The Weekly Brief

It costs about 22 cents right now to move Bitcoin from an exchange into a wallet you actually control. Consolidating several small amounts into one runs about 55 cents.

Cost is usually the excuse underneath "I'll get around to it." Twenty-two cents is not the reason. Fees drift with network traffic, but weeks like this one are the easy ones.

Here's the part I want you to sit with.

Over the past year, Bitcoin's price fell about 30%. Someone who simply bought $50 every week over that same year — never timing anything, never watching charts — is down about 1%.

That gap isn't luck, and it isn't cleverness. It's the opposite of cleverness. When you buy the same amount on the same day every week, a falling price buys you more, and the average takes care of itself. The person who tried to pick the bottom this year mostly picked wrong. The person who wasn't trying barely felt it.

Stretch the same habit out and the arithmetic gets easier to see. Ten years of $50 weeks is $26,100 put in, and an average cost of about $6,374 per coin against roughly $78,900 today. Not because that person was smart in 2016 — because they were still doing it in 2026.

Proverbs puts it better than I can: wealth gathered little by little is what grows. Wealth grabbed at in a hurry tends not to stick around.

None of that is a promise about the next ten years. It's a description of what patience did over the last ten, which is the only thing any of us can actually look at.

While we're on the subject of patience, it's worth asking what the safe option did over the same stretch.

Ten years ago, $10,000 sitting in a savings account was $10,000. Today you'd need $13,836 to buy what that money bought then. The dollar lost about 38% of its purchasing power. Over the same period the money supply grew about 79%.

I'm not telling you to empty your savings account. Keep your emergency fund, keep money you'll need this year in dollars, and sleep well. But it's worth being honest that holding dollars isn't a neutral, no-decision choice. It's a slow one, and it's being made whether or not you think about it.

These numbers come from the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis, a few miles from where I'm writing this.

Trezor Suite and Ledger Live both shipped new versions this week. If you use either, update it — through the app itself, or by typing the maker's site into your browser. Never through a link in an email or an ad at the top of a search result. Fake update prompts work precisely because doing the responsible thing is what gets exploited.

One habit worth building: when you send Bitcoin, don't copy the address out of your own transaction history. A scam called address poisoning exists to punish that shortcut — someone sends you a tiny, meaningless transaction from an address built to match the first and last characters of one you've used. Weeks later you scroll back, grab what looks familiar, and send real money to a stranger. Get a fresh address from whoever you're paying, and check the middle, not just the ends.