LRz6_wuxMM8 52 But I think on like a four year time horizon, I think there's a pretty good correlation there between bitcoin following global monetary expansion and also bitcoin following what gold is doing. Because I think we covered for you guys earlier in the week. Gold is breaking out to record highs. And again we got a ton of data showing that when gold rallies, bitcoin follows. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LRz6_wuxMM8 5 US$140,000 right now. It should be well above that based on the liquidity metrics I follow. Very surprised that it's not there, but I think again, it's being held on by the economy. I think once the most market participants believe that the US Economy is finally starting to surge, I think the price of bitcoin will skyrocket at that point. So that's just my personal take is it's going to make up for lost time. It leaves me very bullish with where we are. Like I said earlier, for the next six months or so, I'm actually very bullish. If you would have asked me two or three years ago, I would have said we'd almost be at the peak of this business cycle, but we haven't even started yet. And so there's a chance we either have this massive surge higher in a short amount of time in Q4 and we still maintain these four year cycles, or more likely, what it's looking like to me is the cycle extends into the first half of 2026 somewhere, which to me would mean the bitcoin peak would probably extend and happen somewhere in the first half of 2026. One other thing I want to bring up is because everybody knows that global M2 and liquidity lead the price of bitcoin. Something that I've noticed, however is that at cycle peaks of bitcoin price, the price of bitcoin actually leads those other factors. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LRz6_wuxMM8 3 We've got rumors and talk of Jerome Powell lowering interest rates soon. If Trump fires Powell in the next six months, when he turns up, imagine what global liquidity is going to do. If interest rates are jacked down from like 4 to 5% to 1%, I think liquidity is going to rip and that all kind of that six to nine month timeline that we might see global liquidity increase if history repeats that kind of suggests bitcoin has a good what, six, seven, eight, nine months left in it. So I, I wouldn't be expecting a peak until what Q2, 20, 26 if cycles hold true and if history repeats itself again. My kind of base case is we break the cycles, this bull run and we're even more, I think we see less large two year bear markets where the price goes down like 85%. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LRz6_wuxMM8 . (Source: Simply Bitcoin — NEW DATA: Have Bitcoin Whales Lost Control of The Price?!; Speakers A/D)

Notable Perspectives

‘If you use money as a tool for truth, not as a goal, it will really transform you’ 44 And what I've also found through my life is that out of all the tools that are available as a mirror to yourself, money is one of the best tools. If you use money as a tool for truth, not as a gold, but as a tool for truth, it will really transform you in a good way. People say they respect you. Like, okay, how much do those people pay you? People say that they would buy something from you, okay, how much money would they give you? And it is tricky though because all of us I think feel something and that's that money is a little bit corrupted, which is true in fiat system. We can see that our societies are absolutely built on money, but that money doesn't go to those who create the most value. It goes to those who that are closest to money printer. It goes to those who have power to dominate others. And this is where I think bitcoin as a better Money as the best form of money we as humanity have invented serves as a great mirror. Because once you can stay humble and stack sats and amass that money and use it as a tool, use it as a mirror, suddenly you can aim much better, you can adjust your actions, you can see the real feedback and of the actions you're taking. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h0fMDsOCEm8

— Source: Bitcoin Magazine — Bitcoin as a Mirror for Personal Growth; Speaker B

‘All you need to in bitcoin look at is whether you have more bitcoin today than you had yesterday… focus on yourself, on your own proof of work’ 42 No, that's again beauty of bitcoin as a better system is like you as part of bitcoin as that system. It's like it makes it into a single player game. All you need to in bitcoin look at is whether you have more bitcoin today than you had yesterday. In fiat system, it's multiplayer. You gotta, you depend on whether this person is gonna do something, whether that person is gonna do something. In bitcoin, it's single player. All you need to do is focus on yourself, on your own proof of work. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h0fMDsOCEm8

— Source: Bitcoin Magazine — Bitcoin as a Mirror for Personal Growth; Speaker B

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‘Although people think of it as this passive thing that kind of exists, the view and the philosophy and the ethos [of Bitcoin] are on offense’ 59 And so again, if you think about bitcoin is very interesting to me because bitcoin, again, has no face, has no people, has no team, but it has a view, and it actually expresses that view via code in the world. And although people think of it as this passive thing that kind of exists, the view and the philosophy and the ethos are on offense. And I actually think the more I've thought about it, like that may be a reason why people are attracted to it, is because it kind of implicitly is telling you, this is the worldview that I hold. This is the thing that I think is valuable. This is how I'm going to act in the world. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QYhv40zxrG0

— Source: Anthony Pompliano — Why Bitcoin Is Mispriced RIGHT NOW!; Speaker B

‘The ETF is super low fees… my guess is that the ETF probably just remains entrenched for a while’ 57 I think the ETFs are not dead because probably they just have kind of a liquidity moat. Right? Like, if you're buying spot bitcoin on one venue versus another, what does it take to move it from one venue to another? That's actually. If you're a traditional hedge fund, it's probably not the kind of thing that you're used to dealing with. Okay, I have to provide an address from NYSE to go move it over to this other exchange over here. My guess is that they'll probably just keep trading the ETF for a while. The ETF is super low fees, right? So relative to simplicity and the liquidity that it already has, my guess is that the ETF probably just remains entrenched for a while. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iuGezuOQ9qc

— Source: Unchained — The Chopping Block; Speaker A

‘That’s not censorship… That’s the community deciding what they value in their social environment’ 18 But the thing about the censorship argument is that it's completely confuses the point of why censorship is a problem and where censorship comes from. Like, if you have a hundred thousand miners in a decentralized way, all deciding individually what they want to include or not, and them all coming to a general consensus that they don't want to include this type of thing. That's not censorship. That's got nothing to do with censorship. It's got nothing to do with any of the problems that make censorship a problem. The reason censorship is a problem is when Twitter decides to censor something, and even when all of the users choose not to censor it, it still gets censored. But if every single Twitter user decides they want to block people who are posting porn or dick pics on Twitter, that's not censored censorship. That's the community deciding what they Value in their social environment. And it's not a risk of censorship because if you're saying that like, oh, they're going to like, think about it from the context of knots. It's like, oh, we're just putting in filters and now, now we can just censorship terrorists or whatever. So you're saying that when thousands and thousands of people are running their own nodes and deciding exactly. Individually, manually what they want to. To not have in their M poles that somehow there's going to be this mechanism for one dude to decide that this terrorist address doesn't get put into the blockchain and every one of these tens of thousands of people are all going to just decide, yeah, sure, we'll do that too. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o1w_9tlF0-0

— Source: Guy Swann — Roundtable_012; Speaker A

‘Historically… September does not tend to treat bitcoin and crypto very well’ 61 Historically, I think most people listening here know that September does not tend to treat bitcoin and crypto very well. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rLLqH4DRsuU

— Source: Unchained — Bits + Bips: DAT; Speaker D

‘This is literally a transition from the old guard to the new guard… institutions are eating all of our lunch’ 6 This is literally a transition from the old guard to the new guard. This is a transition from the OG whales that hit their number 100k. It's getting distributed into the network and as of now, the institutions are eating all of our lunch because they basically have free money here. They're taking out sailor loans. They're able to buy Bitcoin with like literally 0% loans, which is unheard of. Well, I think Saylor's like 0.2% loans or something. Just like something none of us have any capacity of getting. So anyways, I saw that chart and it really confirmed my bias that I think we are seeing a fundamental shift in the market structure. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LRz6_wuxMM8

— Source: Simply Bitcoin — NEW DATA: Have Bitcoin Whales Lost Control of The Price?!; Speaker B

Emerging Themes

• Regulatory re-openings vs. clarity needed: CFTC’s FBOT path provides a compliance route for offshore venues to reach U.S. users; guests expect broader clarity (Clarity Act) could pull incumbents in next year, though some doubt a first-attempt passage 48 CFTC is reviving the FBOT Foreign Board of Trade registration path for overseas exchanges. So the announcement was I think a little bit mangled by a lot of reporters who claimed that this was Binance and Bybit and whatever can now come back into the US market. It's not quite what it means. What it does mean is that according to Carolyn Pham, CFTC interim head, the CFTC has opened up US markets to the rest of the world. Firms now have a path back after being driven offshore by regulation, by enforcement. This means that you can apply under FBOT rules to be CFTC licensed and offer derivatives and other asset classes to Americans, but you have to undergo very, very pretty strict CFTC oversight, market surveillance, all this other stuff. So it's not a walk in the park and it's probably not trivial for somebody like Binance or Bybit to do this on day one, but possib possible that they could decide to accept this regulatory regime and open themselves back up to the US market. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iuGezuOQ9qc 47 So my understanding is that FBOT applies to exchanges like URX or I think for something like Elmax or something like that. It's relatively Straightforward for them to get this designation, an FBOT designation, but it's not something you can easily get out of the box. But it doesn't require you to be domiciled in the US is my understanding. But it does require you to expose your trading surveillance stuff to US regulators so that CFTC can pull records anytime they want, if they want to do an investigation or whatever. That makes sense then. So you have to onshore to US regulation and US and ex US businesses can do that by submitting to US jurisdiction. That's right. So again, is this something that Binance is going to do out of the box? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iuGezuOQ9qc 23 I think that we are probably going to get that with the Clarity act sometime next year. I think that that generally, like incumbent big tech and big finance firms haven't really wanted to come into crypto and dismediate themselves, particularly if it adds legal and regulatory risks. But now once we get regulatory clarity they're going to have to come in in a big way. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2OwBDCflHFI 62 The Clarity act is something to stay focused on. Maybe we'll touch on that soon. I doubt it gets passed in the first attempt. Just like the current stablecoin bill as well. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2OwBDCflHFI .

• Institutions absorbing supply: corporate treasuries and ETFs account for ~2M BTC, with ETFs reportedly buying ~3× new issuance; exchange/OTC balances down materially over multi-year periods 56 Firstly, we just saw, saw a new record pass literally hours ago because the corporations with bitcoin on the balance sheet now hold over 1 million bitcoin. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LRz6_wuxMM8 55 And that's not even counting the ETFs that also have a million bitcoins. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LRz6_wuxMM8 54 This is a little bit of an older chart, but I like it because visually it's showing you that ETFs alone are buying three times the new supply of bitcoin. Again, each year. There's about 160,000 bitcoin mined. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LRz6_wuxMM8 1 It is down 70% since its 2021 peak where we saw around 500,000 Bitcoin on OTC disks. There's 150,000 today. Let's move on to the OTC spot exchanges. This is down 35% since 2022. Again that was only a three year chart. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LRz6_wuxMM8 .

• Self-custody safety and UX: strong case for covenants (CTV+CSFS) and vaults to improve user safety; Miniscript tooling and templates arrive; Lightning interoperability/UX still uneven across wallets and POS 37 All right, well to kind of start for context, like every scaling solution that exists for bitcoin except for sidechains, the Lightning network, state chains, arc, bit, vm, all of these rely on pre signed transactions. The entire security model of users funds is whatever set of keys are actually locking the coin. You sign transactions ahead of time, ensuring that funds are distributed how they should be from users. And so that's kind of the core technological bedrock that everything we are doing to try to make sure people can cost effectively transact with. Bitcoin is built on. CTV is essentially kind of a shortcut to creating those pre signed transactions like Doing things. Now you actually have to get all of the users involved together, coordinating to go through that signing process. What CTV would allow you to do is simply define the hash of the transaction that you want to pre sign and you just use that as the address essentially. So you get the exact same kind of guarantees that you would from everybody going through the process of pre signing. But you don't have to go through that coordination getting everyone online together at the same time and actually signing things. Checksig from Stack is kind of a variant of the op checksig code that I mentioned earlier. When you use opcheck sig what that is checking the signature against because you actually have to sign something, it just assumes the transaction that's being verified, that's what was signed, and that's what the signature is being verified against. With Checksig from Stack, you can arbitrarily sign and prove a signature against any data that you verify through the course of that program. And so with these two things together, you can have a massive optimization of the whole pre signing process with CTV and then combining that with checksig from Stack, you can have that hash that effectively commits to the pre signed transaction, be authorized by actually signing and getting everyone together to do that. And so that creates a situation if you structure a program right, you can have the key for checksig from Stack and then the call to verify against a CTV hash. And you can dynamically, without spending the coins on chain, create new CTV hashes that would be valid to spend that coin off chain just using the checksig from Stack signature to resign a new hash every time you need to do this. And so that creates the possibility of a floating signature essentially where that is not stuck committing to the exact transaction ID that you want to use. It can dynamically change over time. And so given that everything we're building is based on pre signed transactions, this is simultaneously making the whole process of pre signing things much more efficient with CTV and then when combined with Checksig from Stack, it's a lot more flexible in terms of changing things after the fact without having to move those coins on chain and pay blockchain fees for the process of doing that. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cGZS-jNOXIY 34 But the thing that gets me really most excited for Covenants is the application of vaults and vaults allows you to essentially, I would say make self custody for an individual much safer. You actually add this new element beyond the application of like, you know, a basic time lock that you could have for a transaction. You add time on your side in a brand new way. So a vault is basically where you could envision you would keep your long term savings. Right? And basically in a vault you can't go in right away, make a payment to an on chain address. You basically go into this lockup state where funds are pending, it's going out the door, but it's going to wait in a predefined period, say two weeks, four weeks, a year, whatever suits your use case the best. And then during that lockup period, at any time you decide, okay, no, I don't want to go forward with this transaction, you can reverse it or send it to a set of predefined addresses that belong to you. You. So like, let's say worst case scenario, like nightmare situation, you're self custodying your funds, this is your savings. Someone comes into your house, pulls a gun on you, forces you to give up your seed phrase, right? Well now the attacker can't just force you to send to an address, it has to go up through this lock period. So now you have this grace period which hopefully you can, you know, escape that situation and you could reverse course while it's still in that lockup period. So vaults I think are super, super important for making, you know, self custody more safe, right? You don't have to really rely on these third parties or you know, like lawyers or third party signing services like, like a casa or an unchained to be like a third party that has to sign off on every transaction for you. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cGZS-jNOXIY 14 Oh actually on that this isn't actually anything to do with Lightning, but I am super stoked and I got this like an hour ago was the new update for Nunchuck. Dude, I was so excited. So Nunchuck. Nunchuck has been my go to for a long time now. Yeah, my favorite wallet. I have tons of different multi sig setups and stuff and I've always dreamed about the. The different sort of like time lock and like hierarchical multi sig and all of this stuff. They have full support for miniscript. They just released it. I have it like right now. I haven't done anything with it. I haven't started a wallet but now I can totally do a. And they have like some built in templates that you can just select. But if I wanted to I could do a two of three multisig with a three month time lock for any other of this set of keys with like a five of seven and then two of three. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o1w_9tlF0-0 15 I'm super excited that for Square to integrate lightning checkout with their Point of sale system. I like that because it gives kind of a default or kind of a. What do you call it? Like, everyone kind of agrees. Selling point. Yeah. There's just so many formats and different wallets default to different formats. Like when I was buying food from a food truck at the Honey Badger conference, I could pay those invoices with Aqua or Phoenix, but I could not pay those invoices with Cash app because just whatever. Like the. And it wasn't a lightning channel issue. It was a. It's a wallet, you know, QR format code or whatever. Lightning address format. So it's like, like we can have all of these special ones, but like there has to be one that works and that one has to be the default one. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o1w_9tlF0-0 .

• Decentralized policy choices: node-level filtering vs. censorship remains a live debate as some operators opt out of relaying inscription-like data; practical evasion exists but is costly 22 So I'm like, miserable in the trenches fighting the spam war because, you know, in my opinion, bitcoin core has gone rogue and they're ripping out tools that no people clearly want because why would you. This appears to be broken game theory. If the concerns they're levying at us about mining centralization and blocks propagation and stuff like that are true, and we need nodes to altruistically relay as much junk as miners feel like putting in the chain in order for bitcoin to work right then we have a problem because clearly a lot of bitcoiners don't want to relay this crap and they're not going to. We're up to 18% now that are saying screw this. Wow, 18. Now that's dope. Yeah, I didn't realize. Yeah, it is. And that's a. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o1w_9tlF0-0 21 If the concerns they're levying at us about mining centralization and blocks propagation and stuff like that are true, and we need nodes to altruistically relay as much junk as miners feel like putting in the chain in order for bitcoin to work right then we have a problem because clearly a lot of bitcoiners don't want to relay this crap and they're not going to. We're up to 18% now that are saying screw this. Wow, 18. Now that's dope. Yeah, I didn't realize. Yeah, it is. And that's a. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o1w_9tlF0-0 19 Bitmex actually has two things on their blog which I find interesting because one of them is a showing that filters don't work because they, they got together and figured out a way like using just the idea of information theory, which they rightfully point out that the idea that information theory just proves filters it. It's not that you can't like say that information theory is, is a, is a, is a broad spectrum of what we think about how we think about information theory, think about information itself. So they rightfully kind of like caveat the, the notion or the claim. But they say that, you know, basically you can't, you can't stop it because they were able to actually hide a JPEG in private keys, right? And what they did was they created a like kind of like a 15 signature or 15 key system where 14 keys to 14 addresses actually have the, if you, if you release your K value, your, your secret or whatnot, that anybody can actually pull the image from that set of UTXOs. And. But still, because it's locked with there's a 15th, you still have the private key where you're the only one who can move it on chain. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o1w_9tlF0-0 .

