The Weekly Brief
A year ago this week, Bitcoin hit the top of its range. Here's the year from three different chairs.
Bitcoin finished the week at about $77,325.00, down about 3.4% on the week and about 8.5% on the month. That's the fourth red week in a row, and I'll leave it at that. Weekly moves are weather.
What caught my attention this week is the calendar. One year ago this week, Bitcoin traded near $110,047.16, and within a day it touched the highest price of the past twelve months, about $110,601.99. So this week's one-year numbers measure something unusually clean: what happened to someone who started at the top.
I want to look at that year from three chairs, because most of my clients have sat in one of them.
The first chair is the person who bought all at once. A year ago they put a lump of savings in at roughly the high. Today that money is down about 29.7%. Nothing they did was foolish. They just started on a day that, looking back, was the most expensive day of the year. Nobody rings a bell at the top, and nobody could have told them.
The second chair is the steady buyer. Same year, same coin, but fifty dollars every week instead of one big purchase. They bought on the expensive days and on the cheap ones, without trying to tell them apart. Today they're up about 1.5%, about forty dollars on $2,650.00 put in. That's not a victory lap. It's barely above even. But it's the difference between a year that hurt and a year that was simply uneventful.
The third chair is the saver who stayed in dollars. Their balance didn't move, which feels safe. But prices rose about 3.5% over the same year, so those dollars quietly bought less. For this particular year, that chair did better than the first one, and I want to say that plainly. A year starting at a high is exactly the kind of year when dollars look wise.
Here's the point I'd take from all three. The difference between the first and second chair wasn't intelligence or timing. It was a method. One method depended on the starting day. The other one didn't care.
Where Things Stand
Descriptive context. Not a forecast.
Solid line: price. Dashed: 200-day average.
What It Costs To Move Coins
The number that actually matters if you are moving to cold storage this week.
very cheapWell below normal. A good week to move coins or tidy up your wallet.
Fees rose this week, and they're still cheap. The recommended rate was about 4 satoshis per byte, up from the floor of 1 last week. Moving coins from an exchange to a wallet you hold costs about $0.44. Combining five small pieces of Bitcoin into one costs about $1.08.
About 56,869 transactions were waiting, a bit more than last week. Four times the fee sounds like a lot until you notice it's forty-four cents. That's the useful lesson here: fees are relative, and a week can be "up 4x" and still be one of the cheaper weeks of the year.
If you meant to move coins off an exchange last week and didn't get to it, you didn't miss your chance. Forty-four cents is still a very reasonable price to own your own keys.
The usual caution: cheap fees are a good reason to do wallet maintenance you were already planning. They're not a reason to buy or sell anything.
Steady Accumulation
$50 every week, never sold. What patience did over each horizon.
| Horizon | Invested | Bitcoin held | Worth today | Change |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 years | $2,650 | 0.0348 | $2,690 | +1.5% |
| 2 years | $5,250 | 0.0610 | $4,716 | -10.2% |
| 3 years | $7,850 | 0.1096 | $8,473 | +7.9% |
| 5 years | $13,050 | 0.3045 | $23,543 | +80.4% |
| 10 years | $26,100 | 3.3552 | $259,442 | +894.0% |
Past results describe what happened. They are not a prediction of what comes next.
The table below is our usual $50-a-week buyer, never selling. Every row slipped again this week, and the one I want you to see is the top one.
Over one year, 53 purchases of $50.00 add up to $2,650.00, now worth about $2,690.19, up about 1.5%. Last week that row was up about 5.3%. The average cost per coin over the year is about $76,169.87, and today's price is only a little above it. That margin is thin. Another soft week could put this row in the red, and if it does, I'll print it right here, the same as I've printed the two-year row.
That two-year row is the one that hurts. $5,250.00 invested is worth about $4,716.40, down about 10.2%, a loss of a little over five hundred dollars. Its average cost is about $86,073.37, well above today's price. That's four straight weeks of red for that row. A steady habit doesn't mean you never see a loss. It means a loss doesn't depend on one bad day.
