Coin Stories with Natalie Brunell
Interviews on money, Bitcoin, and the road ahead.
Recent episodes
Rapha Zagury: Tether's Bitcoin Empire, Taking Over XXI and What Comes Next
- Rapha Zagury's background: Brazilian hyperinflation, frozen savings, and family fleeing WWII shaped his monetary skepticism and eventual Bitcoin adoption. - His Wall Street career (Goldman Sachs, Merrill Lynch) and post-2008 financial crisis disillusionment led him to co-found Elektron, now the third or fourth largest Bitcoin mining operation globally. - Twenty One Capital's strategic pivot from treasury company to **operating company** under new CEO Rapha: mining, M&A, energy trading, securitization, and lending. - Potential acquisition or integration of Elektron into XXI; both firms pursue profitable cash-flow-generating businesses rather than purely financial arbitrage. - Tether's role: majority stakeholder in XXI, primary backer of Elektron; Rapha argues Tether serves real need as transparent alternative to fragile banking systems in emerging markets. - Ocean pool leadership changes and BIP 110 controversy; importance of decentralized block template creation and proper corporate governance in Bitcoin companies.
News Block: Dario's AI Warning, Trump's $5,000 Promise and Will Fed Hike Rates?
- AI industry leaders, including Anthropic's CEO Dario Amodei, are calling for the sector to slow down and for government involvement in regulating AI development to ensure safety research keeps pace with capability advances. - A Fed rate hike in September is now looking increasingly likely after producer prices came in hotter than expected and core inflation data showed a 0.3% monthly increase instead of the anticipated 0.2%. - President Trump promised a $5,000 check to every adult American citizen if Republicans retain control of Congress, a proposal that would cost roughly $1.2 trillion with no clear funding mechanism. - Metaplanet made significant concessions to shareholders by cutting its executive option pool by 41%, eliminating over $220 million in estimated option value and improving Bitcoin per share by approximately 8.8%. - A Liquid sidechain exploit resulted in the theft of nearly 600 Bitcoin (worth ~$50 million), with attackers returning 85% of stolen funds but demanding a 10% bounty; Blockstream has rejected the payment demand and vowed to pursue law enforcement action.
Vik Sharma: Why He Built a Private Messaging App That Sends Bitcoin
- Vik Sharma's background in the steel industry and his evolution into Bitcoin entrepreneurship, starting with mining in 2013 after being banned from Coinbase for a darknet purchase attempt. - Development of CakeWallet as a response to self-custody challenges, designed with simplicity and minimal clicks to onboard non-technical users. - Radar Chat as a Signal-compatible messaging app that integrates Bitcoin payments via Lightning Network, allowing permissionless value transfer without a third party. - The Cold Card hardware wallet vulnerability, Sharma's $10,000 donation to OpenSats' Red Team initiative, and the importance of open-source code review and security audits. - U.S. regulatory restrictions on AI frontier models versus Chinese advancement; concerns that early-stage regulation stifles innovation and competitive advantage. - Macro concerns about $40 trillion U.S. debt, tariff effects on the steel industry (paradoxically lowering scrap prices while raising producer margins), and Bitcoin's role as protection against currency debasement.
Mike Belshe: The 100 Bitcoin Hacking Bounty & How to Hold Bitcoin Where the ETFs Do
- BitGo has opened institutional-grade custody to retail with no minimums or account fees, leveraging the same security features (multi-sig architecture) that institutions have used for over a decade. - Mike Belshe released 100 Bitcoin ($7+ million) as a public bounty to test AI and quantum computing threats; no one has claimed it, demonstrating that feared AI models and quantum computers are not yet practical threats to Bitcoin security. - Reserve banks (which hold assets without lending them) are structurally safer than depository banks and better suited to digital assets; BitGo operates as a reserve bank under OCC charter and does not lend out customer Bitcoin. - The current regulatory environment under the Trump administration shows unusual interagency coordination (OCC, Treasury, SEC, CFTC) focused on creating a pro-Bitcoin framework rather than enforcement-based regulation. - BitGo deployed a new quantum-resistance feature this week: a tool that shows users if their addresses have public key exposure and an algorithm that prevents future exposure by optimizing coin spend patterns. - Institutional finance (Wall Street) has paid far lower fees (~10–20 basis points) than retail exchanges (~160 basis points), while depositors receive near-zero interest despite the risk-free rate being 3.6–3.8%; reserve banks and tokenized lending could reverse this.
