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I sent issue seventy-nine of The Bitcoin Act on Tuesday. The first one went out about nine months ago, twice a week since then, every Tuesday and every Sunday, without a missed send. In that time, the list has grown. It has grown slowly, and I would rather be accurate about that than flattering.
Slowly means what it sounds like. There has been no week where the number jumped, and I sat watching it climb. Most weeks it moves by an amount that would look like a rounding error to anyone running a publication for a living. I have written single posts on Reddit that were seen by more people in an afternoon than have ever subscribed to this newsletter. That comparison used to sit badly with me. It sits fine now, and the reason is the part of this project I did not plan for.
The people who did subscribe actually read it.
I know this because they answer. The Sovereignty Move of the Week, the one practical thing I publish every Tuesday, comes out of the inbox rather than out of my head. Readers send me the question, and often they send the statute along with it, already located, already highlighted. When I get a detail wrong, someone tells me within the day, politely and with a citation.
A bigger list would not have given me that. Attention gathered quickly tends to behave the way cheap things behave. It arrives without much intention, and it leaves the same way. What I have instead is a few hundred people who care whether a freeze order requires a warrant, and who will tell me when I have described one incorrectly. I would not trade that for a spike on a chart, and I have had enough time to consider the offer seriously.
The second thing I want to put on the record is that I love writing this.
That is not a line I am adding to soften the growth numbers. The work itself is the good part. Most of it is reading primary sources, which sounds tedious and is not. It is bill text, consultation papers, dockets, the occasional committee recording that nobody has bothered to sit through. There is a particular moment I look forward to every week, which is when the text of a bill turns out to say something narrower or stranger than every headline written about it. California just handed the Governor a bill that lets police freeze exchange-held coins for ten days without a warrant. The headline version of that story is a sentence. The version that matters is the mechanism, and the mechanism is only visible in the text.
Taking forty pages of statutory language and turning it into two paragraphs that a person can actually act on is a craft. I spent years learning to read that kind of language, and it turns out to be the most useful thing I own. Doing it well is satisfying in the same plain way that building anything properly is satisfying. I do not have to push myself to open the file on Sunday morning. It is one of the hours of the week I protect from everything else.
None of this would hold together if I were not serious about Bitcoin, and I am.
Sound money changes how a person prices time. If you hold an asset you genuinely expect to be worth more in a decade, you stop optimizing for the next quarter, because the next quarter stops being where your life is decided. Legal exposure accumulates on the same schedule as savings. The rule written into law this September is the rule that determines, in 2035, whether the coins you hold are reachable, taxable, or freezable by someone who sends an email to a custodian. Almost nobody is reading those rules as they are drafted. Somebody should, continuously, and write down what they find.
Sunday's issue is roughly half written. There is a cloture vote on September 15 that most people will encounter as a headline, and I would like the version my readers get to be the one that explains exactly what remains true about their coins if it fails.
Satoshi's Lawyer Founder, The Bitcoin Act
Slowly means what it sounds like. There has been no week where the number jumped, and I sat watching it climb. Most weeks it moves by an amount that would look like a rounding error to anyone running a publication for a living. I have written single posts on Reddit that were seen by more people in an afternoon than have ever subscribed to this newsletter. That comparison used to sit badly with me. It sits fine now, and the reason is the part of this project I did not plan for.
The people who did subscribe actually read it.
I know this because they answer. The Sovereignty Move of the Week, the one practical thing I publish every Tuesday, comes out of the inbox rather than out of my head. Readers send me the question, and often they send the statute along with it, already located, already highlighted. When I get a detail wrong, someone tells me within the day, politely and with a citation.
A bigger list would not have given me that. Attention gathered quickly tends to behave the way cheap things behave. It arrives without much intention, and it leaves the same way. What I have instead is a few hundred people who care whether a freeze order requires a warrant, and who will tell me when I have described one incorrectly. I would not trade that for a spike on a chart, and I have had enough time to consider the offer seriously.
The second thing I want to put on the record is that I love writing this.
That is not a line I am adding to soften the growth numbers. The work itself is the good part. Most of it is reading primary sources, which sounds tedious and is not. It is bill text, consultation papers, dockets, the occasional committee recording that nobody has bothered to sit through. There is a particular moment I look forward to every week, which is when the text of a bill turns out to say something narrower or stranger than every headline written about it. California just handed the Governor a bill that lets police freeze exchange-held coins for ten days without a warrant. The headline version of that story is a sentence. The version that matters is the mechanism, and the mechanism is only visible in the text.
Taking forty pages of statutory language and turning it into two paragraphs that a person can actually act on is a craft. I spent years learning to read that kind of language, and it turns out to be the most useful thing I own. Doing it well is satisfying in the same plain way that building anything properly is satisfying. I do not have to push myself to open the file on Sunday morning. It is one of the hours of the week I protect from everything else.
None of this would hold together if I were not serious about Bitcoin, and I am.
Sound money changes how a person prices time. If you hold an asset you genuinely expect to be worth more in a decade, you stop optimizing for the next quarter, because the next quarter stops being where your life is decided. Legal exposure accumulates on the same schedule as savings. The rule written into law this September is the rule that determines, in 2035, whether the coins you hold are reachable, taxable, or freezable by someone who sends an email to a custodian. Almost nobody is reading those rules as they are drafted. Somebody should, continuously, and write down what they find.
Sunday's issue is roughly half written. There is a cloture vote on September 15 that most people will encounter as a headline, and I would like the version my readers get to be the one that explains exactly what remains true about their coins if it fails.
Satoshi's Lawyer Founder, The Bitcoin Act