• Market structure shift: whales distributing while institutions and funds provide a persistent bid; dominance/rotation dynamics and seasonal patterns remain in focus 53 But what is interesting here is if you look at this date here, where the price and the supply per whale starts to divert here is around that January 20th, 24th time frame, which is literally when the ETFs launch. And so if this first half of the chart was kind of following the historical kind of makeup here, you would think that as the price go, or rather as the whale starts selling bitcoin, that the price would go down. But you're seeing that there's a divergence here in the chart which make leads me to believe that yes, in fact the data is showing us that since the ETF have come into, or rather been launched and everyone is, is piling into these ETFs since the Bitcoin corporate treasury companies are, are acquiring as much bitcoin as they have, million plus. And we're seeing nation states secretly buying bitcoin. At least that's the rumors and the speculation. You'd expect that the bitcoin price would go down if the whales were selling as much coin as they are. Though we've been holding above 100k for over 100 days here. So there is a divergence going on here. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LRz6_wuxMM8 28 Bitcoin's market dominance is around 58% and change. Or so I know during like at the peak of the COVID driven boom, et cetera, it drops down to like the low 40s, even below 40. Not necessarily saying that history is going to repeat itself, but it does suggest that this rotation out of Bitcoin into alts has some more room to grow. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rLLqH4DRsuU 61 Historically, I think most people listening here know that September does not tend to treat bitcoin and crypto very well. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rLLqH4DRsuU .

• Macro watch: liquidity cycles and gold’s strength are key external signals for Bitcoin timing in this cycle 4 Bitcoin and global liquidity. Now I also agree that these kind of four year cycles of liquidity look as if they're excited, expanding a little bit. You can see in the blue. I'm going to take the pink line off this chart. So we've just got the bitcoin price in white and then in the blue you can see that when we see these big massive expansions in the global liquidity that correlates really nicely with bitcoin peaks. Now again, I think we're just kind of warming up here. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LRz6_wuxMM8 52 But I think on like a four year time horizon, I think there's a pretty good correlation there between bitcoin following global monetary expansion and also bitcoin following what gold is doing. Because I think we covered for you guys earlier in the week. Gold is breaking out to record highs. And again we got a ton of data showing that when gold rallies, bitcoin follows. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LRz6_wuxMM8 .

• Security and custody realities: irreversible asset withdrawals heighten exchange-target incentives; new insurance/custody products and state-level custody policies point to a maturing stack 45 The reason why they are targeted exponentially more is because today crypto exchanges handle assets that are irreversible. They handle crypto tokens like USDC and Bitcoin and Ether, that once it's gone out, you cannot get it back with a court order. You cannot get it back with all the safeguards of traditional markets. The other assets going into the crypto exchange do benefit from those protections. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iuGezuOQ9qc 43 If you can withdraw crypto, then it's like 70, 80% that you can monetize for cash. Which means your incentive to hack this account goes way, way up. Everybody in the right mind knows this. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iuGezuOQ9qc 12 But Anchor Watch has launched kidnap and ransom insurance policies. So they're doing a multi sig setup with like an ongoing fee and they're doing the Lords Lloyds of London is doing the insurance policy and they have set up their system so that they believe that it is secure enough that they can get insurance with Lloyd's of London and they believe that basically you can prove that the setup is secure enough that you don't have to worry about kidnapping, being kidnapped and having ransoms. And thus you can have insurance for being that covers kidnapping, extortion, detention, ransom reimbursement, 27, 247 crisis response, like this sort of, sort of stuff like hostage negotiators. And like that's just like that's a huge deal because I know there's, I at least know like in the back of my mind this is like an issue. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o1w_9tlF0-0 40 Look what, look what Texas just voted on, right in their legislature, literally being able to custody bitcoin on their balance sheets, right? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xjfI0aqAGTw .

Key Developments

• Source: Bitcoin Magazine — Jeff Walden (Strive). Bitcoin treasuries are being transformed into layered securities (convertible bonds down to junior tranches) to match distinct risk/return profiles and unlock large fixed-income and real-estate capital pools. Example: a junior instrument with a 5.1x BTC collateral “rating” implies coverage even after an ~85% BTC drawdown, per the presenter’s illustration 63 So this image that you see on the screen, this is strategy's capital stack. And what this effectively is, is they've got an entirely, they've got a very large pool of Bitcoin sitting on their balance sheet. And what they've done is transformed that capital sitting on their balance sheet into different layers of risk. And these are layers of liquidation risk. So in the event, and this is just, this is corporate finance. In the event of a liquidation or a bankruptcy from a corporation, debtors get paid out first and equity shareholders get paid out last if there's any assets that are left. So what they've done here is they've effectively monetized the capital stack into different layers of risk return metrics that are attractive to different capital pools. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WGATlu6Epe8 62 So as you can see, the convertible bonds are the highest priority. Then you've got strife, stretch, strike and stride in that order. And the lowest priority being the common stock down on the bottom. So what does this risk landscape look like? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WGATlu6Epe8 61 And all of this is available on strategy.com you can go look at the risk profile of all these different instruments. And I'll draw your attention here to the BTC rating in the middle. And what this effectively does is outline the amount of collateral, the bitcoin collateral that is backing each one of these individual instruments. So you can start to understand, you know, how, how likely is it that strategy would not be able to pay back this debt or this preferred instrument into perpetuity or into the future. And what you can see here is if you look down at the very bottom of the screen, you can look at strd, which is the most junior in the capital stack, the most risky bitcoin backed security, and it has a 5.1x BTC rating. That means that they have 5 times the amount of bitcoin backing. The notional liability of that liability on the balance sheet. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WGATlu6Epe8 60 And what you can see here is if you look down at the very bottom of the screen, you can look at strd, which is the most junior in the capital stack, the most risky bitcoin backed security, and it has a 5.1x BTC rating. That means that they have 5 times the amount of bitcoin backing. The notional liability of that liability on the balance sheet. Okay, why is that important? That's important because effectively the price of bitcoin could fall 85% and they would still be able to pay off that liability into the future. So when you start to think about how risky are these things, when you actually start to run the math, they start to look incredibly attractive because they've got a significant pile of capital that is backing each one of these individual instruments. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WGATlu6Epe8 59 That's important because effectively the price of bitcoin could fall 85% and they would still be able to pay off that liability into the future. So when you start to think about how risky are these things, when you actually start to run the math, they start to look incredibly attractive because they've got a significant pile of capital that is backing each one of these individual instruments. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WGATlu6Epe8 . Walden argues these instruments show higher liquidity with comparable yields to many traditional fixed‑income products because risk can be priced continuously, and position Bitcoin for inflows from $318T fixed income and $370T real estate 58 So this is looking at the performance of these specific instruments over history since they've been launched in the last six months. And over on the Y axis you see a bunch of little gray dots. The Y axis is yield, the X axis is the 30 day average trading volume. And each one of those individual small dots is the traditional fixed income market. And all of the colored dots, strategy securities here are in colors and at a different point in this axis. So the significance of this graph is that everything else in the traditional fixed income market is significantly less liquid than the strategy securities and the yields are relatively similar. So what that the reason for this liquidity is because the risk of these individual instruments can be calculated 24, 7, 365. This is an innovation that has never existed before, like physical risk and other fixed income instruments. You have to wait for quarterly updates of the company, right? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WGATlu6Epe8 57 So the significance of this graph is that everything else in the traditional fixed income market is significantly less liquid than the strategy securities and the yields are relatively similar. So what that the reason for this liquidity is because the risk of these individual instruments can be calculated 24, 7, 365. This is an innovation that has never existed before, like physical risk and other fixed income instruments. You have to wait for quarterly updates of the company, right? You have to see what is the performance of the company, how much debt am I taking on? And they're very illiquid instruments. So this market has evolved drastically and these instruments have performed incredibly well. They're very liquid and they have high yield. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WGATlu6Epe8 56 So this is arguably the most important slide in the entire presentation, sizing the market. And this is from Jesse Myers. I love this chart. He continues to put this out and update it. So you've got bitcoin in the upper left hand corner at a $2 trillion asset. Gold is a $22 trillion asset. Equity is 135 trillion. But you've got real estate at 370 trillion and fixed income at 318 trillion. These instruments that strategy has created are providing product market fit for the fixed income market and the real estate market. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WGATlu6Epe8 .

• Source: Stephan Livera — Shone Anstey (LQWD). LQWD is scaling Lightning operations across ~20 global nodes (e.g., Hong Kong, Indonesia, Japan, Canada) with thousands of channels; ~70 BTC currently deployed on Lightning with the rest in cold storage, and nodes/custody audited for three years 13 And so we have 20 nodes all over the world, Hong Kong, Indonesia, two in Japan, one in Canada, and thousands of channels. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BwSGj0jUbcY 15 Probably about 70 bitcoin on lightning right now, and the rest remains in Bitcoin. Cold storage. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BwSGj0jUbcY 14 Of course, under Bitgo we are an audited company. We've been audited for three years. Our nodes are audited, which is, you know, we had to do a lot of reporting, a lot of build out around that because that's difficult because you know, the layer one blockchain, like, you know, layer one bitcoin. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BwSGj0jUbcY . Early “Project YES” results: ~19.9 BTC routed over ~3–4 weeks produced a 24% stretch yield; a naive straight APR read shows ~2.5% due to channel ramp timing. Management emphasizes sats‑per‑share and transparent NAV reporting 10 We had 19.9, just a little under 20 Bitcoin. We had a 24% yield off of. Off of a stretch of three to four weeks here. The details are out there. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BwSGj0jUbcY 9 So we have our, you know, the APR, sorry, a weighted APR. Because doing a year lot like a straight APR, the numbers are about 2.5% but not all the channels open on day one. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BwSGj0jUbcY 12 We have our own dashboard here, treasury ltwdtech.com. and I think it's, you know, we're 1.24x our Bitcoin nav. Let's see what the M Nav is, if I can find it. Well, m nav, it's 1.24. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BwSGj0jUbcY 11 The number one stat that I like, and I like this because I look at, you know, obviously I'm a major shareholder, is sats per share. Yeah. All I want to know stats per share and how much if the company was liquidated tomorrow, how much bitcoin would I get? That's like the brass tax, the most hard look at everything you could get down to. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BwSGj0jUbcY . Anstey stresses Lightning routing yield is earned without giving up keys (no counterparty custody), though with tech/ops risk 7 What I like about lightning is there's your earned yield. There's no counterparty risk. We don't give up our keys. We're not, you know, we're not dealing with a Celsius where we're earning that there's technology risk. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BwSGj0jUbcY .

• Source: Simply Bitcoin — Hosts. Community governance friction: Core contributors seek to remove a longstanding “fence” they deem obsolete, while Knots supporters argue for preserving monetary‑first guardrails. Hosts frame this as letter‑of‑the‑code vs spirit‑of‑Bitcoin; they note ~19% of the network reportedly running Knots as a visible signal 20 But at the end of the day, the change right now, if you really want to summarize it in a very, very simple way from a bitcoiner perspective, kind of comes down to there's been a fence that's out there, and CORE wants to remove that fence because they're saying that that fence is no longer effective. And I'm, I'm kind of of the age in my life now where I don't really want to see any fences removed until I've studied and understood why that fence was there in the first place. And as I've studied why this fence is there in the first place from a bitcoiner perspective, it does not advance the, the goal of making bitcoin the best form of money that humanity's ever seen. So I am not pro the change that CORE is making here. And as a result, from the vantage point of, of the Kent bitcoiner, I'm adopting knots on my side, not because I think that knots is technically superior. Anything else. The only reason why is, is as kind of a political vote in our ecosystem that, hey, look, I don't think we should remove that fence, full stop. That's it. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TRXhIY86oTQ 19 When it comes to the U.S. constitution, there's roughly two groups of scholars that study it and argue in court over court cases related to the US Constitutional code. There's the spirit of the law scholars and there's the letter of the law scholars. And if you apply that, that lens to this particular debate, which I think is the most contentious debate since the block size wars, what you see is that the spirit of the law is. And the letter of the law people are talking right past each other. The letter of the law are the very technical people seeing there's no point. This fence doesn't do anything. We should remove it. Like, it just cleans up the code and the spirit of law. People are saying, look, man, you just haven't studied why this fence is there in the first place. Like, it just seems like, hey, why remove something that doesn't seem like it's broke? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TRXhIY86oTQ 18 And now we've got, I think it's up closer to 20% at this point, fellas, 19%, last I looked of bitcoin network is now running on Knots vs Core. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TRXhIY86oTQ .

• Source: Simply Bitcoin — Hosts. Mining buildout: Hive Digital completed Phase 2 in Paraguay, reaching ~18 EH/s and ~8.5 BTC/day, with Phase 3 targeting ~25 EH/s and ~12 BTC/day by Thanksgiving 21 Hive just completed phase two of its Iguazu project in Paraguay ahead of schedule. Their global hash rate is now 18 exahashes. They're producing 8.5 BTC a day and it's powered by a 200 megawatt hydro energy from Itapu. Damn. Phrase 3 is currently underway targeting 25 exahashes and 12 BTC per day production by Thanksgiving. Go check out the ticker H I V E at on the NASDAQ if you want to find out more about Hive. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TRXhIY86oTQ .

Technical Insights

• Source: Bitcoin Magazine — Panel (Aaron van Wirdum, Eric Wall, Shinobi). On‑chain scalability and fungibility remain limited; credible long‑term paths point to adding succinct proof verification (SNARK/STARK) so Bitcoin can validate complex off‑chain states and private proofs natively 41 But if we could just do snark verification on Bitcoin, everything would be a lot simpler and better. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hHqJdRp3wwU 40 Turns out that if you can concatenate things and you can hash things, you can build Merkle trees inside Bitcoin script. If you can Merkle things in Bitcoin script, you can build stark verifiers. And what we were talking about earlier, stark verification, ZK verification is the. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hHqJdRp3wwU . Nearer‑term, optimistic constructions (BitVM) and “Glock”/garbled‑circuit techniques shift complexity off‑chain to make trust‑minimized bridges and L2 logic more practical today, though still constrained without new primitives 39 Sure, yeah, I think it's going pretty well. People might have heard of the Bit VM line of work. I think of what I'm working on is the next evolution of that. So because we don't have OPCAD and we don't have the ability to verify a snark directly on chain, we have these like kind of what are called optimistic protocols. So instead of verifying a proof, you like claim that a proof is valid and then I can prove that it's not like invalid. So it's like a two step thing. And so if you're cheating, I can prove it and that can be verified on Bitcoin. So one way this was done previously was with bitvm. It was very expensive. This new technique of Glock using garbled circuits moves all of the, or essentially all the complexity off chain. So I think these protocols are becoming quite practical. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hHqJdRp3wwU 30 If you're trying to like unscrew something and you need like some grease, like you need some gravel in a chain or like to get grip around the screw for the things to start to come off, I think, Liam, you can sort of resonate with this. The, the screws are starting to come off and some of the ugliest properties of Bit VM bridges, the size of the scripts and the capital inefficiencies. I'm starting to finally see that there might be a path that we can build trust minimized bridges that are maybe good. They're not completely useless. There may actually there's starting to be some light at the end of the tunnel. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hHqJdRp3wwU 29 I think that the Glock kind of paradigm bit VM stuff is interesting because it doesn't require changing bitcoin and so it works now and it kind of forces the question. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hHqJdRp3wwU .

• Source: Bitcoin Magazine — Panel (Eric Wall). A high‑leverage soft‑fork addition is string concatenation (OP_CAT) to enable Merkle constructions and in‑protocol STARK/SNARK verifiers. Taproot’s OP_SUCCESS was designed to allow such additions via soft fork 36 Mean, should be obvious. The upgrade that I've been championing for the, for the last couple of years is just string concatenation in Bitcoin script. I mean the Taproot upgrade that happened four years ago was specifically designed and came with a bunch of new opcodes called OP successes which are designed to purpose. They were specifically designed so that you could soft fork in stack modifying opcodes as a soft fork into bitcoin. So some people may not know this, but for example, if you take dogecoin, which doesn't have Segwit or Taproot, you cannot do opcat as, as a soft fork on dogecoin. It would be a hard fork. But bitcoin is specifically like designed to allow these like string concatenation to be soft for in. And if you take the authors of the Taproot BIP and you and you poll them, I guarantee you that two out of three, Peter Willey, Andrew Polstra and Gregory Maxwell, two out of three of those people will either say that they are surprised or disappointed that this has not happened yet. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hHqJdRp3wwU 35 There's a button for SHA hashing, there's no button for concatenating strings. And if you ever use like a Linux computer and you've looked at the manual, concatenation is like one of the most basic primitives of computer programming. Turns out that if you can concatenate things and you can hash things, you can build Merkle trees inside Bitcoin script. If you can Merkle things in Bitcoin script, you can build stark verifiers. And what we were talking about earlier, stark verification, ZK verification is the. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hHqJdRp3wwU .

