Today's FOMC decision carries real weight: markets are pricing an 87% probability of a 25 basis point hike, the first since 2023, after the Fed held in July on a divided 9-3 vote. Core inflation is running at 3.3%, the labor market is still warm, and Bitcoin is sitting around $77-79K heading into the announcement.

Ansel Lindner (Bitcoin & Markets) joins us to break down what actually matters here: whether 25 bps is a real policy shift or mostly signaling, what a hike does to that 9-3 dissent, and why the conventional wisdom that rate hikes are automatically bad for Bitcoin might...

In 2008, Zach sat down to read the official story of 9/11 so he could stop thinking about it. That was 18 years ago. This Reads episode walks the record, not the theories: Operation Northwoods and its 35-year classification, the Gulf of Tonkin attack that never happened, Colin Powell's vial, the 567-page Commission report that never mentions Building 7, and NIST conceding 2.25 seconds of freefall. Then it applies Rothbard's cui bono method to the whole quarter century and asks the question that finally matters: how does a state pay for a psyop and the war it sells? It prints. You don't have to...

Liquid, the Blockstream sidechain built to give Bitcoin users faster and more private transactions, hit a consensus split this week and "white hat hackers" pulled $320 million out of it. Bitcoin itself never went down. The layer built on top of it did.

Rob from Bitcoin News joins us to go deep on what actually happened with Liquid and why this keeps being the pattern: the same week, the ColdCard attacker moved 45 percent of previously stolen funds in a third wave, and Orionx, a Tether-backed Chilean exchange, shut down after an audit found $7 million in customer funds missing...

There is a camera on a pole near you right now, and it is photographing every car that passes. Adam O'Brien's essay "Jump Out of the Pot" turns that camera around and points it at your bank account: the 1970 Bank Secrecy Act that made banks informants, the 1976 Supreme Court ruling that made your financial records the bank's property instead of yours, and the 257 Canadian accounts frozen in hours for a perfectly legal donation. Financial privacy isn't about hiding bad things. It's protection against a government that changes the definition of bad things after the fact. The code already protects...

There is a camera on a pole near you right now, and it is photographing every car that passes. Adam O'Brien's essay "Jump Out of the Pot" turns that camera around and points it at your bank account: the 1970 Bank Secrecy Act that made banks informants, the 1976 Supreme Court ruling that made your financial records the bank's property instead of yours, and the 257 Canadian accounts frozen in hours for a perfectly legal donation. Financial privacy isn't about hiding bad things. It's protection against a government that changes the definition of bad things after the fact. The code already protects...

Q sits down with Nolan Bauerle (CountBTC) for a conversation that goes way past the price chart. Nolan's frame: the Iran war was decided the day Lloyds of London pulled war insurance, because the real fight was between physical energy delivery and the paper version of it (Brent, futures, risk premiums). Fiat is words. And the world is shifting toward something more symbolic, simpler, and physical.

From there it gets spicy. Politics as kayfabe, the Whitfield Diffie story about America being imperial and revolutionary at the same time, why Quebec is quietly what MAGA wants, and where...

There's a camera on a pole near you right now, tracking every car that passes. Your city bought it to catch stolen vehicles. It's already been used to track romantic partners, reach into immigration cases, and build a national database that runs warrant-free searches across tens of thousands of cameras.

Your bank account is the same machine. It's just older, and nobody built a satirical Darth Vader bit about it yet.

Adam O'Brien, CEO of Bitcoin Well, joins us to make that case in full. We get into why surveillance infrastructure never stays limited to...

Bitcoin ran from $64K to $79K-plus in a single week, hashrate hit an all-time high near 1,020 EH/s, and fees stayed cheap — and almost none of the mainstream coverage mentioned any of that. It was the same ETF-flows, institutional-buying, short-squeeze story on repeat.

GMONEY (Bitcoin self-custody consultant, host of "Bitcoin is Digital 1776") and Rod Palmer (Bugle News, media and culture) join us to tell the story that actually got missed this week — what a $15K move means for the network versus what it means for the price, whether the CLARITY Act's September 15 Senate vote is a win for...

Everyone agrees Bitcoin's big returns are gone. That agreement is the trade.

