TheCryptoDegen

Iran just showed the world why Bitcoin is the hardest money.

A student wakes up in Tehran and the phone is dead. Not “slow.” Dead. Iran is in a near-total internet blackout connectivity reported around 4% of normal. (The Washington Post)

The next problem isn’t politics. It’s money.

If the internet is off, payments don’t clear. If protests spread, accounts get watched. If the state feels threatened, banks become a control surface. And if the currency is melting, your savings bleed while you’re trying to stay safe. In late January the rial hit a record low around 1,500,000 per dollar. (Al Jazeera)

This is the war lesson: in conflict, money stops being neutral. The rails become permissioned. Access becomes conditional.

Bitcoin wins here for one simple reason: it’s bearer money.

Not “a bank account.” Not “a promise.” An asset you can hold yourself, move without asking, and take across borders in your head. It doesn’t fix war. But it does remove a key weapon: the ability to trap people inside a broken currency and a controlled banking system.

The best money is the money that still works when institutions don’t.

21 million units. No CEO. No freeze function. No hotline.

This is the ad Bitcoin never had to buy. Price doesn’t reflect it yet.

It will.

Most people don’t know this, but Bitcoin has a hidden message that can never be deleted

Bitcoin block 666,666 was mined on January 18, 2021

It contains a message permanently written into the blockchain

Using Bitcoin’s OP_RETURN, the miner embedded a Bible verse directly into the block’s data

“Do not be overcome by evil, but overcome evil with good.” Romans 12:21

To make it happen, they paid over 5x the normal fee just to guarantee inclusion in that exact block

The transaction is linked to wallets named “GoD” and “BibLE”, verifiable on any public block explorer

Once it’s there, it can never be removed

Japan's 5 year bond yield just hit its HIGHEST level in history

Japanese banks and pension funds hold $1.2 trillion in US bonds because their own paid near zero for decades

As Japanese yields rise, that money starts flowing home, pushing US interest rates higher and pulling liquidity out of stocks and crypto

LYN ALDEN: Imagine making an iPhone, and then twenty thousand imitators make a buggy knock-off fake iPhone with a glued-on Apple symbol that doesn't work properly. That's "Bitcoin vs crypto" 👏

BARON ROTHSCHILD: "Buy when there's blood in the streets, even if the blood is your own."

This guy stole $9.6 million and then lost ALL of it to a phishing website

In February 2025 a hacker used flash loans to drain $9.6 million from zkLend on Starknet

The protocol offered him a deal: Return 90% and keep 10% as a bounty

Deadline was Valentine's Day but he never responded

Two months later he finally tried to launder the ETH through Tornado Cash but typed the wrong URL

He sent 2,930 ETH to a fake site of Tornado Cash

A phishing page that had been running for over five years

He then sent a message on chain to the same protocol he robbed:

"I tried to move funds to Tornado but I used a phishing website and all the funds have been lost. I am devastated. I am terribly sorry for all the havoc and losses caused"

Stole $9.6 million from a smart contract

Lost $9.6 million to a fake website

4 BTC lost using Brain wallet.

"The pass phrase was a line from an obscure poem in Afrikaans"

POV: Buying 1 BTC

🚨🚨🚨 500 BTC of the 6,000 BTC belonging to drug dealer Clifton Collins moved after 10 years and sent to Coinbase Exchange.

The keys were stored on a fishing rod in a rental home, that were sent later to a landfill in 2017 after his arrest.

Guess the keys were never lost ;)

explorer.timechainindex.com/tx/transaction…

The US government seized 30,000 Bitcoin from criminals and sold it all for $19 million.

> In 2013 the FBI shut down Silk Road and seized 30,000 Bitcoin.

> They auctioned every single coin to get rid of it.

> 44 bidders showed up.

> One man outbid all of them across a 12-hour auction.

> Tim Draper walked away with the entire lot for $19 million.

> The government thought they were disposing of criminal money.

> Draper thought he was buying the future.

> Those 30,000 Bitcoin are worth $2.1 billion today.

> The US government sold $2.1 billion for $19 million.

> Draper still hasn't sold a single coin.

“Yeah but Satoshi compared Bitcoin to gold”

Yeah, but “gold” meant that it’s limited in supply and you mine it with your computer.

Satoshi was an optimist in terms of scaling Bitcoin for payments to replace Visa, Mastercard & PayPal.

For him, digital gold didn’t mean slow & expensive to transfer, a settlement layer for high value transactions, or something that you should only store speculatively.