• Source: Bitcoin Magazine — Panel. Covenants (e.g., CTV, CHECKSIGFROMSTACK) would replace bulky pre‑signed transaction schemes and simplify L2 protocols by restricting spend paths natively; community movement is gradual but trends toward this minimal, broadly useful set. Broader “Great Script Restoration” proposals (reactivating old opcodes with resource limits) are longer‑dated 34 Well, so the basic way that Bitcoin works is you, when you create an address, what you're actually doing is defining a little computer program that defines the proof that you have to provide in order to spend those Coins. And all of these programs can do is restrict the kind of ability to spend. But once you've provided that proof and met that condition, you can spend the coin however you want, wherever you want you. You can burn the coins forever if you want. The idea of a covenant is to have little primitives you can include in that program that restrict how it can be spent. So it's not just proving that you're allowed to spend it, but now these extra restrictions could say limit it so that they can only be sent to a certain number of predefined places or like including other data or commitments with it. And the idea is that when you are trying to build these layer two protocols that interact with a lot of off chain data, that's essentially what you want to do. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hHqJdRp3wwU 33 And that's done very clunkily right now with pre signed transactions. And that's kind of the only mechanism we have to do that with covenants. You can natively enforce that in Bitcoin scripting system itself. And like Liam said, you no longer have to go through the process of signing what could potentially be a massive set of pre signed transactions. You just define the logic of how you want to restrict coins and include that in this little locking program. And it simplifies a lot of the setup process, the overhead in that, it's just a lot cleaner and simpler. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hHqJdRp3wwU 32 We're very gradually, I think, making progress with check template, verify CTV and check sig from stack like essentially the most basic simple covenants out there. I wouldn't say that they're going to get turned on or activated tomorrow or they. There's like a mob screaming to turn them on now, but people are slowly coming to consensus that this is the bare minimum set of new functionality that everybody agrees would be useful and just kind of moves us a little bit forward. Is there even consensus on this panel for that? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hHqJdRp3wwU 31 That's the great script restoration. Yes. So what's the process of. The progress of that is that I. Think Rusty's been kind of slowly chipping at that, but he also works full time for Blockstream's Lightning implementation. So it's not something he. He's working on full time. And for those unfamiliar with that, the idea is essentially to add a couple of simple covenants to Bitcoin as well as reactivate most of the old opcodes that satoshi deactivated in 2010 with a. Probably gonna piss some people off with this. But essentially an equivalent of gas and Ethereum. So a way to rate limit the resources that those opcodes use on your node when they're being verified to kind of ensure that nodes can't be denial of service attacked or crashed off of the network. I think the long term that would be a very sound goal to work towards. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hHqJdRp3wwU 66 Yes. I basically think of Great script restoration as a like nice rebranding of like opcat like packages in a way that people more easily, you know, drink without thinking that it's poison because it's like been packaged very well by Rusty and works for blockstream. We used to. Where does it work now? Well, I think the kind of the logic behind that is we know most of the things people would want to do with App CAT if we activated that on its own right now. And a lot of the other OPCO codes that would be reactivated in the great script restoration just provide like simpler, more efficient and concise ways of doing those things. So that rather than the clunky block space inefficient opcat versions, people could just directly use those other opcodes in combination with opcat to just keep things more cost effective, easier to ensure that they're going to behave and operate correct correctly, like things along those lines. But great script restoration is not going to happen in like four years. Realistically. Bobcat could happen like next year if we wanted to. So it's like thinking about upgrades like four years into the future when we have no idea what the consensus climate or prospects are going to be of changing the, the protocol. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hHqJdRp3wwU .

• Source: Bitcoin Magazine — Panel. Scaling the network likely requires shared UTXO control with succinct proofs to verify off‑chain balance updates; zero‑knowledge approaches are cited as the cleanest long‑term route 42 Well, I think like, disentangling the asset from the network is the first thing you need to do. Like, as far as Bitcoin, the asset scaling to the world, people just having a claim to that, that's doable right now. But scaling bitcoin the network and people's ability to actually transact people peer to peer on it, we're nowhere close. And the reality is it's just not possible for everybody to actually get their transaction confirmed on chain. There isn't enough throughput. And kind of the second order effect of that is it's not even possible for everybody to own their own Bitcoin UTXO on chain. And so I think the real core of that problem, without kind of going the direction that bitcoin cash wants, which essentially completely sacrifices the decentralization for that throughput, is we need to find ways for people to share control of a utxo. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hHqJdRp3wwU 37 And that means Bitcoin as a system needs to be able to verify things like how is that distribution of funds in a UTXO state spread around off chain? How can that be proven on the base layer in a verifiable way? And what kinds of protocols can we build for users to be able to coordinate and change that distribution and always have something that they can take to the base layer if necessary that can properly verify that how funds are distributed with that UTXO being broken up or done correctly. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hHqJdRp3wwU 38 Well, you ultimately need a way to share authorization control for that utxo. And to be able to prove that as that changes off or off chain like this is the most recent balance distribution amongst everybody sharing that UTXO and like Liam and what they're doing at Alpen Labs with the zero knowledge research like that is in my opinion in the long term probably the only, only clean, viable path to do that, like to actually be able to construct very small succinct proofs that can prove in a verifiable way, very complicated conditions or properties about how these UTXOs are being shared, how that distribution is being updated off chain. And it's really the only way that we have to kind of go forward in that direction without very clunky, inefficient, like messy ways of constructing those proofs. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hHqJdRp3wwU .

• Source: Bitcoin Magazine — Panel. Privacy risk is rising: chain analytics plus advancing AI could make reconstructing long histories trivial, elevating the need for stronger privacy tooling and practices 65 Eric, I think one underestimated like risk basically is that the privacy of bitcoin is so bad that if you've been a bit, a bitcoin user for a while, even if you're like taking your funds, depositing it into exchanges and then taking it out again, you will very soon be able to just ask like chatgpt5, chatgpt6 and ask like what is Shinobi's entire transactional history over the last 10 years? And it'll be able to stitch it together. Like it is a. It's an annoying process to do manually, but an AI could very easily like break and trivialize the privacy characteristics of Bitcoin such that I'm today like scared myself to even like touch any of my old wallets and like commingle any of my funds. So it's like for me that's like the biggest issue that I, I'm like scared to interact with with Bitcoin because I know that I'm leaving forever traces in a system that's very soon going to be much more transparent for state actors to want to link your transactional history together. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hHqJdRp3wwU .

• Source: Preston Pysh — Tuur Demeester. Lightning’s maturation requires interoperability and realistic expectations; Layer 1 is optimized for security/decentralization while scalability lives on higher layers. Adoption timelines hinge on operator know‑how and business models, not “everyone running nodes” overnight 49 My frustration, and we talk about this on the show quite a bit, is just like when you look at the Lightning network and you look at If Bitcoin layer 1 is optimized for decentralization and security and not optimized for scalability, and this is the trilemma that we're talking about here, the scalability is pushed off into subsequent layers that are above it. When you do go to those subsequent layers, the scalability is the thing that shines when you get into the layer two and it still comes with the security and decentralization of layer one. And so when I'm looking at all of these stable coins, and we had Tether back in January, say that they were going to try to use, I believe, the Taproot asset protocol from Lightning Labs to issue tether on Bitcoin Lightning, it's going to move faster, it's going to have lower fees, it's going to have the decentralization of the node network and not four people running a quote unquote full node that's going to have tens of thousands of nodes that are running and having the reliability and all of that that comes with it. And so I'm looking at it and I'm saying long term, it just doesn't make sense to me that something that has better incentives would lose. I'm assuming you agree with that. But do you, and are we just impatient? Do we just need to give this more time for real world assets being tokenized on top of Lightning being a better use case with no native token, unlike Ethereum, Solana, Tron, you name it. There's a test phase that kind of needs to happen and I think there was a little bit of overexcitement, maybe early on about lightning, I think it was not realistic to think that everybody would just run a lightning node and do it well enough to keep doing it. Similar to maybe early on people thought anyone is just going to run an email server, their own email server in their basement. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tgX8BaVnZAY 48 So yeah, you need to kind of build that infrastructure. It does seem maybe that lightning needs to be interoperable with one or more other protocols to really become like that performant juggernaut. And that also takes time to do it well. We need people that, that have the knowledge and the risk appetite to invest in those companies and make it happen. So I'm not surprised. It's been, I think 2016 was the lightning paper maybe. So I'm not surprised. It's been nine years also because the real trunk of bitcoin is that store of value property. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tgX8BaVnZAY 47 It does seem maybe that lightning needs to be interoperable with one or more other protocols to really become like that performant juggernaut. And that also takes time to do it well. We need people that, that have the knowledge and the risk appetite to invest in those companies and make it happen. So I'm not surprised. It's been, I think 2016 was the lightning paper maybe. So I'm not surprised. It's been nine years also because the real trunk of bitcoin is that store of value property. Like that is the real kind of the root, the strong foundation of it all. And then the branches and the leaves, like that's more retail, that's more of that high speed Stuff. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tgX8BaVnZAY .

• Source: Stephan Livera — Shone Anstey (LQWD). Routing economics: Lightning nodes monetize with base plus proportional fees; being central to payment flow increases fee capture. LQWD focuses on automation (global “supernodes,” network scanning) to optimize connectivity and rebalancing 1 So in the lightning network, it is literally a network of bidirectional payment channels. But it's not just, you know, let's say I open a channel with shown. It's not just the SATs that I would fling back and forth between me and Sean, it's actually the routing as well. So let's say I have a channel with Sean, he might have a channel with someone else and then I could pay through that channel. And so the way things work in Lightning is, you know, you open channels and you close the channel. That's an on chain transaction on Bitcoin. But the point here is these Lightning nodes will set their fees accordingly. And then I guess generally speaking in the Lightning network you want to be in the middle of the flow, right? Like if you people are routing through the channels that you operate, then obviously they'll be paying you some routing fees on that. And so in the Lightning network there's different ways people do the fees. As my understanding, there's like a base fee plus a, like a percent of the, you know, transaction fee. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BwSGj0jUbcY 8 But ultimately yes, the secret sauce is the, is the global network. We've taken all kinds of data that we have here and we actually have our own version of a sort of Googlebot where you know, it'll in the sense that it'll look out there and scan the network and see if there's a node operator that meets the requirements. Maybe it's a new node, but it's been up for a period of time. It has a certain channels and we'll automatically open a channel with it and we'll do that because it makes sense. And we have our supernode in Canada and we're looking to deploy more super nodes across other key areas on the network and continue to support it. So we also want to make sure that's geo specific. So if there's, you know, there's a node operator in Indonesia, our Indonesian node will actually automatically open a channel, make sure that we have the best connectivity that we can possibly get at any time and support the network as aggressively as we can here and then and capture that market share. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BwSGj0jUbcY .

Market & Adoption

• Source: Simply Bitcoin — Hosts (citing Ray Dalio). Dalio warns the US debt spiral could trigger a “debt‑induced heart attack” in the near term, with rising interest costs and rollover needs accelerating risk 25 Hedge fund billionaire Ray Dalio, who isn't necessarily like a hardcore bitcoine, the founder of Bridgewater Associates, has warned that the spiring US debt pile is, quote, likely cause a debt induced heart attack in the relatively near future. I would say three years, give or take a year or two. Dalio posting responses to Financial Times questions on X after claiming its reporting had mischaracterized his position, pointing to the 1 trillion dollar a year interest on the 37 trillion dollar debt and $9 trillion, $9 trillion needed to roll over the debt as quote out other spending. The more that happens, the closer the country is to a debt induced economic heart attack. According to Alio, quote, the federal government will spend about $7 trillion and take in only about 5 trillion. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TRXhIY86oTQ .

• Source: Simply Bitcoin — Hosts. ETF demand remains strong; corporates and treasury companies are adding BTC to balance sheets, providing persistent spot demand 24 ETFs are pulling in billions. These treasury companies are pulling in. They're raising tens of millions, hundreds of millions of dollars to buy more corn. Companies are stacking sats on their balance sheet. And most importantly, I think this is the signal out of this entire article. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TRXhIY86oTQ . Snapshot during recording: price ~$112,380; market cap ~$2.24T; realized monetary inflation ~0.84% 23 At the time of recording, the bitcoin price is $112,380 or block height 913,042 sats per dollar. 890 sats per dollar. Market cap 2.24 trillion. Bitcoin versus gold market cap 8.84% decline from all time high. Negative 9.8% realized monetary inflation 0.84%. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TRXhIY86oTQ .

• Source: Preston Pysh — Tuur Demeester. This cycle looks truly institutional; Bitcoin is increasingly viewed as a conservative, apolitical store of value relative to other cryptoassets 52 It's an institutional cycle. I don't know if you agree, but I think this is the real institutional cycle. I don't think retail is really in this market yet. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tgX8BaVnZAY 51 I feel that people are seeing bitcoin increasingly as a conservative investment. And they're not saying that about Ether or Cardano or any of the other coins. Those are not conservative investments. So I just feel like that fits in the zeitgeist, where the whole world is looking for safety. Like, what is safe, what is permanent, what is universal, what is apolitical? And bitcoin fits that to a T. Of course. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tgX8BaVnZAY .

• Source: Bitcoin Magazine — Jeff Walden (Strive). Securitizing BTC exposure in familiar wrappers is the mechanism to tap the $318T fixed‑income and $370T real‑estate pools, not just retail demand 56 So this is arguably the most important slide in the entire presentation, sizing the market. And this is from Jesse Myers. I love this chart. He continues to put this out and update it. So you've got bitcoin in the upper left hand corner at a $2 trillion asset. Gold is a $22 trillion asset. Equity is 135 trillion. But you've got real estate at 370 trillion and fixed income at 318 trillion. These instruments that strategy has created are providing product market fit for the fixed income market and the real estate market. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WGATlu6Epe8 55 These are the two biggest capital pools in the entire planet. This is the biggest story in all of finance right here. This is the math I'm telling you and I'm showing you. This is the biggest story in all of finance. Because there's no other cryptocurrency that has a security that is attracting the fixed income market or the real estate market. That's it. And the reason this is important, right, is you think about how does Bitcoin go from a $2 trillion asset to a $22 trillion asset like gold or $27 trillion asset like the art bucket there. And it's not necessarily just retail adoption. It's getting these enormous pools of capital and siphoning that capital into the bitcoin market. And that's what the creation of these securities has started to do. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WGATlu6Epe8 54 And that's what the creation of these securities has started to do. And all of these bitcoin treasury companies that exist in the market are doing the exact same thing. They're designing and creating these securities that these pools of capital can buy. They're in wrappers that are very familiar, and they fit within the portfolio because they are the same, you know, like, in kind. So that brings me to the end of my presentation here. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WGATlu6Epe8 .

• Source: Stephan Livera — Shone Anstey (LQWD). Lightning is positioned as the Internet’s payment layer, including future machine‑to‑machine micro‑payments; integrations and professionalization continue despite public capacity fluctuations 6 I've always felt it's going to be the payment layer of the Internet itself. And I just go back to my old philosophies and my upbringing in tech and certainly it's one of those things. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BwSGj0jUbcY 5 And where I've always thought is extremely exciting, that we don't talk about a lot is we talk about people paying people, but ultimately it'll be machines paying machines. And they're going to use microtransactions to do it. And they use it for authentication, they use for validation, they use it for straight payments. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BwSGj0jUbcY 4 And so, yes, there's less bitcoin, but what we're seeing is, in my view is you're going from. It was grassroots, supported by, you know, random node operators. Random node operators, very passionate about the space. Maybe they can make some yield. Maybe they can. Maybe they were Just they were super interested to. Now it's becoming, you know, professionalized, where companies like LQWD and others in the space are managing it at a higher level in terms of what the capacity and they have the resources to do so. So I think you're seeing, you know, the professionalization of the network, it's getting a little. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BwSGj0jUbcY 3 So, yeah, the network itself, a lot more flow. We're seeing a lot more integrations, a lot more adoptions. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BwSGj0jUbcY . Regulatory note: in Canada, Tether is still classified as a security, while USDC is not, influencing stablecoin activity at the edges of Lightning/Taproot Assets 2 Definitely, yeah, we've done some Reno preliminary work on it in Canada. The Tether is still classified as a security where USDC is not. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BwSGj0jUbcY .