In this Reads, Zach walks through why the diminishing returns thesis quietly became the most crowded belief in Bitcoin, how gold and silver just ran a $15 trillion proof of concept that killed the law-of-large-numbers argument, what a $40 trillion national debt does to a central bank that no longer sets its own policy, and why Jeff Booth's deflation thesis is now running on an AI schedule. Four completed cycles is four data points, and everyone drew the comfortable curve through them.

Then the part...

Last week was about custody failing. This week it's about whether the infrastructure underneath Bitcoin — mining itself — is quietly being captured.

Bob Burnett sits on OCEAN's board, runs Barefoot Mining, and went on record defending how OCEAN handled the BIP-110 fork after miners demanded leadership be ousted and Adam Back called for docked pay. This is his first real chance to tell the full story — and we're not letting him off easy.

We also get into the bigger story pool centralization: Foundry alone controls roughly 31% of global hashrate, four pools control over 70%, and the Nakamoto coeffi...

This isn't just a ColdCard story anymore. In this emergency episode, Portland Hodl, Bitcoin Core contributor and creator of Slipstream, reveals that an open-source AI model with none of the safety guardrails of US frontier models is now tearing through the entire hardware wallet industry's code. ColdCard was first. Then BTCPay Server. Then Nunchuk. As of this morning, Trezor too.

We get into what to actually do right now if you're on an affected device (priority order matters: some setups need to move funds immediately, others have more time), how Slipstream lets you migrate funds through a...

$116 million vanished from "self-custody" wallets after a ColdCard firmware bug quietly broke wallet randomness for five years. The response from the market was almost nobody expected: $853 million flowed into Bitcoin ETFs the same week — the most custodial option available.

Eric Yakes (author of The 7th Property) and Trey Sellers (Fire BTC) join us for a two-part conversation: what actually happened with ColdCard and what to do about it, why the ETF flows might be Bitcoin's most interesting contradiction right now, the BIP-110 fork that failed in two blocks and what it proves about Bitcoin governance, the CLARITY Ac...

The BIP-110 activation weekend came and went with almost zero miner support. Now the Bitcoin Knots camp is talking about a proof-of-work change to fire the miners entirely. Q hosts the post-mortem Spaces with Hodl, Otto, Wicked, and guests to break down what actually happened, what a POW change would mean in practice, why the 51% attack risk on the new chain is enormous under SHA-256, and whether the Bitcoin Knots fork can hold the name "Bitcoin." Coldcard hack fallout also covered — Bitcoin Well is offering complimentary help to anyone still trying to sort their custody situation.

If yo...

Q wanted a place where Bitcoiners could disagree without it turning toxic. This four-hour Spaces — featuring Hodlonaut, Knut Svanholm, and a rotating cast of guests — is what that actually looks like. The BIP-110 debate, ordinals as spam vs. legitimate fee market activity, whether this moment is worse or better than the Block Size Wars, Craig Wright threatening to sue Bitcoin Magazine, the 2032 halving and miner fee revenue, Mimblewimble extension blocks for privacy, and why creating enemies when you could have allies is the wrong strategy for Bitcoin. A civil conversation that the space badly needed.

Bitcoin Well is a...

$130 million. That's how much Bitcoin has vanished from "self-custody" wallets since a firmware flaw in Coldcard hardware wallets was disclosed — one of the largest security failures in Bitcoin's history, and it happened to people who did everything right by taking their coins off exchanges.

This week we're joined by Pete Rizzo — Bitcoin historian, former Bitcoin Magazine and CoinDesk editor — to put this moment in context. We trace the history of self-custody, why collaborative custody exists and who it's actually for, and how this hack stacks up against Mt. Gox, Celsius, and FTX. The uncomfortable truth: none of those...

Bitcoin is at $64K USD. The Korean stock market just dropped 30% in a day. Asian markets are flashing red from Japan to Taiwan. The Fed is about to hike rates. And Galaxy Research dropped a $5M bet that quantum computers will break Bitcoin before the ecosystem can respond. Q, Riley, and Zach cover all of it: why every global stock market is a cousin of the US market, what the S&P priced in gold actually shows since 2000, the Galaxy quantum bet and whether it's signal or noise, the Clarity Act timeline, and a bet involving the world's hottest...

