Frequently asked questions

No. The IRS lists nine community property states: Arizona, California, Idaho, Louisiana, Nevada, New Mexico, Texas, Washington and Wisconsin. In an Ohio divorce, property acquired during the marriage is marital property, and the statute's starting point is that it is divided equally.

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Ohio's statute on dividing property says that if a spouse has engaged in financial misconduct, including concealment or nondisclosure of assets, the court may compensate the other spouse with a distributive award or a greater share of marital property.

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Yes. Series such as E no longer earn interest, but TreasuryDirect says those bonds can be cashed, at a bank that handles them or by mailing FS Form 1522 with the bonds. Above $1,000 in value, the form must be signed in front of a notary or certifying officer.

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Not according to NGRAVE. Attackers took over the access of the third-party provider that sends push notifications for its LIQUID app and sent a fake security alert. People lost funds when they typed their recovery phrase or Perfect Key into the site the alert led to; NGRAVE says the ZERO and its keys were not affected.

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NGRAVE says to treat that wallet as unsafe on every network, even if it still looks intact: move whatever is left to a new wallet with a new recovery phrase and never send anything to the old addresses again. That applies even if the page said the phrase was wrong or you only typed part of it.

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No. Genuine Check verifies that the secure chip is authentic, and here it was: according to Ledger, the implant is a separate component that does not modify the Secure Element or the operating system.

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According to Galaxy Research, by September 7, 2026, the third-wave attackers had moved 97.09 BTC, about 45% of what that wave took, through THORChain and CoinJoin. Across the whole case, 82% of the stolen funds were still sitting in the attackers' original addresses.

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It would have limited the damage. In all three cases the attacker obtained a single seed, and in a 2-of-3 multisig one seed is not enough to spend. The compromised key still has to be rotated.

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100,000,000. Bitcoin Core defines one coin as 100,000,000 of its base unit, the satoshi, and every on-chain amount is a whole number of sats.

More in: Sats to USD: How Satoshis Convert to Dollars, With the Numbers Worked Out

The bitcoin price divided by 100,000,000. At the October 18, 2026 daily close of $82,116, one sat was worth $0.00082116, so 1,000 sats were about $0.82 and 100,000 sats about $82.12. Our sats to USD converter updates the figure every hour.

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100,000,000 divided by the bitcoin price. At $82,116, one dollar bought about 1,218 sats. At the October 6, 2025 record close of $124,777 it bought about 801, and at the December 2018 low about 30,941.

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Not as a normal on-chain output. Bitcoin Core treats outputs below its dust threshold as non-standard and won't relay them: 546 sats for a legacy P2PKH output and 294 sats for a native SegWit P2WPKH output at the default dust relay fee. Lightning payments can carry amounts down to a thousandth of a sat inside a channel.

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No. A 'bit', as proposed in BIP 176, is 100 sats, or one millionth of a bitcoin. Some wallets display bits; most now show sats or BTC.

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Only if your plan offers it. Since May 28, 2025 the US Department of Labor takes a neutral position on crypto in 401(k) menus, after rescinding 2022 guidance that asked fiduciaries for 'extreme care'. A March 2026 proposed rule would give plan fiduciaries a safe harbor for adding alternative assets, but as of October 19, 2026 it is still a proposal, not a final rule.

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Spot bitcoin exchange-traded products have traded on US exchanges since the SEC approved them on January 10, 2024, so a brokerage IRA that lets you buy listed ETPs can usually hold them. Whether yours does depends on the broker, and the SEC said it is 'merit neutral' and takes no view on the bitcoin underlying those products.

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Outside a tax-advantaged account, the IRS treats digital assets as property: selling is a capital gain or loss, long-term if you held more than one year. Brokers report proceeds on Form 1099-DA for sales from January 1, 2025, and basis for certain sales from January 1, 2026.

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Nobody knows. William Bengen's 1994 study found a 4% first-year withdrawal survived every 30-year period since 1926 for portfolios of US stocks and bonds. Bitcoin has about 16 years of daily prices and drawdowns of 53% to 85%, so there is no comparable history to test it against.

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It depends on your age, spending and the return you assume. For a 40-year-old who retires at 65 and wants $40,000 a year for 25 years, our calculator gives about 0.28 BTC under its default blended assumption, inside a range of roughly 0.04 to 2.0 BTC depending on the model.

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No. This page explains rules and history with sources. It is not financial, tax or retirement advice, and it does not recommend any allocation.

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It is a derivative, not a chain fork. Its own README says development generally takes place as part of Bitcoin Core and is merged into Knots for each release, with extra patches on top. Luke Dashjr is its lead maintainer. Both follow the same consensus rules, so they accept the same blocks.

More in: Bitcoin Core vs. Knots: Versions, Defaults and Node Share, Checked Against the Source Code

As of October 22, 2026, the newest Bitcoin Core version is 32.0, tagged on October 21, 2026; the official binaries and the bitcoincore.org release page were not yet out that day. The previous final release is 31.1 (July 8, 2026). The latest Knots release is 29.4.2.knots20260508, which is built on Core's 29 line.

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Bitcoin Core 30 and later default -datacarriersize to 100,000 bytes, which the 30.0 release notes say effectively uncaps the limit. Knots 29.4.2 keeps 83 bytes (80 bytes of data plus 3 of overhead) and, by default, applies that limit to every data-carrying method it recognises.

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Yes. Knots 29.4.2 enables -rejecttokens by default, which refuses to relay or mine transactions involving non-bitcoin tokens, and has a -rejectparasites option against overlay protocols. Its default minimum relay fee is 1 sat/vB, against 0.1 sat/vB in Core 32.0.

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Yes, by design. Knots sets a default software expiry roughly two years after a release's copyright year and warns four weeks before it. Its website explains that an expired version can be restored by adding softwareexpiry=0 to bitcoin.conf, while warning that obsolete versions are unmaintained. Core 32.0 has no such option.

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On October 7, 2026, the Bitnodes crawler counted 4,111 Knots nodes out of 24,881 reachable ones, 16.5%, with 83% on Core. The crawler only sees nodes that accept incoming connections, and the figure moves daily.

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A list of words, usually 12 or 24, drawn from a standard list of 2,048 (BIP-39), from which every key in the wallet is derived. The words can rebuild the wallet on another device, and whoever has them can move the funds, unless an extra passphrase was also set.

