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Bitcoin Brief

Sup, freaks.

The misallocation of capital enabled by unfettered money printing is a crime against humanity. That is not hyperbole. It is the central thesis of one of the most important books on money ever written. And it is the reason Bitcoin exists. Fix the money, fix the world.

Lead Story

The Moral Case for Bitcoin

In 2008, the economist Jorg Guido Hulsmann published The Ethics of Money Production. His thesis was simple and devastating: the production of fiat money is not merely bad economic policy. It is a moral crime. The misallocation of capital enabled by unfettered money printing is a crime against humanity.

That same year, a pseudonymous programmer named Satoshi Nakamoto published a nine-page whitepaper describing a peer-to-peer electronic cash system. They never communicated. But Hulsmann correctly identified the rot at the center of the global monetary system. Satoshi invented the solution that would cure that rot.

Hulsmann traced the history of money from its natural origins in commodity exchange through its capture by governments. His conclusion: paper money has never emerged voluntarily on a free market. Not once in human history. It has always been imposed through coercion. First, governments establish a monopoly on which metals can be used as money. Then they grant legal-tender status to a privileged bank's notes. Then they authorize that bank to suspend payments. And just like that, the notes that used to represent real money become money themselves. Irredeemable paper backed by nothing but government decree.

On page 108, he highlighted something that is very relevant today: "It takes just a drop of ink to add one or two zeros to a $100 bill. Here is the great difference between the production of paper money and the production of natural monies such as gold and silver. Miners cannot increase their production ad libitum."

Lo and behold, in 2026 the Trump administration is floating H.R. 1761, the Donald J. Trump $250 Bill Act. A new denomination. A drop of ink. Hulsmann warned about exactly this eighteen years ago. The creation of higher denominations is not commemorative. It is an acknowledgment that existing denominations are losing their purchasing power so fast that larger ones are needed. It is the government telling you, without saying it directly, that your dollars are worth less than they used to be.

The people who are most negatively affected by money printing have been psyop'd into believing that the solution to their problems is MORE government spending and MORE taxation. They have been convinced that the very institution responsible for their declining purchasing power, their inability to afford a home, their shrinking real wages, is also the one that will save them. Hulsmann called this the great deception of fiat money. It allows the government to tap the property of its citizens without having obtained their consent. Aristotle and Nicole Oresme, writing centuries apart, both called this tyranny.

The damage runs deeper than economics. Hulsmann's most powerful chapter traces the cultural and spiritual legacy of fiat inflation. It centralizes government and crushes civil society. It extends wars by allowing governments to bypass fiscal resistance. World War I's unprecedented destruction was financed by the printing press and likely prolonged by years because of it. It forces everyone into debt and financial market dependency. It makes society materialistic. It weakens family bonds. It destroys the family as what Hulsmann calls "the producer of morals."

His proposed solution, published in 2008, reads like a description of Bitcoin before Bitcoin existed. Abolish legal-tender laws. Let people freely choose what money to use. Abolish monopoly privileges for central banks. Allow free competition in money production. Return to what he called "natural money," money that cannot be inflated at will because it is costly to produce. He wrote: "Mankind is free to return at any time to the natural production of money."

And that is exactly what happened. Bitcoin is a monetary system with a native currency that cannot be printed ex nihilo. Twenty-one million coins. No more. No central bank can manipulate it. No institution can seize it without the private keys. No government can inflate it away. The energy expenditure of proof-of-work is the digital equivalent of the mining Hulsmann described. The cost that provides built-in insurance against arbitrary inflation.

The government is not your friend. It is a material impediment to human flourishing. And it derives most of its power from two things: money printing and the debt expansion that money printing enables. Take away the ability to print money and you take away the ability to wage endless wars without popular consent. You take away the ability to bail out banks that made reckless bets. You take away the ability to run deficits that future generations will be forced to repay.

This is what Bitcoin fixes. Not price charts. Not portfolio allocation. The fundamental moral rot at the center of the global financial system. Hulsmann correctly identified the problem. Satoshi launched the distributed network that provides the solution. And the solution is available to anyone with an internet connection and the conviction to use it. Fix the money, fix the world.

Signal

On-Chain

STH Realizing Largest Losses on Record. Most Oversold Since 2018.

Why it matters: The on-chain picture confirms maximum pessimism while fundamentals strengthen.

Short-term holders are realizing their largest losses on record. Bitcoin is the most oversold since the 2018 collapse. Glassnode BTC Market Pulse Week 24 confirms the on-chain picture is ugly but historically, this is what bottoms look like.

Regulation

GOP Senators Urge Fed, FDIC, OCC to Revise Basel Bitcoin Rules

Why it matters: Institutional adoption doesn't stop because price drops.

Six GOP senators sent a letter to the Fed, FDIC, and OCC calling for reconsideration of the Basel framework's overly punitive risk-weighting of bitcoin. Even in a bear market, the regulatory infrastructure continues to improve. The institutional foundation is being built regardless of short-term price action.

Bitcoin Adoption

First Fannie Mae-Conforming Bitcoin-Backed Mortgage Issued

Why it matters: Bitcoin is now collateral recognized by the US housing system.

Just under a year after the FHFA initiated its exploration into bitcoin as mortgage collateral, the first Fannie Mae-conforming bitcoin-backed mortgage has been officially issued. This marks bitcoin's formal integration into the traditional housing finance system, creating a new avenue for bitcoin holders to access liquidity without selling.

Markets/AI

Apollo + Blackstone Finalize $35B Private Credit Deal for Anthropic

Why it matters: The old system is simultaneously breaking down AND funding its replacement.

