The HiFi Bitcoin Letters

A quick note before we start: the Tuesday Take is a bonus edition of the Letters for all subscribers. It only lands when major Bitcoin news breaks between Fridays, so some Tuesdays you’ll hear nothing from me. That is by design, not an oversight.

Dear Readers,

On Thursday, attackers drained about $6.3 billion from the hot wallets of Binance, currently the world’s largest Bitcoin exchange, in roughly 20 minutes. Blockchain analytics firms and the U.S. FBI have linked the theft, the largest on record, to TraderTraitor, a North Korean hacking group. About $3 billion of the stolen assets has been frozen with help from stablecoin issuers Tether and Circle.

To its credit, Binance moved fast. Co-CEOs Richard Teng and Yi He said the exchange, not its users, would bear the loss, drawing on its Secure Asset Fund for Users and company funds. By the weekend it said about 95 percent of the stolen assets had been replenished.

That response matters, and it still leaves the harder lesson untouched. For more than two days, while withdrawals were paused, a balance on Binance was a promise you couldn’t use. You couldn’t move it, sell it, or secure it yourself while Bitcoin fell to a six-week low and October closed down 7.32 percent overall. A pledge can restore your units. It can’t restore the days when they weren’t yours to control.

Sunday supplied the test. When withdrawals reopened, customers withdrew about $4.65 billion in nine and a half hours, against about $1.01 billion in deposits: a net $3.64 billion out the door. Bitcoin rose that day, and rival exchanges reportedly saw only slight inflows, which suggests much of that money wasn’t moving to another custodian. It was moving home to people’s own wallets.

The Bitcoin network didn’t fail last week. A company’s hot wallet did. Coins held in a wallet of your own weren’t frozen, weren’t drained, and weren’t waiting on a proof of reserves. That’s the whole difference between owning Bitcoin and owning a claim on Bitcoin held by someone else.

If Bitcoin you mean to hold for years is still sitting on an exchange, perhaps today is the day to take another look. My Premium Hardware Wallet Setup Checklist went live last Monday, built for exactly this move, and Friday’s Letter will take up multisig, the step that keeps any single key from becoming a single point of failure.

Prefer to Listen on YouTube?

Every Letter and Tuesday Take also goes up as a narrated video on The HiFi Bitcoin YouTube channel. Listen here:

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This is not financial or business advice. This newsletter and related content are for informational purposes only. Cryptocurrencies and digital assets can be risky. Always do your own research before making any sort of investment.

In October 2026, I began using an AI voice synthesizer to read the content of my weekly Letters for those who want to listen to the Letter on the go or as a podcast.

If you want to hear what my voice actually sounds like, feel free to check out some of my older letters, in which the audio was recorded and curated by yours truly.

The header image for this article was created via the use of AI.

This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit hifibitcoin.substack.com/subscribe

A quick note before we start: the Tuesday Take is a bonus edition of the Letters for all subscribers. It only lands when major Bitcoin news breaks between Fridays, so some Tuesdays you’ll hear nothing from me. That is by design, not an oversight.

Dear Readers,

Last week, BlackRock’s iShares Trust filed with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission for a new fund, the iShares Bitcoin Managed Protection ETF (ticker PBIT). James Seyffart, a Bloomberg Intelligence ETF analyst, called it a “buffer” fund. It’s built to soften Bitcoin’s falls, and it charges for that softness in a way that isn’t on the label.

PBIT wouldn’t hold Bitcoin at all - or even shares of IBIT, BlackRock’s spot Bitcoin fund directly. It would hold three overlapping sets of call options tied to IBIT, plus cash and short-term fixed income. Each set buys calls near 90 percent of IBIT’s value, setting an initial floor of about 10 percent in losses before fees, and sells higher calls, which caps the holder’s share of Bitcoin’s rise. The fee and exact caps are still blank. It isn’t approved or trading, and the protection can be adjusted.

The honest case for it is easy to understand. Bitcoin’s swings scare households who might otherwise take a first, careful look, and a softer landing could keep them from panic selling at the worst moment. Volatility is real, and it’s the price of admission we’ve all had to make peace with.

That said, look at the layers you’re being asked to trust. At the bottom, Bitcoin sits with a custodian for IBIT. Above that sits IBIT itself. Above that sit options on IBIT, in tranches that run on their own schedule, not yours. What you own at the top isn’t Bitcoin. It’s a shaped payoff, losses that might stop near 10 percent if the timing lines up, and gains that will stop at a ceiling either way.

