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15% of the way home

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by Coinbits
Tuesday, Dec 30, 2025 - 13:03

Warren Buffett, quoting Ben Graham, famously said: "In the short run, the market is a voting machine, but in the long run it is a weighing machine." The short-run “voting” action results from how investors react to short-term events and narratives. But it does not capture bitcoin’s destination. That is where the weighing machine comes in, which operates on a long-term time horizon.

Bitcoin's dollar exchange rate stands roughly where it began 2025, yet this year marked seventeen years since Satoshi released the whitepaper with significant milestones. Bitcoin has reached an all-time high above $126,000, public companies have purchased billions of dollars worth of bitcoin for corporate treasuries, and 45% of young investors now own bitcoin according to Coinbase research.

The remarkable part is that all of this occurred without the Federal Reserve letting loose with its money printer. Rates remained elevated throughout 2025 as the tightening cycle wound down. But 2026 and 2027 will bring a different environment altogether. The path of least resistance points toward more rate cuts and renewed liquidity provision. Bitcoin’s monetary fundamentals are, as designed, unchanged.

Bitcoin's seventeen-year journey reaches yet another inflection point as fiat-system shenanigans present a bullish outlook. Those who can remain patient will be rewarded.

BlackRock names bitcoin ETF a top 2025 investment theme

The world's largest asset manager named iShares Bitcoin Trust (IBIT) as one of the top three investments for 2025, placing it alongside cash equivalents and blue-chip stocks. This comes despite bitcoin falling more than 4% year-to-date. IBIT has still attracted over $25 billion in inflows since January, making it the sixth most popular ETF by new investment this year.

Conviction driven by fundamentals

BlackRock could have promoted higher-fee products that outperformed IBIT in 2025, like its gold ETF, but it chose to spotlight bitcoin instead. As ETF Store president Nate Geraci noted, "Asset managers aren't typically in the business of spotlighting underperforming products." BlackRock's decision signals that the world's largest asset manager views bitcoin as essential to diversified portfolios regardless of short-term price action.

Nature retracts climate study after central banks worldwide based policy on flawed data

The scientific journal Nature retracted an influential climate study that estimated a 62% decline in global economic output by 2100, but only after central banks including the European Central Bank, Bank of England, and People's Bank of China had used it to guide risk management and scenario planning. The paper's catastrophic projections were skewed by bad data from Uzbekistan. When corrected, the expected decline drops to 23%. Yet, the Network for Greening the Financial System had already incorporated the flawed research into global policy frameworks.

Trust the experts, or run the numbers?

Central banks made multi-trillion-dollar policy decisions based on peer-reviewed research that turned out to be off by a factor of three due to corrupt data originating from a single country. In contrast, bitcoin's monetary policy requires no peer review, no expert committees, and no institutional validation. It simply executes mathematical rules that can be verified by anyone, and cannot be manipulated, no matter how compelling the narrative or opportunity for grift.

Samourai Wallet developer begins five-year prison sentence for writing privacy code

Keonne Rodriguez, co-founder of Samourai Wallet, surrendered December 19th to FPC Morgantown to begin serving a five-year prison sentence for building bitcoin privacy software. In his first letter from prison, Rodriguez describes fellow inmates, which include doctors, scientists, and business owners, greeting him with coffee, clothing, and kindness as he adjusts to incarceration for writing code.

Code is speech and privacy is not a crime

It has been challenging to reconcile the federal government's efforts to make the United States more bitcoin-friendly with its simultaneous criminalization of developers for building non-custodial software that empowers individuals to transact without surveillance. If this issue concerns you, you may sign a petition in support of the Samourai Wallet developers here.

BITCOIN ADOPTION CONTINUES

Latin America's largest private bank Itaú Unibanco advised clients to allocate 1 to 3% of portfolios to bitcoin as a hedge against currency erosion.

Citi forecasts that bitcoin could reach $143,000 within twelve months, with a bullish scenario above $189,000, driven by continued ETF adoption and regulatory clarity in the United States.