News Block: Jobs Shock Rocks the Fed Debate, Metaplanet Under Fire and the $319M Bitcoin Hack on Liquid
- U.S. jobs report came in 162,000 new positions in August, nearly three times economist expectations, keeping unemployment at 4.1% and pushing markets toward a 60% probability of a September Fed rate hike. - Producer and consumer inflation reports due Thursday and Friday are expected to be the deciding factors for the Fed's September 15–16 meeting on whether to raise rates again. - Nearly 4,000 Bitcoin (worth ~$319 million) were withdrawn from Blockstream's Liquid Network sidechain due to a software bug; the unauthorized party returned 3,400 BTC and retained approximately 600 BTC (~$47 million) as claimed reward. - MetaPlanet shareholders are criticizing executives over an old stock option formula that automatically expanded as the company issued new shares to fund Bitcoin purchases; CEO Simon Gerevich exercised options worth tens of millions in August. - Oil prices rose nearly 9% in one week to ~$95/barrel amid Middle East conflict disrupting the Strait of Hormuz, creating inflation pressure that the Fed cannot solve through rate hikes alone.
News Block: Fed Turns Hawkish as Bitcoin Heads Into Its Biggest September Test
- Fed Chair Kevin Warsh signaled at Jackson Hole that inflation at 3.7% remains above target and a September rate hike is now more likely (odds moved from 1-in-3 to 2-in-3). - U.S. Treasury is doubling longer-term bond buybacks starting September 9th while federal debt exceeds $40 trillion, creating tension between inflation-fighting and debt-servicing costs. - Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent criticized Senator Elizabeth Warren for misunderstanding currency intervention mechanics, though Treasury has not publicly disclosed the size of its yen intervention. - Major financial institutions including Goldman Sachs, Bank of America, Citi, and Deutsche Bank are planning to launch dollar stablecoins in 2027, following clearer regulatory frameworks. - September catalysts for Bitcoin include jobs reports (September 4th), inflation data (September 11th), the Clarity Act Senate procedural vote (September 15th), and the Fed's rate decision (September 15–16th).
Clay Garrett: Why Bitkey Has No Seed Phrase & How It Keeps Your Bitcoin Safe
- The Coldcard hack revealed a critical entropy misconfiguration in the hardware wallet's random number generator, allowing attackers to predict private keys and steal approximately $80 million in Bitcoin across multiple victims who had followed security best practices. - BitKey's multi-sig design uses three separate keys generated in three different environments (hardware, mobile app, server) to create resilience against single points of failure, contrasting with Coldcard's vulnerability. - BitKey eliminates the need for traditional seed phrases, instead using encrypted cloud backups and trusted contacts to enable recovery even if both the device and phone are lost simultaneously. - The Coldcard attacker likely paid unnecessarily high transaction fees and used a specific blockchain service provider's API, providing potential leads for law enforcement investigation. - BitKey features a new hardware screen that displays transaction details for verification, protecting against clipboard replacement attacks and other address-swapping exploits. - Inheritance functionality built into BitKey allows non-technical beneficiaries to access funds after a six-month waiting period without requiring knowledge of seed phrases or advanced Bitcoin skills.
Is the AI Buildout the Next Debt Crisis Trigger?