• Source: Preston Pysh — Tuur Demeester. Mining and AI data‑center workloads are complementary where cheap, stable energy exists, potentially birthing new regional hubs 46 Yeah, I do think, you know, mining and AI is a marriage made in heaven. Like, you know, these data centers, like they can just switch from one to the other. If they're close to a cheap energy source, if they have political stability on a relatively around them, they can really flourish. And we can even see, you know, new towns, new cities be built around that. That's going to be huge. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tgX8BaVnZAY .

• Source: Simply Bitcoin — Hosts. Participation matters: running your own node (and connecting it to your wallet) ensures you verify and “vote” for the rules you run; passive nodes or exclusive reliance on custodians/ETFs outsource that control 17 If you aren't running a node, you don't have A vote, right? That vote is by the wallet or the exchange or whatever. They're voting on your behalf and you don't even know what they're running, right? So it's incredibly important to run a node, especially if you own Bitcoin. If you have bitcoin in self custody and you're transacting bitcoin, you should be running your own node. Like, you should be verifying your own transactions. You should have your own copy of the bitcoin blockchain chain. You should have, you should decide what version of bitcoin you want to run. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TRXhIY86oTQ 16 Nico did say run a node. It's not just enough to run a node, guys. If you're just spinning up a node, you're not actually helping the network. You need to connect these to your wallets. You need to use them with your bitcoin wallets. That's how you actually, you know, have an effect here. Just spinning up a node or, you know, buying a. A standalone node and just chilling there. It really doesn't do much. You need to connect these to your wallet. So if you are choosing a side, make sure they're connected to your wallets, guys, because just running a node literally means nothing. You need to connect these to your wallets. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TRXhIY86oTQ .

Notable Perspectives

• Source: Bitcoin Magazine — Jeff Walden (Strive)

  This is the biggest story in all of finance right here. This is the math I'm telling you and I'm showing you. This is the biggest story in all of finance. Because there's no other cryptocurrency that has a security that is attracting the fixed income market or the real estate market.

• Source: Preston Pysh — Tuur Demeester

  “This is the real institutional cycle… Bitcoin [is] increasingly [seen] as a conservative investment.” 52 It's an institutional cycle. I don't know if you agree, but I think this is the real institutional cycle. I don't think retail is really in this market yet. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tgX8BaVnZAY 51 I feel that people are seeing bitcoin increasingly as a conservative investment. And they're not saying that about Ether or Cardano or any of the other coins. Those are not conservative investments. So I just feel like that fits in the zeitgeist, where the whole world is looking for safety. Like, what is safe, what is permanent, what is universal, what is apolitical? And bitcoin fits that to a T. Of course. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tgX8BaVnZAY

• Source: Simply Bitcoin — Hosts (macro framing)

  “The US is in a debt death spiral… borrowing over a trillion dollars every 100 days… the so‑called safest asset in the world is now the riskiest bag to hold.” 44 The US is in a debt death spiral. We're borrowing over a trillion dollars every 100 days. That's not some fringe blog saying it. That's straight from treasury auctions. Every new bond issue looks like a yard sale nobody wants to att. Yeah, big oof. Yields are ripping higher, the 10 year treasury is breaking levels not seen in decades. And the so called safest asset in the world is now the riskiest bag to hold. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hIkmbvLmYRs

• Source: Simply Bitcoin — Larry Lepard (clip aired by hosts)

  “There will be… winners and losers [in a monetary reset]… allocate to things the government can’t print — gold, silver, bitcoin.” 22 If we're in a sovereign debt crisis, and I think we are, and if we're going to have a lot of inflation, I think we do. And if we're going to go to have a monetary reset. They're going to be real winners and losers and you're not going to get a do over. You know, you're not going to get a do over. It's not going to be like, oh gosh, I missed it. Maybe I'll, you know, I mean, it's like we could wake up one day and the government can say, you know, we're going to a gold standard. We're taking the price of gold up to $20,000. We either own gold and gold mining stocks or you don't. They're going to go up enormously. Same thing with bitcoin. I mean, you know, the US could say we're going to do a strategic bitcoin reserve and the bitcoin price could triple. Well, if you don't have any, you don't benefit from that. So there will be, you know, because of the risk of monetary debasement and the fact that there will be no do over, I would just strongly encourage all of your listeners to have some allocation of their wealth into things that the government can't print. The government can't print gold, government can't print silver, government can't print bitcoin and the government can print dollars and they're going to print a shitload of dollars in my opinion. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TRXhIY86oTQ

• Source: Bitcoin Magazine — Eric Wall (panel)

  “The upgrade that I’ve been championing… is just string concatenation in Bitcoin script… [Taproot] was specifically designed so that you could soft‑fork in stack‑modifying opcodes.” 36 Mean, should be obvious. The upgrade that I've been championing for the, for the last couple of years is just string concatenation in Bitcoin script. I mean the Taproot upgrade that happened four years ago was specifically designed and came with a bunch of new opcodes called OP successes which are designed to purpose. They were specifically designed so that you could soft fork in stack modifying opcodes as a soft fork into bitcoin. So some people may not know this, but for example, if you take dogecoin, which doesn't have Segwit or Taproot, you cannot do opcat as, as a soft fork on dogecoin. It would be a hard fork. But bitcoin is specifically like designed to allow these like string concatenation to be soft for in. And if you take the authors of the Taproot BIP and you and you poll them, I guarantee you that two out of three, Peter Willey, Andrew Polstra and Gregory Maxwell, two out of three of those people will either say that they are surprised or disappointed that this has not happened yet. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hHqJdRp3wwU

• Source: Bitcoin Magazine — Self‑Custody Panel (Stefan Livera/Owen Chemis and panelists)

  “The whole purpose of bitcoin was to have your money as a bearer asset that does not require you to trust anybody else… not your keys, not your coins.” 28 The first thing of course, is that the whole purpose of bitcoin was to have your money as a bearer asset that does not require you to trust anybody else. We're trying to get away from this idea that you need to have an intermediary because the whole history of money is satoshi, literally embedded in the bitcoin Genesis block is full of repeated breaches of the trust when you involve third parties in your money. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9rvJtTVkBLg

• Source: Preston Pysh — Host critique of Wall Street’s messaging

  Institutions “don’t get into any of the tech or why [Bitcoin is] more decentralized or why it’s more secure… [They] just want to sell ETFs…” 45 One of my frustrations with the institutions and Wall street showing up right now is I haven't seen or heard anybody from those institutions really kind of laying out bitcoin, especially as they're comparing it to call it Ethereum or Solana or any of these other things. They don't get into any of the tech or why it's more decentralized or why it's more secure at all. It's just kind of like a wave of the hand. Here's bitcoin, here's these other blockchains we think you. And they're clearly incentivized to just sell product. They just want to sell ETFs that, you know, are rappers on top of all these things. And so maybe the reason we're seeing that is they're incentivized to just kind of like, not really get into it because they have more to sell. Sure. But then again, you know, they're no longer. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tgX8BaVnZAY

• Source: Simply Bitcoin — Hosts (stablecoin critique)

  “Stablecoins are hospice care for the US dollar.” 43 Stablecoins are hospice care for the US dollar. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hIkmbvLmYRs

Emerging Themes

• Institutionalization via familiar wrappers and ETFs: From Walden’s capital‑stacked BTC securities to ongoing ETF inflows, the adoption vector is product‑led and compatible with legacy mandates 55 These are the two biggest capital pools in the entire planet. This is the biggest story in all of finance right here. This is the math I'm telling you and I'm showing you. This is the biggest story in all of finance. Because there's no other cryptocurrency that has a security that is attracting the fixed income market or the real estate market. That's it. And the reason this is important, right, is you think about how does Bitcoin go from a $2 trillion asset to a $22 trillion asset like gold or $27 trillion asset like the art bucket there. And it's not necessarily just retail adoption. It's getting these enormous pools of capital and siphoning that capital into the bitcoin market. And that's what the creation of these securities has started to do. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WGATlu6Epe8 24 ETFs are pulling in billions. These treasury companies are pulling in. They're raising tens of millions, hundreds of millions of dollars to buy more corn. Companies are stacking sats on their balance sheet. And most importantly, I think this is the signal out of this entire article. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TRXhIY86oTQ .

• Professionalization of Lightning: Operators emphasize automation, routing optimization, audits, and clear shareholder metrics (sats‑per‑share), pointing to a maturing payments layer even as throughput and UX evolve 8 But ultimately yes, the secret sauce is the, is the global network. We've taken all kinds of data that we have here and we actually have our own version of a sort of Googlebot where you know, it'll in the sense that it'll look out there and scan the network and see if there's a node operator that meets the requirements. Maybe it's a new node, but it's been up for a period of time. It has a certain channels and we'll automatically open a channel with it and we'll do that because it makes sense. And we have our supernode in Canada and we're looking to deploy more super nodes across other key areas on the network and continue to support it. So we also want to make sure that's geo specific. So if there's, you know, there's a node operator in Indonesia, our Indonesian node will actually automatically open a channel, make sure that we have the best connectivity that we can possibly get at any time and support the network as aggressively as we can here and then and capture that market share. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BwSGj0jUbcY 14 Of course, under Bitgo we are an audited company. We've been audited for three years. Our nodes are audited, which is, you know, we had to do a lot of reporting, a lot of build out around that because that's difficult because you know, the layer one blockchain, like, you know, layer one bitcoin. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BwSGj0jUbcY 11 The number one stat that I like, and I like this because I look at, you know, obviously I'm a major shareholder, is sats per share. Yeah. All I want to know stats per share and how much if the company was liquidated tomorrow, how much bitcoin would I get? That's like the brass tax, the most hard look at everything you could get down to. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BwSGj0jUbcY .

• Protocol debate heats up: OP_CAT, covenants (CTV/CSFS), and trust‑minimized bridges are back in focus as developers seek scalable, private, and verifiable off‑chain systems; timelines vary from near‑term soft forks to longer‑range restorations 36 Mean, should be obvious. The upgrade that I've been championing for the, for the last couple of years is just string concatenation in Bitcoin script. I mean the Taproot upgrade that happened four years ago was specifically designed and came with a bunch of new opcodes called OP successes which are designed to purpose. They were specifically designed so that you could soft fork in stack modifying opcodes as a soft fork into bitcoin. So some people may not know this, but for example, if you take dogecoin, which doesn't have Segwit or Taproot, you cannot do opcat as, as a soft fork on dogecoin. It would be a hard fork. But bitcoin is specifically like designed to allow these like string concatenation to be soft for in. And if you take the authors of the Taproot BIP and you and you poll them, I guarantee you that two out of three, Peter Willey, Andrew Polstra and Gregory Maxwell, two out of three of those people will either say that they are surprised or disappointed that this has not happened yet. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hHqJdRp3wwU 34 Well, so the basic way that Bitcoin works is you, when you create an address, what you're actually doing is defining a little computer program that defines the proof that you have to provide in order to spend those Coins. And all of these programs can do is restrict the kind of ability to spend. But once you've provided that proof and met that condition, you can spend the coin however you want, wherever you want you. You can burn the coins forever if you want. The idea of a covenant is to have little primitives you can include in that program that restrict how it can be spent. So it's not just proving that you're allowed to spend it, but now these extra restrictions could say limit it so that they can only be sent to a certain number of predefined places or like including other data or commitments with it. And the idea is that when you are trying to build these layer two protocols that interact with a lot of off chain data, that's essentially what you want to do. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hHqJdRp3wwU 32 We're very gradually, I think, making progress with check template, verify CTV and check sig from stack like essentially the most basic simple covenants out there. I wouldn't say that they're going to get turned on or activated tomorrow or they. There's like a mob screaming to turn them on now, but people are slowly coming to consensus that this is the bare minimum set of new functionality that everybody agrees would be useful and just kind of moves us a little bit forward. Is there even consensus on this panel for that? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hHqJdRp3wwU 30 If you're trying to like unscrew something and you need like some grease, like you need some gravel in a chain or like to get grip around the screw for the things to start to come off, I think, Liam, you can sort of resonate with this. The, the screws are starting to come off and some of the ugliest properties of Bit VM bridges, the size of the scripts and the capital inefficiencies. I'm starting to finally see that there might be a path that we can build trust minimized bridges that are maybe good. They're not completely useless. There may actually there's starting to be some light at the end of the tunnel. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hHqJdRp3wwU .

• Self‑custody and privacy urgency: Exchange failures (historical) and advancing chain analytics/AI raise the stakes for secure key management, collaborative custody, and privacy‑preserving tools 27 Well, there are others before that, but I think the most well known one that really hit the media was an entity called Mt Gox or Mt. Gox as it's sometimes known. And that literally involved, you know, I think it was like something like a million bitcoins went missing in that range to that effect, you know, a massive chunk of the bitcoin supply. And you know, it took years and years and years for people to get sort of any of that back. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9rvJtTVkBLg 26 And this is exactly what FTX did in the more recent catastrophic crash of an exchange. Very high profile. They had, I believe, liabilities for something like again, and also missed a million, several hundred thousand. I don't know the number but yeah. Whatever it was, it was a huge number of bitcoin but they literally didn't own anything. Interestingly with FTX it was like encouraged for people to leave. There were staff of FTX who left their coins on ftx. It was kind of encouraged because they were doing like staking and yield and this kind of thing. So and so many people thought this is not some two bit operation. This was the biggest exchange in the world and people thought in good faith they bought bitcoin and they left it on the platform. And it turned out that when the books were looked at after the collapse of ftx they had, as I said, liabilities I think for at least 100,000 bitcoin or there as you can check out the figure, it doesn't matter exactly what, what it is. Guess how many bitcoin they actually really owned though that they could redistribute back one they didn't have. So what did that mean? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9rvJtTVkBLg 64 I think one of the most important non communication consensus things that we can do right now is work on collaborative custody solutions. Things like unchained casa, nunchuck, like ways where users can have full self custody over their own funds, but another signer or a service provider can essentially be a helping hand, like protect you against some degree of key loss or mistakes that you made or you know, wallet compromises to, to ensure that your funds do not completely disappear if you mess something up with your key management. And I think in the short term that could be a huge difference maker in terms of getting people to actually self custody their own coins instead of just leave them on exchanges or purchase an ETF and then just walk away. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hHqJdRp3wwU 65 Eric, I think one underestimated like risk basically is that the privacy of bitcoin is so bad that if you've been a bit, a bitcoin user for a while, even if you're like taking your funds, depositing it into exchanges and then taking it out again, you will very soon be able to just ask like chatgpt5, chatgpt6 and ask like what is Shinobi's entire transactional history over the last 10 years? And it'll be able to stitch it together. Like it is a. It's an annoying process to do manually, but an AI could very easily like break and trivialize the privacy characteristics of Bitcoin such that I'm today like scared myself to even like touch any of my old wallets and like commingle any of my funds. So it's like for me that's like the biggest issue that I, I'm like scared to interact with with Bitcoin because I know that I'm leaving forever traces in a system that's very soon going to be much more transparent for state actors to want to link your transactional history together. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hHqJdRp3wwU .

• Macro tailwinds and risks: Debt‑cycle stress (Dalio) and monetary debasement narratives continue to push allocators toward assets governments can’t print, with Bitcoin increasingly framed as a conservative store in an institutional cycle 25 Hedge fund billionaire Ray Dalio, who isn't necessarily like a hardcore bitcoine, the founder of Bridgewater Associates, has warned that the spiring US debt pile is, quote, likely cause a debt induced heart attack in the relatively near future. I would say three years, give or take a year or two. Dalio posting responses to Financial Times questions on X after claiming its reporting had mischaracterized his position, pointing to the 1 trillion dollar a year interest on the 37 trillion dollar debt and $9 trillion, $9 trillion needed to roll over the debt as quote out other spending. The more that happens, the closer the country is to a debt induced economic heart attack. According to Alio, quote, the federal government will spend about $7 trillion and take in only about 5 trillion. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TRXhIY86oTQ 22 If we're in a sovereign debt crisis, and I think we are, and if we're going to have a lot of inflation, I think we do. And if we're going to go to have a monetary reset. They're going to be real winners and losers and you're not going to get a do over. You know, you're not going to get a do over. It's not going to be like, oh gosh, I missed it. Maybe I'll, you know, I mean, it's like we could wake up one day and the government can say, you know, we're going to a gold standard. We're taking the price of gold up to $20,000. We either own gold and gold mining stocks or you don't. They're going to go up enormously. Same thing with bitcoin. I mean, you know, the US could say we're going to do a strategic bitcoin reserve and the bitcoin price could triple. Well, if you don't have any, you don't benefit from that. So there will be, you know, because of the risk of monetary debasement and the fact that there will be no do over, I would just strongly encourage all of your listeners to have some allocation of their wealth into things that the government can't print. The government can't print gold, government can't print silver, government can't print bitcoin and the government can print dollars and they're going to print a shitload of dollars in my opinion. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TRXhIY86oTQ 51 I feel that people are seeing bitcoin increasingly as a conservative investment. And they're not saying that about Ether or Cardano or any of the other coins. Those are not conservative investments. So I just feel like that fits in the zeitgeist, where the whole world is looking for safety. Like, what is safe, what is permanent, what is universal, what is apolitical? And bitcoin fits that to a T. Of course. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tgX8BaVnZAY .

