Before Bitcoin, before most people had email, a cryptographer named David Chaum already built digital cash that actually worked. In 1982 his Berkeley dissertation laid out nearly every piece of what we now call a blockchain, missing only one: proof of work. By 1990 he had founded DigiCash, and by 1994 people were spending eCash that no bank could trace. He had solved the privacy. He had solved the math. He was a decade ahead of everyone. Then in 1998 DigiCash went bankrupt, and the money died with it. Not because the cryptography failed. Because it ran through a company, and companies fail, get bought, or get shut down. That was the piece Satoshi added. Not better math. No company at all. No office to raid, no CEO to pressure, no firm to go under. Chaum built money a bank couldn't trace. Bitcoin built money no government can kill.

Saturday thought. The most valuable thing you can hand your kids is not the bitcoin. It is the reason for it. Anyone can gift a few sats. Far fewer sit down and explain why money that can't be printed, frozen, or inflated away actually matters. Why twelve words on a piece of paper can be worth more than a vault. Why holding your own is worth the small fear of being responsible for it. Teach the why, and the sats take care of themselves. Skip it, and they will sell at the first scary headline. We are not only stacking for ourselves. We are stacking a different relationship with money for the people who come after us. Start the conversation this weekend. Its a better inheritance than the coins.

Since 1971, the US dollar has lost roughly 99% of its value against gold. The pound lost more. The euro, about the same. Pick a fiat currency, any fiat currency, and the chart is the same melting line. Gold didn't get more valuable. The money got worse. 1971 is when the dollar's last tie to gold was cut, and the line has bled downhill every year since, because a currency that can be printed without limit will be printed without limit. That is not a conspiracy. It is an incentive. Gold told the truth about that for fifty years, and almost nobody acted on it, because gold is hard to hold, hard to move, and easy for a government to call in. So people kept the melting money instead. Bitcoin is gold's lesson with the friction removed. A hard cap of 21 million, held by you, moved by you, callable by no one. Same escape hatch, no vault, no permission, no exit anyone can close. The dollar has been telling you what it is since 1971. The only question left is what you hold instead.

Freedom Friday. Here is a freedom most people never test until the day they need it: the freedom to be wrong in someone else's eyes and still keep your money. A bank account can be frozen by a form you never see. A payment processor can decide your politics are bad for business. A government can call your savings suspicious and make you prove they are not. None of this requires a trial. It requires a checkbox. Bitcoin held in your own custody answers to none of that. No application. No permission. No one who can flip a switch because you fell out of favor. Money you can be denied is not really yours. Its an allowance with extra steps. The freedom to transact is the freedom every other freedom stands on. Guard it now, because the day you need it is a bad day to start.

Today at noon. The one Bitcoin session built for people who think for a living. "Most Investors Approach Bitcoin Backwards. Let's Fix That," with Eric Runge @VeritasForward . No price predictions. No hype. Just monetary first principles and a long, open Q&A. The same way you'd vet any other asset before you touched it. 12 PM ET. Bring your hardest question. Register: streamyard.com/watch/ETQxYEW…

Your raise was not a raise. You got 3% more dollars and the dollars lost more than that, so you did more work for less buying power and called it a promotion. This is the quiet tax nobody votes on. It never shows up on a pay stub. It shows up at the grocery store, the gas pump, the rent renewal. Inflation is not prices going up. It is your money going down. The Austrians named this a century ago: print more units, each unit buys less, and the people furthest from the printer pay first. Bitcoin has a fixed supply of 21 million. No board can vote to make more of yours worth less. You can't out-earn a currency designed to leak. You can only opt out of it.

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Here's the question almost no investor asks before buying Bitcoin: what is money, actually? They'll study a company's cash flows for a week before buying the stock. They'll read the prospectus twice. Then they'll buy Bitcoin off a chart and a tweet, with no framework for what they're actually holding. Eric Runge @VeritasForward spends his career fixing that for advisors and their clients. Start with the long history of money, and why currencies that can be printed without limit keep ending the same way. Do that first, and the price chart stops looking like noise and starts looking like a consequence. Tomorrow, he's walking through the whole framework live with us, plus an extensive Q&A. "Most Investors Approach Bitcoin Backwards. Let's Fix That." Friday, June 12 · 12 PM ET. If you advise families or run a business, this is the framework you've been missing. Register: streamyard.com/watch/ETQxYEW…

Yes, here at Bitcoin Well,

Breaking: Peter Schiff

Excited to finally share the big news for our US customers!! Bitcoin IRA coming soon!