This is not a drill. On July 30th, 594 Bitcoin — roughly $38 million — was swept from 500 wallets in about 25 minutes. Nobody was phished. Nobody's device was touched. A firmware bug in Coldcard meant the random numbers generating people's seed phrases weren't actually random. A predictable seed is a math problem an attacker can solve. Zach — who owns a Mark III — breaks format to give you the immediate action steps first, then walks through the full timeline, the entropy failure explained simply, what a BIP39 passphrase would have protected, why multisig across multiple vendors is the structural fix, and the habits that protect...

Bitcoin clawed back to $64K. BlackRock added $600 million. ETF inflows ran 5 straight days. The loud screen was euphoric. The quiet screen — fear and greed index locked at 28, gold near all-time highs, Treasury yields ripping — was telling a completely different story. Zach reads his original piece on the gap between price and belief, why the crowd doesn't trust this rebound, why an ETF share is a claim on a claim, and why the only version of Bitcoin that delivers on its promise is the one whose private keys exist only in your physical possession.

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Bitcoin just crashed from a $122K all-time high to $63K, and this week alone brought five separate bombshells. Trump accused China of stealing 220 million US voter files and Bitcoin dropped within hours. The US struck 80+ Iranian military targets. Russia's Duma just legalized Bitcoin for cross-border trade. Treasury and Commerce are in an open turf war over who controls the government's 300,000+ BTC reserve. And Michael Saylor, the guy who said "you do not sell your Bitcoin", sold Bitcoin.

This week Alex McShane and Hank Hudson join us to break down all of it, including the theory nobody wants...

In January 2026, US forces seized Nicolás Maduro and announced they'd run Venezuela through a transition. The stated prize was the oil. Nobody pretended otherwise. Zach reads his original piece pulling the thread from Nixon closing the gold window to the petrodollar handshake to Venezuela, Libya, Iran — and the uncomfortable possibility that the Strait of Hormuz closing was the planned outcome, not the disaster. Plus: what if the great power rivalry is, at the altitude where real money moves, less of a cage match and more of a script? And what you can actually do about it.

Doc...

Michael Saylor built the biggest corporate bitcoin bet in history. Now the charts are red and the questions are getting louder. On this episode of the Bitcoin Well Podcast, we sit down with Chris Alaimo (Strategic Advisor at Simple Bitcoin) and Joe Consorti (Horizon) to dig into what's actually happening with Saylor's position, whether "forced seller" fears are real or overblown, and what it could mean for the rest of the market if they play out.

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Bitcoin Well Reads: Your House Is a Savings Account but It Just Stopped Paying.

Florida home prices are technically up 1.8%. Inflation ran 4.2%. That's a real loss most owners will never feel — and that's exactly the point. Zach reads his original piece on housing demonetization: the quiet, drift-based process by which the monetary premium stacked on top of shelter starts migrating away — not in a crash, but one flat year at a time. Henry Hazlitt, Ludwig von Mises, 170,000 Florida listings, and why Bitcoin was built for exactly the job your house was never designed to do.

RESO...

Bitcoin Well Reads: The KIDS Act Was Never About Kids. It's About Control.

On June 29th, 2026 the House passed the Kids Act — an omnibus bill sold as protecting children online. Almost nobody covered the part that actually matters: the slow construction of an internet where the price of admission is your government ID. Zach reads his original piece connecting the Kids Act to KYC, the UK Online Safety Act, Texas's ID for Content Law, the EU's cracked age verification app, and why this is ultimately the same fight as sound money. The permissioned internet and the permissioned ba...

He was quietly cashing in while everyone else got rugged. On episode 1 of the Bitcoin Well Podcast, we sit down with Tatum Turn Up — yes, the guy behind Between Two ASICs — to break down what's really going on with Trump, crypto rug pulls, and what it means for bitcoiners. We also get into the mining side of things, since that's Tatum's actual day job — expect real insider perspective on where that industry is headed.

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Kevin Warsh chaired his first FOMC meeting on June 17th, 2026. By the time it was over, every rate cut penciled in for 2026 was gone. Bitcoin fell from 66K to 62K. Gold — the safe haven — was also bleeding. And the headlines did what they always do: screamed volatility.

