The Weekly Brief

Fees are still at the floor: 1 satoshi per byte, the lowest the number goes. Moving coins from an exchange into a wallet you control costs about $0.12. Combining five small pieces into one runs about $0.30. About 73,181 transactions are waiting in the queue, nearly all of them from people who offered almost nothing and are content to wait.

That is six issues running at the bottom, so I'll keep this short. For comparison, plenty of exchanges charge a flat withdrawal fee that is many times twelve cents. Cheap fees are the only part of this whole process that has been consistently on your side. I'm not saying that to hurry anyone. Moving your coins is worth doing carefully, with a small test amount first. I'm saying it so that cost is never the reason it keeps slipping down the list.

Take the person who has bought $50.00 of Bitcoin every week and never sold. Over one year that is 53 purchases and $2,650.00 put in. Today it's worth about $2,941.61, up about 11.0%, with an average purchase price of about $77,222.22.

Set that beside the lead. The coin itself is down about 30% over those same twelve months, and the person who bought a little every week is up about 11%. Nothing clever happened. They bought every week, including the weeks when the price was lower, so their average cost ended up well below where the price started the year. The schedule did the work, and their mood didn't get a vote.

The two-year row is positive again, barely: $5,250.00 invested, worth about $5,288.13, up about 0.7%, which is a gain of about thirty-eight dollars. Their average price is about $85,102, and the market is only a few hundred dollars above that. That row has crossed back and forth over the last three weeks, and I print it the same way every time, because it's honest about how thin the margin is. A move of one percent either way would turn it back.

The rest, all backward-looking: three years turned $7,850.00 into about $9,697.50, up about 23.5%. Five years is up about 100.4%. Ten years turned $26,100.00 into roughly $308,928.39.

None of that tells you what comes next. It describes what steady, unremarkable buying did over periods that included some very bad weeks.

Here is the comparison I run every week, Bitcoin against the plain option, over the same stretch of time.

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%. The money supply grew about 4.9% over the year, and Bitcoin fell about 30.0%.

So for the twelve months just ended, the boring option won, as it has for several issues now. Losing three percent quietly beat losing thirty loudly.

Look at the longer window and the picture changes, and I'm printing that too, because choosing only the horizon that suits the story would break the rule I set at the start. Over three years, prices rose about 8.6% and the money supply grew about 12.6%, so $10,000 then needs about $10,859.13 now. Bitcoin is up about 212.7% over that period. Over ten years, a dollar has lost roughly a quarter of what it could buy. Those figures are why people look at this at all, and they are also why a three-year number tells you very little about the next twelve months.

The money supply figures come from the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis, a few miles from my desk. This week's one-year reading eased a little from last week's as newer data came in, and that is a good reminder that even the official numbers get revised.

And the guardrail, every week: I'm not telling anyone to move savings into Bitcoin. Keep your emergency fund in dollars. Keep money you'll need this year 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 4.23.0, three days ago, and Trezor Suite 26.9.3, four days ago. 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 that sits above the real result in a search. No relevant FBI fraud alerts this week.

This week's topic is for anyone who looks after money that belongs to a group: a church, a nonprofit, a small business with partners. Don't let the organization's Bitcoin depend on one person's signature.

Here's the problem. A wallet with a single key means one individual can move everything, and if that person is unavailable, everything is stuck. Both risks are real. The first is the obvious one, whether through a mistake, a stolen laptop, a pressure situation, or a temptation. The second gets less attention. If the one person who knows where the key lives moves away, falls ill, or passes away, the organization can lose access with no recourse. There's no customer service line to call.

The usual answer is a multisignature setup, commonly two keys out of three, held by different officers. Any two can approve a payment, so no single person can act alone, and no single loss locks the money up. The keys should be kept in different places, and the written instructions for recovering them belong with the organization's records, not in one treasurer's head.

Churches and nonprofits already do this with bank accounts: two signatures on larger checks, board oversight, someone who reviews the statement. It's the same wisdom, just applied to a different kind of account. It's worth setting up before anyone needs it, and worth testing with a small amount before a large one.