Hard Money Dispatch Week of 3/9/26

The 20 millionth bitcoin has been mined, leaving just 1 million more to be created. Ever.

My entire social media feed on every platform has been flooded with posts about this.

Honestly, I don’t see it as such a big deal, but it’s worth mentioning. There are only 1M BTC left to ever be mined, and it will take ~114 years to mine them.

Bitcoin’s fixed supply of 21M is what makes it the hardest money ever known. And it’s not just about the limited supply – it’s also about desirability. If something is scarce but no one wants it and it’s not hard to produce, then no one cares about it.

An example that a journalist shared recently (I don’t recall the name or publication) involved teeth. They said “my teeth are scarce, no one wants those.” Similar ideas have been repeated elsewhere. It’s a new FUD narrative, and a pretty weak one at that.

It doesn’t take any work to produce a tooth, and it has no use to anyone.

BTC requires energy and computing power to produce, and:

Obviously, this makes Bitcoin valuable. It’s also why BTC will never go to zero. Once you experience the power of having full control over your money and being your own bank, there’s no going back. And when you understand the gravity of true digital scarcity having been created for the first time, you never want to part with your BTC, and you start to see other assets as less valuable.

Even in the worst case scenarios possible, BTC will not go to zero.

If quantum computers somehow miraculously start breaking wallets, the price will tank, but not to zero.

If nuclear war breaks out, all assets will see steep declines, but BTC won’t go to zero.

If ecological disaster strikes – lakes drying up, rivers running dry, coastal cities being flooded, water and food shortages abound – BTC still won’t go to zero.

The only possible way BTC could go to zero would be if the entire internet were to be shut down worldwide forever.

So why do people always talk about BTC “going to zero?”

No one ever talks about stocks, bonds, gold, REITs, mutual funds, ETFs, real estate, or oil going to zero. Why is that?

My guess is that because many still don’t understand that bitcoin is an actual form of money backed by energy in cyberspace, they just assume it’s magic internet money backed by nothing.

All the benefits of BTC get attacked during every bear market. It’s nothing new.

And every time, these criticisms wind up being proven wrong. But that doesn’t stop them from resurfacing during the following cycle. For example, the idea of bitcoin being a non-correlated store of value has been widely “debunked,” according to many.

One of the things that first attracted me to BTC was its non-correlation with other assets. In the beginning, the bitcoin market was entirely detached from traditional financial markets.

In recent years, as the market has grown, matured, and become integrated with mainstream stock exchanges and public companies, the correlation between BTC and other assets (like stocks) has grown.

Despite this, when things really get out of hand, bitcoin still tends to show its resilient role as a hedge against uncertainty.

While stocks and gold are down since the recent Iran and US/Israel conflict began, bitcoin has seen a resurgence.

Of course, this could be random, as gold and silver have been overbought while bitcoin has been oversold. But it still disproves the narrative of bitcoin being a purely speculative risk asset, and the chart above shows strong evidence that bitcoin can serve as a safe haven.

Over the past few weeks, a growing controversy has surrounded Jane Street, the massive Wall Street market-making firm, and whether some of the same trading tactics it used to manipulate markets abroad may have also been influencing Bitcoin.

Back in July 2025, India’s market regulator SEBI took the extraordinary step of banning Jane Street from trading in the country’s securities markets, accusing the firm of manipulating the Bank Nifty index through derivatives and cross-market positioning.

According to regulators, the firm used a two-leg strategy: accumulate positions in the underlying stocks that make up an index while also taking large short positions using derivatives tied to that index. By selling the individual stocks that make up the index, its price would fall, resulting in a profit on the short positions. In this way, the index could be moved in profitable directions.

In other words, move the ingredients… profit from the basket.

Some traders believe a similar dynamic may have been showing up in Bitcoin markets during the past several months. The theory goes something like this: buy spot BTC, position short exposure in the ETF or derivatives market, then sell the spot BTC position to cause BTC’s current market price to fall, which leads the ETF price to follow, benefiting those who had short positions.

During the recent drawdown, many traders noticed a curious pattern — a near-daily “10 a.m. market smackdown” shortly after U.S. markets opened, where Bitcoin would abruptly sell off. While analysts debate whether any single firm could actually control BTC’s price, the pattern became widely discussed on social media.

Then something interesting happened.

After lawsuits and regulatory scrutiny surrounding Jane Street intensified earlier this year, the pattern appeared to fade — and Bitcoin began climbing again.

Correlation doesn’t prove causation. But the similarities between these two situations sure do create some strong circumstantial evidence. And this event highlights something important: as Bitcoin becomes more financialized, Wall Street strategies inevitably follow.

Bitcoin itself remains neutral, decentralized, and governed by math.

But the markets built around it?

Those will increasingly look like the rest of global finance — complete with arbitrage desks, derivatives games, and the occasional attempt to tilt the table.

The difference between bitcoin and other assets is that you can hold your own private keys. When done correctly, this makes them unconfiscatable. By comparison, you can’t take custody of any other financial asset aside from previous metals, which are easy to steal/confiscate.

I’m conducting market research for future bitcoin content designed for beginners – helping them use bitcoin with confidence. It would help me out a lot if you could answer the questions in this Google Form. It should only take about two minutes:

🧠 What we got into:

🎯 Big takeaway:

Listen on Fountain: https://fountain.fm/episode/AnLqPOjQOJDHeuaojNpp

Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/from-lawn-mowing-to-bitcoin-mining-how-a-22-year/id1649814816?i=1000754599568

Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/episode/32acFSya91qudJbrePir6G

YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2V1fvZXYJSA

To your sovereignty and prosperity,