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A photo turns a piece of paper into a file. With cloud backup turned on, photos are saved to the account and can be opened from any device signed in to it. Industry security guides list photos and cloud storage among the ways of storing a seed phrase they advise against.

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The ones most often described are paper, metal plates with the words etched or stamped (better against fire and water), several copies kept in separate places, and an extra passphrase, sometimes called a 25th word, which protects the phrase at the cost of a harder recovery.

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Send and receive: Cake Wallet (since v4.18.0, May 2024) and Sparrow (send since 2.3.0, October 2025; receive since 2.5.0, May 2026, through an SP-capable Electrum server). BlueWallet sends only (since v6.6.7, June 2024). Bitcoin Core ships no wallet support in any release: as of October 8, 2026, only the base-protocol PR of its three wallet PRs has been merged (September 23), too late for 32.0, and the sending and receiving PRs are still open.

More in: Silent Payments in October 2026: Who Can Actually Receive, What Scanning Costs, and What BIP-352 Leaves Unsolved

Not at the wallet level. The cryptographic module was merged into libsecp256k1 on July 22, 2026 and Core pulled that library update on September 9, 2026, but only the base-protocol PR has been merged (September 23, 2026, after the 32.0 branch-off), the sending and receiving PRs remain open, and neither the 30.0, 31.0 and 31.1 release notes nor the 32.0 release notes mention BIP-352.

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Because the address each payment lands on is computed by the sender and never communicated. The receiver can only find it by trying every candidate transaction with its scan key. Cheap on a full node, a real bandwidth or trust cost on a phone.

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Amounts stay public, the sender's inputs stay linkable to the sender, and spending several received outputs together still merges them under the common-input heuristic. It fixes exactly one thing: address reuse on the receiving side.

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No. BIP-47 needs an on-chain notification transaction with an 80-byte OP_RETURN before the first payment; BIP-352 needs nothing on-chain beyond the payment itself, at the price of requiring the receiver to scan.

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It's the ability to choose by hand which UTXOs (the individual coins that make up your balance) go into a transaction, instead of letting the wallet's selection algorithm combine them for you. It matters because spending coins from different origins in one transaction links those origins publicly and permanently.

More in: Coin Control, Read Backwards: The UTXO Mistakes a Privacy Audit Penalizes and the Habit That Prevents Each One

It reads the chain, not your wallet labels. Any transaction with several inputs asserts that one owner signed them all; if two or more inputs trace back to identified exchanges, that's a toxic consolidation, and if five or more distinct addresses sign together with at most two outputs, that's a wide consolidation, flagged even when no origin can be named.

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No. A few hundred satoshis delivered in a transaction that fans out to dozens of addresses is usually an attempt to make you spend it alongside your real coins so the two get linked. Unspent dust is a warning with zero penalty in our audit; spent dust is a 12-point penalty because the link already happened.

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Not by itself. Merging coins that already share an origin reveals nothing new. The damage comes from merging origins that were previously unlinkable, or from joining five or more addresses at once, which our audit registers as a wide consolidation regardless of what it knows about each one.

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Among open-source wallets that document it: Sparrow (UTXOs screen, 'Send Selected'), Electrum (freeze an address so its funds are never used when sending), Bitcoin Core (input selection in the GUI plus the lockunspent RPC) and Wasabi (mandatory labels with privacy warnings before signing). We don't recommend one over another.

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Historically, yes. In 2021, going by our daily closing prices, 73 of the 364 day-to-day changes were bigger than 5% up or down, and the average daily move, ignoring direction, was 3.2%.

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It's the name Shlomo Benartzi and Richard Thaler gave to two things happening together: losses hurt more than equal gains (roughly twice as much, in the estimates they cite), and people check their investments often even when their goals are long term. The more often you look, the more often you see a loss.

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On Android, Digital Wellbeing shows how often each app has been opened and lets you set a timer per app; when it runs out, the app closes and its icon dims until midnight.

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The daily difference between BTC sent to addresses labeled as exchange-controlled and BTC sent out of them, per Coin Metrics' labeling and excluding exchange-to-exchange transfers. The Score uses it smoothed over 30 days, because a single day's reading is dominated by noise.

More in: Bitcoin Exchange Reserves: Two Data Providers, Two Very Different Numbers, One Labeling Problem

Because each provider counts only the addresses it has managed to label as exchange wallets, and no two label sets match. Coin Metrics states outright that its figure is an underestimate; Santiment's count, reported by CoinDesk in July 2026, is roughly half of Coin Metrics' as a share of supply.

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Not by itself. A withdrawal to a saver's cold wallet and a withdrawal to an ETF custodian or corporate treasury look identical on-chain, and only the first is accumulation in the usual sense. An unlabeled new exchange hot wallet also registers as an outflow until someone labels it.

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Daily netflow measures short-term pulse and is noisy; the 90-day trend of the reserve level measures structural change and is stable. Folding both into one number would let a noisy week mask a quarter's trend, or the reverse.

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Per Coin Metrics, 2,663,370 BTC sat in exchange-labeled addresses as of October 7, 2026, 16.1% below the series peak of 3,175,540 BTC on July 27, 2021. Other providers report far lower figures because they label a different set of addresses.

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At block 969,785 (4 October 2026), 20,093,081.25 BTC had been issued under the schedule, and our node counted 20,092,851.13 BTC in the unspent set. The 230.12 BTC difference was issued but can never be spent.

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Four known causes: the unspendable 50 BTC genesis reward, 100 BTC lost to duplicate coinbase transactions in 2010 (BIP30), miners claiming less than the full subsidy, and coins deliberately burned with OP_RETURN. Up to May 2020 these added up to 182.68 BTC.

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Anyone running a node would notice: the unspent set would exceed the schedule and the gap would turn positive. Across 452 weekly snapshots since 2018, our gap has always been negative and has never shrunk.

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No. Coins whose keys are gone are still unspent outputs and still counted. The 230.12 BTC are only what the protocol itself can no longer spend.

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Look the name up in the CNMV's public list of crypto-asset service providers, which covers firms authorised in Spain and firms authorised elsewhere in the EU that have notified they serve Spanish customers, or in ESMA's MiCA register. Since 1 July 2026 a platform absent from both cannot legally sell you bitcoin in Spain.