Apollo and Blackstone finalized one of the largest private credit fundraisings ever: $35B structured as an SPV for AI compute infrastructure. The private credit market is bifurcating. Traditional lending is collapsing (Q2 issuance down 40%, Blackstone BCRED gating, Partners Group gating).

But mega AI deals are proceeding at unprecedented scale. Banks are choking on AI debt and pushing it into private markets. The contradiction is perfect: the system gates out retail investors while funding the infrastructure that will eventually replace it.

Banking

Auto Loan Delinquencies: The Numbers Are Being Gamed

Why it matters: When the data gets gamed, the problem is bigger than it appears.

Auto delinquency rate at 2.64% in Q1, down from 2.86% prior year. Looks like improvement. Except the numbers are being gamed, according to Bill Moreland at BankRegData.

Capital One ($85.7B) and Ally Bank ($77.4B) make up 30% of all bank auto lending and 57% of all industry delinquencies. Capital One added $714M in auto loan modifications in the past year while exploiting a 2023 rule change that lets banks report only 12-month modifications instead of cumulative.

Wells Fargo grew auto lending 29.6% in one year after the Fed lifted their asset cap. Portfolio too new to show delinquencies yet. Give it 12-18 months.

AI/Robotics

China's Unitree Will Dominate Global Robotics

Why it matters: When humanoids need real-time AI inference at scale, compute and energy demand multiplies again.

Unitree is becoming the BYD/DJI of humanoid robots. Nearly 10,000 humanoids shipped. Tripling revenue YoY on 60%+ gross margins. G1 pricing slashed from $50K+ to under $20K in some deals while maintaining 67% margins. The SemiAnalysis deep-dive shows the same pattern we've seen with DeepSeek in AI models: China iterating faster and cheaper.

Jordi Visser noted token demand estimates are "before robotics even arrive." This is the next extension of the infrastructure thesis.

AI Infrastructure

Intel's Hidden Advantage: The Only Company That Can Make Copackaged Optics Work

Why it matters: The AI bottleneck is not compute. It is packaging. Intel owns the only viable path to copackaged optics at scale.

The AI infrastructure bottleneck is not compute. It is packaging. Specifically, how you get photonic engines onto the same substrate as switch ASICs and accelerators without your yield crashing and your reliability failing.

TSMC's answer is CoWoS, where everything bolts onto one monolithic silicon interposer. It works until you hit the reticle limit, which happens at 5.5 reticles. After that, yields fall off a cliff and a single bad die sends a five-figure package to the dumpster. Every chiplet and HBM stack added to that interposer compounds the defect probability. CoWoS is thermally constrained and the entire industry knows it.

Intel's EMIB (Embedded Multi-die Interconnect Bridge) takes a fundamentally different approach. Instead of a giant interposer, it uses tiny silicon bridges that do high-density coupling locally, exactly where you need it. The result: 90-95% yield at 12 reticle-equivalent packages, compared to CoWoS crashing after 5.5. Intel has been doing silicon photonics in-house for 25 years. In 2024 they demonstrated an Optical I/O chiplet doing 2 Tbps bidirectionally at 5 pJ/bit, with the photonic chip co-packaged right against the ASIC. Already running JEDEC-grade reliability.

Analyst Jeff Pu confirmed the numbers this week: Intel's 18A process node has improved to 80% yield, with EMIB reaching 90-95% in recent weeks, a dramatic improvement that validates the packaging thesis. Arizona capacity is set to double by the end of 2028, and a major US fabless customer is already in the pipeline alongside a collaboration with Nvidia on x86 server CPUs slated for late 2028. The financial picture is catching up to the engineering: Intel Foundry Services is on track to turn profitable in the second half of 2027, with datacenter and AI revenue growing 39% year over year. Pu raised his price target to $135.

The model is the commodity now. Open-source weights compete with frontier labs at a fraction of the cost. The money is migrating to whatever part of the stack is still scarce: compute, memory, power, and the packaging that connects it all. Intel may be the most underpriced company in the AI infrastructure stack because they own the only viable path to copackaged optics at scale.

⚡ Freedom Tech Corner

Set Up a Non-Custodial Lightning Wallet This Week

The ability to send and receive bitcoin over Lightning without trusting a third party with your funds is one of the most important developments in Bitcoin's history. Two projects are leading the way.

Phoenix by ACINQ is the best non-custodial Lightning wallet for most people. It runs a real Lightning node on your phone, manages channels automatically using splicing technology so you only ever have one channel, and handles all the complexity behind the scenes. You hold your own keys. You control your own funds. No custodian sits between you and your bitcoin. If you have never used Lightning before, Phoenix is where you start.

Zeus is for users who want maximum control. It can connect to your own Lightning node at home (LND, Core Lightning, or Eclair) or run an embedded LND node directly on your phone. You manage your own channels, route your own payments, and maintain full sovereignty over your Lightning experience. If you already run a node or want the most hands-on approach to non-custodial Lightning, Zeus is the tool. Both wallets exist because Bitcoiners refused to accept the trade-off between convenience and custody. You do not have to give up your keys to use Lightning.

Data Snapshot

Bitcoin Price	$62,659
Sats per Dollar	1,595
Block Height	952,961
Hashrate	650 EH/s
Daily Fees	$186,542

MVRV Ratio	1.21 Below fair value
SOPR	0.943 Coins moving at loss
STH Realized Price	$71,847 STH underwater
NUPL	0.18 Hope zone
Supply in Profit	71.2% Most supply underwater