You can’t withdraw it to a wallet of your own. You can’t spend it, send it, or pass it on the way you can pass on real Bitcoin. And the floor isn’t a guarantee: the fund may adjust it, and buying mid-tranche changes the protection you actually get.

What protects a household over time isn’t a cap negotiated by a fund manager. It’s owning the actual asset, holding the keys yourself, and securing that holding in a way you can live with through the swings.

If the swings are what’s kept you on the sidelines, I invite you to consider a simpler answer than a product with no Bitcoin in it: perhaps today is the day to take another look at owning the real thing.

Prefer to Listen on YouTube?

Every Letter and Tuesday Take also goes up as a narrated video on The HiFi Bitcoin YouTube channel. Listen here:

🙋🏽‍♂️Did You Enjoy This Edition Of The HiFi Bitcoin Letters?

This 3-question survey is your chance to tell me how I can improve the newsletter for you.

This is not financial or business advice. This newsletter and related content are for informational purposes only. Cryptocurrencies and digital assets can be risky. Always do your own research before making any sort of investment.

In October 2026, I began using an AI voice synthesizer to read the content of my weekly Letters for those who want to listen to the Letter on the go or as a podcast.

If you want to hear what my voice actually sounds like, feel free to check out some of my older letters, in which the audio was recorded and curated by yours truly.

The header image for this article was created via the use of AI.

This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit hifibitcoin.substack.com/subscribe

A quick note before we start: the Tuesday Take is a bonus edition of the Letters for all subscribers. It only lands when major Bitcoin news breaks between Fridays, so some Tuesdays you’ll hear nothing from me. That is by design, not an oversight.

Dear Readers,

Last week brought the kind of story self-custody educators dread. Not an exchange hack, not a phishing email, but a compromised supply chain: a hardware wallet altered by an authorized reseller.

On Friday, Ledger announced it was investigating reports of drained wallets from customers who had bought their devices through CryptoBilis, a reseller operating in Southeast Asia. By Saturday, Ledger had confirmed the fear was real: at least one of the affected devices contained an unauthorized hardware implant - physical tampering, inside the device itself.

On-chain investigators estimate the damage at more than $86 million across hundreds of wallets. One victim reportedly moved 80 BTC, purchased months earlier, into a CryptoBilis-bought device last week. All of it is gone.

Now for the part that matters most. Ledger says every confirmed case traces back to devices bought through that reseller. Ledger’s own systems were never breached, and its direct sales channels were never touched. The compromise happened somewhere between the factory and the customer’s door.

My take on this is simple: self-custody means you hold the keys, but holding the keys only matter if nobody else touched the lock. A hardware wallet generates your recovery phrase on the device itself, and that phrase is your Bitcoin. If a device arrives pre-altered, or with a recovery phrase already written down for you, you never held the keys at all; someone else did, and they simply waited for you to fund the wallet.

So here are the rules, and I highly suggest following them:

* Buy your hardware wallet from the manufacturer’s own store. Never from a reseller, a marketplace listing, or an auction site.

* If a device arrives with a recovery phrase already written down, or anyone other than you has seen the phrase, treat the wallet as poisoned. Generate a fresh phrase on the device yourself.

* If you already set up a device you bought from a third party, move your Bitcoin to a fresh wallet, with a new phrase, on a device you bought direct.

Suffice it to say, “not your keys, not your coins” assumes your keys were ever truly yours. Where you buy the device is where custody begins.

And if you want to get the setup right from the start, my Premium hardware wallet setup checklist lands October 26. It walks through exactly this kind of verification, step by step.

If you bought a hardware wallet from anyone other than the manufacturer, perhaps today is the day to take another look.

The HiFi Bitcoin Letters is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

🙋🏽‍♂️Did You Enjoy This Edition Of The HiFi Bitcoin Letters?

This 3-question survey is your chance to tell me how I can improve the newsletter for you.

This is not financial or business advice. This newsletter and related content are for informational purposes only. Cryptocurrencies and digital assets can be risky. Always do your own research before making any sort of investment.

In October 2026, I began using an AI voice synthesizer to read the content of my weekly Letters for those who want to listen to the Letter on the go or as a podcast.

If you want to hear what my voice actually sounds like, feel free to check out some of my older letters, in which the audio was recorded and curated by yours truly.

The header image for this article was created via the use of AI.

