There is another, older, somewhat less effective technology, which is law. If you can get a court to declare that you own a wallet full of Bitcoins, that’s something. It’s not as good as having the private key to that wallet: Without the private key (which the court can’t give you), you can’t transfer the Bitcoins on the blockchain, so…
Crypto doesn’t need regulation – something that charting the price of bitcoin over successive U.S. governments clearly shows, according to the provocative co-founder of BitMEX and CIO of Maelstrom, Arthur Hayes.
Hayes’ thesis is simple: fiat liquidity – precisely, the printing of more units of fiat money – is the only thing that affects bitcoin’s value proposition.
“If you want to talk about the price of Bitcoin and what’s the fair value, or what’s the future price, all that matters is how many units of fiat are there today,” Hayes told the audience at Consensus Miami 2026. “How many units of fiat will there be in the future, and what’s the pace of this fiat creation?”
While there’s a lot of talk about tradfi and regulators and crypto coming together and having this “bastard child,” the majority of people who attend conferences like Consensus want only to see the number go up, Hayes said. But they forget what has made the price of Bitcoin go from from zero to however many trillions of dollars that it’s worth today, he added, hammering his thesis home:
”The more money that is printed in the U.S. and around the world, the more value that bitcoin will have in fiat currencies,” said Hayes. “And it’s this liquidity part of the equation that really drives the price of bitcoin, and not anything to do with politics.”
Source: Crypto’s value is from being outside regulatory apparatus, says Arthur Hayes
For a few days every year, the world’s most fervent Bitcoin believers descend together in orange cowboy hats, ties and T-shirts to chant about $1 million coins. This year, in Las Vegas, the chants worked on everyone — except the market.
Bitcoin is still hovering near $76,000, on track for its first down week in five and trading about 40% below October’s record high. The slide came as Michael Saylor, Eric Trump and a parade of US senators, including Cynthia Lummis and Bernie Moreno, promised retail investors a generational rally — and as a top White House crypto adviser teased an imminent strategic Bitcoin reserve “breakthrough.” None of it landed. The conference circuit’s jawboning strategy — that crypto price will obey the pulpit — appears to have stopped applying.
Source: Bitcoin Price Lags Despite Bullish Calls at Las Vegas 2026 Gathering – Bloomberg
You can buy a cup of coffee with bitcoin easily enough in the U.S. — and get a tax headache thrown in for free.
The form-filling burden is enough to deter users from using the largest cryptocurrency to pay for real-world transactions, according to the Cato Institute, a libertarian think tank known for its support of free markets, limited government and individual liberty. Abolishing capital gains tax could change that, it said.
“It’s never been easier to use Bitcoin as money,” Nicholas Anthony, a research fellow at the institute’s Center for Monetary and Financial Alternatives, wrote in a report. “Yet, at the same time, the tax code puts an incredible burden on law-abiding citizens. Something as simple as buying a cup of coffee every day with Bitcoin can result in over 100 pages of tax filings.”
The British computer scientist Adam Back said on Wednesday that he is not the pseudonymous inventor of Bitcoin known as Satoshi Nakamoto, after a New York Times investigation presented evidence that he is.
“I’m not satoshi,” Mr. Back said on the social media platform X on Wednesday. He added that he is merely one of a number of developers who came “so close yet so far” to building something like Bitcoin.
The true identity of the creator of the world’s first cryptocurrency has remained hidden for 17 years. The Times’s investigation, led by reporter John Carreyrou, showed that Mr. Back had, in a series of obscure emails, outlined almost every feature of Bitcoin a decade before Satoshi did. It showed that during Satoshi’s two and a half years posting frequently online, Mr. Back largely disappeared from forums discussing Bitcoin, only to reappear soon after Satoshi famously vanished in 2011. And it found striking similarities between Mr. Back’s and Satoshi’s online posts and emails.
Source: Adam Back Denies He Is Satoshi Nakamoto in Response to Times Investigation – The New York Times
Anyway, in his day job, Back is now the chief executive officer of Bitcoin Standard Treasury Company, a digital asset treasury company planning to go public by merger with a special-purpose acquisition company, of course. […]
One more point. Carreyrou writes:
“As chief executive of the merged company, Mr. Back was required under U.S. securities law to disclose any information that was material to its investors. A secret stash of 1.1 million coins that could crash the Bitcoin market if it were suddenly sold, for example, would probably be considered material.”
Everything, I often say around here, is securities fraud. It would be satisfying if being Satoshi Nakamoto is also securities fraud.
It has been 17 years since a nine-page white paper appeared in an obscure corner of the internet and ushered in the world’s first cryptocurrency. Bitcoin has grown from a curiosity to a mainstream fixture of the financial landscape. Yet the identity of its inventor has remained unknown, concealed behind the now-famous pseudonym Satoshi Nakamoto.
I spent more than a year digging into Satoshi’s identity, sifting through thousands of decades-old internet postings. With the help of computer-assisted reporting provided by my colleague Dylan Freedman, I amassed a body of evidence pointing to Adam Back, a 55-year-old British cryptographer. Mr. Back denied that he was Satoshi, and chalked it all up to a series of coincidences.
Here is what we learned….
Source: 4 Takeaways From Our Search for Satoshi Nakamoto, Bitcoin’s Creator – The New York Times
Police in London seized around 61,000 bitcoin as part of an investigation into Zhimin Qian, who was jailed at Southwark Crown Court in November for orchestrating a fraud between 2014 and 2017 against more than 128,000 victims in China. It was the world’s largest confirmed crypto seizure by law enforcement.
Bitcoin has soared in price since the fraud took place, quintupling since the end of 2017 to around £52,300 apiece. It means the haul, which was seized from electronic devices at a mansion in Hampstead, is worth about £3.2bn.Various groups of victims are fighting to stop the Treasury from capturing the inflated value of the bitcoin. They are seeking redress through the courts in England under section 281 of the Proceeds of Crime Act, which allows crime victims to recover criminal assets.
Source: Legal battle intensifies over £3bn bitcoin haul seized by British police
Since its peak last fall, Bitcoin, the world’s largest cryptocurrency, has lost almost half its value. Nearly $2 trillion of wealth has evaporated from the global crypto market since October. We have one question. What took so long? Outside of crimes and scams, the technology is useless, and its economics are even worse. The answer is that crypto was held…
In the event that quantum computers one day become capable of breaking Bitcoin’s cryptography, roughly 1 million BTC attributed to Satoshi Nakamoto, the creator of the Bitcoin network, could become vulnerable to theft. At today’s price of about $67,600 per bitcoin, that stash alone would be worth approximately $67.6 billion. But Satoshi’s coins are only part of the story. Estimates…