1. Key Developments

US Government Establishes Strategic Bitcoin Reserve In a significant policy development, the United States government has created a strategic Bitcoin reserve through an executive order, a move previously considered highly unlikely 9 The United States government now has a strategic bitcoin reserve. So that is, if you'd asked me five years ago, that would have been kind of like vision board and someone would have said, you're crazy. Like, the United States government's not going to officially hold bitcoin, but if they do that, which there's now an executive order to do, I think a bunch of other countries are going to do that. So, I mean, million dollar Bitcoin by 2030, bro, that's, I know 2025 has felt like we've just been kind of going sideways well, we didn't just go sideways. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fnW9RCSDNdQ 10 But just to give you a couple of data points, right, it's like we're starting to see regulatory clarity emerge in the United States, which I think is a bellwether for the rest of the G20. You have the Genius act passed now for stablecoins, but this market structure bill is being debated in the Senate. Fingers crossed, something could happen by the end of this year that would be a huge milestone. The United States government now has a strategic bitcoin reserve. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fnW9RCSDNdQ . This was highlighted on Simply Bitcoin as a major milestone that could serve as a bellwether for other G20 nations.

Middle Eastern Nations to Disclose Large Bitcoin Purchases According to Coinbase’s Chief Investment Officer, several Middle Eastern countries are preparing to announce significant Bitcoin purchases for their treasuries 31 Coinbase's chief investment officer just announced that several Middle Eastern countries are going to be disclosing large bitcoin treasury purchases. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zfNSp5cZQ5A . A speaker on Simply Bitcoin noted that undisclosed investments from the region are likely already substantial, signaling a growing trend of nation-state adoption 30 And it's, it is possible that crypto to a degree becomes part of some new monetary standard. Not that bitcoin takes over the dollar, but that like it's, it's possible know you see the US talking about a strategic digital asset or bitcoin reserve. And there certainly are are countries around the world in the Middle east who've made large investments that are probably bigger than the ones that they've disclosed. And so it's possible that there even do become some monetary standards that are at least in part backed by by crypto, just like they might be backed by gold or other commodities. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zfNSp5cZQ5A .

Bitmain & Hut 8 See Over $1B in Preorders for New US-Made Miners In a fireside chat on Bitcoin Magazine, Irene Gao of Bitmain revealed that the new generation of U3S23 hydro miners, announced in June, has already received over $1 billion in preorders 19 And since June we announced the new generation of U3S23 hydro miners. We receive a lot of pre orders for that more than $1 billion pre orders right now. And those machines are all going to be produced in the US under the collaboration of us. So we're very excited about it. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bsyklDuBeMs . The machines are set to be manufactured in the US as part of the collaboration with Hut 8, indicating a strategic shift towards domestic production and supply chain verticalization 38 And I think another big thing, I know we're in Hong Kong right now, but we're starting to do a lot more US manufacturing as well from a supply supply chain perspective and looking at manufacturing across like a lot of things here from the conveyance systems to the rack systems and so forth. And so I think as we think about vertically integrating, being able to scale aggressively, all of those elements are really important when thinking about mining and building. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bsyklDuBeMs .

2. Technical Insights

Advanced Energy Strategies for Bitcoin Mining Medi Naseri, CEO of Load Technologies, explained on HashrateUp how energy strategy can account for up to 70% of a miner’s profit margin 28 There are industries out there whose biggest capital expenditure, sorry, operational expenditure is energy, such as bitcoin mining. So in Bitcoin mining usually 70, 80% of the cost is because of like operational cost is because of energy. In that case it really matters what energy you use, how you source your energy, what's your cost of power. That's the most important KPI in your business. So if you are not managing the flow of energy in your data center or for like bitcoin mining operation, you are losing big. Like our analysis shows, like for certain types of machines that number could be as high as 70% of the profit margin that comes from energy strategy rather than bitcoin mining. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1fqBx3OEeD0 . Load’s platform co-optimizes multiple layers of energy management, including real-time price responsiveness, avoiding peak grid charges (4CP/5CP), and participating in demand response programs 37 What we do as a platform, we give people access to all the four and help them co optimize all these programs together in Order to maximize their profitability. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1fqBx3OEeD0 . Naseri noted that Bitcoin miners are ideal for co-locating with AI data centers, acting as a “valley filling instrument” that consumes energy when AI demand is low 36 If you look at the load shape of AI data centers, they are usually like a curve that very much depends on time of the day. Usually the peak happens around noon, depending on where the data center is located. During night hours the demand is very low where bitcoin mining comes in. Bitcoin mining could be a valley feeling instrument that will co locate with AI data centers in order to fill the valleys. So that's probably the biggest synergy between AI and Bitcoin. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1fqBx3OEeD0 .

Innovations in Mining Hardware and Operations Discussions on What Bitcoin Did with Rod Roudi covered the evolution of mining hardware. He praised Jack Dorsey’s Block for rethinking the miner form factor to focus on field-tested durability and serviceability, such as easily replaceable parts, to reduce downtime 4 However, you got a guy like Jack Dorsey. And I got to give Jack a lot of credit here, you know, as a CEO of a now Fortune 500 company for him to be like, you know what, Thomas Templeton and team Max, guys, Jenny Perry, I mean the list goes on with that entire proto team. I'm going to give you the air coverage, I'm going to give you the funding and let's go and see if we can't build a better bitcoin miner. And by the way, let's not go and make it the same form factor. Let's reinvent what this could be. And so they were kind enough, by the way, to invite me out to their launch event. And so I got to talk with the team. I got to go actually see the product live. I got to like lift it. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=whpVFklmRys 34 And one of the things that struck me was like over this 12 year period of time in development, they're like, look, we went out to the field, we went out to the field and talked to miners on what they cared about. They're like, dude, we have to scrap an almost an entire miner because the, the, the hashboard is just kaput or the fan just breaks or whatever. And so it was like, well, what if it wasn't? What if you could just replace the fan easily? Just like take it out, pop or back in. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=whpVFklmRys . The conversation also touched on the integration of AI for predictive maintenance, where on-board agents can forecast part failures, allowing for proactive replacements 3 I think one of the cool things as well is I, I've, I've not seen this, this minor or anything but I've heard that there's like an AI agent on board that will tell you that like parts are going to, are like going to be retired in say three months like the F or whatever it might be. Yeah. And that like integration of AI into these machines seems really cool especially in terms of downtime. Like you can have the replacements ready to go, rip something out, put it in and like there's really no downtime. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=whpVFklmRys 33 But that's one where it could be proactive to sense like, oh the f. There's an irregularity with the fan speed. And we've, you know, looked at our entire data set and noticed that there's a common, common issue with that type of the way the fan is acting that we think in the next 32 days that that fan could go down. You may want to go look at it. So it's a yellow right now and then it becomes a red 10 days. It's like, holy smokes, let's go replace that. But imagine like Tyler then sees that data. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=whpVFklmRys .

Grassroots Mining and Open-Source Development Rod Roudi also highlighted the importance of the grassroots mining movement. He described how Bitcoin Park successfully solo-mined a block live on-stream—an event with one-in-a-thousand odds—demonstrating the power of community-donated hash rate 6 But I mean our chances were one in a thousand, Danny. One in a thousand. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=whpVFklmRys 35 But at block height. 8, 8, 1, 4, 2, 3. We at Bitcoin park solo mined a bitcoin block on the bitcoin blockchain live on our livestream. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=whpVFklmRys . Open-source projects like Bitax are enabling home miners to participate, which Roudi views as the best way to learn about the entire Bitcoin ecosystem 32 So at the pleb or grassroots level, it's happening with a guy like Scott open sourcing the Bitax project so you can build your own home miner and just with whatever. 1, 2, 3 terahash. Just mine Bitcoin at home without your own electricity. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=whpVFklmRys 5 So it can happen. And you know what if enough crazy people get involved or get a future bit or just this is the. The best way to learn about bitcoin in my opinion, is just to mine Bitcoin, you're running a full node. You're learning about bitcoin, you're learning about deposit addresses, you're learning about mining pools, you're learning about everything. And you're just like, wait, how does this work? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=whpVFklmRys .

3. Market & Adoption

Corporate Treasuries Hold Over 6% of Bitcoin Supply According to J.P. Morgan analysts cited on Simply Bitcoin, corporate treasuries now hold over 6% of the Bitcoin supply, a trend that is dampening volatility 11 So Bitcoin's volatility has dropped to historic lows this year despite record highs in May, July and August. JP Morgan analysts attributed attributed this to corporations rapidly accumulating bitcoin. Corporate treasuries now hold over 6% of the supply functioning like private sector quantitative easing and dampening price swings. The trend began with Michael Saylor's MicroStrategy and has since expanded to companies like Trump Media, GameStop and Meta Planet, with over 180 firms adopting similar strategies. In July alone, corporations accounted for nearly two thirds of major bitcoin purchases. This accumulation, combined with ETFs and futures, is stabilizing Bitcoin and making it more competitive against gold as a store of value. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fnW9RCSDNdQ . In July alone, corporations accounted for nearly two-thirds of major Bitcoin purchases. This movement, pioneered by MicroStrategy, now includes over 180 firms and is making Bitcoin more competitive against gold as a store of value 7 So Bitcoin's volatility has dropped to historic lows this year despite record highs in May, July and August. JP Morgan analysts attributed attributed this to corporations rapidly accumulating bitcoin. Corporate treasuries now hold over 6% of the supply functioning like private sector quantitative easing and dampening price swings. The trend began with Michael Saylor's MicroStrategy and has since expanded to companies like Trump Media, GameStop and Meta Planet, with over 180 firms adopting similar strategies. In July alone, corporations accounted for nearly two thirds of major bitcoin purchases. This accumulation, combined with ETFs and futures, is stabilizing Bitcoin and making it more competitive against gold as a store of value. The Trump administration has fueled this momentum by easing accounting rules, supporting corporate crypto adoption, and advancing pro crypto legislation, such as allowing banks to issue stablecoins and enabling crypto in retirement accounts. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fnW9RCSDNdQ .

Central Banks Shift from Treasuries to Hard Assets Multiple podcasts noted a structural shift away from US Treasuries. Anthony Pompliano pointed out that central banks’ gold demand doubled last year, surpassing the euro as a reserve asset 24 Last year, central banks were 20% of global demand for gold. Historically, it's only been 10%, so it's two times more on a percentage basis. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vAIISLT4BFU 23 And what we have seen is that we have seen gold last year surpass the euro as a reserve asset for foreign central banks. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vAIISLT4BFU . This is driven by persistent currency debasement and negative real returns on government bonds 22 So the Fed not only is not doing their job, but on top of that, you go all the way back to 1971 when we came off the gold standard and you look at the dollar debasement over that time, we've actually been debasing at about 4%, not 2%. So okay, why is that important? Well, what is the fed funds rate right now? Right. It's not much more than 4%. So now all of a sudden you start asking yourself, wait a second here on a real return basis, because we know that if that's the period of debasement from 1971 to today, but the US dollar has lost 30% of its purchasing power since 2020. That means we're accelerating the debasement. Wait a second. If I'm holding Treasuries, I'm not making a real rate of return. I'm actually getting paid a negative real rate of return. So take what am I getting paid plus the currency debasement or minus the currency debasement, that puts me negative. So it means if I hold Treasuries, I'm actually losing money. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vAIISLT4BFU . On Simply Bitcoin, hosts noted that central banks now hold more gold than US Treasuries for the first time since 1996, signaling a global repricing of sovereign debt 13 Central banks have now officially held more gold than US treasuries. And this is the first time since 1996. Let that sink in. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fnW9RCSDNdQ 12 Bottom line, the bond markets across the world is being repriced. France, Germany, Japan, the uk, the US are all seeing yield surge in unison. This isn't an anomaly, it's a structural reset. 5% long bonds may just be the new normal in global finance. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fnW9RCSDNdQ .

Institutional Adoption Catalysts and Requirements On a Bitcoin Magazine panel, Alessio Quaglini stated that a major catalyst for adoption would be the first major central bank, sovereign wealth fund, or large pension fund announcing a significant Bitcoin purchase 25 But I think to really if we're talking about bitcoin, the thing that really would make a difference is when we will see the first major real central bank or sovereign wealth fund really announcing the purchase and the setup of his position specific fund to hold bitcoins or the first huge pension funds or pension systems really put in bitcoins as one of the the assets for people that actually investing in their pension to actually not lose value against the depreciation of fiat. When we see these things happening, happen together with AI, I mean the trajectory is going to be very surprising for everybody. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0Z8xRHhFUUI . Panellists emphasized that institutional comfort requires robust infrastructure, including clear regulations, licensed counterparties, and services beyond custody, such as yield generation, collateral management, and governance tools 26 So I used to sit in a institutional firm that was investing $500 billion in assets. I'll tell you that when it comes to adoption, it's always about what people's comfort level around regulations, around Compliance around whether there's proper governance. So all that stuff that Alessio said matters, even though it's can sound boring to, you know, some retail investors. But if the systems are set up properly, if there are high grade institutional, say custody service or trading firms, counterparties that are licensed, all that is going to help accelerate adoption. So to me, if there's better regulations, clearer licensing regimes is going to help us. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0Z8xRHhFUUI 27 So institutional investors today, companies like ddc, they don't just buy bitcoin, for example, they need to get a yield out of the bitcoins that they have with a financial service provider. Where does the yield come from? Well, the yield comes from either borrowing or Volatility that is implied or it comes from other services, for example staking. You might be aware that right now you can basically stake bitcoin and put it at risk to earn yield on other networks. So Core Network or Babylon, they're for example, examples of this. And this is something that obviously companies that hold a lot of bitcoins also to finance their operations that would need these kind of services. So it's a whole lot of things. And you mentioned leverage, right? So what if somebody wants to borrow against the bitcoins that are held with a financial institution? So we also need to provide services such as collateral management, three party agreements, third party agreements, etc. Escrow to make sure the lenders and borrowers can meet and lend against the bitcoins that they hold with the financial institutions. So it's really a complex set of services and requirements that happen behind the scene. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0Z8xRHhFUUI .

4. Notable Perspectives

Anthony Pompliano on Geopolitical Adoption: “You see it basically in countries that have nothing to lose… These are all places that are making decisions with their backs against the wall… The other place you’re seeing this is people who are saying, well, maybe we’re not going to buy it, but let’s mine it… monetize the energy abundance that we have and go mine bitcoin and then hold it.” 20 You see it basically in countries that have nothing to lose. You see it in El Salvador, you see it in an Argentina, you see it in a Bhutan, you see it in the Kingdom of Tonga, you see it in Russia. Right. These are all places that are making decisions with the their backs against the wall and they realize there's nothing that we can lose. El Salvador doesn't even have a national currency. They lost it. Right. And so now they're a dollarized nation. Well, what are we going to do? We can't print money anyways, right? Just go and do this. And so I think that you're seeing that the other place you're seeing this is people who are saying, well, maybe we're not going to buy it, but let's mine it and you see a lot of countries that have frankly abundance of energy and they're saying, rather than us go and spend capital, why don't we just go monetize the energy abundance that we have and go mine bitcoin and then hold it? And so I think those are the two big things that you're watching play out here. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vAIISLT4BFU (from Anthony Pompliano)

Mitch Moore on the Generational Wealth Blind Spot: A recurring issue for wealthy Bitcoiners is the “education gap.” Heirs who inherit a large stack without conviction often sell during the first bear market, destroying generational wealth 17 The heirs inherit the asset without conviction and the wealth, well, it evaporates in one cycle. Moore calls this the education gap. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=POkqW2s9SJ4 . A common scenario involves a spouse inheriting a position they view as “risky Internet money,” only to be persuaded by a traditional advisor to liquidate at the worst possible time 16 Now let's play that out for a second. The husband dies unexpectedly and the wife inherits bitcoin that she doesn't understand, whatever it is. As long as I can keep shopping. At Nordstrom and the next bear market hits and the price crashes 60%. A traditional wealth advisor whispers in her ear, move into real investments. And just like that, the 15 million bitcoin position and its legacy are liquidated at the worst possible time. And that's the blind spot. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=POkqW2s9SJ4 . (from Simply Bitcoin)

Rod Roudi on Business Treasury Strategy: Reflecting on past mistakes, Roudi advised against a Bitcoin-only treasury strategy for businesses. After getting caught at the market top in 2022, his current approach is a more conservative 50/50 split between Bitcoin and fiat, reviewed periodically to ensure a sufficient operational runway 2 Matt and I, we decided on day one we would only accept bitcoin and we'll only use bitcoin. That was the wrong treasury strategy. Bitcoin was at like 45 some K and we were accepting bitcoin. Blah, blah, blah. I'm not BSing you, Danny. We like literally the market top and this is June of 2022, I believe. It just kept on going down and down. By December of 22, if I get my years right, the price of bitcoin was like 15k. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=whpVFklmRys 1 I mean, it's just, this is all selfish to me, but on the treasury side it's a, It's a loose like 50, 50% and I don't know if that's a right. It's still a work in progress where it just. What's my cash balance? What's my bitcoin balance? It's not something I'm like actively managing because I got a million other things going on. It's one of those like once a month, once every couple months, I'm like looking at my bitcoin balance, like seeing how that's working and looking at my Fiat balance and like looking out two months, three months of AP and then saying, okay, does this, does this feel right in terms of Runway, if you will? Because I do think there's a non zero freaking chance we see this for your business, Danny. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=whpVFklmRys . (from What Bitcoin Did)

5. Emerging Themes

• The Great Reallocation: A consistent narrative across channels is the accelerating capital rotation from low- or negative-yielding government bonds into scarce, hard assets. This is seen as a primary driver for both institutional and nation-state interest in Bitcoin 21 Because not only central banks, but companies, investment firms, individuals, organizations, nonprofits, everyone who can allocate capital is realizing that holding dollars and bonds, a losing trade and therefore they want to hold sound money principles. And you're watching that play out with the adoption of gold and the adoption of bitcoin. Both are going much higher. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vAIISLT4BFU 8 Capital will naturally rotate away from low yield debt into scarce appreciating asset. This undermines completely the demand for government bonds and raises borrowing costs for states and accelerates the shift towards bitcoin as a story of value and most importantly a collateral base. Essentially it flips the hierarchy. Instead of bitcoin being the risk on bet, bonds themselves look riskier compared to a hard cap digital asset, the so called pristine collateral. Right. So bitcoin not only fixes the money problem, Bitcoin, this is what Saylor is proving right now. With all the products that he's developing, he's potentially proving that bitcoin fixes the, the fixed income problem. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fnW9RCSDNdQ .