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Most authorised platforms accept a passport for identity verification, but many also ask for proof of address in Spain, and the tax data they collect under DAC8 is keyed to your tax residence, not your nationality. If Spain is where you spend more than 183 days a year, Spain is where the report goes.

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Because since 1 January 2026 the EU's DAC8 directive requires crypto-asset service providers operating in the Union to collect and report their users' data to the tax authority of the user's country of residence. Reporting is about who you are and what you did on the platform, not about whether you realised a gain.

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Since 9 October 2025 every bank in the euro area must be able to send instant SEPA transfers, and the regulation forbids charging more for them than for a standard transfer. The platform may still charge its own deposit fee, but the bank leg is no longer the expensive part.

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Not for a small first purchase. A well-chosen mobile wallet is enough to learn the full cycle, withdrawal included. Once the amount starts to matter to you, a device that keeps the private key offline stops being optional.

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No. Crypto exchanges serving US customers register with FinCEN as money services businesses, but the FBI has warned that appearing on FinCEN's registrant list is not a recommendation, certification of legitimacy or endorsement by any government agency.

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A fixed, guaranteed return. Bitcoin itself pays nothing; its price just moves. A platform promising a set percentage, especially a daily one, is selling a promise, not bitcoin.

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It doesn't fit the definition. A Ponzi scheme pays earlier investors with money from newer ones and needs an operator promising returns. Bitcoin promises no return, has no operator paying anyone, and its issuance rules are public. That doesn't make it safe: its price can halve in a few months.

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A guaranteed return, especially a daily one. The FTC puts it bluntly: only scammers guarantee profits or big returns, and only scammers demand payment in cryptocurrency.

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Not with any certainty. On November 8, 2021, bitcoin closed at $67,562, the highest daily close of that cycle; on the 9th it closed at $66,954, with the Fear & Greed Index at 84. Nobody knew then that it was the top. Indicators describe whether the market looks expensive or cheap against its own history, not what it will do next.

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The share of coins unmoved for more than 155 days whose price on the day they last moved is above today's price. We compute it coin by coin from weekly snapshots of our own node's UTXO set.

More in: Bitcoin long-term holders in loss: why the peak lags the price bottom

It peaked at 47.9% on 16 August 2026 and was down to 31.6% by 4 October. That is in line with previous cycle bottoms: 52.7% in February 2019, 48.0% in March 2020 and 49.8% in January 2023.

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Because the cohort keeps changing. Coins bought near the top only count as long-term after 155 days, so they join the cohort already underwater even while the price is recovering. The lag was about two months in 2019, six weeks in 2022-23 and six and a half weeks in 2026.

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Not in real time. By construction the peak lags and is only confirmed once the share has started to fall. Four cycles are a pattern, not a rule.

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About 10% of long-term supply was created before August 2010, when there was no market price. Those coins are excluded, and when they exceed 10% of the total we flag the reading. They are almost certainly in profit, so the true in-loss share is somewhat lower: roughly 43% at the August 2026 peak.

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Only half of it. Running our own price history, the signal fired on April 12, 2021, at that cycle's local top (~$60K) — but price kept climbing after an intervening crash to the real cycle top in November 2021, near $69K. The indicator never fired a second time.

More in: We Recomputed Every Pi Cycle Top Signal From Scratch. One of Them Breaks the Legend.

A price-only cycle top signal: it fires when the 111-day moving average crosses above twice the 350-day moving average. No on-chain data involved, just historical price.

More in: We Recomputed Every Pi Cycle Top Signal From Scratch. One of Them Breaks the Legend.

Yes: the Pi Cycle Top chart, with both averages, their ratio and every crossover, is recomputed daily from our own price series. It is not part of our Score.

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The name comes from a numerical coincidence: the crossover's 2x multiple, combined with the ratio between the two windows (350/111), approximates the number pi (3.14159...). It's a naming curiosity, not part of why the indicator works.

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There's no clean answer. The calendar has held in all four cases we have data for: cycle peaks have landed 3.9 to 4.0 years apart. But the intensity has collapsed: the price multiple from halving to peak went from 91x in 2013 to 2.0x in 2025.

More in: The Halving Now Adds 450 BTC a Day. A Single ETF Day Moved 26 Times That.

450 BTC a day, down from 3,600 BTC a day right after the 2012 halving. With 95.68% of the 21 million cap already mined, per our own most recent UTXO-set snapshot, each new halving cuts an ever-smaller slice of what's left.

More in: The Halving Now Adds 450 BTC a Day. A Single ETF Day Moved 26 Times That.

Yes, by a wide margin. On September 21, 2026, US spot Bitcoin ETFs pulled in a net $998.95 million in one day, the largest single-day haul of 2026. At that day's price, that's roughly 11,534 BTC, about 26 times the halving's current daily issuance of 450 BTC.

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December 2013, December 2017, November 2021, and October 2025, per our own price history. The gaps between those four peaks are 4.03, 3.90, and 3.91 years, far tighter than the 371-to-546-day range it takes each halving to reach its own peak.

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No. We don't publish a price target or a peak date. Four data points aren't a statistical law, the same standard we apply on our own page documenting where the Score has failed.

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It depends on your age, your spending and, above all, on the return you assume for Bitcoin. For someone who is 40, retires at 65 and wants $40,000 a year for 25 years, our calculator gives about 0.28 BTC under its default blended assumption, inside a range of roughly 0.04 to 2.0 BTC depending on the model.

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Not as-is. Bitcoin's 10- or 15-year average return, projected over several decades, implies a market cap larger than all household wealth on the planet. Our calculator checks for that and flags assumptions that are impossible, not merely optimistic.

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It models Spain's savings-income brackets as an option, and by default the English version applies no tax. Capital gains tax in your country will raise the amount you need, because you have to sell more than you spend.

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No. It is a simulation over assumptions you choose, with each model's limits spelled out. It is not financial, tax or retirement advice.

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A normalized version of MVRV: instead of dividing market cap by realized cap, it subtracts the two and divides by the historical standard deviation of market cap. That makes readings more comparable across periods with very different volatility than a plain MVRV ratio.

More in: What Every MVRV Z-Score Chart Leaves Out: Sample Depth and Shrinking Extremes

Less than it used to be. Bitcoin's valuation extremes have compressed cycle over cycle as the market matures — peak MVRV at each cycle top has trended lower across recent cycles. A fixed threshold calibrated on an older cycle may simply never trigger in a newer one, even at a real top.

