Café Bitcoin | Sticking the Landing, Answering the Maximalism Eulogy, and One Money in a Free Market | Day 34 of 50

Bitcoin pushed into the high $70,000s and held there. Friday closed near $78,300 and the room watched it cross $79,900 live. Cory's read on why it stuck: the move was spot driven, not leveraged. The ETFs took in $1.92 billion last week per Farside, the strongest week since October 2025. BlackRock accounted for $1.3 billion of it, across five consecutive positive days. Treasury may tap roughly $950 billion from its general account to buy back long bonds. Cory walked through selling short bills to buy the long end, and read it as pressure on traders to stop selling. Answering Nic Carter's essay, Cory rejected the frame before the argument, then offered a narrower definition in its place. Not that other assets disappear. That Bitcoin is the sole uniquely credible form of digital monetary scarcity, settled at inception. Nat offered the cleanest reframe of the hour. You are either a Bitcoin maximalist or a fiat maximalist. Suze added the distinguishing test: no issuer, no CEO, no company, a fixed supply. The real disagreement was dollar tokens on Bitcoin rails. Nat argued it puts people one step from Bitcoin. Cory argued it perpetuates dollars using Bitcoin to do it, and invites government attention. Cory's read on the GENIUS Act: it built a dollar machine. A regulated dollar token can now appear simply as USD inside banking and payment apps, turning fintechs into marketers of dollars at scale. Store of value comes first, and the timeline is long. Cory posted a 2021 chart of his own to argue the framing held up and the timing did not. One guest made the case for AI agents driving payments. Suze's sharpest point was regulatory. The UK's Financial Conduct Authority applies one "same risk, same regulation" standard across the board, so its own rules cannot distinguish Bitcoin from a token spun up in thirty seconds. The hosts closed against trading. Conviction through the cycle rather than timing it, and Brady flagged the 200-week moving average near $64,000 as the level Bitcoin bounced from this summer.