• Mining Industrialization and Decentralization: The mining sector is evolving on two parallel tracks. On one end, massive, vertically integrated operations are optimizing for energy costs and deploying highly efficient, specialized infrastructure 18 One is the biggest opex for mining is your energy cost. And so if we became the best and most sophisticated energy operators in this industry, we would be able to control and manage our margins regardless of bitcoin price and manage through volatility. And the second is innovating around the data center infrastructure stack. So for example this data center outside of the Bitmain chips, we built this whole facility for cheaper than people built air facilities. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bsyklDuBeMs 29 So, hey everyone, Medina Seri here, CEO, co founder at Load Technologies. As Jesse said, we rebranded to Load over the course of 2024. We initially started as a Bitcoin mining pool and FPPs. Bitcoin mining pool, known as Linkcoin Pool, is still around, still thriving and growing. But we had a big expansion that happened to us over the course of past almost two years when we noticed that bitcoin mining is a lot about energy. Maybe it's like 50% Bitcoin, 50% energy, or maybe energy is even more than 50%. So we decided to focus a lot more on energy aspect in order to enable these bitcoin mining data centers source the right electrons from the grid or manage the flow of energy that is going into their ASIC devices. So that has been our focus, like main focus over the course of past two years. We're building some really cool, cool products, features, technologies around, around energy and around computing in general, including bitcoin mining. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1fqBx3OEeD0 . On the other, a vibrant grassroots movement is focused on open-source hardware and home mining, enhancing network decentralization 32 So at the pleb or grassroots level, it's happening with a guy like Scott open sourcing the Bitax project so you can build your own home miner and just with whatever. 1, 2, 3 terahash. Just mine Bitcoin at home without your own electricity. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=whpVFklmRys .

• The Bitcoin Inheritance Problem: A key challenge for early adopters is ensuring their wealth and conviction survive them. Experts are now focused on creating robust estate plans that combine legal structures (trusts), professional custody, and, most importantly, heir education to prevent the liquidation of generational Bitcoin holdings 14 Just hodling is not a plan and conviction is not enough. If you want your bitcoin to outlive you, you need structures, custody and education in place right now. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=POkqW2s9SJ4 15 Air education. And this is probably the most important one. Even if your family gets the keys, do they understand Bitcoin without conviction? The first bear market wipes out generational wealth. Teaching your kids now in plain language before you're gone is the only way to prevent panic selling and ensure your vision of Bitcoin survives. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=POkqW2s9SJ4 .

Key Developments

MicroStrategy Qualifies for Potential S&P 500 Inclusion From Simply Bitcoin

MicroStrategy has officially qualified for potential inclusion in the S&P 500 index after reporting a strong second quarter for 2025 15 So strategy qualifies for s P500 inclusion decision. And it could come on Friday. Microstrategy now officially. Strategy has officially qualified for potential inclusion into the S P500 after posting one of the strongest quarters in its history. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=32hVsgHpQL4 2 So strategy qualifies for s P500 inclusion decision. And it could come on Friday. Microstrategy now officially. Strategy has officially qualified for potential inclusion into the S P500 after posting one of the strongest quarters in its history. In the second quarter of 2025, the company reported $14 billion in operating income and dollars in net income equal to 32.$6 in diluted earnings per share. Quarterly revenue came in at 114.5 million, a modest 2.7% increase year over year, with subscription services rising nearly 70%. The results mark a dramatic turnaround from prior years when impairment charges tied to bitcoin depressed reported earnings. Of course, the fair value accounting is now in play here. They were the first ones to adopt this. And so strategy can now recognize its unrealized gains. And of course, with it around 100k, the company book massive quote paper gains that transformed its balance sheet. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=32hVsgHpQL4 . The company posted significant operating and net income, largely driven by the adoption of fair-value accounting rules that allow it to recognize unrealized gains on its Bitcoin holdings 13 Of course, the fair value accounting is now in play here. They were the first ones to adopt this. And so strategy can now recognize its unrealized gains. And of course, with it around 100k, the company book massive quote paper gains that transformed its balance sheet. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=32hVsgHpQL4 . This development is seen as a major step for Bitcoin’s integration into mainstream financial markets, as inclusion would channel passive investment flows from S&P 500-tracking funds into a major Bitcoin-holding entity 14 While the S P Dow Jones Indices committee retains discretion Strategies qualification underscores the growing role of bitcoin in mainstream financial markets. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=32hVsgHpQL4 . As of June 30, the company held approximately 597,000 BTC and highlighted a year-to-date Bitcoin yield of 19.7% 12 Now as of June 30, strategy held 597,000. I think it's higher than this. I think they're in the 600k. And the firm highlighted a Bitcoin yield of 19.7 year to date, a key performance indicator. Now they raised their guidelines. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=32hVsgHpQL4 .

Meta Planet’s Bitcoin Treasury Strategy Faces Headwinds From Simply Bitcoin

Japanese firm Meta Planet, which has been following MicroStrategy’s playbook to become a Bitcoin accumulation vehicle, is facing challenges with its strategy 9 Meta Planet is essentially trying to copy Michael Saylor's playbook in Japan. Turn a regular company into a Bitcoin accumulation vehicle. Under their CEO they've already piled up 19,000 Bitcoin and they're planning to buy 20,000 Bitcoin. But the strategy depends on keeping their stock price high relative to their bitcoin holdings, the so called Bitcoin premium. That premium allows them to issue equity at favorable terms, recycle the proceeds into Bitcoin and repeat, AKA the flywheel. The problem is their stock has dropped over 50% since June while Bitcoin itself has risen. That collapse in premium has weakened the financial loop with Evo fund because warrants aren't as attractive to exercise when the stock is falling. Without fresh equity capital, their ability to keep buying Bitcoin stalls. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=32hVsgHpQL4 . The company’s model relies on maintaining a stock price premium relative to its Bitcoin holdings to issue new equity and purchase more BTC—a process known as the “flywheel” 7 But the strategy depends on keeping their stock price high relative to their bitcoin holdings, the so called Bitcoin premium. That premium allows them to issue equity at favorable terms, recycle the proceeds into Bitcoin and repeat, AKA the flywheel. The problem is their stock has dropped over 50% since June while Bitcoin itself has risen. That collapse in premium has weakened the financial loop with Evo fund because warrants aren't as attractive to exercise when the stock is falling. Without fresh equity capital, their ability to keep buying Bitcoin stalls. That's why their CEO is racing to pivot to preferred shares, a more defense funding mechanism that can raise billions without diluting common shareholders as heavily. They're trying to secure authorization for up to 555 billion or 3.8 billion in prefers, which by the way, breaking news, they got that approval that just broke. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=32hVsgHpQL4 . However, a significant drop in its stock price has eroded this premium, stalling its ability to raise capital through traditional means 1 Meta Planet is essentially trying to copy Michael Saylor's playbook in Japan. Turn a regular company into a Bitcoin accumulation vehicle. Under their CEO they've already piled up 19,000 Bitcoin and they're planning to buy 20,000 Bitcoin. But the strategy depends on keeping their stock price high relative to their bitcoin holdings, the so called Bitcoin premium. That premium allows them to issue equity at favorable terms, recycle the proceeds into Bitcoin and repeat, AKA the flywheel. The problem is their stock has dropped over 50% since June while Bitcoin itself has risen. That collapse in premium has weakened the financial loop with Evo fund because warrants aren't as attractive to exercise when the stock is falling. Without fresh equity capital, their ability to keep buying Bitcoin stalls. That's why their CEO is racing to pivot to preferred shares, a more defense funding mechanism that can raise billions without diluting common shareholders as heavily. They're trying to secure authorization for up to 555 billion or 3.8 billion in prefers, which by the way, breaking news, they got that approval that just broke. I saw it on the simply Bitcoin X account, which you should definitely follow. One of the Best bitcoin news ags in the business which could give them the ammo to quadruple their bitcoin stash by the end of the year. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=32hVsgHpQL4 . In response, Meta Planet’s CEO is pivoting to preferred shares, recently receiving approval to raise up to ¥555 billion (approx. $3.8 billion), to continue its accumulation strategy without heavily diluting common shareholders 8 That's why their CEO is racing to pivot to preferred shares, a more defense funding mechanism that can raise billions without diluting common shareholders as heavily. They're trying to secure authorization for up to 555 billion or 3.8 billion in prefers, which by the way, breaking news, they got that approval that just broke. I saw it on the simply Bitcoin X account, which you should definitely follow. One of the Best bitcoin news ags in the business which could give them the ammo to quadruple their bitcoin stash by the end of the year. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=32hVsgHpQL4 . This situation highlights the fragility of the flywheel model for smaller treasury companies 6 First, it shows the global spread of the quote bitcoin treasury model. Public companies transforming into vehicles to front run central banks and institutions in hoarding BTC. There are now over 170 entities with $111 billion worth of Bitcoin and Meta Planet is in the top 10. Second, it reveals the fragility of these strategies. They depend on investor faith in the stock's bitcoin premium. If that erodes the flywheel seizes up for bitcoiners. It's significant because Meta Planet is trying to push the model into Japan, a traditionally conservative financial market. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=32hVsgHpQL4 .

Technical Insights

Miniscript Standard Enhances Wallet Security and Recovery From Bitcoin Magazine

Speakers on the Long Term Bitcoin Holding panel emphasized the importance of the Miniscript standard for improving Bitcoin wallet security and inheritance planning 32 So I think one takeaway for all of us here in the audience is to kind of go and check back with your wallet providers, whether are they following the miniscript standard or not. And that's very important because we are talking about wealth preservation. If you are talking about passing on this stash to your loved ones, and if you're not doing the respective due diligence on what kind of wallet standard are you following, I think you are doing a disservice to your loved ones in some sense by not being proactive in upgrading to the right kind of wallets that support these standards. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v8S0tCHEQG8 . Miniscript allows for more complex and programmable signing conditions, moving beyond simple multisig setups 35 So we are at a juncture where you won't lose your keys anymore. I mean, even if you did, the technical insurance that comes along with the technology called miniscript is a standard that a lot of wallets are upgrading to. So you should definitely look out. If you're looking at pure Bitcoin in that sense and you have a wallet, you should definitely go back to your wallet provider and check whether are they giving you the miniscript standard. The reason why I bring this up is because miniscript gives you an ability to create multiple keys as a signing mechanism so that if you lose one of your keys, you have the other two keys. So example, if I have three keys, I can actually use two of three. This has been known as multisig in Bitcoin, but miniscript steps it up from an inheritance standpoint as well, from a backup recovery standpoint as well. So all this news around having lost my keys and lost my stash is a thing of past. Already there are wallet providers that give you an ability to recover and then there is a multi jurisdiction setup that you can do for yourself technically. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v8S0tCHEQG8 . This technology provides stronger recovery mechanisms, such as time-locked conditions where spending requirements change over time (e.g., from 2-of-3 keys to 1-of-3 after a set period) 34 The beauty is if you watched any of the Pirates of Caribbean movies where they're doing a gold treasure hunt and they have these two or three keys to open up, right? So when I'm setting it up, it is three keys to open up that gold treasure hunt. That gold I can take out. But after two years, that same thing can be opened up with just one key, not all three. So it's called contracting multi. So when I set it up till 24 months, three keys can be used. But after 24 months, let's say somebody forgets to whom I've gifted this, I can just use one of the keys that I hold to claw it back. So this is a recovery mechanism that's so beautiful now that's been put in into so many wallets out there that I'm talking technically, it will be very difficult to lose your keys or your stash because even if you did, there's a recovery mechanism. Very strong recovery mechanisms. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v8S0tCHEQG8 . This reduces the risk of permanent loss, making self-custody safer and facilitating the intergenerational transfer of wealth. Listeners were encouraged to verify if their wallet providers support the Miniscript standard 32 So I think one takeaway for all of us here in the audience is to kind of go and check back with your wallet providers, whether are they following the miniscript standard or not. And that's very important because we are talking about wealth preservation. If you are talking about passing on this stash to your loved ones, and if you're not doing the respective due diligence on what kind of wallet standard are you following, I think you are doing a disservice to your loved ones in some sense by not being proactive in upgrading to the right kind of wallets that support these standards. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v8S0tCHEQG8 31 All right, look up miniscript. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v8S0tCHEQG8 .

Market & Adoption

Institutional Flows Deepen Market Liquidity From Bitcoin Magazine

A panel featuring representatives from LTP and Wintermute highlighted the significant shift in market participants over the last few years 20 I think in the past five to six years all the players in crypto have changed a lot. I joined crypto from 2018. At that time all the flows come from maybe 80% from retails and the institutions are like crypto, crypto startups, exchanges and some venture capital, some, some projects, some vc. Nowadays they have been changed to like all the, like the list company, the pension fund, state fund or the big whales in trade finance. I think the ecosystem changed a lot in the past. Like when you trade in we get a lot of flows. It's like maybe the biggest flow is like several million per order. Nowadays we guess the flows is like maybe 1 billion to buy Bitcoin or sell Bitcoin. This kind of flow reflect that the players have changed a lot. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v2GDzBwB-Mk . The market has matured from being 80% retail-driven to seeing major flows from listed companies, pension funds, and sovereign wealth funds 20 I think in the past five to six years all the players in crypto have changed a lot. I joined crypto from 2018. At that time all the flows come from maybe 80% from retails and the institutions are like crypto, crypto startups, exchanges and some venture capital, some, some projects, some vc. Nowadays they have been changed to like all the, like the list company, the pension fund, state fund or the big whales in trade finance. I think the ecosystem changed a lot in the past. Like when you trade in we get a lot of flows. It's like maybe the biggest flow is like several million per order. Nowadays we guess the flows is like maybe 1 billion to buy Bitcoin or sell Bitcoin. This kind of flow reflect that the players have changed a lot. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v2GDzBwB-Mk . This has dramatically increased market depth, with slippage on a $10 million Bitcoin trade falling from around 1% to less than 0.1% 16 You can see that you can combine all the liquidity in the crypto exchange or the etf, like the exchanges in nasdaq, in seme, the pool, the other book have been like. And it's much, much deeper than before. Like five years ago when you want to sell like maybe 10 million of Bitcoin, the slippage will be around like 1% or 0.5%. Today it will be like 0.1 or less. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v2GDzBwB-Mk . The growth of institutional-grade service providers—separating custody, trading, and risk management—has facilitated this trend, with OTC trading volumes for large blocks growing 5x in three years 19 I'll probably add to that if you look back previous years, as Jack rightly said, it's mostly retail and if you're institution you would have to open the exchange account and trade and custody. There's over the past few years the service provider landscape has really really improved. Now you have a custodian that's separate to a trading, that's separate to risk management, separate to exchanges and actually should be the right way of doing this. Crypto did grow because exchange or integrity collapsed everything into one. But for it to really grow for institutions then you need to separate the different business line. And one of the things that really, really see on our side is the percentage of flow going through what we call OTC business versus our own Exchange business. And that's really, you know, past three years that's really done a 5x of terms of proportional flow as a proportion of our business. So OT is really like Otis means that, you know, large accountability issues want to trade in the bigger blocks, right? They come to us and say I want to buy millions, tens of millions, hundreds of millions of blocks. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v2GDzBwB-Mk .

