Hey guys! Hope your week has been kind and that you have some nice plans going into the weekend.
It was a noisy seven days but some unique insights to unpack. Let's dig in.
1. Strategy passes BlackRock as the single largest Bitcoin holder
Strategy (formerly MicroStrategy) bought 34,164 BTC for roughly $2.54 billion between April 13 and April 19, at an average price of $74,395. It was the firm's largest weekly accumulation since November 2024 and pushed their total holdings to 815,061 BTC, narrowly overtaking BlackRock's IBIT, which holds around 802,823 BTC.
It's a symbolic moment because it represents a corporate treasury built on leveraged convertible debt that is now, for the first time, a bigger BTC whale than the world's largest asset manager. However, it concentrates market risk in a single balance sheet, which is a dynamic worth watching if the MSTR premium ever cracks.
2. Pentagon warns Hormuz minefield could take six months to clear
In a classified briefing to U.S. lawmakers this week, the Pentagon said clearing mines from the Strait of Hormuz could take at least six months and only after hostilities with Iran end.
Oil jumped on the news, tightening financial conditions and reviving inflation worries right as Bitcoin was probing $80,000 and caused BTC to slide toward $75,000 by mid-week. This is a reminder that Bitcoin, for now, still trades like a risk asset when the oil-to-CPI pipeline lights up. It also sharpens the case for the Fed sitting on its hands at next week's meeting and not lowering interest rates.
3. Bitcoin Core 31.0 ships with cluster mempool.
Bitcoin Core 31.0 shipped on April 21. For those unaware of what Bitcoin Core is, it is the software the network's nodes actually run. The most important part of this release is the new "cluster mempool".
The "mempool" is Bitcoin's waiting room for transactions that haven't been confirmed yet. The new "cluster mempool" is a smarter way to organize that waiting room, so miners can pick the most profitable transactions more easily and your wallet can give you better fee estimates (fewer stuck transactions, fewer overpaid fees). The release also lets you broadcast transactions privately over Tor so your IP never touches the public internet. Nothing changes for the average holder today, but under the hood it's one of the most significant plumbing upgrades in years.
4. Public Bitcoin miners are becoming AI companies
Bloomberg reported this week on something that's been building for a while. Several of the biggest public miners, names like TeraWulf, IREN, Cipher, and Hut 8, have essentially stopped being Bitcoin businesses. They still run hashrate, but the bulk of their new revenue now comes from renting their power-and-data-center footprint to AI firms hungry for compute.
The miner that used to be a pure play on Bitcoin is becoming a landlord to the AI boom. The interesting second-order effect plays out in two stages. Right now, public miners are selling aggressively, more BTC in Q1 2026 than in all of 2025 combined, because building out AI data centers is expensive and the coins on their balance sheets are the easiest capex to tap. This creates near-term sell pressure. But once those AI contracts are live and generating cash, the structural picture flips: miners historically had to sell almost everything they produced just to cover energy bills, and that steady, forced drip of new supply was one of the most reliable sources of sell pressure in the market. In an AI-subsidized world, they don't need to. The network's security budget gets increasingly paid for by GPUs renting to Google and Anthropic, and the Bitcoin those miners produce can just sit on the balance sheet.
Ride out the near-term selling and the long-run setup is quietly bullish. But it also raises a question worth sitting with: if the biggest miners care more about AI revenue than BTC price, who are they really working for?
5. Bitcoin Weekly Concept: Time Preference
You can't talk about Bitcoin for long without running into the phrase "time preference." It comes from Austrian economics, and it means how much you prefer something now versus later.
High time preference is the cookie tonight. Low time preference is the plan that makes you richer, healthier, or freer in ten years. Sound money lowers your time preference because the money you set aside holds its value, so saving actually works, and the future becomes something you can plan for.
Inflationary money does the opposite: it punishes patience, rewards consumption, and quietly nudges everyone toward shorter horizons. This is why Bitcoiners keep coming back to the idea. It's not just about the price chart. It's about the kind of person you become when you're no longer forced to race against the debasement of your own savings. Stack, don't sprint.
Stay humble, stack sats.
— Stephan