- Data center construction is consuming an estimated $2.9 trillion globally between 2025 and 2028, with roughly half financed through borrowing or outside investment rather than company cash flow. - AI companies and hyperscalers (Microsoft, Google, Amazon, Meta, Oracle) are increasingly reliant on financing from chip makers like NVIDIA and Wall Street firms to fund infrastructure expansion. - The sustainability of the AI buildout depends entirely on revenue growth meeting or exceeding the spending commitments made today; any slowdown in growth rates—even to still-impressive levels—could strain the financing chain. - Half of data center spending goes to non-computing infrastructure: concrete, steel, power systems, and cooling, because chips consume enormous amounts of energy and generate extreme heat. - Capital rotation away from Bitcoin into AI infrastructure has been significant; Bitcoin inflows dropped from $60 billion in 2024 to approximately $10 billion in 2025. - The financial system's traditional response to broken promises is printing more money and issuing new debt, but Bitcoin's fixed 21-million supply stands outside that mechanism.
News Block: Bitcoin's Best Week in 2+ Years, Treasury Buybacks Explained, and Druckenmiller's WSJ Op-Ed Challenges Bessent
- Bitcoin surged over 20% in one week, breaking $80,000 for the first time since May, driven by Treasury bond buyback announcements, White House crypto support, short-seller liquidations, and nearly $2 billion in ETF inflows. - Treasury Secretary Bessent doubled bond buybacks to support long-term yields, shifting debt issuance toward short-term instruments that must be repeatedly refinanced at future market rates. - Bessent adopted the same interventionist borrowing strategy he had publicly criticized when Janet Yellen employed it, signaling a pattern of using Treasury policy to manage economic signals rather than address underlying deficits. - The U.S. fiscal deficit has reached $1.8 trillion just ten months into the fiscal year, with long-term yields climbing again despite buyback efforts, indicating market pressure persists. - Stanley Druckenmiller, Bessant's former mentor and co-trader in the legendary 1992 Bank of England trade, published a Wall Street Journal op-ed warning that bond buybacks amount to "price management" and threaten Treasury credibility. - Druckenmiller disclosed using AI to draft his op-ed, drawing attention but not detracting from his core message: bond market signals cannot be managed away, only addressed.
Jonathan Goodman: Losing $1.6 Million in ColdCard Hack, Why He Isn't Angry and the Bigger Lesson Learned
- Jonathan Goodman lost over 18 Bitcoin (valued at $1+ million at time of theft) due to the Coldcard hardware wallet vulnerability that allowed seed phrase entropy to be compromised. - All three of Goodman's redundant security measures—separate Coldcard devices, metal-stamped seed phrases, and safety deposit box storage—failed against the same vulnerability, exemplifying "common cause failure." - Coldcard's vulnerability appears to have affected multiple waves of victims with increasing sophistication; Goodman was in the first wave and believes the hack may still be ongoing. - Police and detectives have been respectful but direct: their priority is catching perpetrators, not recovering stolen funds, and prospects for asset recovery are minimal. - No class action lawsuit is likely because Coldcard is a small private company with insufficient assets to justify legal funding; smaller group suits are being pursued by law firms seeking 10–15 million dollar settlements, but victims must pay retainers with uncertain returns. - Goodman maintains faith in Bitcoin and self-custody philosophy despite the loss; he views the incident as a test and is rebuilding rather than abandoning the asset class.
Alex Leishman: Institutions Are Buying What Retail Sells — Plus How to Keep Your Bitcoin Safe
- Retail investors are net sellers of Bitcoin while institutions accelerate accumulation, particularly through ETFs, representing a decade-long shift in ownership composition. - River's client base remains net buyers during the bear market despite lower overall trading volumes compared to the prior year; only 15% of clients move Bitcoin to self-custody. - Force Field, River's withdrawal delay feature, protects against social engineering attacks and scammer impersonation—a practical defense against the rising threat of account takeovers. - River is designing a new quantum-resistant custody system with extensible architecture to accommodate future Bitcoin security upgrades without requiring coin migration. - The current bear market drawdown (approximately 50%) is shallower than previous cycles (2011: −93%, 2013–2015: −87%, 2017–2018: −84%, 2021–2022: −77%), suggesting potential for further decline given typical bear-market duration. - Leishman opposes taking River public, citing long-term vision misalignment with quarterly Wall Street pressures; the company remains focused on perfecting its dual-currency banking model.
