The Weekly Brief

Still at the floor. The fee rate is 1 satoshi per byte, the lowest the number goes. Moving Bitcoin off an exchange and into a wallet you control costs about $0.12. Combining five small pieces into one runs about $0.29. About 78,306 transactions are sitting in the queue, most of them from people who offered almost nothing and are content to wait.

That's five issues in a row at or near the bottom. I'll keep this one short, because at this point the only thing left to say about cheap fees is that they don't wait on anyone's to-do list. If moving your coins into your own custody has been on yours since the first issue of this brief, the cost has not been the reason it hasn't happened. Whatever the real reason is — not knowing where to start, worry about getting it wrong — that's the thing worth dealing with, and it's a very solvable thing.

Someone who has bought $50.00 of Bitcoin every week for two years has made 105 purchases and put in $5,250.00. Today it's worth about $5,200.74. That is a loss of about 0.9%, or roughly forty-nine dollars.

Seven days ago the same row showed a gain. Their average purchase price is about $84,870.27, and the market closed this week about eight hundred dollars below it. That's the entire story. Last week the market was a couple thousand above their average; this week it's a little below. The holding didn't change. They bought their fifty dollars on schedule, same as the 104 times before.

I want to be honest about why I'm making a point of this, because it isn't really about Bitcoin. When I started this brief, I decided in advance which numbers I'd print every week, before I knew whether they'd be flattering. That matters more than it sounds. If you only choose which numbers to look at after you see them, you will — without meaning to — end up looking at the ones that agree with you. Businesses do it with their sales reports. Churches do it with their attendance counts. Every one of us does it with the bathroom scale.

The fix is boring: decide what you'll measure, then measure it every time, and report it the same way whether it's up or down. That's the same discipline as buying fifty dollars on a schedule instead of when it feels right. The rule does the deciding, so your mood doesn't have to.

The other horizons, all backward-looking: one year turned $2,650.00 into about $2,873.85, up about 8.4%, even though the coin itself fell over that same year — because the steady buyer did much of their buying at lower prices, for an average cost of about $77,525.35. Three years turned $7,850.00 into about $9,620.47, up 22.6%. Five years is up about 97.0%. Ten years turned $26,100.00 into roughly $309,902.84.

None of that is a prediction. The two-year row is my standing reminder that these lines cross back and forth without asking permission, and it has now done so twice in two weeks.

Same honest comparison as always: Bitcoin against the safe option, over the same stretch of time.

A year ago, $10,000 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 5.3%, and Bitcoin fell about 23.4%.

That's five issues running where the boring option won the year, and I'll keep printing it for exactly the reason I laid out above. Losing three percent quietly still beat losing nearly a quarter loudly.

The number I'd point you to this week is the money supply, because it moved. With the newest Federal Reserve data folded in, its one-year growth now reads 5.3%, up from what I showed you last week. Over three years it grew about 12.5%, while official prices rose about 8.7% — $10,000 then needs about $10,873.97 now. The official inflation rate is the number on the news. The money supply is the number underneath it, and over most stretches it has run faster. You don't need to own any Bitcoin at all for that to be worth understanding. It's the reason cash that just sits for years quietly buys less. These figures come from the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis, a few miles from my desk.

And the guardrail, every week: I'm not suggesting anyone move savings into Bitcoin. Your emergency fund belongs in dollars. Money you'll need this year belongs in dollars. The point of this section is to understand what a dollar does over time, not to pick a winner.

Two wallets shipped updates in the past ten days: Ledger Live 4.22.0, released today, and Blockstream Green 3.6.0. If you use either, update from inside the app itself or by typing the maker's address into your browser yourself. Never from a link in an email, and never from the sponsored ad sitting above the real result in a search. No relevant FBI fraud alerts this week.

Now the one I most want you to pass along.

It usually starts with a text that looks like a mistake. "Hi, is this Karen? Are we still on for Thursday?" You reply kindly to say they have the wrong number. They apologize, they're friendly, and the conversation keeps going. Over the next few weeks — sometimes months — this person becomes a real presence in your day. They ask about your family. They remember your grandkids' names. They never ask for anything.

Eventually, almost in passing, they mention an investment platform that's been good to them. They offer to show you. You put in a small amount, and the dashboard shows steady gains. You even withdraw a little, and it works, which is the moment most people stop worrying. So they put in more. The withdrawals stop working once the balance is large enough to be worth taking. Then come the "taxes" and "fees" required to unlock it. The platform was never real. The friendship was the product.

This scam doesn't prey on foolish people. It preys on kind ones — people who answer a wrong-number text politely, and who are lonely enough to be glad of someone new to talk to. Proverbs says the simple believe every word, while the prudent look carefully at where they're stepping. Prudence here isn't suspicion of people. It's one rule, held firmly: any investment introduced by someone you met online is fraudulent until proven otherwise, no matter how long you've known them or how professional the website looks. A real friend won't be offended that you asked someone else first.

If it's already happened, report it at ic3.gov and pay no one who offers to recover it — that's the second scam I wrote about last week. And if you have a parent, a widowed neighbor, or someone in your congregation who lives alone, tell them about this one before a stranger starts texting them.