This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit hifibitcoin.substack.com/subscribe

The SEC Just Handed Wall Street a Self-Custody Checklist

The SEC proposed new custody rules for investment advisors and funds that hold Bitcoin. When no qualified custodian is available, an advisor could hold client Bitcoin directly — under quarterly reassessments, documented safeguarding procedures, segregated addresses, and controls on who can move the keys.

Read that list again. It's a self-custody checklist.

Bitcoiners worked this out a decade ago, usually after learning the hard way. Now the federal rulebook is catching up.

In this Tuesday Take:

-What the SEC actually proposed — and the honest caveats

-Why the proposal's "self-custody" means an advisor holding for clients, not you holding your own coins

The question for your household: if money managers need a written custody plan with key controls, what's yours?

Sources: SEC Release Nos. IA-7023 and IC-36353 (File No. S7-2026-35), proposed October 1, 2026.

Read the article and subscribe to The HiFi Bitcoin Letters: hifibitcoin.substack.com

This episode was narrated with an AI-synthesized voice.

This is not financial or business advice. This newsletter and related content are for informational purposes only. Cryptocurrencies and digital assets can be risky. Always do your own research before making any sort of investment.

This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit hifibitcoin.substack.com/subscribe

State Of The Network

BTC/USD Performance

Fear & Greed Index

Transaction Fees

Hashrate & Difficulty

Lightning Network Capacity

Bitcoin ETF Tracker

*The Bitcoin blockchain runs 24/7. As a result, some or all of the stats above could have changed, slightly or drastically, since the time the screenshots were taken. Click the source links to see the most up-to-date info available from each source.

Dear Readers,

It's been a while. You may have wondered where the Letters went — so let me give you the honest version.

I was spending upward of twenty hours a week on this newsletter. Research, writing, editing, publishing: a second job, done on nights and weekends. And while I was grateful for every paid subscriber, the support never came close to sustaining that effort. So I did the only honest thing: I stopped.

Not because the mission changed. Bitcoin still needs explaining, and the case for financial self-sovereignty is stronger today than when I started. But a newsletter that can't sustain the person writing it doesn't survive — and I'd rather pause honestly than wither pretending.

So why are my Letters back? Because my model changed, not my mission. I've made my work in writing the Letters more sustainable and I've narrowed the focus to the things that matter most — keeping your Bitcoin yours.

That is the whole of it, and it is everything. Not this week's price, not the talking heads. The only question that matters: is the Bitcoin you believe you own actually yours — in your custody, under your control, and still your family's when you are gone? Self-custody. Security. Inheritance. One topic per email, every Friday, each one written to make you harder to rob, harder to fool, and harder to separate from your own money.

The News Made My Case For Me

Last week, attackers drained roughly $387.5 million from the exchange Bitget. They did not crack a single private key. They compromised a backend wallet system and fed it fraudulent withdrawal instructions, which sailed through the exchange's own authorization process like they belonged there.

Withdrawals were paused. For days, customers could only watch while the company sorted out what was theirs and what was gone.

Now, to Bitget's credit — and credit is due — the cold storage was never touched, no private keys were compromised, and the company's protection fund is absorbing the loss. Bitcoin withdrawals resumed on September 28. As exchange disasters go, this one was handled about as well as these things get handled.

And still. For days, the Bitcoin on that exchange was not its customers' to move. Read that sentence twice, because it contains the entire argument for this newsletter's existence. The customers did nothing wrong. The exchange, by most accounts, did a great deal right. And the money still wasn't theirs to touch — because it was never really theirs. It was an entry in someone else's database, guarded by someone else's security product, moved or frozen at someone else's discretion.

Not your keys, not your coins. The lesson we keep relearning, with tuition paid in other people's money.

(There is a smaller irony worth noting: the thieves took stablecoins and altcoins — everything except the Bitcoin. The one asset no issuer could freeze, no backend could conjure, and no fraudulent instruction could move. As it turns out, the hardest money was also the hardest to steal.)

Something New: The Bitcoin Alpha

The Letters are also gaining something they never had. Each week, paid readers will get my Bitcoin Alpha: the market regime as I see it, where exposure is quietly building up, and what actually changed that week.

Not predictions — I don't make those, and you shouldn't trust anyone who does. Judgment. A framework for thinking about your own exposure, from someone who measures wealth in Bitcoin, not dollars. It is the part of the Letter I would want to read myself, and it is only for those serious enough to pay for it.

