Hey all,

I’m Rizzo, the Bitcoin Historian. For more than a decade, I’ve been documenting Bitcoin’s evolution – the people, ideas, companies, and moments that defined it.

I spend every day tracking what’s shaping Bitcoin.

This week: ⚡ A global bank just called the Bitcoin bottom and $500K by 2030 ⚡ Today's the last chance for the Clarity Act before recess ⚡ Plus, self-custody's founding myth just collapsed.

There's a specific shock that comes from watching a community's founding myth shatter in real time. That's what happened this week, and it's worth naming plainly.

When the dust settles, Bitcoiners will have to reckon with something they never thought possible: the infrastructure failure that finally ended this four-year cycle happened on their own watch, inside the system they trusted most.

The Coldcard exploit isn't just an infrastructure failure. It's a verifiable, undeniable puncture in the core story Bitcoiners have told themselves for over a decade — that Bitcoin held in self-custody isn't a speculative financial product.

Not risky the way altcoins are risky, or exchanges are risky, or trading is risky. Safe, full stop, because you and only you control the keys.

That belief has done a lot of quiet work in Bitcoin culture. We’ve tried (myself included) to draw a hard moral line between ourselves and everyone else — the shitcoiners, the traditional finance crowd, the speculators. The line was: we're not speculating, we're storing. We're not gambling, we're saving.

The Coldcard aftermath makes that line much harder to draw.

We need to be honest about what happened. A plausible hypothesis I can’t shake was that self-custody was simply marketed to people who weren't technically equipped to use it safely. That's a hard sentence to sit with if you've spent years building a company and a social circle around the opposite claim.

I've been in this industry for 13 years. I've been open about using an assisted, collaborative multi-sig setup with Casa, and open about why: I'm not a technical person, and my first Bitcoin transactions were terrifying. There's a massive difference between understanding the theory and executing it correctly under pressure, with real money on the line. I've had to rotate my multi-sig setup more than once, and every time, I've been grateful I could just call the experts at Casa instead of doing it alone.

Yet, I’ve also worked with hardware wallets and encouraged others to use the tools. I’ll certainly think more about whether it’s right to do so in the future, especially for some of the sums we’ve seen stolen from Coldcard devices.

Where does this leave things? Probably in an uncomfortable but necessary place — an honest conversation about what kinds of custody actually match where real users are, rather than where ideology insists they should be.

None of this touches Bitcoin's scarcity or its long-term thesis. What it touches is the story the community told about itself. That story just took a body blow, and the honest answer to what comes next is: we don't know.

There's a specific kind of signal that matters more than any headline. It's when the people who spent their entire careers being the voice of doubt suddenly stop doubting.

That's the moment Ethan Heilman points to as the real reason his own thinking on quantum computing shifted — and it's the keystone moment of the second episode of the Quantum Bitcoin Countdown, Rizzo's new podcast breaking down the science.

What changed wasn't a single dramatic announcement. It was the slow, cumulative disappearance of theoretical obstacles that researchers once assumed might make a cryptographically relevant quantum computer — one actually powerful enough to threaten Bitcoin's signatures — permanently out of reach.

"There was a lot of hurdles and theories about whether they could be made powerful enough," Heilman explains. "And now it seems like most of the hurdles have been cleared and it's just a question of scaling them up."

That's the first shift: the question moved from can this be built at all to how big can we build it, how fast. That's a fundamentally different kind of problem — an engineering and resourcing problem, not an open scientific mystery.

The second shift is the one Heilman keeps coming back to, and it's the more persuasive of the two. Update your own mental model on quantum by listening to our full interview.

Last year's Strive-Semler acquisition didn't get announced from a podium. Two people ended up in the same room, had a conversation, and that was it.

BitcoinTreasuries.net built this conference around that idea. 300 seats. Closed door. No press badges, just the CFOs, treasurers, and allocators who are actually doing these deals, in one room with the banks and custodians they need to talk to.

This September 28 in New York.

Adam Back and Grant Cardone are speaking. I'll be there too.

But if last year's deal is any indication, the one that matters won't happen on stage.

Kalshi now lets you trade crypto perpetuals — long or short, no expiration date, straight from a CFTC-regulated, dollar-denominated platform. If you've been trading perps on some offshore exchange you've never fully trusted, this is worth a look.

Sign up today and you'll get a $25 bonus just for getting started. Head to kalshi.com/p/bitcoinhistory to check it out.

WILL THE CLARITY ACT SUCCEED IN AMERICA?

Read the Hard News. Share the Hype.

Today is technically the deadline. Senate rules require a cloture petition to be filed by Wednesday for any shot at a Friday procedural vote — the last one before the chamber leaves for its August 10 recess. Miss it, and the Clarity Act's realistic path pushes into a September session competing with government funding fights and a midterm calendar that rewards inaction over compromise.

Anthony Scaramucci said yesterday he expects cloture to advance today, teeing up a final vote and a trip to President Trump's desk. Meanwhile, more than a million calls have hit Senate offices in the past week alone.

BIG CORPORATES ARE STILL BUYING

Read the Hard News. Share the Hype.

Coinbase added 819 more bitcoin in the second quarter, taking its treasury to roughly 17,300 BTC worth almost $1.2 billion. Buying didn't stop in the middle of one of the worst bear stretches on record.

Vanguard, the largest fund manager in the country, quietly increased its exposure to Strategy by another $50 million, pushing its combined MSTR position near $1 billion — accumulated in the same week Michael Saylor was busy defending his own company's bitcoin sale. SpaceX told the same story from a different angle. In its first earnings report as a public company, it disclosed it didn't sell a single coin.

Geoff Kendrick runs digital assets research at Standard Chartered, and he just made the boldest institutional call of the cycle. He says $58-59K was almost certainly the bottom. Bitcoin gets back to $100K by December.

Check out the full conversation to get Kendrick's take on Michael Saylor's "whatever it takes" problem, and why he thinks the Clarity Act might not matter as much as everyone assumes.