Supply Shock Dynamics Intensify From Simply Bitcoin

Michael Saylor noted that the natural daily supply of newly mined Bitcoin is only around 450 BTC, equivalent to about $50 million 11 There's now only 450 Bitcoin a day available for sale by natural sellers. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=32hVsgHpQL4 . He argued that Bitcoin treasury companies and ETFs are collectively absorbing this entire natural supply, forcing the price to rise to find new sellers 3 There's now only 450 Bitcoin a day available for sale by natural sellers. That's the miners. At this level, that works out to about $50 million of Bitcoin available for sale every day. If that $50 million is bought, then the price has got to move up to find any natural, any, any seller that's price sensitive. Now, if you do the math, you'll actually see the bitcoin treasury companies by themselves are buying the entire natural supply. Yeah, BlackRock and the ETFs are buying another measure of that. And we've got nation state actors coming into the space. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=32hVsgHpQL4 10 At this level, that works out to about $50 million of Bitcoin available for sale every day. If that $50 million is bought, then the price has got to move up to find any natural, any, any seller that's price sensitive. Now, if you do the math, you'll actually see the bitcoin treasury companies by themselves are buying the entire natural supply. Yeah, BlackRock and the ETFs are buying another measure of that. And we've got nation state actors coming into the space. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=32hVsgHpQL4 . This dynamic is contributing to a significant supply shock as demand from large entities outstrips the available new issuance.

Stablecoins Viewed as a “Trojan Horse” for Bitcoin Adoption From Bitcoin Magazine

JP Richardson, CEO of Exodus, proposed that stablecoins are a key vector for broader Bitcoin adoption 21 So if bitcoin is the vault to protect your wealth, stablecoins become the payment. Rails. Did you know that stablecoins have settled more value than Visa last year? Which is incredible. But what not a lot of people are thinking about is that in five years from now, people all over the world will be using apps to interface and use stablecoins, whether it's the digital yen, digital dollar or what have you. And when you use this app, it's going to be a wallet. And the wallet gives you the potential to to integrate with the bitcoin network. So stablecoins become the Trojan horse for bitcoin adoption. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QYGw0csTC-w . With stablecoins having settled more value than Visa last year, their use as payment rails is growing rapidly 22 Did you know that stablecoins have settled more value than Visa last year? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QYGw0csTC-w . As users interact with stablecoins through wallet applications, those same apps can integrate with the Bitcoin network, creating a seamless on-ramp. Regulatory frameworks for stablecoin issuance are being established in jurisdictions like Hong Kong, Singapore, and Japan, further legitimizing their role 18 So it's great to see that Hong Kong has created a licensing to issue stablecoins. Singapore and Japan as well. So these aren't just plans. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QYGw0csTC-w .

Notable Perspectives

“We need to start educating people that it’s easy to start stacking your first sets and we don’t have much time left because…big name investment firms like BlackRock, like MicroStrategy, because they’re hoarding bitcoin. There’s a finite amount of it.” 33 We need to start educating people that it's easy to start stacking your first sets and we don't have much time left because we've got these like no shade to bitcoin treasuries, no shade, maybe a little bit of shade to big name investment firms like BlackRocket, like MicroStrategy, because they're hoarding bitcoin. There's a finite amount of it. And before, like long before you know it, the same thing is going become to bitcoin as it's going to become like as it's already become. For for example, the housing market in the United States where big name investment firms have pretty much bought up the entire fund of available housing, it is just sitting empty. The same thing in my opinion is, is going to become like it's going to happen to bitcoin. And I do think it's very important that we start reaching out to younger people, to demographics that are getting more and more income as like millennials are aging, they're getting better jobs, they start making money that they have after, even after like buying Labubus and matcha lattes and avocado toast and like iPads and iPhones and everything like that, they have some money Left over. We need to motivate them that that money can be put into savings in a very reliable and demonstrably increasing in value wealth. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v8S0tCHEQG8 — Speaker on Bitcoin Magazine

“Don’t denominate your wealth in dollars or euros or whatever local currency you have. Denominate your wealth in Bitcoin. Your life will completely change.” 5 And now one of the other pieces of wisdom that I'll drop for you guys is don't denominate your wealth in dollars or euros or whatever local currency you have. Denominate your wealth in Bitcoin. Your life will completely change. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=32hVsgHpQL4 — Host on Simply Bitcoin

“If you are focusing on any other asset than Bitcoin for your treasury then your company is going to zero and it’s going to zero against Bitcoin and you are not going to be able to keep up against the other companies that are realize that they need Bitcoin on the balance sheet.” 24 And so if you are focusing on any other asset than Bitcoin for your treasury then your company is going to zero and it's going to zero against Bitcoin and you are not going to be able to keep up against the other companies that are realize that they need Bitcoin on the balance sheet. It's like having a competition between the dollar and the Zimbabwe dollar. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FDNhPZRkJ_s — Alexandre Laizet on Bitcoin Magazine

“Own the last million and you own the future.” 17 Own the last million and you own the future. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QYGw0csTC-w — JP Richardson on Bitcoin Magazine

Emerging Themes

The Bitcoin Treasury Company Playbook Across multiple discussions, the emergence of the “Bitcoin Treasury Company” was a central theme. This model involves public companies focusing their strategy on accumulating Bitcoin and maximizing BTC per share 29 And the third filter is whether or not the company is completely committed to have a Bitcoin treasury company strategy like. Strategy like Meta Planet, Capital B, Smarter Web. By being completely focused on maximizing the number of Bitcoin per share. And if you own a business and this business is not increasing the number of bitcoin per share over time, this business is going to zero against the business that is maximizing the number of Bitcoin per share over time. That is my only role in the company. It is to raise capital to maximize the number of Bitcoin per share by accumulating Bitcoin in a consistent manner and to do the capital raise in an accretive way that is at premiums to the Bitcoin we have on the balance sheet to to be able to maximize that potential return over time for investors that believe in Bitcoin. And if you apply those three filters, you really end up with a hand of companies in the world today. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FDNhPZRkJ_s . While MicroStrategy pioneered the playbook, it is now being replicated globally by firms like Meta Planet in Japan 9 Meta Planet is essentially trying to copy Michael Saylor's playbook in Japan. Turn a regular company into a Bitcoin accumulation vehicle. Under their CEO they've already piled up 19,000 Bitcoin and they're planning to buy 20,000 Bitcoin. But the strategy depends on keeping their stock price high relative to their bitcoin holdings, the so called Bitcoin premium. That premium allows them to issue equity at favorable terms, recycle the proceeds into Bitcoin and repeat, AKA the flywheel. The problem is their stock has dropped over 50% since June while Bitcoin itself has risen. That collapse in premium has weakened the financial loop with Evo fund because warrants aren't as attractive to exercise when the stock is falling. Without fresh equity capital, their ability to keep buying Bitcoin stalls. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=32hVsgHpQL4 . Key discussions centered on the risks, particularly the fragility of the “flywheel” model, which depends on maintaining a stock premium over Bitcoin holdings 7 But the strategy depends on keeping their stock price high relative to their bitcoin holdings, the so called Bitcoin premium. That premium allows them to issue equity at favorable terms, recycle the proceeds into Bitcoin and repeat, AKA the flywheel. The problem is their stock has dropped over 50% since June while Bitcoin itself has risen. That collapse in premium has weakened the financial loop with Evo fund because warrants aren't as attractive to exercise when the stock is falling. Without fresh equity capital, their ability to keep buying Bitcoin stalls. That's why their CEO is racing to pivot to preferred shares, a more defense funding mechanism that can raise billions without diluting common shareholders as heavily. They're trying to secure authorization for up to 555 billion or 3.8 billion in prefers, which by the way, breaking news, they got that approval that just broke. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=32hVsgHpQL4 . The ultimate goal of these companies is to generate “Bitcoin yield”—not from the asset itself, but by using capital markets to acquire more Bitcoin over time 28 I think this comes back to like what is the identity of a bitcoin treasury company and what does bitcoin not do for you? It doesn't generate yield. Right. There's no way to make more bitcoin by holding bitcoin. And so the identity of a bitcoin treasury company is finding ways to generate bitcoin yield. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FDNhPZRkJ_s .

Bitcoin as the Inevitable Fiat Exit Another recurring narrative is the positioning of Bitcoin as the primary hedge against the debasement of fiat currencies. Speakers pointed to macro signals like central banks buying more gold than U.S. treasuries for the first time in 30 years and the NASDAQ’s market cap reaching record highs relative to the M2 money supply 26 Take a look at this chart from Tavi Costa. For the first time in 30 years, central banks own more gold than they do US treasuries. This is an inconceivable chart for the world that most of us have grown up in and experienced where the full faith and credit of The United States government will was enough. But people are losing faith in the government and their monetary policy. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kb9NZ_KcWRQ 4 The NASDAQ market cap relative to the US M2 money supply has hit a record 176%. This means the market value of the NASDAQ is nearly twice as large as the total stock of liquid money in the economy. The ratio has now exceeded the 2000.com bubble peaked by roughly 45 percentage points. Never in the history of financial markets has the rise in stock prices exceeded the growth of the money supply by this much. At the same time, the NASDAQ market cap relative to US GDP has risen to a record 129%, almost double the dot com peak. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=32hVsgHpQL4 . The core thesis presented is that as faith in the fiat system erodes, capital will inevitably flow into hard assets, with Bitcoin’s absolute scarcity making it the ultimate destination 30 And the first one, as Jesse mentioned, is, is this company focused on Bitcoin Because Bitcoin is the only asset on earth that has absolute scarcity, that is protected by the most decentralized and secure network in the world, bonded by real world energy, the equivalent of 21 nuclear reactors around the world. Protecting the value of your time and work over time and space. That's quite unique. And it's the first time in humanity that you have this unique information that this asset is working for you over time and this network is powering you, your family, your corporation, your institution. And so if you are focusing on any other asset than Bitcoin for your treasury then your company is going to zero and it's going to zero against Bitcoin and you are not going to be able to keep up against the other companies that are realize that they need Bitcoin on the balance sheet. It's like having a competition between the dollar and the Zimbabwe dollar. Well, you would want to, if you had the option between just two currencies, you would put everything on the dollar. But now you have the option with Bitcoin and Bitcoin has a fixed supply while the dollar has unlimited supply. So where do you want to store your energy? Where do you want to store the value of your Treasury? You want to store it in Bitcoin. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FDNhPZRkJ_s 25 When bitcoin wins, the printer runs out of toner. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kb9NZ_KcWRQ . This trend is expected to lead to a “billionaire flippening,” where the world’s wealthiest individuals will be those who hold Bitcoin 23 And this is what kicks off the exciting part of biology's presentation. A world where there's sovereign individuals, a world where there's more billionaires from bitcoin than there are the existing fiat system. The world will flip from Keynesians to bitcoiners. Can you imagine a world where the people who are making the decisions believe in creating things, saving things, storing things, spending less than they make. What a novel concept. When bitcoin wins, fiat billionaires get flipped. And what that means is, you know, several years ago with at Coinbase, we calculated that somewhere between $100,001 million per Bitcoin, half the world's billionaires become crypto. And that means all fiat fortunes get diluted down because there's around 2,000 something billionaires and somewhere between 100,000 to a million dollars per bitcoin, you have 2,000 something new crypto billionaires. So all wealth becomes crypto, all property becomes cryptography. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kb9NZ_KcWRQ .

Key Developments

United States Adopts Pro-Bitcoin Stance From Bitcoin Magazine, David Zell highlighted a significant shift in US policy, noting that the current administration has issued an executive order aiming to establish the country as a “global Bitcoin superpower.” This initiative includes the creation of a strategic Bitcoin reserve, currently valued at approximately $10 billion. Congress has also passed stablecoin legislation, with broader cryptocurrency market structure laws expected to follow 32 And so really quickly, I want to set the stage for what we've seen just since the start of 2025. So in the United States, we now have a firmly pro Bitcoin administration in writing in an executive order, this administration has said that they want to be a global Bitcoin superpower, which suggests that a number of things, that there is a race to accumulate Bitcoin, that there is global competition with regard to Bitcoin policy. That different countries want to lead in different ways. The United States established a strategic bitcoin reserve. Currently, there's about $10 billion in this reserve in the United States. We recently passed stablecoin legislation in Congress. There's going to be cryptocurrency, market structure legislation that is passed soon. And altogether, all aspects of government and the executive branch have shown that they're supportive of this industry. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HtvQ1t4m4j8 .

Pakistan Announces Strategic Bitcoin Framework Speaking on Bitcoin Magazine, Bilal explained that Pakistan has also announced a strategic Bitcoin reserve, utilizing coins confiscated by law enforcement 19 So, you know, Pakistan has also announced setting up a bitcoin strategic reserve using the same principles where there were bitcoins that confiscated by law enforcement agencies. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HtvQ1t4m4j8 . The country plans to allocate 2,000 megawatts of electricity for Bitcoin mining and has established the Pakistan Virtual Asset Regulatory Authority, an independent body designed to foster innovation in the crypto sector outside the purview of the central bank and SEC 26 Yeah, so we, we understand the importance of bitcoin and which is why we've, you know, announced the reserve and to accumulate that we also want to contribute our resources, you know, our electricity towards mining on which we've also announced for 2,000 megawatts of electricity. And we want, and we've also set up a Pakistan Virtual Asset Regulatory Authority which is an independent regulator outside the SEC and the central bank that will incubate and accelerate all of these crypto activities where we create a regulatory regime that fosters innovation. And we want builders to come in and why we are unique. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HtvQ1t4m4j8 . The nation is also exploring using blockchain for government efficiency and anti-counterfeiting measures 18 And, and, and we can, you know, just like you mentioned, you know, we are looking at tokenizing our illiquid assets. So Bitcoin is great and, but we want to use blockchain into seeing how we can, you know, use that in government efficiency, how we can use that in stopping counterfeit. So we are exploring all of that. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HtvQ1t4m4j8 .

Technical Insights

Core Properties of Bitcoin In a discussion on Bitcoin Magazine, Stefan Livera emphasized Bitcoin’s foundational strengths. He pointed to its credible and immutable monetary policy, with a hard cap of 21 million coins 15 It's credible monetary policy. There will never be more than 21 million bitcoins. That's obvious. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l1Rgq8UY3zo . He also underscored the network’s decentralization, which allows anyone to run a node to independently verify transactions, and the stability and conservatism of its protocol development 14 It has the strongest liquidity, the strongest brand. It is a decentralized network of nodes. You can run a bitcoin node at home and verify your own coins, your own transactions. You can verify that it's a decentralized network of nodes. There's tens of thousands of them, maybe a hundred thousand around the world. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l1Rgq8UY3zo 13 There is stability and conservatism in Bitcoin, protocol development. In Bitcoin you have the freedom to send, to receive to hodl. These are paramount. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l1Rgq8UY3zo .

Market & Adoption

Institutional and Corporate Treasuries Public companies continue to accumulate Bitcoin for their treasuries, prompting exchanges to upgrade their infrastructure to support institutional players with faster, more secure trading systems 31 And you're seeing that with institutions with public companies accumulating Bitcoin for their treasury programs. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HtvQ1t4m4j8 20 You know, everything from hiring more folks around the globe to upgrading our trading system to our third generation trading system, which effectively allows faster, more secure transactions to be executed. Which is important, especially when now you're onboarding a whole new set of institutional players, not just on the retail side. So I think all of that is really to ensure the best execution environment for both institutional and retail needs. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HtvQ1t4m4j8 . On Simply Bitcoin, Nico noted that Tesla has profited by approximately $700 million from its Bitcoin holdings 7 And what's really interesting to me is not the strategy story, it's actually the Tesla story, because Tesla actually holds a lot of bitcoin. And I was checking, I was taking a look at. They've actually profited. I believe it's $700 million from just holding bitcoin. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=klBcnP8jh50 .