Zach reads his original piece connecting June 17th to Frederick Hayek's knowledge problem and the difference between money run by rules and money run by a person. The uncomfortable mirror: if you're anxious about who the next Fed chair will be, you've already admitted the problem.

FederalReserve #KevinWarsh #FOMC...

Bitcoin Well Explains: The Dangers of Bitcoin Exchanges

"Can't I just leave it on the exchange?" Every Bitcoin beginner asks this. This video answers it directly and permanently. Mt. Gox lost 850,000 Bitcoin. FTX vaporized $8 billion overnight. Bybit lost $1.4 billion in a single hack last year — the largest theft in crypto history. Different decades, different countries, different excuses. Same outcome every time. The people who held their own keys were safe. Everyone else learned a painful lesson.

This video covers paper Bitcoin, rehypothecation, altcoin contagion, regulatory freezes, social engineering attacks, the withdrawal pause signal, and why Bi...

Illinois quietly slipped a 20 basis point tax on all Bitcoin on-chain transactions into a bill overnight — no industry input, no debate, signed into law. Every Bitcoin transaction in the state: sending to yourself, to others, to an exchange, from an exchange. All taxed. Q hosts an emergency Spaces to break down what the law actually says, why it matters even if you're not in Illinois, and what the Bitcoin community's response should be.

Speakers:

Q (@q_liketheletter) — Bitcoin Well, host

Ilya (@ilyaXindy) — CEO, Megawatthq

Jon Gordon (@thebitcoinyogi) — Co-founder, SOUND; Bitcoin and Nostr in...

Bitcoin just dropped $18,000 in 10 days. Strategy sold for the first time since 2022. The headlines are screaming capitulation. Zach reads two pieces back to back: Adam O'Brien's "What Gives Money Its Value" — a clear-eyed dismantling of the "Bitcoin isn't backed by anything" crowd (spoiler: neither is the dollar, and it's not gold either) — followed by a primer on dollar cost averaging, because weeks like this one are exactly why DCA exists. This one's for Uncle Mark.

DCA #WhatBacksBitcoin #BitcoinVsFiat #BitcoinWell #BitcoinReads

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Bitcoin Well Reads: The Unbanked Already Know What the Rest of Us Are Starting to Figure Out

Texas just pulled its $10 million Bitcoin reserve out of BlackRock's iBit and moved it into direct custody. The second biggest economy in the US looked at a custodial ETF and said not good enough. They want the actual coins on their own infrastructure protected by their own keys.

First they laugh at you. Then they fight you. Then they buy the ETF. Then they take self-custody.

Here's what gets Zach: Texas figured this out from a...

Bitcoin Well Explains: Explains: Hardware Wallet Setup, Transactions, and the Rules That Keep You Safe

Bitcoin Well Explains: Hardware Wallets

The theory is one thing. Actually doing it is something else entirely.

If you're a beginner, the thought of buying a hardware wallet, moving your Bitcoin off an exchange, and sending your first transaction probably gives you an anxiety attack. The first few times Zach sent Bitcoin, it scared him too. The fear is completely normal. It's also the main thing standing between you and genuine financial sovereignty.

This video takes...

Bitcoin Well Reads: Bitcoin: The Next Chapter of Humanity

Every time humanity has taken a major step forward, something fundamental changed beneath it. Not just a new invention — a new foundation. Agriculture changed how we lived. Electricity changed how we built. The internet changed how we communicate. Bitcoin belongs in that same category. Most people still see it as something financial. What's happening underneath is much deeper.

In this episode of Reads on the Bitcoin Well Podcast, Zach reads "Bitcoin: The Next Chapter of Humanity" by Ulises Alfaro — a piece that steps back from price cycl...

75% of all Bitcoin transactions never touch the blockchain. 33% of all Bitcoin is held at Coinbase. Only 12 to 15% of new Bitcoiners self-custody their coins.

Those numbers are depressing. This conversation is about why — and what to do about it.

In this Bitcoin Well Spaces, Konrad and Zach sit down with Roberto Rios (The Peruvian Bull), Niko from Simply Bitcoin, Kyle Huber (filmmaker, We Are Satoshi podcast), and Dr. Troy to dig into one of the most important unsolved problems in Bitcoin: why, despite everything we know about self-custody, the vast majority of Bitcoiners still leave their co...