More in: What Every MVRV Z-Score Chart Leaves Out: Sample Depth and Shrinking Extremes

Yes, with a caveat: our MVRV Z-Score chart runs on Coin Metrics' market cap and MVRV (daily since 2011), not on our node's realized price. Our own series has weekly snapshots since 2018, enough for MVRV and NUPL but still short of the cycles the Z-Score's standard deviation leans on.

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Plain MVRV is a simple ratio (market cap / realized cap). Z-Score uses the same gap but normalized by market cap's own historical volatility — so it responds more comparably across cycles with very different absolute price levels.

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The average cost basis at which every bitcoin in circulation last moved on-chain, summed and divided by total supply. Unlike market price (what a bitcoin costs to buy right now), it reflects what the network as a whole actually paid, on average, for the coins it holds.

More in: Bitcoin's Realized Price, Computed From Our Own UTXO Set (Known Bias Included)

Market cap is coin count times today's price, regardless of when each coin last moved. Realized cap values each coin at its own acquisition price, the price on the day it last moved. Same coins, two different ways of pricing them.

More in: Bitcoin's Realized Price, Computed From Our Own UTXO Set (Known Bias Included)

When we can't resolve a UTXO's creation date or historical price, that portion of supply gets excluded from the realized cap calculation — never assigned a made-up price. If that unresolved share exceeds 10% of supply, we flag the reading as degraded explicitly, instead of letting it look more precise than it is.

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Yes, and it's a bias in the metric itself, not specific to our implementation: moving a UTXO to another address you control (a wallet migration, say) resets its 'acquisition date' even though nothing was actually bought or sold. It's a known limitation of realized price in any implementation.

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Spain's MiCA transitional period ended. Providers that had only pre-registered under the lighter SEPBLAC regime lost the ability to operate without full CNMV authorization (or authorization from another EU regulator, passported in).

More in: Spain's Bitcoin Custody Market After MiCA: Retail Banks vs. Wholesale Custodians

Among credit institutions: BBVA (March 2025), Cecabank and Openbank (July 2025), Renta 4 Banco (November 2025), and CaixaBank and Kutxabank (March 2026). Bit2Me, a crypto-native platform, was authorized in October 2025.

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No. A bank like BBVA or Openbank custodies for its own retail or business client. Cecabank is different: it's a wholesale custodian providing infrastructure to other financial institutions, not directly to savers. Conflating the two models leads to wrong conclusions about who actually holds your keys.

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As of October 7, 2026, CNMV's public list shows 193 entities able to operate in Spain: 15 authorized directly by CNMV, the rest passported in from other EU regulators. The count changes with every registry update, so check it live before relying on any specific provider's status.

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Yes. Everything this kind of analysis relies on is already written on a public ledger. What isn't legitimate is treating an address relationship as proof of who owns it without real evidence behind that claim.

More in: What a Free Bitcoin Address Lookup Can (and Can't) Tell You

Not directly. The best you get is a behavioral label (balance and activity patterns that resemble an exchange, for instance) or a match against an already-known tag. Neither is proof of a real-world identity.

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Two different mechanisms feed into it, and they don't carry the same weight: a verified bridge (two inputs of the same transaction sharing an origin, directly checkable by anyone) and third-party clustering (a heuristic with known coverage gaps on recent or low-activity addresses).

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30 to 55 seconds on the first run, because it chains several real queries against the chain. Re-running the same address within 24 hours serves a cached result almost instantly.

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That's a separate tool, built for the opposite direction: it checks your own addresses (or your xpub, always sent in the request body, never in the URL) for exchange links and address reuse, instead of investigating someone else's.

More in: What a Free Bitcoin Address Lookup Can (and Can't) Tell You

Because a node sees addresses, not owners. A cold wallet held by an exchange, or an ETF's custody wallet backing thousands of separate holders, reads identically to a single convinced whale. On-chain data alone can't tell them apart, and treating them as the same thing produces a false story about who is actually accumulating.

More in: 87 Addresses Hold Nearly 15% of All Bitcoin. Here's the Catch Before You Read Too Much Into That.

87 addresses holding more than 10,000 BTC each, together accounting for 14.79% of all counted supply in the October 18, 2026 snapshot (block 971,930). The exact figure shifts with every weekly snapshot; the live number lives on the chart.

More in: 87 Addresses Hold Nearly 15% of All Bitcoin. Here's the Catch Before You Read Too Much Into That.

By grouping every UTXO by its destination script from a full snapshot of the unspent coin set (dumptxoutset), no address resolution required. Each group's total balance determines its cohort, from dust (under 0.001 BTC) to whales (over 10,000 BTC).

More in: 87 Addresses Hold Nearly 15% of All Bitcoin. Here's the Catch Before You Read Too Much Into That.

Largely, yes: alongside the weekly process that keeps running forward, a rollback-based rebuild of the UTXO set generated hundreds of weekly snapshots going back to January 2018, with the odd single week still unprocessed. Each point is still a real composition at a specific block height, not an average or an interpolation -- the exact range always shows on the live chart.

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No. It was merged into the official BIPs repository on February 11, 2026, which means the document meets the standard for formal discussion — not that the network uses it, or that it's been approved for activation.

More in: Bitcoin's Quantum Problem: What BIP-360 Fixes, and What BIP-361 Wants to Do About the Rest

Mainly the ones that have already spent at least once. Signing a transaction publishes the public key on-chain. An address that has only ever received funds hasn't exposed its public key yet.

More in: Bitcoin's Quantum Problem: What BIP-360 Fixes, and What BIP-361 Wants to Do About the Rest

Roughly 34% of circulating supply, per estimates cited by several researchers in the space — a mix of Satoshi-era P2PK coins and ordinary addresses that have spent at least once.

More in: Bitcoin's Quantum Problem: What BIP-360 Fixes, and What BIP-361 Wants to Do About the Rest

A separate proposal from BIP-360: a multi-year, phased plan to eventually stop new deposits to legacy address types and, later, freeze whatever quantum-vulnerable coins never migrated. It's controversial because it touches Bitcoin's core promise that no one can unilaterally freeze someone else's coins.

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Above 1, the coins spent that day realized a net profit relative to when they were created. Below 1, a net loss. Near 1, neither side dominates, often a sign of market indecision.

