The Weekly Brief

For about seven issues the network fee sat at the floor of 1 satoshi per byte. This week it ticked up to 3, which sounds like a tripling and is nothing of the kind in dollars. Moving coins from an exchange to a wallet you control costs about $0.35. Combining five small pieces into one costs about $0.87. The queue holds about 91,937 waiting transactions, up from roughly seventy-three thousand last week.

So fees are a little busier and still very cheap. Plenty of exchanges charge a flat withdrawal fee many times larger than thirty-five cents. I'm not saying that to hurry anyone. Moving your coins deserves care, a small test amount first, and a quiet hour. 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 $2,844.34, up about 7.3%, with an average purchase price of about $76,787.

Put that next to the lead. The coin itself is down about 25.6% over those twelve months, and the person who bought a little every week is still ahead. Last week that gain was about 11.0%, so it shrank by a few points along with the price. I'm not hiding that. A gain that moves with the market is a real gain, and it is not a guarantee.

Now the honest row. Over two years, $5,250.00 invested is worth about $5,067.96, a loss of about 3.5%, or roughly $182. Last week that row was barely positive, up 0.7%, a gain of about thirty-eight dollars. I told you then how thin the margin was, and this week it tipped the other way. The average purchase price over two years is about $85,378, and the market is a few thousand dollars below that. That row will cross back and forth again, and I will print it the same way each time.

The longer rows, all backward-looking: three years turned $7,850.00 into about $9,225.17, up about 17.5%. Five years is up about 92.4%. Ten years turned $26,100.00 into roughly $290,289.45.

None of that says 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 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%, and Bitcoin fell about 25.6%.

So for the twelve months just ended, the boring option won again. Losing three percent quietly beat losing a quarter loudly, and I would be doing you a disservice if I framed it any other way.

The longer window looks different, and I print it for the same reason. Over three years, prices rose about 8.6%, so $10,000 then needs about $10,859.13 now, and Bitcoin is up about 208.0%. Over ten years a dollar has lost roughly 28% of what it could buy. Those figures are why people look at this at all. They are also why a three-year number tells you very little about the next twelve months.

The price and money supply figures come through the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis, a few miles from my desk.

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 4.23.1, three days ago, and BlueWallet 8.0.2, six 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.

That is also this week's topic: keep your wallet and firmware current, but verify where the update comes from.

Updates matter because security fixes ship in them. Running old software for years is a real risk. But the update prompt is also one of the most convincing disguises a scammer has. A message that says your wallet needs an urgent update, with a tidy button, is exactly how people end up typing their recovery words into a fake page. A real wallet will never ask you for those words in order to update.

The habit is simple. When you hear about an update, close the message. Open the app you already trust, or type the maker's website yourself, and check whether the update is really there. If it is, install it from there. If you can't find it, it probably isn't real. Waiting an hour to confirm costs you nothing, and a rushed click can cost you everything.

Before any update, make sure your recovery words are safely written down and stored offline. If something goes wrong, those words are what get you back in.

A story from the past few days belongs here too. On October 9, Ledger said it is investigating reports of lost funds from customers in South East Asia who bought devices from a reseller called CryptoBilis. Ledger asked that reseller to pause all sales and shipments while the investigation continues. News outlets have gone further and reported a hidden hardware implant, but that is not something Ledger has said in its notice, so I'm leaving it out until there is something firmer.

What Ledger did say is plain. If you bought a Ledger from that reseller in the last 90 days and haven't set it up yet, don't. If you have set it up, Ledger suggests moving your coins to a new Ledger with a new set of recovery words.

The broader lesson holds whatever the investigation finds: buy a hardware wallet directly from the maker or an authorized retailer, never a marketplace listing or a discounted reseller, and never one that arrives already set up or with recovery words printed on a card. If this applies to you, read Ledger's announcement and contact their support through the official channels listed there.