Today Washington offered to release Iran's frozen funds in return for concrete nuclear steps, U.S. officials told Axios. The same morning, Tether announced it has frozen about $550 million in Iran-linked USD₮ this year. Two headlines. One lesson, and it isn't about Iran. In 2023, $6 billion of Iran's oil money was unlocked as part of a prisoner swap. That October, after the Hamas attack, the U.S. and Qatar agreed to hold it back. Frozen, unfrozen, frozen again. A balance someone else can freeze isn't yours. It's a bargaining chip, and it belongs to whoever holds the switch. A treasury, a bank, a stablecoin issuer. Bitcoin in your own wallet is the one balance nobody can put on the negotiating table.

HODL is the greatest meme in bitcoin history. It got us through 80% drawdowns. It kept the network alive when nobody else would hold it. It might also be what's holding bitcoin back now. Tomorrow on The Deep Dive, @thekylehuber makes the case. He's spent bitcoin around the world and filmed the people living on it, from Kenya to Bulgaria. His line: bitcoin doesn't need more spectators, it needs participants. Come ready to have your HODL conviction stress-tested. Tuesday (tomorrow), 2 PM ET. Link below.

Even nation states can't use the gold they supposedly own. Venezuela 'owns' 31 tonnes of gold. For almost eight years it couldn't have it. The gold sat in the Bank of England while London's courts decided who the owner was. Today the FT reports it's moving to the New York Fed. Under the deal, Venezuela still can't sell it. It can borrow against it. A country with an army, a central bank and a seat at the UN needed two governments' permission to touch its own gold, and got a loan instead. Bitcoin collapses ownership and possession into one thing. Whoever holds the key has the coins, and there's no appeal.

Your Bitcoin IRA Is Not a Get-Out-of-Jail-Free Card https://t.co/Bo3VtLwfis

Tuesday the Senate voted 49 to 50 on the rules for the companies that hold people's coins. The bill stalled. By Thursday the CFTC had reportedly sent its own rulebook to the White House for review. In Washington a no vote doesn't stop the rules. It changes who writes them. Bitcoin's rules were published in 2008 and have never needed a vote, a chairman or a review. You can read them tonight.

At 11:20 this morning the Governor of the Bank of Canada speaks in Halifax. On September 16 the Bank wrote that Canadians "can continue to count on price stability." Five days earlier the Bank's own researchers published a table. In a shock-prone world like the one they say we're in, the odds that core inflation runs above 3% more than triple, from 1.1% to 3.7%, and it stays there five quarters instead of three. The promise and the probability were published by the same building, a week apart. Your dollar doesn't get to count on the promise. Only the probability.

On August 15, 1971, a Sunday night, the President of the United States went on television and told you what your money was going to be from now on. "I have directed Secretary Connally to suspend temporarily the convertibility of the dollar into gold." Then, to the people watching: "your dollar will be worth just as much tomorrow as it is today." Temporarily has lasted 55 years and one month. Nobody voted on it. Gold was $35 an ounce that night. Bitcoin was 38 years away. Since that speech the dollar has lost roughly 88 cents of every dollar of purchasing power. The people who wrote the speech called that "laying to rest the bugaboo of what is called devaluation." That sentence is in the transcript too. Every fiat currency you can hold has a sentence like this somewhere in its past: a night when a man in an office decided what it was, and a promise that you wouldn't notice. Bitcoin's supply schedule has no office, no man, and no night. It has a number, and you can check it yourself.

what was the moment you decided to take your bitcoin off the exchange for the first time?

Julian Assange is back on twitter... I mean X. Here's the part of his story that belongs to anyone holding bitcoin. December 2010. WikiLeaks had just published a quarter of a million U.S. diplomatic cables, and Washington was furious. So the money got cut off. Not by a judge. By the payment companies. Over the next two weeks PayPal, MasterCard, Visa and Bank of America each announced they would no longer process donations to WikiLeaks. No charge had been filed against the publisher. No court had ordered anything. A senator made some phone calls, the companies pointed at their terms of service, and a publisher's income disappeared in 14 days. Someone on a forum suggested WikiLeaks take bitcoin instead. Bitcoin's creator said no. On December 11, 2010, Satoshi Nakamoto wrote: "WikiLeaks has kicked the hornet's nest, and the swarm is headed towards us." Within days he stopped posting in public. He never came back. WikiLeaks started taking bitcoin in 2011 anyway. In 2017 @JulianAssange thanked the U.S. government for the blockade: it had "caused us to invest in Bitcoin -- with > 50000% return." The swarm came. The network is still here. The companies that flipped the switch on a publisher can flip it on you, and they don't need a judge to do it. The one payment rail that never had a switch is the one Satoshi was afraid to test.

Warren Buffett stepped down as Berkshire chairman this morning. I'll be honest: I barely know the man. I know he called Bitcoin "rat poison squared" in 2018, and that was about it. Give him his due. Sixty-one years, one company, and a letter today about "owners who thought in decades rather than quarters." That's a nod to low time preference and he's right about that. He played the game in front of him better than anyone alive. But look at the game. Cheap credit, a Fed backstop, a dollar that shrank for everyone holding it and rewarded everyone holding assets. He didn't build that. He was very good at living inside it. Bitcoin was written to fix the thing his fortune sat on. Of course it looked like poison to him because it would turn the mechanism that made him his fortune on its head. Respect for the player, but we're here to end the game. - Zach

What She Couldn't Freeze: Chrystia Freeland, the Rhodes Trust and the Money the State Couldn't Reach