News Block: Bitcoin Price Surges on Surprise Treasury Move, Washington's Big Crypto Week, and Tether's First-Ever Audit
- Bitcoin jumped 7% to near $70,000 after the U.S. Treasury announced surprise bond buybacks to control rising long-term borrowing costs, erasing over $1 billion in short positions. - The SEC proposed its first formal crypto rulemaking allowing token projects to raise up to $75 million annually without full securities registration and a potential path to exit securities laws. - Japan's MetaPlanet, the third-largest corporate Bitcoin holder, is expanding into the U.S. via a NASDAQ-listed SuperPlanet subsidiary seeded with 2,100 Bitcoin ($132 million). - Tether received a clean audit from KPMG showing $6.8 billion in excess reserves, including $141 billion in U.S. Treasuries, after a decade without a major audit. - A Trezor shipping partner was hacked, exposing names, emails, and home addresses of nearly 14,000 hardware wallet owners; France has become a hotspot for wrench attacks targeting crypto holders. - Bitcoin volatility hit its lowest level in 98.5% of its trading history, with volume at 2019 lows, creating potential for sharp moves when conditions normalize.
Michael Saylor & Phong Le: MSTR Dilution Fears, Buybacks and Strategy as the "J.P. Morgan of Digital Assets"
- Michael Saylor and Phong Lee address dilution concerns around MSTR common stock and explain why share issuance at premium to NAV is accretive to Bitcoin per share. - Strategy's digital credit product STRC is positioned as the company's core focus; management defends concentrated efforts to stabilize STRC over near-term equity buybacks. - Saylor articulates a taxonomy of digital assets—digital capital (Bitcoin), digital credit (STRC), digital money (yield-bearing stablecoins), and digital currency (non-yielding stablecoins)—and explains why traditional finance must flow into Bitcoin through credit and equity instruments. - MSTR buybacks are contingent on the stock trading at a discount to net asset value per share; currently STRC is the priority because fixing credit improves both the credit and equity value propositions. - STRC pricing discipline: management commits to keeping STRC trading at par ($99–$101) rather than allowing it to float above $100, in order to maximize liquidity and maintain the product's core value proposition. - Long-term Bitcoin price targets (including $1 million and $10 million per coin scenarios) remain unchanged, though management emphasizes that timing is uncertain and investors should adopt a multi-year or decade-long holding horizon.
Mark Moss: "Retire Off Bitcoin" Strategy and How to Build Wealth in Any Market
- Mark Moss explains why Bitcoin's 50% drawdown doesn't affect a "retire off Bitcoin" strategy, arguing that volatility itself is not the problem—forced selling at the wrong time is. - The real distinction between building wealth (concentration in assets) and protecting wealth (diversification) applies to both Bitcoin holdings and storage methods across multiple wallet types. - The Coldcard exploit and broader custody debate reveal that self-custody carries real risks, but so does exchange holding; the answer is not purity testing but thoughtful risk mitigation and diversification. - Satsuma, the Bitcoin treasury company Moss worked with, failed due to regulatory delays, timing misalignment with Bitcoin's price decline, and investor discord—not fundamental flaws in the treasury company model. - A **debt-based monetary system** (post-1971) rewards asset owners with collateral and favorable tax treatment; Bitcoin becomes a "cheat code" because it allows anyone to own pristine collateral and issue credit against it without selling. - Leverage amplifies returns but requires disciplined risk management, multiple layers of liquidity, and understanding market cycles; MicroStrategy and similar companies can trade above book value because they apply leverage to Bitcoin holdings.