A Taste of the Bitcoin Alpha

Paid readers get this every Friday. Here’s this week’s Alpha in miniature — the format, if not the full depth.

Regime: Custodial risk is the regime. A nine-figure exchange breach, a multi-day withdrawal freeze, and the market barely blinked — that’s how normalized counterparty risk has become. The drift is away from trusting third parties with your keys.

Exposure: The quiet build-up is Bitcoin sitting on exchanges, treated as savings and secured by someone else’s backend. Every coin on an exchange is one fraudulent instruction away from someone else’s wallet.

What changed: Bitget’s withdrawals resumed September 28, and the protection fund absorbed the loss. The system worked as designed — and still, for days, the Bitcoin wasn’t its customers’ to move.

My bias: Long spot Bitcoin, in my own custody, no leverage. I measure wealth in Bitcoin, not dollars, and I sleep well.

That’s the shape of it. The full Alpha, every week, is for paid readers.

The Honest Version, Continued

I told you the support didn't sustain the work, and that is why the Letters stopped. They are back because the model is sustainable now — and the model includes you. Paid subscriptions are what keep this from becoming another well-intentioned archive gathering digital dust.

The terms are simple: $15 a month, or $150 a year. And for the first sixty days, I'm offering founding memberships at $250 a year — for the readers who want to put their weight behind this from the very first week. Every paid plan begins with a seven-day free trial. If the Letters earn their keep, stay. If they don't, leave with my thanks and no hard feelings.

I invite you to consider it.

Next Friday

We begin where every Bitcoiner should begin, and where too few ever do: your seed phrase. Twelve words or twenty-four words stand between you and everything you own — and for most holders, that phrase is a single point of failure wrapped in a false sense of security. Next week's Letter is "Your Seed Phrase Is a Single Point of Failure." I invite you to read it with your own setup in mind.

The time to take your Bitcoin into your own hands is now. No one is more interested in protecting your Bitcoin holdings than you should be. So why wait?

The HiFi Bitcoin Letters is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

🙋🏽‍♂️Did You Enjoy This Edition Of The HiFi Bitcoin Letters?

This 3-question survey is your chance to tell me how I can improve the newsletter for you.

This is not financial or business advice. This newsletter and related content are for informational purposes only. Cryptocurrencies and digital assets can be risky. Always do your own research before making any sort of investment.

In October 2026, I began using an AI voice synthesizer to read the content of my weekly Letters for those who want to listen to the Letter on the go or as a podcast.

If you want to hear what my voice actually sounds like, feel free to check out some of my older letters, in which the audio was recorded and curated by yours truly.

This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit hifibitcoin.substack.com/subscribe

Dear Reader,

As many of you know, I am a huge supporter of self-custody. I’ve written an entire series of articles dedicated to helping you understand self-custody basics, and I thoroughly believe that most, if not all, of our Bitcoin should be held by us.

We won’t convince everyone though. Some people will want to use custodians for one purpose or another. For example, earlier this week I wrote about the future of Bitcoin banks and how they may contribute to rewarding Bitcoin miners as the block subsidy ends.

Not So Stable Stablecoins

In a concerning turn of events, people have used custodians and technologies over the past few years to attempt to recreate Bitcoin’s utility on other blockchains. The most popular example is “bridging” Bitcoin over to the Ethereum blockchain in order to use one’s Bitcoin within Ethereum’s DeFi ecosystem, which occurs through the use of so-called Bitcoin “stablecoins”.

Trading your Bitcoin for an Ethereum-based token opens you up to a number of different risks that simply wouldn’t exist otherwise. For example, users expose themselves to risks inherent to the Ethereum blockchain, such as centralization and censorship. Ethereum-based stablecoins also rely heavily on smart contracts, many of which are infamous for being glitchy and susceptible to hacking.

The biggest risk of course stems from the fact that most Bitcoin stablecoins require users to give their Bitcoin private keys to someone else. There are a few different ways to create a Bitcoin stablecoin, and quite frankly they leave a lot to be desired in terms of allowing you to maintain sovereignty over your Bitcoin:

Custodian-Based Stablecoins

The most popular Bitcoin stablecoin is called “Wrapped BTC” or “wBTC” for short. Wrapped BTC can only be minted by sending your Bitcoin across its native blockchain to the wallet of a custodian enabled to “mint” wBTC tokens. Once the custodian has your Bitcoin in hand, it can send the minted wBTC to you across the Ethereum blockchain.

