Explaining #bitcoin at $100 to an empty room.

On 25 September 2011, developer Amir Taaki suggested on the Bitcoin development mailing list that Bitcoin’s formal change documents should be called Bitcoin Improvement Proposals (BIPs). The BIP process is the public specification system used to propose, discuss, and document changes to Bitcoin. Individual BIPs are numbered papers covering protocol rules, peer-to-peer behavior, wallet standards, and process conventions. Later upgrades such as Segregated Witness and Taproot were specified through this system. Taaki’s idea is still used 15 years later. The documents live in an open repository, are debated in public, and are adopted only if implementations and the network follow them. The mailing-list note did not create Bitcoin’s governance. It named one of the formats through which that governance is written down.

Jack Dorsey built Twitter, America’s news feed, and Cash App, the most popular financial app in the country. He also built Square, that little reader on the counter at almost every store you pay. Listen to @Jack explain his philosophy of work: “The cypherpunks and cryptopunks, including Satoshi as well, someone who put something out there for others to critique, use, challenge, change, to make their own.” “I don’t know of any faster way to evolve than just letting everyone see it in the open so that everyone can benefit from it, including yourself.”

Bitcoin is the best performing asset of the year. It is also sometimes the worst. Look at Fidelity’s table of rolling returns. Everything else lives in the middle. Stocks. Bonds. Gold. Cash. Forgettable. No one cares. Bitcoin is never in the middle. It is either first or last. That is not bad. It means people are paying attention to bitcoin all the time. You do not want to own the asset nobody has an opinion about. The volatility is the signal.

In this new video game, you search for James Howells’ lost Bitcoin hard drive in a trash landfill. Howells infamously mined about 8,000 bitcoin in 2009, then in threw out the wrong hard drive during a cleanup into the garbage can. His partner then took the bag to Docksway landfill in Newport, Wales. The coins sat there while the price exploded into hundreds of millions of dollars. He spent more than a decade asking for permission to excavate, offered to buy the site, and sued. The High Court said no. The city said the trash was theirs. The drive is still under the heap. Howells never found the key. Can you?

They asked 100 Harvard students about bitcoin

Developers just figured out a way to hide who sent bitcoin, who received it, and how much moved, without changing Bitcoin itself. This new proposed idea is not a fork around the protocol or new cryptocurrency. This is how Bitcoin was designed, a base layer people can innovate on without asking permission. On Thursday, researcher Misha Komarov and colleagues published Shielded Bitcoin, a Zcash-style shielded pool for Bitcoin’s base layer. Encrypted notes and zero-knowledge proofs ride along in ordinary Bitcoin transactions. Separate software checks that no coins are created from nothing and none are spent twice. There is no company running the pool, no sidechain, and no soft fork. Funds go in and out through cryptographic vaults Komarov has been building, called PIPEs, so no federation has to hold the bitcoin. Miners do not enforce the privacy rules. Invalid shielded data can still land in a block, indexers simply ignore it. The trade is: Bitcoin stays conservative, and the experiment lives on top of it. If it works, private transfers arrive the way most of Bitcoin’s best ideas have, not by rewriting the constitution, but by building on the settlement layer everyone already trusts.

This is the entire history of bitcoin and money

The bill the entire crypto industry wanted died in the Senate. Then the price of bitcoin went up. To almost everyone, that made no sense. On Tuesday, Michael Saylor sat with Bitcoin Policy Institute director Conner Brown and explained why it made perfect sense. After the Clarity Act failed, Bitcoin slipped toward $75,000, then climbed through $81,000 and past $86,000. The market was pricing a different future: regulators at the SEC, CFTC, Treasury, and White House can still write rules, banks can still custody Bitcoin and lend against the $1.6 trillion bitcoin industry, and a 600-page bill of restrictions never gets locked into law. Each head regulator has a positive and optimistic opinion on digital assets, explained Michael @Saylor. Saylor’s comparison was Steve Jobs. Imagine asking Congress for an iPhone law before a single phone shipped. Individuals and companies need a bill of digital rights, he said, not Congress freezing a $3 trillion market that could become a $100 trillion one. AI agents will need 24/7 digital money. The failed bill looked like a loss. The price made it clear, this is an opportunity.

