The Weekly Brief

The network is at the floor again. The fee rate is 1 satoshi per byte, which is as low as the number goes. Moving Bitcoin from an exchange into a wallet you control costs about $0.11. Combining five small pieces into one runs about $0.28.

That's three issues in a row at the floor — close to three straight weeks. I've already made the case twice that cost isn't the real reason coins stay on an exchange, so I won't make it a third time.

One thing worth explaining instead, because it confuses people: there are roughly 77,725 transactions sitting in the queue right now, about 39 blocks deep. That sounds like congestion, and it isn't. The queue is mostly transactions that have offered to pay almost nothing and are content to wait however long that takes. A backlog only raises your cost when the people in it are bidding against you. Right now they aren't. So the count is large and the price is eleven cents at the same time, and both numbers are accurate.

Fees will drift back up when real traffic returns. They always do.

Here's where the start-date problem gets interesting.

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 $2,666.39. That is a gain of about 0.6% — sixteen dollars and change.

Sixteen dollars is not a result worth writing home about. But set it next to the two numbers from the top of this issue. Bitcoin itself is down 32.0% over that same year. Someone who started a month ago is up around a quarter. The weekly buyer is sitting at roughly flat, right in the middle of those two extremes, and that is not luck.

It's arithmetic. They don't have a start date. They have 53 of them. Their average purchase price across all of it works out to about $78,314.54, a shade under where the market sits today. They bought the expensive weeks and the cheap weeks in equal measure, because they never tried to tell the difference, and the result is that they own the average instead of owning someone's guess.

Proverbs has a line about not boasting about tomorrow, because you don't know what a day will bring. That's the whole case, honestly. Not that steady buying is clever — it isn't — but that it's what's left once you admit you can't pick the day.

Stretch the window and the picture changes, in both directions. Two years of the same $50 weeks is $5,250.00 in and about $4,906.24 today, a loss of about 6.5%; that buyer's average price is about $84,320.07, because they bought through a more expensive stretch. Three years turns $7,850.00 into roughly $9,213.85, up about 17.4%. Five years is up about 85.3%. Ten years turned $26,100.00 of grocery money into roughly $303,339.37.

I keep printing the two-year number because it's a loss, and it has been a loss in every issue I've written. Steady buying is not a promise about the outcome. It's the average, and the removal of a weekly decision most of us were never going to make well.

All of that already happened. None of it says anything about what comes next.

The fair comparison is always what the safe choice did over the same stretch.

A year ago, $10,000 in a savings account was $10,000. Today it takes about $10,304.89 to buy what that bought — prices rose about 3.0%. Over the same twelve months the money supply grew about 4.7%. And over those same twelve months, Bitcoin fell about 32.0%.

That's three issues running where cash won the year, and I'm not going to bury it. A dollar lost three percent quietly. Bitcoin lost nearly a third loudly. Anyone selling you Bitcoin as a tidy inflation hedge owes you an explanation for the last twelve months, and "zoom out" is not an explanation.

So let's actually zoom out, and look at the thing I find more interesting than the price. Over ten years, official prices rose about 38.5% — $10,000 then needs about $13,854.24 now. Over that same ten years, the money supply grew about 77.9%. Twice as fast as prices. That gap is the part worth understanding, whatever you end up owning: the quantity of dollars and the cost of groceries are two different measurements, they move at two different speeds, and only one of them shows up in the headline.

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

My position hasn't moved an inch. Money you need this year belongs in dollars. Your emergency fund belongs in dollars. If owning something that can drop 32% in a year would cost you sleep, that isn't a flaw in you to be argued away — it's useful information about what you should own.

Ledger Live shipped version 4.20.0 three days ago. 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. No relevant FBI fraud alerts came out this week.

Now the thing I'd most like you to fix, and it has nothing to do with your wallet.

If your exchange account still sends its security codes by text message, your Bitcoin is protected by your phone company. Here's how that fails. Someone calls your carrier, claims to be you, and asks to move your number to a new phone. Sometimes they have a few details about you; sometimes they just get a tired employee. If it works, your phone quietly loses service, and every code that was supposed to prove you're you now arrives on their device instead. They reset the password. They empty the account. This is called a SIM swap, it is not rare, and it is the most common way people lose coins they never moved off an exchange.

Two fixes, and both are short. Switch the account from text codes to an authenticator app or a physical security key, so the code lives on a device rather than a phone number. Then call your carrier and ask them to put a port-out PIN on the account, which means nobody moves your number without knowing it. Twenty minutes, total, and it costs nothing.

I'm putting this ahead of the fancier advice on purpose. Most people reading this still keep some or all of their coins on an exchange. If that's you, the text-message code is the weakest thing standing between a stranger and your money — weaker than your password, which at least they'd have to steal.

If you handle money for a business, a church, or a nonprofit, go check whose phone number is actually on the account. It's frequently an old cell number, or a person who left two years ago. That's worth ten minutes of somebody's Tuesday.