Bitcoin Brief

Sup, freaks.

Bitcoin has become painfully boring.

It has spent months grinding sideways. Volatility is sitting near multi-year lows. Sentiment is in the gutter. The tourists have moved on to whatever shiny object is working this week.

Meanwhile, the derivatives market is still carrying a meaningful amount of leverage. James Check estimates futures open interest near 752,000 BTC with funding around 5.9% annualized.

A quiet market, a tight range, and a large pile of open positions can only coexist for so long.

Let's get into it.

LEAD STORY

Bitcoin Is Coiled and Nobody Cares

Bitcoin traded as low as $57,740 and as high as $82,791 on Kraken from February 1 through this afternoon. That sounds like a wide range until you look at how the market got here.

Since mid-June, the range has compressed to roughly $58,000 to $67,000. August has been even tighter, between approximately $62,200 and $65,400. We have spent weeks watching bitcoin bounce around the same few thousand dollars while the rest of the market finds something else to talk about.

You can feel the apathy. Bitcoin is no longer commanding the daily conversation, and even large price moves inside the range struggle to hold anyone's attention.

Fidelity Digital Assets highlighted the other side of that boredom. Bitcoin's annualized one-month realized volatility is hovering near multi-year lows.

Source: Fidelity Digital Assets via Glassnode, August 9, 2026.

Compressed volatility has left positions waiting on both sides of the range with no clean directional signal.

James Check's latest Squeeze 'em note adds useful context. Check estimates futures open interest at approximately 752,000 BTC, or 3.7% of bitcoin's market capitalization. He puts annualized funding near 5.9%. The leverage is elevated. Funding is positive and fairly ordinary.

The price range keeps tightening while a large derivatives stack remains open.

The spot ETF tape has cooled too. U.S. spot bitcoin ETFs recorded approximately $389.7 million of net outflows from August 10 through August 14, although August remained positive by about $463.8 million through Friday, according to TFTC's ETF dataset. Demand slowed without turning into a full institutional exit.

The boredom is familiar. Bear market bottoms tend to form after the tourists leave, the headlines dry up, and bitcoin stops rewarding anyone looking for quick excitement. History offers no timestamp for the bottom. Apathy, compressed volatility, and a months-long range are still worth our attention when they show up together.

I have no idea which side breaks first. Bitcoin has spent months storing energy, and enough leverage remains in the system to turn the return of volatility into a violent move.

SIGNAL

Peter Todd Keeps Pushing Tail Inflation. Bitcoin Does Not Need It.

Bitcoin++ published Peter Todd's latest presentation on bitcoin's long-term security budget last week. Todd has pushed tail emission or demurrage-style miner funding for years. There is no new BIP, code, deployment path, or broad consensus campaign behind this presentation.

I disagree with him. Scarce block space should create the fee market that pays miners as the subsidy declines. We are less than two decades into a monetary revolution built to last for centuries, and we have barely scratched the surface of real bitcoin demand and usage. Trying to predict the mature fee market from the network's first 17 years is a fool's errand.

Compressed margins should also distribute mining across more geographies, owners, and uses. Our home-mining playbook with Exergy shows how useful heat changes the math. Adoption is still early, the fee market is immature, and permanently altering issuance now would be a massive unforced error.

Washington Is $65 Billion Away From $40 Trillion of Debt

The Treasury's latest Debt to the Penny reading put total public debt outstanding at $39.9348 trillion on August 13. Washington added roughly $163.2 billion between July 31 and August 13 and now sits only $65.2 billion below $40 trillion.

The round number will produce a day of breathless headlines. Then Washington will get back to borrowing. Interest compounds, deficits continue, and neither party has shown any appetite for shrinking the debt stack in nominal terms.

The system needs growth, higher tax receipts, financial repression, inflation, or some combination of the four. Bitcoin does not need the debt counter to hit a specific number before the thesis works. The counter keeps showing us what the dollar system requires to survive.

The Next AI Bottleneck Is the Balance Sheet and the Grid

BUZZ is a clean example of what this buildout demands: serious money before the revenue arrives. HIVE announced a five-year, $350 million AI cloud-services agreement covering 2,016 NVIDIA Blackwell Ultra GPUs at its Merritt, British Columbia site. HIVE projects approximately $70 million of annualized revenue from a build requiring about $185 million of capital spending. The company expects a roughly $35 million customer deposit, previous financing, and more equipment financing to support a fourth-quarter deployment. HIVE calls the unnamed customer investment-grade.