Proponents of custodial Bitcoin stablecoins claim that all is well because public blockchains allow some visibility into the underlying smart contract. I find it hard to agree with them though. The power structures behind the “Decentralized” Autonomous Organizations (DAOs) and custodians are often opaque, and it’s hard to understand exactly what their service entails without reading the fine print and without having the ability to review and debug their smart contracts.

“Decentralized” Stablecoins

Another common type of Bitcoin-based stablecoins on Ethereum are so-called “decentralized” stablecoins. Users call them decentralized because, rather than sending your real Bitcoin to a custodian, you send them to wallets controlled by a network of signers selected at random.

Contrary to what people might think, I actually find “decentralized” stablecoins to be a worse option than custodial stablecoins. At least you can look into the background of a custodian to perform some level of assessment of counterparty risk. Good luck trying to understand the motives and background of random people around the world to whom you’ve handed over your Bitcoin private keys.

Synthetic Stablecoins

Synthetic stablecoins have been created that attempt to peg their token to the value of Bitcoin without actually using any Bitcoin as collateral. Instead, their underlying protocols use native tokens as collateral.

On the one hand, users aren’t required to hand over any Bitcoin in order to access synthetic Bitcoin stablecoins. That isn’t necessarily better though, since instead of having the possibility of getting actual Bitcoin back when they want to exit the stablecoin or if the protocol fails, users are forced to buy niche crypto tokens that risk imploding from one moment to the next.

Bitcoin “Stablecoins” Are Not Real Bitcoin

The most important fault of all with Bitcoin-based stablecoins is the fact that they aren’t really Bitcoin to begin with. The only real Bitcoin is one on its native blockchain for which you hold the private keys. Bitcoin-based stablecoins are nothing more than IOUs, with all the risks we discussed above, and countless more that we didn’t.

Why trade Bitcoin for IOUs?

Read the next article in this series:

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This is not financial or business advice. This newsletter and related content are for informational purposes only. Cryptocurrencies and digital assets can be risky. Always do your own research before making any sort of investment.

This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit hifibitcoin.substack.com/subscribe

Dear Readers,

When people hear the words “Not Your Keys, Not Your Coins”, they naturally think of Bitcoin, as well as perhaps “Crypto” since that space has adopted the saying too given that many digital assets use public key cryptography like Bitcoin does. However, it seems unlikely that people think of traditional banks when they hear it. I intend to change that with today’s discussion.

The sentiment behind “Not Your Keys, Not Your Coins” reflects the fact that, if you leave your Bitcoin in someone else’s control, then you effectively hand them ownership over the private keys protecting your Bitcoin, and you can never be 100% certain that you’ll be able to get them back. That reality became painfully obvious to many people during 2022, as failure after failure among crypto companies led to massive user losses.

However, the idea that leaving your money in someone else’s hands carries risks that don’t exist when you hold it yourself applies to far more than just Bitcoin, as tens of thousands of customers in the traditional banking system found out just last week…

Want Your Deposits Back? Don’t Bank On It

I thought crypto companies failed quickly, what with several major companies failing over the course of 2022. However, traditional finance has seemingly put that to shame, as three major banks failed in just a handful of days last week:

* Silvergate Bank, a “leading bank for business & crypto” was the first to go down, announcing on Wednesday that it would wind down its operations entirely.

* Silicon Valley Bank, which claimed to be the bank of choice for over half of startups in the U.S., failed outright on Friday, quickly becoming the second-largest bank failure in U.S. history.

* Regulators announced Sunday evening that they had forcibly closed Signature Bank, one of the largest banks in the state of New York, apparently believing that it represented a potential systemic risk.

Depositors, shareholders, and bondholders are probably in various stages of disbelief, and many of them will likely not receive the full value of what they had put into the banks. They trusted those banks and the regulators overseeing them to protect their money and their interests. They’ve now learned the hard way that trust only holds its worth until it’s broken.

Regulation Is All About Control

As an outsider who has (so far) not been impacted by this situation, I’ve recognized a disturbing fact that many people may not think about: regulators are stepping in to seize banks’ assets, including customer deposits, and shut the banks down.

Some people may be relieved by that. After all, regulators have largely convinced people around the globe that they’re only interested in protecting economies, businesses, and everyday people. However, the fact remains that the government was able to step in and seize private assets from massive corporations with little pushback and little visible effort.