Three years turned $7,850.00 into about $8,473.39, up about 7.9%. Five years turned $13,050.00 into about $23,543.07, up about 80.4%. Ten years turned $26,100.00 into about $259,441.54. Those longer rows describe the past, not a promise about anyone's next ten years.
One more thing about the steady buyer from the lead. Their year didn't feel good. They watched the price fall for most of it, and every week they bought anyway, which takes a kind of quiet stubbornness. Proverbs talks about wealth gathered little by little being what grows. I'd add that it also has to be gathered on the weeks when nobody feels like gathering.
What A Saved Dollar Did
Inflation and money supply from FRED — the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis.
$10,000 set aside ten years ago, measured in what it buys today.
| Horizon | Inflation | Money supply | $10k now needs | Bitcoin |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 years | +3.5% | +5.2% | $10,346 | -29.7% |
| 3 years | +9.1% | +13.0% | $10,914 | +121.3% |
| 5 years | +20.6% | +9.8% | $12,057 | +26.7% |
| 10 years | +39.0% | +77.2% | $13,895 | +10,542.0% |
Every week I set Bitcoin next to the plain option.
Over the past year, prices rose about 3.5%, so it takes about $10,345.63 today to buy what $10,000 bought a year ago. The money supply grew about 5.2%. Bitcoin fell about 29.7%. For this past year, dollars held their value much better, and that's the honest reading of the table.
Over three years, prices rose about 9.1% and Bitcoin is up about 121.3% from about $34,934.65. Over five years, prices rose about 20.6%, so $10,000 then needs about $12,057.19 now, and Bitcoin is up about 26.7%. Over ten years, a dollar lost about 28.0% of what it could buy.
Put the one-year and five-year rows side by side and you'll see why I keep saying the starting date matters as much as the asset. Five years ago was also a high-priced week. Both rows started near a peak, one shows a loss and one shows a modest gain. Neither tells you what a dollar or a coin will do from here, and I won't pretend otherwise.
The inflation and money supply figures come from the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis, right here in town.
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. If the first chair in the lead made your stomach drop, that's useful information about how much, if any, belongs in something this volatile.
Self-Custody & Security
Keeping your coins yours.
Ledger Live, Sparrow, Trezor Suite, Bitcoin Core shipped a new version in the past 10 days. If you use one of these, update through the official app or the maker's own site -- never through a link in an email or a search ad.
Signing a message is not the same as sending funds -- but be careful anyway
A busy week for updates. Four apps shipped new versions in the past ten days: Ledger Live 4.26.0 today, Sparrow 2.5.6 and Trezor Suite 26.10.3 four days ago, and Bitcoin Core 32.1 five days ago. If you use any of these, update from inside the app or by typing the maker's website into your browser yourself. Never use a link from an email or a sponsored search result. A week with several real updates is exactly when fake "urgent update" emails show up. No relevant FBI fraud alerts this week.
This week's topic: signing a message is not the same as sending funds, but be careful anyway.
Some wallets let you "sign a message." It's a way to prove you control an address without moving any money. It has honest uses. An auditor, a church finance committee, or a business partner might ask you to prove a wallet is yours, and a signed message does that cleanly.
The problem is that scammers have learned to use the same request. A website or a "support agent" asks you to "verify ownership" by signing something. On Bitcoin, a plain signed message can't spend your coins by itself, which is better than on some other networks. But the request is usually the opening move, not the whole scheme. Once you've cooperated with step one, step two is often "now enter your recovery words to finish verification." That's where the money goes.
A simple rule: only sign when you started the conversation and you understand exactly what the signature proves. If a request to sign shows up out of nowhere, that's a reason to stop, close the window, and call someone you trust.
If you sat in the first chair this year, I'm sorry. That's a hard year, and you're not alone in it. If you'd like to talk through where things stand, what you actually hold, where it's kept, and whether the plan still fits your life, I'm glad to do that with you, in person if you prefer.
No pressure and no pitch. Reply to this, or reach out through the site, and we'll start from wherever you are.