Alex Thorn: Tracking the Stolen Bitcoin and the "Red Team" Racing to Find More Bug
- Over 1,700 Bitcoin worth approximately $112 million has been stolen from approximately 8,300 Coldcard wallet addresses through a five-year-old seed generation vulnerability. - The attacks have occurred in multiple waves, with Waves 1 and 2 containing the largest amounts (over 1,000 and 1,200 Bitcoin respectively) and remaining largely unmoved since exploitation. - A volunteer "Red Team" of Bitcoin developers is comprehensively auditing open-source Bitcoin software repositories using AI to identify similar vulnerabilities; they've scanned over 500 repositories and found no issues in LibSecP256K1 (Bitcoin's core signature math). - The Coldcard vulnerability went undetected for five years partly because Coinkite became hostile toward the open-source community, discouraging code audits and vulnerability submissions. - Alex Thorn has identified diverse threat actors—from organized early attackers to opportunistic copycats—and is working directly with victims to provide forensic reports and help them file claims with law enforcement. - The exploit was likely operationalized using AI, and the Wave 1 attacker appears to have queried victim addresses through a blockchain data provider with a paid account, leaving traceable footprints.
News Block #152: Bitcoin's Red Team Fights Back, the BIP-110 Moment of Truth Arrives, CLARITY Punted to September
- Bitcoin's Red Team audited 390 open-source projects and identified nearly 5,000 security issues, including 85 critical vulnerabilities, in response to the Cold Card hack that drained an estimated 1,800 BTC ($116M+). OpenAI's safety systems blocked researcher Rob Hamilton from continuing the analysis despite prior approval, forcing him to switch to Chinese open-source AI models. - BIP-110's mandatory signaling period ended with overwhelming rejection: 99.85% of Bitcoin's hash power remained on the main chain, demonstrating the high bar required to change Bitcoin's consensus rules and the system working as designed. - The CLARITY Act, a comprehensive U.S. federal digital assets framework, missed its August vote window. The Senate returns September 14th, but prediction markets now estimate only a 15% chance of passage this year, down from 70% in May, due to unresolved ethics provisions and shrinking legislative windows. - Russia passed its first comprehensive crypto law: domestic crypto trading is legal through licensed exchanges, but domestic payments in crypto are banned and retail investors face a ~$3,750 annual purchase cap (roughly 17 years to buy one BTC). Cross-border crypto settlements have no cap, indicating the law targets capital controls rather than genuine adoption. - Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent engineered the first joint U.S.–Japan currency intervention in decades to prevent yen collapse, which would threaten Japan's $1+ trillion in U.S. Treasury holdings and destabilize American debt refinancing.
Matt Kratter: Inside Bitcoin's Civil War Over BIP-110
- BIP 110 fundamentals: A consensus change proposal that would restrict OP_RETURN data field sizes to prevent large non-monetary data (spam, NFTs, inscriptions) from being embedded in the Bitcoin blockchain. - Node decentralization vs. mining pools: The core tension—whether individual node runners or large regulated mining pools determine Bitcoin's rules. Currently, five to six pools produce ~90% of blocks. - Chain split risk: If miners do not signal BIP 110 support by mandatory signaling (scheduled for August 8), a permanent chain split is possible, mirroring the 2017 block size wars and resulting in two separate Bitcoin versions. - Spam and CSAM concerns: Expanded OP_RETURN fields (80 bytes → 100,000 bytes) open the door to hosting child sexual abuse material and other illicit content permanently on-chain, making node operation legally and ethically problematic. - UASF precedent: BIP 110 follows the User-Activated Soft Fork model used successfully in 2017 to activate Segwit against industry opposition; Kratter argues Bitcoin's "immune system" is working despite hostile rhetoric. - Bitcoin University and Kratter's background: Founder transitioned from Stanford English PhD and hedge fund manager (Clarium Capital under Peter Thiel, 2003–2006) to Bitcoin educator after discovering Bitcoin in late 2019.