More in: Most SOPR Charts Average the Ratios. Here's Why That's the Wrong Math.

A single 50 BTC output represents 500 times more real money than a 0.1 BTC one. Averaging their ratios as if they carried equal weight treats a trivial move and a massive one identically, which distorts the day's actual reading.

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By walking each block with our own node and reading, for every spent input, the height at which that coin was created versus the height at which it's being spent now. Bitcoin Core already keeps that data to support undoing blocks, no full txindex required.

More in: Most SOPR Charts Average the Ratios. Here's Why That's the Wrong Math.

Not yet. As of this piece, the walk reaches mid-2015 and keeps advancing. We say so plainly rather than let the chart imply more coverage than exists.

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No. MVRV compares the entire supply's market value against its cost basis at one instant. SOPR only looks at coins that actually moved on a given day, a behavioral signal about recent activity, not a snapshot of the whole supply.

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MVRV, Puell Multiple, NUPL, HODL waves, holder distribution, the hash ribbon, funding rate, BTC dominance and the fear and greed index — all calculated or aggregated from free sources with no sign-up on NodeWitness.

More in: Free Bitcoin On-Chain Data, Mapped: MVRV, HODL Waves, and What Still Costs Money

A genuinely free indicator doesn't require sign-up and doesn't cap how many times a day you can check it just to push you toward a paid plan later. Plenty of platforms market themselves as 'free' but only unlock the first chart — everything past that sits behind a paywall.

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Detailed breakdowns by specific exchange, entity-adjustment (grouping addresses belonging to the same real entity) and very large catalogs of thousands of metrics — that's where platforms like Glassnode charge, for depth and volume, not because the underlying data is impossible to get for free.

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Because it combines free public sources (Coin Metrics, Binance, alternative.me) with data calculated directly from our own Bitcoin node — without relying on licensing paid third-party data.

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Because a test set can only be used once without invalidating its statistical guarantees. Train, validation and test are already consumed. Any re-evaluation on that same data would be retrospective overfitting, even done with the best intentions. The only dataset still untouched is the future.

More in: Sealed Prospective Validation: The Future Is the Only Clean Test Set Left

A SHA-256 hash chain (each entry references the previous entry's hash, so altering one breaks every entry after it), plus periodic OpenTimestamps sealing, which anchors the log's hash to the Bitcoin chain itself: independent, public proof that a given entry already existed on a specific date.

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The system's own shadow-test (which re-derives every already-logged signal and compares it to what's stored) caught a divergence in the inaugural batch: it had been computed on a Bitcoin candle that hadn't actually closed yet. The system halted without touching the log, exactly as designed. The affected lines stay exactly as they were, unedited, as proof the verification mechanism actually works.

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A minimum of 3 continuous months of daily logging, a 100% match between the live signal and its re-derivation from the backtest, and zero edits, verifiable independently through the hash chain, git history, and the OpenTimestamps seals. P&L is not a success criterion: what's being validated is whether the system behaves as advertised, not whether it makes money.

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No. The logged strategy remains, formally, documentation only. It cleared the robustness gate but never the decisive statistical bar or the out-of-sample consistency test. This experiment doesn't redeem it. It only observes, publicly and verifiably, whether its out-of-sample behavior matches what the backtest predicted.

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Addresses that have kept their coins unmoved for a long time (the usual threshold is 155 days or more). HODL waves measure what percentage of total supply has stayed unmoved for that long or longer.

More in: Bitcoin Long-Term Holder Supply: Conviction, Not a Price Call

It's no guarantee. It's a conviction signal: someone who held through a long decline probably won't sell over a small additional dip, but it doesn't forecast price. Holders can keep not selling while price keeps falling; they can also start selling while price keeps rising.

More in: Bitcoin Long-Term Holder Supply: Conviction, Not a Price Call

No, though they're related. VDD tracks how much old, dormant supply is moving right now (a spend-weighted signal). HODL waves track how much supply hasn't moved yet (a stock, not a flow). Different math, same underlying idea about coin age.

More in: Bitcoin Long-Term Holder Supply: Conviction, Not a Price Call

With full UTXO set snapshots taken directly from our own Bitcoin node, not a third-party API. See the Supply and Holders section for the full detail on HODL waves and holder distribution by wallet size.

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Because the more combinations you test, the more likely it is that one looks good by pure luck, the same way buying more lottery tickets makes a win more likely without saying anything about any single ticket's quality. The deflated Sharpe ratio raises the bar precisely to strip out that unfair edge from the search itself.

More in: The Multiple-Testing Lottery: What the Deflated Sharpe Ratio Actually Tells You

0.9718 mean cross-asset Sharpe, computed over 2,250 individual variants. The lone survivor of the robustness gate arrived with a Sharpe of 0.4467, a margin of -0.525, not even half of what was required.

More in: The Multiple-Testing Lottery: What the Deflated Sharpe Ratio Actually Tells You

That the same strategy beating buy-and-hold in 3 of 4 assets during validation dropped to 0 of 4 in test, the one partition that had never been touched before. That's exactly the pattern predicted by a result indistinguishable from the best ticket in a wide, purely random search.

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That none of the 6 champions cleared the 95th percentile of their own null distribution (what pure chance would produce with the same strategy). The closest came in at 0.614 against a 0.821 threshold, still short, like all the rest.

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No, it doesn't say that. It says that, with the data available, its result can't be distinguished from what pure chance would produce after 2,255 attempts. That's a claim about the available evidence, not a certainty about whether a real edge exists.

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Treating it as a direct signal (fear = bad, greed = good) instead of a contrarian one. Historically, extreme fear has coincided more with bottoms than tops, and extreme greed more with tops than bottoms — the opposite of the immediate intuition.

More in: The Fear and Greed Index Reacts to Price — It Doesn't Predict It

Not directly. Some of its own inputs, like recent volatility and volume, already react to a decline or rally that has already happened — so an extreme fear reading in the middle of a drop is, in part, an echo of that same drop, not an independent signal confirming something separate.

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Not reliably. It can stay in an extreme fear or greed zone for weeks without the price changing trend. That's why the NodeWitness Score combines it with nine other signals, requiring several to agree.

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From alternative.me's public API, free and requiring no access key, with history going back to February 2018.