This hacker lost MILLIONS trading stolen funds

A wallet linked to a hack received 12,282 ETH worth $23.7 million

He sold all of it at $1,932

Bought back 4,958 ETH at $2,495

Lost $7 million on a basic trade

Can hack a smart contract but can't read a chart

Strategy is now holding a total of 762,099 BTC bought at an average price of $75,694

They're currently down $4 billion

If Bitcoin gets back to its all time high of $126,198 their portfolio is worth $96.2 billion

That's a $38.5 billion profit

In the early days of Bitcoin there was almost nothing you could buy with it

One of the first real products was a pair of alpaca socks from a small farm in Massachusetts

Grass Hill Alpacas charged 75 BTC per pair and even Bitcoin's own lead developer bought one

That pair of socks cost over $6.5 million at today's price

The Winklevoss twins used their Facebook lawsuit money to buy 1% of all Bitcoin at $120 each

In 2013 Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss spent $11 million of their $65 million Facebook settlement on Bitcoin at around $120 per coin

That was roughly 1% of all BTC in circulation

They became the first publicly known Bitcoin billionaires when BTC hit $10,000 in late 2017

Still holding thousands of Bitcoin

Zuckerberg paid them $65 million to go away and they turned it into BILLIONS

They won twice. Once in court against Facebook, and then again by being early to Bitcoin. It's remarkable that what seemed like a huge settlement at the time ended up being just the starting point.

Someone borrowed $1 billion, used it to vote themselves the right to rob a protocol, took $182 million and then even returned the billion

In April 2022 an attacker took a $1 billion flash loan from Aave and used the borrowed money to buy enough governance tokens to control Beanstalk's voting system

With 70% of the votes in hand they passed an emergency proposal that contained hidden code to drain every dollar from the protocol into their own wallet

$182 million transferred in a single transaction

Then he repaid the $1 billion loan in the same block because flash loans have to be returned instantly

Profit: $76 million

The protocol's lead dev went on Discord and wrote "We are fucked"

The attacker also sent $250K to a Ukraine donation wallet during the robbery and then laundered everything else through Tornado Cash in 270 transactions

The governance function that made this possible was never audited before it went live

Some people have paid more in ETH gas fees than they've spent on gas for their car in their entire life

Some of us have paid more in gas fees than the car itself

This guy paid $50,000 in gas fees to swap $7 worth of tokens on Uniswap

Shame considering they’re pretty much free now

Wen airdrop?

Bitcoin price is being driven by 5 things:

1. ETF + Strategy spot buying
removes real BTC from the market
2. Tight float
tradable supply is much smaller than headline supply
3. Liquidity / real rates
easier money helps BTC
4. The dollar
a stronger dollar is a headwind
5. Leverage
amplifies the move, up or down

Numbers:
450 BTC/day of new supply.
$56.2B of cumulative U.S. spot ETF net inflows.
Strategy: 761,068 BTC held.
Latest buy: 22,337 BTC = about 50 days of new supply.
Glassnode liquid + highly liquid supply: ~6.57M BTC.
Strategy alone is ~11.6% of that pool.

First principles:
Price is set at the margin.
What matters is not total supply.

What matters is how much new BTC is created, how much spot is being removed, and how little float is actually available.

Did you know ?
A single person once minted over 184 BILLION Bitcoins

In 2010 someone exploited a bug in Bitcoin's code and generated 184,467,440,737 BTC in a single transaction on a blockchain that was only supposed to have 21 million total supply

Satoshi and the developers caught it within 5 hours and pushed Bitcoin's first ever emergency fork to erase the transaction

Nobody knows who designed the Bitcoin logo and it represents a $1.4 trillion asset

Satoshi's original logo was a gold coin with the letters "BC" on it

In February 2010 a BitcoinTalk user named NewLibertyStandard proposed using the Thai baht symbol ฿ and the ticker "BTC" in a single forum post

Before that, Bitcoin had no symbol and no official ticker

Satoshi responded two weeks later with an updated logo:

Same gold coin but now with a "B" and two vertical strokes inspired by the dollar sign

It was better but the community still wasn't impressed

One user replied asking if they could come up with something "more respectable" and added "I really am not trying to be mean."

Then in November 2010 an anonymous user called "bitboy" showed up on BitcoinTalk, said he just wanted to drop by and share some graphics, and posted the orange and white logo the entire world now recognizes

White ₿ tilted exactly 14 degrees clockwise on a flat orange circle

Free to download on a public domain

Then he left

Nobody has ever confirmed who bitboy is

The ticker "BTC" technically violates international currency code standards because "BT" is already the country code for Bhutan, which is why some exchanges use "XBT" instead.

The ₿ symbol wasn't officially added to Unicode until late 2015 when Bitcoin was trading around $400

For over 6 years the most important digital currency in the world didn't have an officially recognized symbol

Every piece of Bitcoin's identity was made by anonymous people on a forum and given away for free

Just because a few people believed in something before anyone else