Bitcoin doesn't need your belief. Every ten minutes, on schedule, it adds a block. It has done it through every crash, every ban, and every obituary written about it. No CEO, no marketing budget, no quarterly guidance. Just code doing exactly what it promised, for over seventeen years straight. Most things asking for your money need you to have faith in the people running them. Bitcoin has no company running it just people like us that run the code ourselves. That is the entire point. The most reliable monetary network on earth has no boss. Strange that the one thing with nobody in charge is the one that never misses.

Excited to share that you’ll be able to HODL the hardest money ever created in a Bitcoin Well IRA! Save those contributions. Coming soon🚀

Bitcoin doesn't need the Strait of Hormuz to move. 👀 Worth remembering on a day like today. A fifth of the world's seaborne oil passes through a waterway about 21 miles wide at its narrowest, and this afternoon the White House confirmed Iran shot down an American Apache over it. Oil is quoted in dollars. The dollars are wanted because the oil is, and the oil flows because a navy keeps that strait open. Pull on the thread and the petrodollar stops looking like a law of economics. It looks like what it is: a shipping arrangement defended by force. Every reserve currency in history sat on top of something physical that could be blockaded, seized, or sunk. A strait. A sea lane. A vault someone else guards. The moment the chokepoint is contested, the money built on it inherits the risk. Bitcoin has no strait. No tanker, no escort, no red line drawn on someone else's coastline. It settles the same on a quiet morning and a morning a helicopter goes down, because the network doesn't care who controls the water. Hard money you hold needs no one's navy to clear.

Sam Bankman-Fried asked Donald Trump for a pardon this week. Whatever happens to his sentence, the lesson he taught is permanent, and it costs nothing to remember. FTX customers didn't lose their Bitcoin to a crash. The price was fine. They lost it because Sam held the keys. Their coins sat on his exchange, on his balance sheet, spendable by him, and one morning they simply weren't there. No hack. No act of God. Just a man with custody of other people's money deciding it was his to gamble. That is the entire case for self-custody, dressed up as a scandal. Every exchange, every custodian, every "regulated platform" runs on the same arrangement SBF ran on: you get an IOU, he gets the keys. Most of them won't blow up. The point is that they can, and you'd find out the same way his customers did. A pardon can shorten a sentence. It can't give anyone their Bitcoin back, and it can't unteach the one thing FTX proved at scale. Not your keys, not your coins. Sam's customers learned it the expensive way. You don't have to.

The CLARITY Act cleared committee today. Senator Lummis is telling the Senate not to quit at the 5-yard line, and more than 200 crypto companies signed a letter begging for the floor vote. Good news for the industry. Worth being honest about what it actually is, though. A market-structure bill draws lines around the middlemen. It tells Coinbase what it can list. It tells Circle how to back a stablecoin. It tells the SEC where its authority stops. It is a rulebook for the companies that hold your coins for you. Your keys were never on the ballot. Self-custody didn't need a law last year. It doesn't need one in 2026. A node running in a closet has been enforcing its own rules this whole time, and not one senator gets a vote on it. Clear rules can make the on-ramps safer. That's real, and it matters for anyone buying their first sats. Just don't mistake a cleaner cage for an open door. The Senate is fighting over who gets to govern crypto. Bitcoin answered that question in the genesis block: nobody.

Most people meet Bitcoin through a price chart. Green candles, red candles, a number that won't sit still. No wonder it looks like gambling. That's backwards. You can't understand Bitcoin by starting at the price, any more than you can understand a language by starting at its poetry. You start with the grammar. With money itself: what it is, why the version we use keeps losing value, and what a hard cap actually does to a balance sheet. That's the whole premise of our next Lunch & Learn: "Most Investors Approach Bitcoin Backwards. Let's Fix That." With Eric Runge, founder of Veritas Bitcoin Strategies @VeritasForward (partnered with Calamos and Schwab). Built for principals and advisors who want to think about Bitcoin the way they already think about every other asset class. First principles, monetary history, and a long open Q&A. Friday, June 12 · 12 PM ET. Bring your hardest questions. Register: streamyard.com/watch/ETQxYEW…