Two more episodes this week worth your time. One goes deeper on the Coldcard story with the person tracking it more rigorously than anyone else. The other zooms all the way out and reminds us why we're here.
After weeks of heavy news, I needed to talk to someone who could help me zoom out. That’s exactly what this conversation did.
The centerpiece is an idea Mark has been developing for years. He calls it “retiring with Bitcoin.” A clip of him explaining it from our last episode went viral, and he’s been hearing from people ever since.
Bitcoin is down more than 50% from its all-time high, so the question everyone is asking him now is whether the strategy still works.
His answer is yes.
Volatility isn’t the risk, he told me. Being a forced seller during volatility is the risk. There’s a huge difference. He shared a story from his twenties to make the point. He built a building. Had an $11 million offer in hand. Thought it was worth $12 million, so he held out. Then 2008 hit and the bank forced a sale at $4 million. The asset wasn’t the problem. The capital structure was. Everything Mark does with Bitcoin now is built around never being in that spot again — low loan-to-value ratios, multiple layers of liquidity, and letting the asset appreciate over years, not quarters.
He also broke down the debt-based monetary system in language anyone can follow. Since 1971, money has been created through debt. That means people who own assets have access to cheap capital that wage earners simply don’t. Mark’s argument is that Bitcoin is the first asset in modern history that lets anyone in the world cross from the wage-earner column to the asset-owner column, starting with a single dollar. That’s the cheat code. Not because it’s easy. Because the return profile is unlike anything else available to ordinary people.
We got into self-custody too, which felt especially relevant given everything happening with Coldcard right now. Mark made a point I really liked. He said the Bitcoin community can sometimes fall into purity tests that actually increase risk rather than reduce it. He runs multiple hardware wallets. He keeps some Bitcoin with regulated custodians. And he doesn’t apologize for any of it. Freedom means choosing your own approach.
On the broader market, Mark doesn’t see a 2008-style crash coming. His view is that the government simply can’t afford one. Every crash since then has been shorter and shallower because intervention arrives faster. He thinks liquidity is quietly improving and that by the end of this summer the setup starts to favor Bitcoin again.
On sentiment — which multiple guests this week have called the worst they’ve ever seen — Mark pushed back. He’s been through 2018, 2020, 2022. It’s always different reasons. It’s always equally terrible. And it always ends.
“There’s never been a period where you could have bought Bitcoin and been down for years,” he said. Your timeframe should be at least four years. Act accordingly.
If you needed a reset this week, this is the one.
If you want the clearest, most data-driven account of what’s happening with the Coldcard exploit, Alex Thorn is your person.
He’s the head of firm-wide research at Galaxy Digital. Starting from day two of the attacks on July 31st, he’s been running stolen funds through his own analytics stack, encouraging victims to come forward, and turning their reports into forensic intelligence he’s sharing with the FBI, the Treasury Department, exchanges, and blockchain monitoring firms.
Here’s where things stand as of August 10th, when we recorded. Alex has confirmed with high confidence that at least 8,300 addresses have been hit. That’s 1,720 Bitcoin, or roughly $112 million. He believes the number may climb toward 2,100 Bitcoin as more patterns get corroborated. As with any big compromise, the true scale is going to take time to fully emerge.
What makes this one so devastating is that the stolen funds didn’t start in one centralized place. They started in hundreds of individual wallets belonging to people who had done everything right. The average dormancy of the stolen coins is about four years. These weren’t speculators. They weren’t chasing yield. They were quiet, long-term savers — some of whom had air-gapped their devices and never connected to the internet — and they still got hit.
The conversation went to some really important places beyond just the numbers.
On the chance of recovery, there’s cautious optimism in at least one thread. Block Inc. engineers identified that the wave one attacker seems to have used a paid account at a blockchain data provider to query the addresses they ultimately targeted. That’s a real lead. A footprint in the conventional financial system that investigators can follow.
Alex also gave a full update on the Bitcoin Red Team. It’s a volunteer group of about 25 researchers led by Rob Hamilton of AnchorWatch, Calle, James O’Beirne and others, and they’ve been running AI models against open-source Bitcoin projects since the hack. They’ve now looked at over 500 code repositories. One headline finding I want to make sure lands: the signature mathematics underlying all of Bitcoin came back clean after dozens of hours of trying to break it. There is no evidence of anything wrong with Bitcoin itself.
A few things every Bitcoiner should know:
If you have a vulnerable device — any Coldcard model, seed generated between March 2021 and the patch, without manually introduced entropy like dice rolls — move your funds ASAP.
If you were a victim, reach out to Alex at @IntangibleCoins on X. You don’t need to give personal information. Include your affected addresses in the first message and he’ll send back a forensic report you can use when filing with the FBI’s IC3.
Alex’s last word to victims: you did nothing wrong. Don’t be ashamed. File your report. It’s the only path to any possibility of recovery.
Share this interview with anyone who may have purchased Coldcard products.
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