An anonymous user decided they had enough money and pledged 5,057 bitcoin to charity. The Reddit user “PineappleFund” remembered watching bitcoin reach $15, $20 and $30. By December 2017, they posted: “I have far more money than I can ever spend.” Five months later, their farewell post reported that 5,104 bitcoin had become $55,000,000 for charities. The final donation went to the Internet Archive. One recipient, OpenStreetMap, independently documented receiving 18 bitcoin. Today, if the charities had kept the donations in bitcoin, it would be worth $426,394,540. The user has not been heard from since.

Anyone who bought bitcoin daily, weekly, or monthly has seen the value of those purchases go up. By September 21st, 2026 everyone is in profit. A chart of regular buying from 5 June 2011 shows why. Repeated purchases through each cycle pulled the average cost below later market prices, including after the advances or “bubble” of 2013, 2017, 2021, and 2024–26. By the end of the period the daily-average cost basis was about $86,985, under the prevailing price. The same result applied to weekly and monthly buying: the stack was worth more than what had been paid for it.

This container is filled with bitcoin mining computers on a fenced gravel lot deep in the Alberta, Canada wilderness. The site is operated by AlbertaHash, and is one of three one-acre facilities the company owns. It is connected to Alberta’s wholesale electricity market and can reduce or stop load when power prices rise. The operator plans to build a new 149 kW solar farm array there to sell power back to the grid in expensive hours and to offset its own consumption.

A difficult concept to wrap your head around is that a bitcoin can be divided into ever smaller units as needed, so it remains usable no matter how large the population becomes. Even with a global population of a trillion people on Earth, anyone can send or receive amounts of any size because the unit itself can be split further and further, and further. 0.0000000001 bitcoins The software could retain precision that its interface did not display. Satoshi Nakamoto discouraged developers from relying on those extra displayed digits: 
“I would not encourage using the extra decimal places. They’re only intended for future use.” 
He explained that a recipient would see the amount rounded down in the interface. This concerned precision beyond the client’s two displayed decimal places, not an extension beyond Bitcoin’s eight-decimal accounting. Since this post by Satoshi on September 23rd, 2010, the price of bitcoin has increased exponentially and many people now use additional decimal places.

The oldest producer of clean renewable electricity in the United States, Mechanicville Hydroelectric was saved by bitcoin mining. The Mechanicville hydroelectric plant in New York dates to 1897. It was built on the Hudson River to supply electricity to General Electric’s operations in Schenectady. The company has since long abandoned the facility. In 2021, the hydroelectric dam could not make a profit and was going to be decommissioned. Bitcoin mining fixed that when the CEO decided to use some of the electricity to run Bitcoin miners. CEO Jim Besha said selling power to the grid brought in three cents per kilowatt-hour. Bitcoin mining brought in approximately three times as much. He was buying used mining equipment and converting the bitcoin into cash rather than keeping it as an investment. This saved the facility.

A bitcoin prize was encrypted into human DNA DNA, the building blocks and foundational structure of life itself, can store computer data by translating information into sequences of its four chemical letters. In January of 2015, geneticist Nick Goldman distributed tubes of synthetic DNA at Davos. The encoded files included the private key to 1 bitcoin. Participants had three years to sequence the DNA and recover it. Belgian doctoral student Sander Wuyts solved the challenge shortly before the January 2018 deadline. His first attempts failed because of an erroneous line in his decoding program, but removing it produced the files and the spendable key.

They are mining bitcoin using the brain of a fruit fly

Watch the moment a class of students at Chiang Mai University in Thailand get their first bitcoin

Next ₿itcoin Halving Progress ▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓░░░░░░░░░ 61% Loading…Please HODL Current Block: 968,142 Halving Block: 1,050,000 Blocks Remaining: 81,858 Days Remaining: ~568

> The year is 2011 > User buys 3 bitcoin for $6.14 each > Then sold them for $6.20 > After fees, the total profit was “11 cents” > The user was relieved and posted, “That was close…but thankfully I came out without a loss.”

₿𝗥𝗘𝗔𝗞𝗜𝗡𝗚: The first company to mine bitcoin in space will be Starcloud, says CEO Philip Johnston “We’ll have some bitcoin mining ASICs on the second spacecraft launching later this year”

The Bitcoin Policy Institute’s office window is designed like bitcoin blockchain transactions