The Weekly Brief

The network is still as cheap as it structurally can be. The fee rate is 1 satoshi per byte — the floor, the same as four days ago. Moving Bitcoin from an exchange into a wallet you control costs about $0.11. Combining five small pieces into one runs about $0.27. There are roughly 77,120 transactions waiting in the queue.

I explained consolidating in the last brief and won't take up the space again. The only new thing to say is that the floor has now held across two issues, which does not happen every month. If the fee was the thing standing between you and getting your coins somewhere you control, it has been out of the way for a couple of weeks running.

I'm not telling you to hurry. Fees drift back up when traffic returns, and they will. I'm telling you the excuse is currently unavailable.

Here's the number I found most interesting this week, and it's a quiet one.

Someone who bought $50.00 of Bitcoin every week for the past year has made 53 purchases, put in $2,650.00, and is holding about $2,632.57. Down about 0.7% — flat, for practical purposes.

Now look at what they paid. Their average purchase price across all 53 buys works out to about $78,874.84. Today's price is $78,356.00.

Sit with that for a second. A person who made no decisions at all — who never looked at a chart, never waited for a dip, never had an opinion about what the Fed was going to do — ended up with an average price a hair above where the market sits right now. They bought some of it high. They bought some of it low. The high and the low did what they always do over enough purchases, which is cancel each other out and leave you with the middle.

That is the entire mechanism. It is not clever and it is not supposed to be.

Stretch the window and the numbers move around: two years of the same $50 weeks is $5,250.00 in and about $4,902.18 today, down about 6.6%. Three years turns $7,850.00 into roughly $9,281.41, up about 18.2%. Five years is up about 84.4%. Ten years turned $26,100.00 of grocery money into roughly $307,299.53.

I show you the negative ones on purpose. The two-year figure is a loss, and it has been a loss in every issue I've written. What steady buying gives you is not a promise about the outcome. It's the average, and the removal of a weekly decision you were never going to make well anyway.

None of that is a description of what comes next. It's what already happened, which is the only thing I can honestly hand you.

The fair question is always what the safe option did over the same stretch.

A year ago, $10,000 sitting in a savings account was $10,000. Today it takes about $10,264.24 to buy what that bought — prices rose about 2.6%. Over the same year the money supply grew about 4.7%, close to double the rise in prices.

And over that same year, Bitcoin fell about 29.5%.

I'm not going to soften that. A dollar lost a couple of percent quietly. Bitcoin lost nearly a third loudly. Over twelve months, cash was the less painful place to be, and anyone who tells you Bitcoin is a tidy inflation hedge owes you an explanation for the past year.

Stretch it to ten and it inverts: $10,000 then needs about $13,799.59 now, the dollar having given up roughly 38.0% of what it could buy, while the money supply grew about 77.9%. Both pictures are true. The short run and the long run are telling different stories, and showing you only the flattering one would be a sales tactic, not a brief.

My position hasn't moved. Money you need this year belongs in dollars. Your emergency fund belongs in dollars. If owning something that can fall 29% in a year would cost you sleep, that's not a flaw to be argued out of — it's useful information about what you should own.

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

Ledger Live shipped version 4.19.0 yesterday. If you use it, update from inside the app or by typing the maker's address into your browser yourself. Never from an email, never from the sponsored result at the top of a search.

Now the thing I actually want to talk about in a week where nothing else happened.

If something happened to you tomorrow, could the people you love find your Bitcoin?

For most people holding their own coins, the honest answer is no. Not stolen — just gone. Sitting on the chain, perfectly intact, permanently unreachable, because the one person who knew where the backup was is no longer here to say. This is the most common way self-custodied Bitcoin is lost, and it has nothing to do with hackers.

The fix takes an afternoon. Write a plain-language document that says: what you own and roughly how much, what kind of wallet it's in, where the recovery backup physically lives, and who to call for help. Then store that document with your will, your insurance papers, your deed — wherever your household already keeps the things that matter. Tell your spouse or executor it exists and where.

One hard rule: the document says where the backup is. It does not contain the recovery words themselves. Wills go through probate and can become public record, and a copy in a desk drawer is a copy an intruder can read. You are writing a map, not a key.

If you handle money for a church or a nonprofit, the same problem is worse, because "one person knows" is how it usually works there too. That's a conversation about documented successors and more than one signature, and it should happen while the person who set it up is still available to explain it.

Proverbs says a good man leaves an inheritance to his children's children. Whatever you think about the asset, that instinct is right, and an inheritance nobody can find isn't one. This week gave you nothing to react to. Spend the hour on the paperwork instead.