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Because a rotating strategy is taxed every year on that year's realized gains, while losses from later years carry forward (up to 4 years, oldest first) but may not fully offset them within the simulated window. The gold case: +1.1% and +1.0% gross, -0.6% and -0.7% net.

More in: Taxes as a Strategy Cost: Why Deferral Is a Structural Edge, Not a Footnote

Spanish progressive savings-income brackets (19% up to €6,000, 21% up to €50,000, 23% up to €200,000, 27% up to €300,000, 28% above that), a calendar tax year, annual netting of gains and losses, and a 4-year loss carryforward. Buy-and-hold and DCA are hypothetically liquidated in full at the end of the period, to compare on equal footing with strategies that do rotate.

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Because it defers the entire tax event to the final trade. A rotating strategy generates a taxable event every time it closes a position, year after year, and each one, if it's a winner, gets taxed immediately, without waiting to see whether next year offsets it.

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The median across champion strategies ran roughly 19-22% of gross return. Gold is the extreme case, not the norm, but even in the typical case, taxes take a real bite out of the gain before a strategy has rotated one time too many.

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The specific model (brackets, tax year, 4-year carryforward) is Spanish, but the mechanism producing the effect, taxing on realization while deferring under buy-and-hold, exists in any tax regime that taxes gains on sale, not on holding. The exact numbers would shift; the structural edge of deferral wouldn't.

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In past cycles, tops coincided with MVRV above 3, Puell Multiple above 4, sentiment in extreme euphoria, and price well above its 200-day moving average: several overvaluation signals at once, not just one.

More in: Bitcoin Cycle Tops and Bottoms: The Pattern — and Where the NodeWitness Cycle Score Missed It

The opposite: MVRV at or below 1, Puell Multiple below 0.5 (miner capitulation), sustained extreme panic in sentiment, and price well below its moving average. The November 2022 case, after FTX's collapse, is an already-verified example.

More in: Bitcoin Cycle Tops and Bottoms: The Pattern — and Where the NodeWitness Cycle Score Missed It

No. There are only 3-4 complete Bitcoin cycles, too small a sample to claim statistical certainty a pattern will repeat exactly. The thresholds themselves have also been shrinking cycle after cycle, so they're documented as verified historical coincidences, not a guaranteed law.

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That's not the comparison being made. The question was whether adding short positions improved on the same strategy's own long-only version, and it only did in 2 of 8 cases in validation and 3 of 8 in test. In most cases the short version lagged its own long-only counterpart.

More in: The Short Side Loses Even While Collecting Funding

It follows the perpetual's price premium over the spot index, not who's in the market's minority or majority. With positive funding, the historical norm, longs pay and shorts collect — the opposite of the intuition that betting against the trend is what costs money.

More in: The Short Side Loses Even While Collecting Funding

Measured conditioned on the real position in validation: on their short days, the two strategies that reached a real short version COLLECTED between 0.006% and 0.012% daily (roughly 2-4% annualized). On their long days, the perpetual-financed trading track PAID between 0.060% and 0.089% daily (roughly 22-32% annualized), the period's real financing cost, carried by the long/short package itself, not by the shorts.

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Not exactly. The S&P 500 short was simulated on the total-return index, so it pays dividends by construction, which is its dominant real cost. The gold short uses a futures contract, where that cost is already embedded in the price. Neither carries an explicit daily funding rate the way crypto perpetuals do.

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No — it means that in this specific experiment, with the real funding mechanism applied to both legs, none managed it consistently. If this research ever became a product, it would be long/cash, never long/short, precisely because of this result.

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The moment when sellers who had been holding through a decline stop resisting and sell at a loss, usually after a prolonged drop. It shows up in concrete on-chain signals: miners selling below cost, long-term holders breaking their usual pattern of not selling, and sentiment in sustained extreme panic.

More in: Bitcoin Capitulation: What the On-Chain Signals Confirm, and What They Don't

Not always, but it has coincided with several historical Bitcoin bottoms. It's no guarantee — there can be capitulation and the price can keep falling afterward, though historically that has been less frequent than the opposite.

More in: Bitcoin Capitulation: What the On-Chain Signals Confirm, and What They Don't

Because a hash ribbon reversal or a low Puell Multiple reading is a real, verifiable data point, and 'generational buying opportunity' is a much better headline than 'selling pressure from one group has eased.' The data confirms that a specific kind of seller has been exhausted — it doesn't set a date for price to recover, no matter how the headline frames it.

More in: Bitcoin Capitulation: What the On-Chain Signals Confirm, and What They Don't

No. All 5 were fixed before the winner selection ran on the validation partition, so the numbers already reported in the previous article — no strategy clearly effective — already reflect the fixes. That's the entire point of auditing before, not after.

More in: Why Backtests Lie: 5 Real Bugs an External Audit Found Before We Touched the Test Set

Because the test set can only be touched once — that's the central rule of the whole experiment. A real bug found after that single shot would have burned the only clean partition left, with no way to re-run the evaluation on the corrected engine.

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No. Only 3 of the 5 changed code: two in the candidate-selection logic (data loading and ranking) and one in the simulation engine itself. The other 2 were resolved by documenting precisely what the code already did, without touching it — sometimes the bug is that the text promised something different from what the code actually delivered, not the other way around.

More in: Why Backtests Lie: 5 Real Bugs an External Audit Found Before We Touched the Test Set

Not this kind: an external, line-by-line review hunting for look-ahead errors. What it does have is a mechanism that freezes input data so an external source can't silently rewrite the past, plus several internal attempts at improving the formula, none adopted without checking against known real cases first.

More in: Why Backtests Lie: 5 Real Bugs an External Audit Found Before We Touched the Test Set

Yes, two independent passes: the original report with all 5 findings, and a second review by the same auditor over the already-fixed code, reproducing the most serious finding's original attack against the corrected version to confirm it fails exactly the way it should.

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No. Both follow identical consensus rules — what makes a block valid — so there's no chain split between them. The difference is which unconfirmed transactions each one relays by default, not which blocks it accepts.

More in: Bitcoin Core vs. Knots: The Differences and the Debate, Explained

Version 30 (October 2025) relaxed the default relay policy for OP_RETURN outputs, raising the default limit from 83 bytes to 100,000 bytes. Bitcoin Knots, maintained by Luke Dashjr, keeps a much stricter default filter against that same kind of data.