Brazil approved funding for a live orchestral performance in Brasília that will convert bitcoin price movements into music in real-time using an algorithm that translates market data into melody, rhythm, and harmony.

VanEck's head of multi-asset solutions, David Schassler, predicts bitcoin will be a "top performer" in 2026 after lagging the Nasdaq 100 by roughly 50% year-to-date, noting the firm has been accumulating bitcoin as monetary debasement accelerates.

Trump Media moved 2,000 bitcoins worth $174 million across treasury wallets after expanding its holdings to 11,542 coins valued at over $1 billion.

Metaplanet, which holds Japan's largest corporate bitcoin treasury valued at $2.75 billion, approved dividend-paying preferred shares for overseas institutional investors, packaging bitcoin treasury exposure alongside traditional shareholder benefits.

HOW BITCOIN WORKS

Learn one key idea about bitcoin each week. This week:

The Christmas gift that keeps on taking

On December 23, 1913, while Americans celebrated the holidays, President Woodrow Wilson signed the Federal Reserve Act into law. 112 years later, it remains one of the most consequential moments in American history.

The Federal Reserve was created by bankers and for bankers, but was sold to the public as protection from those same bankers. In November 1910, representatives from Morgan, Rockefeller, and other Wall Street interests met secretly on Jekyll Island to design a cartel that would allow them to inflate the money supply in coordination, backed by the force of government.

They understood that Americans distrusted Wall Street and would never accept a central bank operating for banker benefit. So they orchestrated elaborate theater: the Pujo Committee hearings that created the illusion of investigation while the accused wrote the final legislation. The National Citizens League, which appeared to represent grassroots support, received 100% of its funding from the banks themselves.

The Fed's supposed purpose was to make the money supply more elastic. In practice, this meant that over time, credit and currency would expand without limit, fueling the intense boom-bust cycles that have defined the past century.

However, the Austrian economists that inspired Bitcoin’s creators understood that free markets naturally produce gently falling prices as productivity increases. The Fed's mandate to maintain "price stability" requires perpetual inflation, transferring wealth from savers to the financial system.

Once the problems with central banking became understood, innovative technologists asked themselves – what if we could design software that combined the best properties of gold (scarcity, recognizability) with the best properties of fiat (portability, divisibility)? After dozens of attempts, Bitcoin was the first such solution that worked. Its supply is fixed at 21 million coins through mathematical consensus that no banker, politician, or committee can alter. Where the Fed provides elastic money that can be expanded at will, bitcoin provides inelastic money that cannot be debased.

The Federal Reserve is 112 years old, and bitcoin is 17 years old. That means bitcoin is about 15% of the age of the Fed. Depending on how you look at it, that is either a low percentage, or an extraordinarily high one, given the odds against bitcoin – and it’s only up from here.

Bitcoin returns monetary policy to natural forces, just as gold relied on geology – but the natural phenomenon that bitcoin is build upon is mathematics and energy. Not politics, not secret meetings of bankers. Not deception. Not inflation. Just verifiable scarcity and neutral money that serves everyone equally.

COIN CHECK

Austrian economists often argue that in a growing, productive economy, which scenario can be “healthy” rather than catastrophic?

A. Falling prices because more goods are produced per unit of money
B. Falling prices triggered by mass liquidations and collapsing credit
C. Falling prices caused by a sudden tax shock
D. Falling prices caused by a war-time demand collapse

Check your answer at the end of the page.

FROM THE MEME POOL

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ANSWER

Answer: A. “Productivity deflation” is a good thing – it means that your money buys more because the cost of making goods and services went down. This is a natural tendency because, as technology improves, goods and services become cheaper to provide.

Productivity deflation is very different from a debt-deflation spiral driven by credit destruction. Keynesian and neo-classical economists who say “deflation is bad” are referring to debt-driven deflation, but oftentimes (and conveniently for them, might we add) leave ambiguity about the word "deflation” unaddressed.

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