Dylan LeClair: Why Bitcoin Treasury Companies Sold Off and What Comes Next
- Bitcoin treasury companies, particularly Micro Strategy and MetaPlanet, have seen their stocks fall 50–80% while Bitcoin itself declined less, prompting criticism from maximalists who argue these levered instruments are inferior to holding Bitcoin directly. - Dylan LeClair argues the bear market sentiment mirrors 2022 cycles and that the criticism is overblown; he believes Bitcoin's integration into capital markets (via treasury companies, perpetual preferreds, and financial instruments) is essential for Bitcoin to reach $100 trillion. - MetaPlanet is building a neo-financial institution in Japan, launching MetaPlanet Securities to pioneer a high-yield bond market and serve as a hub for Bitcoin companies to issue preferred equity and debt instruments. - Perpetual preferreds strip 80–90% of Bitcoin's volatility, creating a product with genuine institutional demand; they are not substitutes for self-custodied Bitcoin but vehicles for capital that would never buy Bitcoin otherwise. - Convertible bonds issued by Micro Strategy add leverage and volatility to the preferred equity market; reducing or eliminating converts is expected to stabilize preferred pricing. - Bitcoin's quantum-computing risk is largely theoretical but perception of unquantifiable tail risk weighs on institutional adoption; the Bitcoin security consortium addresses this concern and removes a "left tail" fear factor similar to the U.S. ban risk eliminated after Trump's election.
News Block: ColdCard Hack Explained - First Self-Custody Breach at Scale, Strategy Makes First STRC Buyback, Fed's Most Hawkish Dissent in Decade
- COLDCARD hardware wallet compromise: Attackers drained over 1,300 Bitcoin from thousands of wallets whose seed phrases were generated on affected COLDCARD devices between March 2021 and the present. A firmware update switched the random number generator to a much weaker entropy source, making seed phrases far easier to brute-force. CoinKite confirmed the flaw; the attacker reportedly used AI to discover the vulnerability after it went undetected for over five years. - Self-custody risk and diversification: This is the first time a major self-custody device has been compromised at scale. Affected users remain at risk even if they later moved Bitcoin to different wallets or multi-sig setups, as long as the original seed was generated on a vulnerable COLDCARD. - MicroStrategy capital allocation shift: MicroStrategy announced it will no longer allocate 100% of future capital raises to Bitcoin purchases. Proceeds will instead be split between Bitcoin and cash reserves, with ratios depending on market conditions. The company remains a net buyer (purchases exceeded sales 48 to 1 in the first seven months of 2026) and boosted cash reserves to $3.75 billion. - Federal Reserve dissent on rates: Three FOMC members voted for a quarter-point rate hike at this week's meeting—the most divided vote since September 2016. This signals some Fed officials believe inflation remains above the 2% target despite five consecutive years above that level. - Treasury yields and macro headwinds: Long-term yields rose on Fed dissent; the 10-year reached ~4.74% and the 30-year moved above 5.2%. Higher rates tighten financial conditions, which typically pressure risk assets like Bitcoin.
Parker Lewis: Digital Credit, Bitcoin Treasury Companies, and Where We Disagree
- Parker Lewis critiques Bitcoin treasury companies' marketing as misleading, specifically targeting claims that Bitcoin is "too volatile for 99% of people" and framing perpetual preferred equity as "digital credit" rather than what it actually is. - The fundamental economic incentive problem: perpetual preferred equity is inherently inferior to owning Bitcoin directly because investors are "left holding the bag" when fixed dollar claims devalue over time, particularly in a hyperinflationary scenario. - Bitcoin's volatility is a feature, not a bug—it reflects rational price discovery during adoption waves when new market participants price Bitcoin for the first time; explaining this mechanism is far more productive than discouraging adoption. - Preferred equity markets remain tiny (roughly $1 trillion) compared to traditional credit markets ($300 trillion) for good reasons: perpetual duration with no maturity makes it impossible for institutional credit investors to price risk. - On-chain adoption mechanics matter more than yield products: Bitcoin's value proposition improves when people can spend it directly (via Square, Zaprite payments), which closes the mental loop that "digital credit" products intentionally obscure. - The ribeye index as inflation proxy: steak prices have compounded at ~12–13% annually since 2020, illustrating how traditional inflation measures (CPI) obscure real purchasing power loss and why Bitcoin's fixed supply solves this problem.