If this doesn’t alarm you, it should. It’s bad enough that banks can lose your money through rehypothecation, malinvestments, theft, or any number of other mismanagements. But it’s now painfully obvious that governments can step in from one second to the next and take your assets out of the bank and into their coffers. Today they’re doing so seemingly to protect your money from corporate mismanagement. Tomorrow they could be doing it because you said something they didn’t like or because their bills have come due.

Not Your Keys, Not Your Money

Bitcoin is the only money in the world that is truly decentralized and wholly resistant to confiscation, censorship, and debasement. If you protect your private key well, I believe there’s nowhere safer to keep your money. So why would I keep my money anywhere else?

Read the next article in this series:

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This is not financial or business advice. This newsletter and related content are for informational purposes only. Cryptocurrencies and digital assets can be risky. Always do your own research before making any sort of investment.

This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit hifibitcoin.substack.com/subscribe

Listen now to learn how even governments can't be bothered to protect your money from crypto custodians.

Read the article: https://hifibitcoin.substack.com/p/not-your-keys-us-judicial-system-agrees

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Dear Readers,

Humanity has had a variety of different monies over the years, like shells, livestock, precious metals, and more. But each of them eventually fell out of favor when societies found better money.

Perhaps no money in history has been as unfavorable as fiat. Fiat currencies, which are typically issued and controlled by governments and their cronies, have enabled various misdeeds against society at large:

* Fiat enables theft via inflationary money printing, destroying wealth and people’s ability to save.

* Fiat inflation incentivizes ever-increasing amounts of debt for governments, businesses, and individuals.

* Fiat financial systems are highly susceptible to confiscation, surveillance, censorship, and burdensome taxation.

Many projects in the “Crypto” space have billed themselves as a cure for the evils perpetrated through fiat currencies. But as we’ll see today, fiat and “Crypto” are not quite as different from one another as we’ve been led to believe.

“Crypto” And Fiat Are Alike In More Ways Than One

One advantage that historical monies had over today’s fiat currencies is that they were typically free of control by any one party: Anyone could dive for shells, anyone could raise livestock, and gold was often acceptable as payment whether or not it had a monarch’s face imprinted on it.

Fiat currencies are of course completely controlled by the governments that issue them. Those governments decide when to increase supply or when to remove certain denominations from circulation. They decide who can access the money and how it can be spent.

If “Crypto” truly is different from fiat, then we should expect it to be relatively resistant to centralized control like monies in the past were, right?

It seems like that may not be the case. Every token within the “Crypto” space has a central team or group that decides what the token’s supply will be, how the token can be used, and who can use it. For example:

* There are cryptocurrencies with foundations and corporations deciding how “treasuries” will be spent or when portions of the supply will be burned.

* There are cryptocurrencies issued by Central Banks that can be programmed to only be spent for certain goods and services and only within specific timeframes.

* There are cryptocurrencies where the majority of nodes will refuse to process transactions unless certain conditions are met, such as adherence to government regulators like the Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) within the U.S.

Fiat money is defined as a type of currency that derives its value from government decrees. But if “Crypto” is full of tokens with value that is manipulated by centralized teams that are all susceptible to government oversight and coercion, does that mean that “Crypto” is fiat too?

Bitcoin Is Not Fiat

We can’t really end a discussion like this without diving a bit into the unique characteristics that set Bitcoin apart from both fiat and “Crypto”:

* Bitcoin has no central team and cannot be controlled by any group or entity that wants to control it.

* Bitcoin’s essentially immutable supply cap ensures that savers can enjoy their wealth for as long as they choose to keep it.

* Bitcoin’s deflationary nature disincentivizes people from taking on all but the most prudent of debts.

* Bitcoin’s decentralized network reduces almost to the point of elimination the risk of censorship, confiscation, and burdensome taxation by any entity, government or otherwise.

Bitcoin succeeds where both fiat and “Crypto” do not: protecting the rights and interests of users with respect to their own money. With that perspective in mind, it’s clear that neither fiat or “Crypto” could ever hope to compete with Bitcoin as money.

Read the next article in this series:

The Ultimate Pocket Bitcoin Glossary

Don’t forget that as a Premium subscriber to The HiFi Bitcoin Letters you get access to my new book, The Ultimate Pocket Bitcoin Glossary, at no extra charge.

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This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit hifibitcoin.substack.com/subscribe