From Yesterday's Simply Bitcoin Live | Episode 1605
The Numbers
Today's bounce traces back to a weaker-than-expected jobs report, the kind of macro miss that's starting to read as bullish for Bitcoin instead of bearish.
The News
Bitcoin shorts got liquidated for $172 million in the last 24 hours as price touched $87,000 this morning before sellers dragged it back down to $85,000. CoinDesk's James Van Straten called the move hours ahead of time: if the jobs report came in soft, Bitcoin goes to the low to mid $90,000s next week. The jobs report came in soft. He confirmed the call a few hours later.
Glassnode's on-chain read explains the mechanics. The sell wall sitting at $85,000 got partially filled and partially pulled, leaving almost nothing in the way until the next resistance cluster at $87,000, which is roughly half the size of the one that just broke. CryptoQuant adds that Bitcoin's MVRV Z-Score just cleared its 365-day moving average, a level that has marked real momentum shifts before.
The last wall folded and vanished before anyone could test it. If $87,000 goes the same way, $90,000 stops being a prediction.
The Clarity Act is dead in Congress, no vote, no bill. But the SEC proposed new custody rules for institutions this week, and the CFTC is working on parallel rules of its own. Regulatory clarity is arriving through agency action instead of legislation.
That is a strange kind of win. It means the rules Bitcoin needed to attract institutional money are showing up regardless of whether Congress ever agrees on a bill, and it means the next fight over crypto regulation happens at the SEC and CFTC, not on the House floor.
A bill can die in Congress and the policy can still happen. That is the real story here.
Eleven of the last fourteen Octobers closed green, and the average October return is 18.7%. Apply that from here and Bitcoin is near $105,000 by the end of the month. The median October return gets you closer to $100,000.
Q4 is where the seasonality argument gets aggressive. The average Q4 return is 71%, which would put Bitcoin near $145,000 by year end. The median Q4 return is closer to 26%, landing in the $107,000 to $110,000 range. None of this is a forecast. It is just what the calendar has done before.
The Culture
Guest SegmentClay Garrett, Bitkey's lead at Block, walked through why the wallet never hands you an exportable seed phrase. Bitkey is a 2-of-3 multisig: one key lives in the phone's hardware-backed secure enclave, one lives on the physical hardware device, and one lives on Block's server. None of those keys ever get written down on paper, because nothing ever gets exported in the first place.
Garrett's answer to "what if Block disappears" is an emergency exit kit generated at setup. It is a PDF, stored locally and in the cloud, that links to an open-source Android app and an encrypted version of the user's app key. Tap the unlocked hardware to the phone and the funds move, with or without Block in business.
He also addressed the standing complaint that Block can see a customer's balance. Bitkey built something called chain code delegation, formalized as BIP-89, that lets a co-signer complete a signature without ever learning the account's chain code. Block says it only sees a transaction when it is actually co-signing, or during a full recovery sweep.
The Coldcard exploit was supposed to be bad press for hardware wallets. For Bitkey, it turned into the best pitch the team never had to write.
A $172 million short squeeze pushes Bitcoin toward $87,000 while regulators route around a dead bill in Congress. Then Bitkey's lead engineer explains what actually happens to your coins if Block disappears tomorrow.
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