More in: Bitcoin Core vs. Knots: The Differences and the Debate, Explained

On October 7, 2026, the Bitnodes crawler counted 4,111 Knots nodes out of 24,881 reachable ones: 16.5%, about one in six. That's down from a peak near 25% in late 2025, after rising from roughly 2% in January 2025. Only 80 of those nodes run the RDTS build tied to the BIP-110 fork. The figure moves daily and only counts nodes that accept incoming connections.

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If you don't run your own node, this doesn't touch your funds' security either way. If you do, it's a preference about which relay policy you want to support, not a security decision — both validate the chain identically.

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There's no way to know for certain — not us, not anyone else. What can be done is comparing the current moment against indicators that have historically coincided with lower relative risk (low MVRV, miner capitulation, extreme fear in the fear and greed index), knowing that this lowers relative risk, it does not eliminate it.

More in: Bitcoin Buy Signals: What They Actually Measure, and What They Don't

No. The Score classifies the current moment into one of five phases (from Strong Distribution to Strong Accumulation) based on ten combined signals. It's one more data point for you to decide with, using your own financial situation and time horizon — never a buy order or personalized advice.

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No, no classification guarantees anything. The Score's own public track record includes real misses, not only hits — see the specific cases, with their numbers, in 'Where the Score Has Failed'. A favorable reading lowers relative risk compared to other points in the cycle, but it's no guarantee of any kind.

More in: Bitcoin Buy Signals: What They Actually Measure, and What They Don't

Not in a statistically defensible way. The single candidate that survived the robustness gate (a breakout strategy, long-only) missed the deflated Sharpe threshold by -0.525, and went from beating buy-and-hold in 3 of 4 assets in validation to 0 of 4 in the untouched test set.

More in: 2,255 Strategies, Zero Survivors: A Pre-Registered Backtest Against Dollar-Cost Averaging

Because searching that wide, and requiring a bar that rises with the size of the search, is exactly what stops a lucky-by-chance result from being mistaken for a real edge. It's the step most public backtests skip entirely.

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Mostly no. With real funding applied to both legs of the position, the short version of each strategy beat its own long-only version in only 2 of 8 cases in validation and 3 of 8 in test.

More in: 2,255 Strategies, Zero Survivors: A Pre-Registered Backtest Against Dollar-Cost Averaging

No strategy in this experiment uses the Score. It's a fully independent research project. But it arrives, through a completely separate path, at the same conclusion we'd already found while auditing our own Score DCA simulator: no demonstrated edge over plain DCA either.

More in: 2,255 Strategies, Zero Survivors: A Pre-Registered Backtest Against Dollar-Cost Averaging

More than most positive trading results circulating online: success criteria were fixed in writing before any results were computed, the test partition was touched exactly once, and the bar itself (the deflated Sharpe ratio) rises specifically so it can't be fooled by the best result of a wide search.

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Only if enough wallets adopt it. BIP69 defines a deterministic ordering of transaction inputs and outputs so that ordering stops leaking which software built the transaction. Because adoption was partial, following it became a distinguishing signal in itself.

More in: BIP69 Was Meant to Hide Your Wallet. It Became a Fingerprint.

No. Address hygiene prevents linkage through a repeated identifier. Fingerprinting works on transaction structure, which persists even when every address is fresh. They are separate layers requiring separate answers.

More in: BIP69 Was Meant to Hide Your Wallet. It Became a Fingerprint.

Barely. Most of these parameters are not user-configurable. What you control is whether you mix outputs from different wallets in the same spending chain, which turns a single fingerprint into a traceable sequence.

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No, and it isn't planned. Our privacy audit looks for exchange linkage, address reuse and toxic consolidation. Wallet identification is a layer we don't cover, and we'd rather say so than let you assume otherwise.

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There's no binary answer, but there are indicators that compare the current price to Bitcoin's own history: MVRV (market price vs. the average price each coin last moved at), the Puell Multiple (miner revenue vs. its own yearly average), and the distance of price from its 200-day moving average. All three are relative to Bitcoin's own past, not predictions of what comes next.

More in: Bitcoin Valuation Without the Hype: MVRV, Puell Multiple, and the 200-Day Average

Not on its own. A historically cheap zone lowers the relative risk of that decision compared to buying in a historically expensive zone, but it guarantees nothing — Bitcoin has kept falling after hitting historical lows on these same indicators, more than once.

More in: Bitcoin Valuation Without the Hype: MVRV, Puell Multiple, and the 200-Day Average

No. They measure where the price sits today relative to its own past, not where it's headed. They're a snapshot of the present compared to history, never a forecast.

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Assume it is traceable if you ever withdrew to it from an exchange that knows your identity: the exchange knows that destination address, and everything spent from it can be followed forward. To check the rest, paste one of your addresses into our free privacy audit. It looks for links to known exchange addresses, deposits into exchanges, address reuse and consolidations that merge coins from different sources, and shows the formula behind every flag.

More in: How to Check If Your Bitcoin Wallet Is Traceable (For Free)

No. A single address is enough for a first check, and a public address reveals nothing that isn't already on-chain. An xpub gives a fuller picture because it covers your whole wallet, but it also shows that whole wallet to whoever receives it, including us. Use it only if you accept that trade-off.

More in: How to Check If Your Bitcoin Wallet Is Traceable (For Free)

Yes. We built a free audit tool that runs against our own Bitcoin node and checks your addresses (or an xpub) for known exchange links, reuse patterns, and toxic consolidations — with the exact scoring formula shown, not a black-box result.

More in: How to Check If Your Bitcoin Wallet Is Traceable (For Free)

No, and it never will. A public address is already visible on-chain, so checking it reveals nothing new. An xpub only derives addresses — it can't move funds — but it's still sensitive, and the tool tells you that upfront before you paste anything.

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Three things, mainly: a direct label match (an address already identified, e.g. from an exchange), a behavior pattern typical of careless wallet hygiene (address reuse, moving funds with zero delay), or the counterparty's transaction history being too large to be a personal wallet.

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Yes, no signup, and it runs against our own infrastructure — not a paid third-party chain-analysis API.

More in: How to Check If Your Bitcoin Wallet Is Traceable (For Free)

Spending, in a single transaction, UTXOs that came from separate and already-distinguishable origins — for example, withdrawals from two different exchanges. Combining them publicly reveals that both origins belong to the same wallet.