Bitcoin Well Reads: The Great Decoupling: From the Reformation of Heaven to the Reformation of Money

The most powerful institutions in history all share one trait — they make themselves indispensable.

The medieval Church taught that you needed a priest to reach God. The modern central bank teaches that you need a custodian to store value. Both monopolies look natural until somebody opens the door.

In this episode, we read Konrad Fitzpatrick's piece The Great Decoupling: From the Reformation of Heaven to the Reformation of Money. Konrad draws a clean line between two technical do...

The yen has lost a third of its purchasing power in five years against the dollar. The Bank of Japan now owns half of its own bond market. And every other reserve currency appears to be on the same trajectory.

In this May 14th Bitcoin Well Spaces, Zach sits down with Roberto Rios (The Peruvian Bull) and macro analyst Robert of Infra for one of the most comprehensive macro conversations the show has run. Simon Dixon — Bitcoin OG and respected on-chain analyst — joins midway through for additional perspective.

Guests:

Roberto Rios (The Peruvian Bull...

Bitcoin Well Reads: Banks Vs Bitcoin - Why the Alternative Is Becoming the Obvious Choice

In this episode of Reads on the Bitcoin Well Podcast, Zach reads an original article on the structural differences between Bitcoin and the banking system — not the surface level talking points, but the things that actually matter for your financial future.

BitcoinVsBanks #FractionalReserve #NotYourKeysNotYourCoins #CBDC

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Bitcoin Well Explains: Hot vs Cold Bitcoin Wallets

Your seed phrase can never touch the internet. But Bitcoin is a digital network. So how do you actually use it?

That contradiction trips up almost every Bitcoin beginner. This video solves it.

In this episode of the Bitcoin Well 101 series, Zach breaks down the full spectrum of Bitcoin custody — from exchange accounts to hot wallets to cold storage hardware wallets — and explains exactly how a hardware wallet pulls off what can only be described as a magic trick: sending money across the globe without your...

Bitcoin Well Reads: When Rules Don't Need Rulers

Every rule system you've ever lived inside had someone behind it. A lawmaker who wrote it. A judge who interpreted it. An authority ready to enforce it — and if necessary, to back that enforcement with something harder than words.

That's just how rules work. Or so we assumed.

In this episode of Reads on the Bitcoin Well Podcast, Zach reads "When Rules Don't Need Rulers" by Ulysses Alfaro — a piece written from the perspective of a legal professional grappling with something Bitcoin does that no lega...

You've done the work. You understand fiat. You understand miners, nodes, and private keys. And then you open an exchange and get hit with 20,000 other cryptocurrencies — coins named after dogs, coins promising to be a world computer, coins claiming to be faster, cheaper, smarter, and better than Bitcoin in every measurable way.

It's a fair question. And how you answer it will determine whether you protect your purchasing power over the next decade or lose it chasing a mirage.

In this episode of the Bitcoin Well 101 series, Zach breaks down what altcoins actually are, the tr...

Bitcoin Well Reads: Wake Up America, Bitcoin or Bust

Owning Bitcoin isn't enough. How you hold it determines whether you're actually free.

In this episode of Reads on the Bitcoin Well Podcast, Zach reads two original articles back to back. The first, written by Zach, makes the case for Bitcoin as the ultimate savings technology — and explains why no other money, crypto, or financial instrument comes close. The second, written by Bitcoin Well founder and CEO Adam O'Brien, lays out why America is at a critical crossroads for financial freedom, and why Bitcoin Well's non-custodial mo...

Bitcoin Well Reads: The Engineered Collapse: How the 2026 Iran War Really Started

The mainstream narrative says the 2026 Iran conflict was a sudden eruption of ancient hatreds and regional tension. That framing is convenient. It's also wrong.

The fuse wasn't lit in the Strait of Hormuz. It was lit months earlier in the halls of the US Treasury, by men in suits wielding spreadsheets.

In this episode of Reads on the Bitcoin Well Podcast, Zach reads his original long-form article "The Engineered Collapse: How the 2026 Iran War Really Started" — a deep dive into the mo...