The Weekly Brief

The network is still at the floor. The fee rate is 1 satoshi per byte, which is the lowest the number goes. Moving Bitcoin from an exchange into a wallet you control costs about $0.12. Combining five small pieces into one runs about $0.30. There are roughly 78,719 transactions waiting in the queue, and as I explained last time, that queue is mostly people who offered to pay almost nothing and don't mind waiting.

That's four issues in a row at the floor. I've made the case about cost enough times, so I'll add only one observation and move on: the price moved almost thirteen percent this week and the fee didn't move at all. Those are two unrelated things. A busy price is not a busy network. People buying and selling on an exchange aren't touching the Bitcoin network — they're changing rows in a company's database. The network only notices when coins actually move.

Now the number.

Someone who has bought $50.00 of Bitcoin every week for the past two years has made 105 purchases and put in $5,250.00. Today that's worth about $5,374.93 — a gain of about 2.4%, or roughly a hundred and twenty-five dollars.

I've printed that same two-year figure in every issue of this brief, and every single time it has been a loss. Last week it was down about 6.5%. I said then that I kept publishing it precisely because it was negative. So I'm not going to quietly stop mentioning it now that it's green.

But look closely at what actually happened, because this is the useful part. That person did nothing this week. They bought their fifty dollars, same as the other 104 times. They didn't add money, they didn't time anything, they didn't get smarter. Their average purchase price across two years is about $84,601.73, and the market happened to close the week about two thousand dollars above it. A loss became a gain by a margin smaller than one ordinary week of movement in either direction.

Which tells you how little the words "up" and "down" are carrying here. The same holding was a failure seven days ago and a success today, and nothing about the holding changed. If a 2.4% gain is supposed to prove steady buying works, then a 6.5% loss last week proved it doesn't — and I don't believe either sentence.

The other horizons: one year turned $2,650.00 into about $2,946.82, up 11.2%. Three years turned $7,850.00 into about $10,019.52, up 27.6%. Five years is up about 103.3%. Ten years turned $26,100.00 of grocery money into roughly $326,371.25.

All of that already happened. None of it says a thing about what comes next, and the two-year row is my standing reminder that these numbers cross back and forth over the line without asking anyone's permission.

The honest comparison is always against the safe option over the same stretch.

A year ago, $10,000 sitting in a savings account was $10,000. Today it takes about $10,304.89 to buy what that bought, because prices rose about 3.0%. Over those same twelve months the money supply grew about 4.7%. And over those same twelve months, Bitcoin fell about 25.2%.

That's four issues running where the boring choice won the year, and I'm not going to hide it in a footnote just because we had a good week. Losing three percent quietly beat losing twenty-five percent loudly. If someone has sold you Bitcoin as a clean hedge against inflation, the last twelve months are a bill that's come due, and "look at a longer chart" is a dodge, not an answer.

So here's a longer chart, offered as information rather than as a defense. Over three years, official prices rose about 8.7% — $10,000 then needs about $10,873.97 now. Over those same three years the money supply grew about 11.9%. Two different measurements of the same dollar, moving at two different speeds, and the one that moves faster is the one nobody quotes on the news. That gap is worth understanding no matter what you decide to own. These figures come from the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis, a few miles from my desk.

And the usual guardrail, which a week like this one makes more necessary rather than less: money you need this year belongs in dollars. Your emergency fund belongs in dollars. A good week is not an invitation to move the rent.

Four wallets shipped new versions in the past ten days, which is more clustered than usual: Blockstream Green 3.6.0, Ledger Live 4.20.1, Sparrow 2.5.5, and Trezor Suite 26.9.2. If you use any of them, update from inside the app itself, or by typing the maker's address into your browser with your own fingers. Never from an email. Never from the sponsored result sitting above the real one in a search. No relevant FBI fraud alerts came out this week.

Now the thing I most want you to know this week, and I hope you never need it.

If someone loses Bitcoin — to a scam, a hacked exchange account, a fake support agent — there is a good chance they get approached a second time. The second approach is friendlier. It comes from a "recovery service" or a "blockchain forensics firm," it often knows real details about what happened to them, and it offers to trace and return the stolen coins for a fee paid up front.

There is nothing to recover. A confirmed Bitcoin transaction cannot be reversed by anyone — not by the recovery firm, not by me, not by the people who write the software. That permanence is the point of the system, and it does not have an exception for victims. So anyone charging a fee to undo one is not failing at a hard job. They are running a second theft against someone who has already been robbed once and is desperate enough to hope.

The correct move is to report it at ic3.gov, which is the FBI's complaint site, and to pay no one. If this happens to a friend, or to someone in your church, the most useful thing you can do is tell them this before the second call comes — because after the loss, hope is exactly the thing that gets used against them.