Jordi Visser's latest video gets to the real constraint. Compute demand can scale almost instantly. Chips, substations, data centers, cooling systems, and financing cannot. The IEA expects global data-center electricity demand to more than double by 2030.

Miners already understand the ugly physical work. Now they have to prove they can finance and execute it.

Passport Prime's Beta Fixes Bitcoin-Signing and Multisig Validation Flaws

Foundation released KeyOS 1.4.0-beta1 for Passport Prime on Sunday. The notes describe flaws involving malicious PSBT data, witness-UTXO trust, and duplicate multisig cosigner keys. Foundation does not say the bugs were exploited.

Zach Herbert and I spent nearly 90 minutes talking about Passport Prime in May. He described it as a personal security platform that reaches beyond the usual hardware-wallet box. That bigger ambition raises the bar for transaction parsing, permissions, app isolation, updates, and recovery.

The beta adds permission-controlled app sideloading, Unchained and Casa multisig exports, Bitcoin Safe and Coconut connections, and PIN confirmation before revealing a seed. It remains beta firmware. Read the notes, preserve your backups, and test it before putting meaningful funds through it.

Markets Lowered the Near-Term Fed Bar. BofA Still Expects 75 Basis Points This Year.

Bank of America's privately distributed August 17 research note says softer July employment and inflation data reduced expectations for a September rate increase. BofA still forecasts 75 basis points of increases by year-end 2026. That forecast belongs to the bank, not the Federal Reserve.

The July FOMC minutes cover a meeting held before the softer data arrived. They may tell us how many officials were open to tightening at the time. They cannot tell us how those officials read the economy today.

BofA may be right, but one hot inflation print can mangle this setup. Higher yields and a stronger dollar would hit liquidity first. Washington would then have to explain how a government approaching $40 trillion of debt plans to keep tightening.

⚡ FREEDOM TECH CORNER

Bitcoin's Freedom Tech Stack Had a Productive Weekend

A useful batch of privacy, wallet, ecash, and mining software landed over the weekend.

RoboSats 0.8.6-alpha adds private Nostr chat, encrypted image uploads, warnings for orders carrying bonds below the default 3%, configurable Nostr hosting, and several security and reliability updates. It also removes three coordinators from the default set without explaining why. RoboSats remains alpha software, and traders still have to judge coordinator and counterparty risk.

AQUA Wallet 0.5.2 requires TLS and domain verification for custom Electrum connections, removes copying from the recovery SeedQR screen, cleans up logging, and shows the swap provider in Lightning support details. The notes mention security updates without identifying an exploited vulnerability.

Cashu's developer stack shipped two releases. CDK 0.18.0-rc.0 moves mint configuration into the database, adds validation and rollback, improves cross-mint transfers, and adds active-active signer support. Mint operators have to migrate their configuration before starting the release candidate. Cashu-TS 4.9.0 allows a paid but expired quote to be minted and repairs cached keysets after a mint rotates keys.

ESP-Miner 2.15.0-rc1 embeds AxeOS in the main binary, adds local-network discovery, improves Stratum V2 visibility and authentication, adds solar-oriented voltage support and Bluetooth Low Energy, and fixes multiple crashes, memory problems, and race conditions. It is still a release candidate.

Running this software still means choosing who you trust. RoboSats traders pick coordinators and counterparties. Cashu users pick mints. Wallet and miner operators verify releases, preserve backups, and test upgrades. That work comes with the territory when you choose software designed to reduce your reliance on banks and platforms.

SECURITY UPDATE

The Rust bip322 crate fixed an ownership-proof forgery bug affecting P2WPKH and P2SH-P2WPKH address proofs. Version 0.0.11 contains the fix, and vulnerable versions were yanked. Taproot address proofs were unaffected.

Developers using the library should upgrade and review any ownership proofs accepted through affected versions. The bug concerns signed proofs of address ownership. It does not let an attacker spend bitcoin from the affected address.

DATA SNAPSHOT

As of August 17, 2026, approximately 4:07 p.m. ET

Sources: Kraken for spot price; mempool.space for block, fee, hashrate, and difficulty data; TFTC Bitcoin ETF Flows for ETF data through Aug. 14.

See you tomorrow. Nothing here is investment advice. Do your own research.

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