This trend has given rise to a new class of public Bitcoin treasury companies. A panel on Bitcoin Magazine featuring Andrew Webley and Matt Cole outlined a framework for valuing these entities:

• MNAV (Market NAV): The value of a company’s Bitcoin holdings relative to its market capitalization 9 You can find it online. Most Bitcoin treasury companies have an analytics dashboard that you can see. What the M Nav means is very, very simply, it's the value of the Bitcoin versus the market cap. You know, maybe below 2 is pretty low, below 3 is relatively low, maybe above 5, 6. Getting expensive, not financial advice. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jzwmi2HkpS8 .
• BTC Yield: The growth in Bitcoin held versus the dilution from issuing new equity 10 So you've got your ebinav. Then the second thing that you've got is the BTC yield. So this is really important. So a company like my company will issue equity which increases the shares in issue. In return for doing that, it will generate capital which in our case gets deployed into bitcoin. So we issue shares and we buy Bitcoin. So the growth in that bitcoin held is the BTC yield. So you're calculating the growth in the BTC versus the dilution caused by issuing the equity, which is in very, very simple terms made possible when the NNAV is greater than one. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jzwmi2HkpS8 .
• Company Size: Smaller companies may find it easier to grow their BTC yield, as raising additional capital has a more significant impact 34 Then the third thing that is something that not a lot of people talk about is the size of the company. And very, very simply, the model is ever so slightly easier the smaller the company. So if you look at, say, the market cap of the company, one of the components of your MNAV calculation, you'll be able to see the size with the theory there being, which isn't, you know, 100% true, that the larger you are, the harder it is to raise additional capital to make that much difference to your BTC yield and therefore MVav. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jzwmi2HkpS8 .

Financing strategies for these companies have evolved from convertible notes to perpetual preferred equity instruments, which do not require principal repayment and are better suited for a long-term holding strategy 33 But then on the beta side, I think the debt markets are evolving so quickly where when we announced our merger, our reverse merger in May, convertible notes were still the in way for people to get leverage. And now it's shifted to perpetual preferred equity instruments. And so we've kind of found ourselves in a position, I think, as probably the only bitcoin treasury company that's doing a reverse merger. So as a SPAC, no debt, raised $750 million of capital. So that's become a very interesting opportunity for us to consider as we complete our merger. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jzwmi2HkpS8 22 Like a company like MicroStrategy has been doing it for a really long time, they've got really low borrowing rates and they actually can extend out the life of how long they can take these loans out. I mean, for instance, sailors issuing preferred stock, he never has to repay that preferred stock. And granted it is technically stock. Right. It's much lower in the capital structure than let's say the bonds that he's been issuing. But the terms are really much better. And obviously he's paying a higher interest rate to do that. But again, he doesn't have to repay that. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=klBcnP8jh50 . The primary goal for these firms is to grow their Bitcoin-per-share, thereby outperforming a direct investment in a Bitcoin ETF 8 Bitcoin's the hurdle rate. And so we adopted bitcoin as the hurdle rate, which means that if we are going to put money to work, if when we're putting that money to work, we don't think it's going to beat the future return of Bitcoin 30%, 40%, 50% a year, then why aren't you just buying bitcoin? And so for us as a bitcoin treasury company, we are looking for ways to grow bitcoin per share. The amount of bitcoin each share of our company owns, which is like other bitcoin treasury companies. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jzwmi2HkpS8 .

Market Dynamics and Outlook Data from Bitcoin Magazine indicates a shift in market structure, with approximately 75% of spot Bitcoin settlement volume now occurring on off-chain platforms and exchanges. Following a volume surge in early 2025, spot transactions declined by 20-25%, while derivatives volume remained relatively stable, falling only 2-3%, highlighting the importance of derivatives for institutional hedging and arbitrage strategies 30 But you know, the one thing about spot Bitcoin settlement for example, is actually that has, that volume has been shifting on back to the exchanges and also in the stock market via spot ETFs. And now I think 75% of that volume is on off chain platforms such as ourselves. And by the way, that that figure is not for Bitmart, it's just across the industry. The, another interesting fact is that when there was a huge surge in volume in February, March, right. And since then has kind of tapered off, spot transactions have come down about 20, 25%. Since that surge, derivative transactions actually have remained relatively the same. It was only dropped off maybe 2 to 3%. And that's largely the due to the fact that institutions are, they need the derivatives as a way to hedge, a way to sort of execute their ARP strategies. And also on the retail side, it's really interesting, 80% of the retail transactions that are derivatives, they're closed within 24 hours. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HtvQ1t4m4j8 .

Financial advisor Morgan Richard, on Simply Bitcoin, suggested that increasing adoption by corporations and governments might signal an end to the volatile four-year cycles, leading to a steadier upward price trend. She believes declining volatility will strengthen Bitcoin’s properties as a medium of exchange and unit of account 5 And so when we think about those things, I think in some ways it might mean that the four year cycle is over. Right? It might mean actually that we get less volatility now in the market and that we get sort of more of a drift up as more and more people are just getting involved, more corporations are getting involved, more governments are getting involved. Like it might look very different than previous cycles. And I think that that's a good thing. Actually, the less volatile that Bitcoin is, the more likely that people are going to see it is not just a store of value, but also medium of exchange and unit of account, which eventually makes it a global reserve currency. Right. And so when it starts to have all the aspects of money, and I think it already has that. Right. But obviously not everyone agrees with me on that. And so, but the more we start to see it edge in that direction, I think actually volatility will come down. And this, this is actually an opinion of mine that I think has changed. Previously I did think that the volatility was really more of a factor of, of just human behavior and that because of that, like, because it's a growth currency and people are getting involved, that the volatility will persist for a very long period of time. And I think I'm actually wrong. I'm starting to, to rethink that, and I think I'm actually wrong about that. And that volatility should decline over time. And that might be bad news, though, for some of these, these option strategies and other things that have popped up. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=klBcnP8jh50 .

Regulatory Climate In the US, the legal and regulatory environment appears to be improving, with a pro-Bitcoin administration dropping cases and issuing pardons 3 You know, it's not perfect, but we have A pro bitcoin administration. And you see the cases being dropped. You know, the treasury dropped the case against tornado cash. A lot of pardons were issued as well against for people that worked in the industry. So it seems like that lawfare aspect, you know, I wouldn't say it's completely over, but let's just say that hopefully the worst has, has passed us. And it really, really does seem like not only tradfi is embracing bitcoin, but also the most powerful government on the face of the planet, the United States government is embracing it as well. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=klBcnP8jh50 . Concurrently, there is a growing call for international coordination. Panelists on Bitcoin Magazine proposed a standardized global regulatory framework for digital assets, similar to G20 or international aviation rules, and suggested that each country establish a dedicated ministry for blockchain and Bitcoin to harmonize policy and terminology 29 So I actually spoke to the G20 guys, I said, hey, is there a way that we could form a more standardized platform where we could really educate and advocate the same kind of message throughout all the different nations? And I think that suggestion is very important because what your country has and all the good case studies that you have, you could share it openly with all the rest of the members so that they can operate in the same manner. Because all these associations right now is like, oh, maybe CZ is coming to Singapore. They come over, shake hand, put a photo and then bye. That's not what we are trying to do. This is not policy making. This is just pure pr. So we need people who is really into the policy and we need people that can actually talk about policy and make some changes. So there are a lot of public consultancy paper from various countries. And if this thing is serious, it should be open to people in the global manner so that people can contribute the paper, contribute the ideas properly so that it can be executed in a more standardized manner throughout the world. So I think that part is really missing from, from this equation. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HtvQ1t4m4j8 17 I think what will be great is like, just, you know, just like we have international aviation rules, banking rules, there should be a body that leads charge on a basic regulatory framework for digital assets, or let's say bitcoin, which presses that every single country must have a basic regulatory regime and then which every country can contribute towards for exchanges for custody for stablecoins. And I think this can be a game changer globally at the adoption of bitcoin. But there has to be, like, these bigger organizations of the world that invites, you know, people like you and institutes like you, where we can turn this global confusion, which is there still into clarity for adoption. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HtvQ1t4m4j8 16 So I think every country in this world needs to have a ministry or an official office for blockchain and bitcoin, right? Every country wants to collaborate with each other on bitcoin and blockchain, but each time that conversation gets very difficult because do we speak to regulators, do we speak to the trade and finance people, do we speak to the industry people? But I think the best way to synergize the entire world would be to have an official blockchain and bitcoin ministry. And that way every country in the world knows how to speak on the same terms, the same terminology, the same technology. And I think that's great for the world. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HtvQ1t4m4j8 .

Notable Perspectives

Stefan Livera, on Bitcoin Magazine, on Bitcoin vs. Altcoins: “The utility token thesis is bunk… who actually buys a bus ticket or mass bus tickets to speculate on the future price appreciation of bus tickets? Nobody… if you want to actually have hold and secure money, you’ve got to hold bitcoin.” 12 So when you want to ride the bus, you buy the bus ticket, you take the ride. However, who actually buys a bus ticket or mass bus tickets to speculate on the future price appreciation of bus tickets? Nobody. That's right, because the utility token thesis is bunk. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l1Rgq8UY3zo 11 But if you want to actually have hold and secure money, you've got to hold bitcoin. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l1Rgq8UY3zo

Morgan Richard, on Simply Bitcoin, on Portfolio Allocation: When asked if one can have a reasonable portfolio in 2025 without Bitcoin exposure, her response was an emphatic “No.” She argues that with Bitcoin as a ~$2 trillion asset class, not holding at least a 2% market-weight allocation is effectively taking a short position 1 Do you believe that at this moment, holding, and this is a message just for the general audience, like, do you believe that you can have a reasonable portfolio without having some type of exposure to Bitcoin in 2025? No. You want to elaborate? Yes, we're elaborating. Okay. So, yeah, no, I don't think you can. And I think that this is really hard for people to hear because there are a lot of people out there who have gotten really comfortable with their inde index funds and their bogleness and whatever else that they're doing and that they need to have some form of cash flow in order to have a return and so forth. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=klBcnP8jh50 23 And I think the last thing to mention is we are a $2 trillion asset class at this point. So if you're not holding 2% of your portfolio in bitcoin, you're effectively taking a short position, you're underweight. And so anyone in traditional finance would say that you need to hold a market weight of portfolios of all these things and there are proxies and ways to do it. Right. And the proxy right now would be holding the ETF. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=klBcnP8jh50 .

Matt Cole, on Bitcoin Magazine, on Treasury Assets: “I just have to call out Ethereum makes for a horrible asset for a Treasury company… Because Bitcoin perpetually goes up versus fiat currencies because they’re being debased. Ethereum is like a company and a perpetual strategy as a Treasury asset.” 28 But I just have to call out Ethereum makes for a horrible asset for a Treasury company. And oh my gosh, why? Everybody, round of applause here. Real quick. Come on. Because Bitcoin perpetually goes up versus fiat currencies because they're being debased. Ethereum is like a company and a perpetual strategy as a Treasury asset. To buy Ethereum or Solana or Dogecoin or Pepe Coin, I don't really care. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jzwmi2HkpS8

Emerging Themes

The Rise of Bitcoin Treasury Companies A recurring theme is the emergence of public companies that hold Bitcoin as their primary treasury asset. These entities offer a new way for investors to gain exposure through traditional markets, but experts caution they come with additional risks related to corporate governance, leverage, and execution, suggesting that for most individuals, direct ownership of Bitcoin is preferable 4 Yeah, so I've been calling them Bitcoin tangential investments, for lack of a better word. Maybe I should come up with something else. But basically the, the short answer is that for most people it's not going to be appropriate, right? For most people it's going to be more risk than it's worth and holding money is going to be better for them because holding money reduces uncertainty. The whole reason why people who hold money is to do that, and they do that, right? You'll hold Fiat over a short, short period of time to reduce short term uncertainty and you would hold Bitcoin over a long period of time to reduce long term uncertainty. Investments don't do that. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=klBcnP8jh50 .

International Policy Coordination & Education Across discussions, there was a strong emphasis on the need for global regulatory clarity and cooperation. Experts are pushing for standardized frameworks to reduce confusion and foster adoption. A parallel theme is the critical need for educating policymakers and government officials, moving beyond photo-ops to substantive policy-making 29 So I actually spoke to the G20 guys, I said, hey, is there a way that we could form a more standardized platform where we could really educate and advocate the same kind of message throughout all the different nations? And I think that suggestion is very important because what your country has and all the good case studies that you have, you could share it openly with all the rest of the members so that they can operate in the same manner. Because all these associations right now is like, oh, maybe CZ is coming to Singapore. They come over, shake hand, put a photo and then bye. That's not what we are trying to do. This is not policy making. This is just pure pr. So we need people who is really into the policy and we need people that can actually talk about policy and make some changes. So there are a lot of public consultancy paper from various countries. And if this thing is serious, it should be open to people in the global manner so that people can contribute the paper, contribute the ideas properly so that it can be executed in a more standardized manner throughout the world. So I think that part is really missing from, from this equation. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HtvQ1t4m4j8 24 So I recently made a trip to El Salvador and I met with President Bukele. And I think El Salvador has done a great job with their Bitcoin office and especially Stacy who leads that, that they've introduced the concept of money and they've started to educate the youth, like even young children on what is money. And I think that is something that we in our culture, at least in Asia take that for granted. And I think that is very important. So that From a very young age, you are taught at the importance of money. And not just that. I think they. So you need to educate toddlers and then people who are at the highest stop as well. I think these. The middle age gap is pretty well kind of updated with what is happening. So you need to educate government officers and bureaucrats, et cetera, who might not have ever bought bitcoin, but they have an opinion, and that opinion is based on value, not on factual information, and hence why. So we are pushing again in partnership, and this is the first time that Pakistan and El Salvador came together on the concept of diplomacy. So we are, you know, changing traditional diplomacy into diplomacy and learning from them and taking these, these frameworks to upskill our Broca CR government on these courses so they can actually understand what it is. Because if we do not, then there is this blockage of opinions that people have. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HtvQ1t4m4j8 25 We started the Bitcoin Policy Institute because we realized if you don't understand what bitcoin is and how it works, it is nearly impossible to make good policy with regard to Bitcoin. And every time we speak with offices a congress member, they go, well, who in my district or who in my constituency is using this? How are they using this? Contrary to, you know, certain people's beliefs, but lawmakers do want to listen to their constituents and they hear, you know, the phone calls or the emails that they get about different issues and they want to make sure that they're responding to the actual needs and the day to day use cases of their constituents. So for the first couple of years of the Bitcoin Policy Institute, we're just explaining here's what bitcoin is, here's what bitcoin isn't, here's how it works. And then from there, you know, in 2024, we're able to popularize something like the strategic Bitcoin Reserve as a policy issue. But we couldn't do that in 2021 because how is the government going to buy something that they don't even understand? So Bilal, I want to hear from you and Jeremy, I want to hear from you. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HtvQ1t4m4j8 .

Bitcoin in Personal Finance Discussions are increasingly focusing on integrating Bitcoin into long-term financial planning. This includes calculating retirement needs in BTC terms, the importance of self-custody with robust cold storage setups, and new approaches to estate planning that prioritize passing on financial values and resilience to heirs over rigid trust structures 6 So if you're spending about $80,000 a year, you should have somewhere around four and a half million dollars worth of bitcoin, basically on a very conservative scale. So, like, this is me using basically a 1.67% with withdrawal rate rather than like this typical 4% withdrawal rate. And then if you're going to put that in today's bitcoin prices, so I can use 120. So I mean, that would be somewhere around 40 Bitcoin. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=klBcnP8jh50 21 Oh, definitely, yeah. So I think that the best way for clients to hold bitcoin, really for anyone to hold Bitcoin, is that, well, first of all they understand what it is and what they're taking possession of, but ultimately that they have a cold storage setup that works for them. And that might mean for some people it's single say, for some people it's multi sig. And that they're storing it properly and they're taking good care of their seed and they're periodically checking their keys. These are things that we work on with clients to make sure that they are actually taking sovereignty of their funds ultimately. Right. Like I really do think that everyone should have at the very least some kind of go bag where, you know, just in case you've got your passport, you've got your bitcoin, you've got whatever it is and that you could just grab it and go if you need to go. Right. I don't think that maybe you should store all of your wealth like that, but you should at least have something that it should the situation arise, God forbid that you have, you have the ability to do that. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=klBcnP8jh50 2 My other thing that I've been thinking about quite a lot and I'm actually, I'm writing a book about bitcoin personal finance and I've been thinking a lot about like the estate planning chapter. Because I think that on the one hand, yes, people should know about trust. They should know what's available to them and so forth, and making sure that, that, like, that is all buttoned up if that's the direction that they want to go in. But also the thing that's the most important, I think, is the values that you're passing on to your children. Yes, 100%. Yeah. Like the families who have done really, really well have passed on these values over and over and over again. It is a family core value and they make sure that their kids understand. And so it's not like, you know, in three generations, all of a sudden, you know, they've got a silver spoon in their mouth and they're wasting all this money and so forth, right? And so the idea is like, how can you create resilient children who can, who can make good decisions, who can value what you value, right? And obviously they're going to do it in a different way, which I think is hard for parents, because parents are like, no, I want my kid to be a carbon copy of how I did things because obviously I did it all great. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=klBcnP8jh50 .