More in: Your Wallet's 'Consolidate UTXOs' Button Can Undo Your Privacy in One Click

Because a confirmed Bitcoin transaction is permanent. Even if you stop using the addresses involved afterward, the link the transaction created between the two origins stays on the ledger forever.

More in: Your Wallet's 'Consolidate UTXOs' Button Can Undo Your Privacy in One Click

With coin control, the feature in privacy-focused wallets (Sparrow, Electrum, and others) that lets you manually pick which UTXOs go into each transaction, instead of letting the wallet auto-select without regard for where each one came from.

More in: Your Wallet's 'Consolidate UTXOs' Button Can Undo Your Privacy in One Click

No. Combining UTXOs that already share a known origin — change from your own past transactions, for instance — adds no new information. The risk is specifically mixing origins that weren't provably connected before.

More in: Your Wallet's 'Consolidate UTXOs' Button Can Undo Your Privacy in One Click

The blockchain is public: anyone can see that every payment sent to the same address is linked. If one of those payments identifies you (an exchange withdrawal with KYC, for example), the rest inherit that identity by association.

More in: Bitcoin Address Reuse: The Privacy Mistake Exchanges Make For You

Most modern HD wallets (BIP32/BIP44) generate a fresh address per receipt by default. Older wallets, or a fixed address you shared publicly, are the real exceptions worth checking.

More in: Bitcoin Address Reuse: The Privacy Mistake Exchanges Make For You

No. If an exchange assigns you a single fixed deposit address, every deposit you make reinforces the same link regardless of what your own wallet does afterward — the exchange's design choice, not yours, drives the reuse.

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Yes, in progress: Silent Payments, a proposal that lets someone pay you without coordinating a fresh address each time, fixing the root cause instead of relying on every user remembering to do the right thing.

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A temporary soft fork ('Reduced Data Temporary Softfork') that tightens how much arbitrary data can go into the chain, with a mandatory signaling window projected for the second week of August 2026. Its rules expire automatically about 52,416 blocks after activation, roughly a year.

More in: BIP-110: The Node Operator's Decision Tree for August 2026

No. BIP-110 is a soft fork: a block valid under its rules is also valid under Core, so your node keeps validating and following the chain exactly as it does today, with zero action required.

More in: BIP-110: The Node Operator's Decision Tree for August 2026

Only in one specific case: a P2TR UTXO inside a pre-signed transaction, spent during the deployment year through a Tapleaf path that violates the new limits, with no alternative spending path available. Outside that exact combination, your keys and funds aren't affected.

More in: BIP-110: The Node Operator's Decision Tree for August 2026

From block height 961,632, your node starts rejecting any block that doesn't signal, even one that's perfectly valid under Core consensus. With miner support sitting under 3% as of late July 2026, against a 55% lock-in threshold, that means accepting upfront the risk of ending up on a minority chain.

More in: BIP-110: The Node Operator's Decision Tree for August 2026

Not on the original timeline. On August 2-3, 2026, activation was postponed indefinitely, with no new date set. Anyone running the activation client should revert to unmodified Bitcoin Core before block 961,632. See the update at the top of this piece and the signaling-math writeup that anticipated this outcome.

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No, and this article doesn't frame it that way. It's a way of thinking about a long-term savings complement, not a replacement for the public system — how much to allocate to each is a personal decision that depends on your own situation.

More in: Bitcoin as a Retirement Plan in Spain: What the Public System Can't Promise You

Between 2.81% and 21% permanently under voluntary early retirement, and up to 30% under involuntary early retirement, depending on years contributed and months of advance — these are official Social Security reduction coefficients, not an estimate.

More in: Bitcoin as a Retirement Plan in Spain: What the Public System Can't Promise You

Today it pays one of the most generous pensions in the OECD relative to final salary. Spain's own official fiscal watchdog (AIReF) warns that this generosity is compatible with growing public debt as demographics adjust — it's not that the system is bad now, it's that the adjustment hasn't arrived yet.

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No one can unilaterally change the protocol's rules or move funds without the private key — not a government, not a bank. The counterweight is that this same property shifts all the responsibility for not losing the key onto you: there's no rescue if you lose it.

More in: Bitcoin as a Retirement Plan in Spain: What the Public System Can't Promise You

No. It's a framework for thinking about a system whose rules are already changing, not personalized financial or tax advice, nor a promise about Bitcoin's future returns.

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No. It's a map of the problem and the options that exist, not a resolution of your specific case. Acting on any of these decisions requires a real notary, lawyer, or tax advisor.

More in: Managing Your Bitcoin in Practice: Custody, Inheritance and Taxes in Spain

Because they answer two different questions. The Score and the rest of the market analysis answer 'when'; this section answers 'how you keep, protect, and declare what you already have' — something that doesn't depend on any cycle phase.

More in: Managing Your Bitcoin in Practice: Custody, Inheritance and Taxes in Spain

It's lost permanently. Unlike a bank account, there is no account-recovery process in Bitcoin — without the private key (or the seed phrase that generates it), no one, not even you, can ever access those funds again.

More in: Managing Your Bitcoin in Practice: Custody, Inheritance and Taxes in Spain

No. Modelo 721 only applies to crypto held by a third party outside Spain (a foreign exchange, for example). If you control your own private keys, you're not required to file it, regardless of the amount.

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From €50,000 in total value of crypto held by third parties abroad, as of December 31. In later years, you only need to file it again if the balance grows by more than €20,000 compared to the year you last filed.

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Yes. Any crypto-to-crypto swap is a taxable event just like a sale — you don't need to pass through euros to trigger a taxable gain or loss.

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FIFO (First In, First Out): the first units you bought are treated as the first ones sold, not whichever you'd choose — important if you bought at very different prices at different times.

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Yes, against capital gains from the four years following the year the losses were generated.

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Depends on the jurisdiction and the timeline. Outside the EU, CARF (the OECD's equivalent framework) applies, rolling out in waves: 46 jurisdictions (Spain included) already have a first exchange in 2027, another 29 — including Switzerland, the UAE, Singapore, and Hong Kong — a year later in 2028, and the US alone in 2029. The reporting date doesn't change your obligation to declare today, only when the tax authority can receive independent confirmation.

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You shouldn't. Exactly how and when a will becomes accessible after death depends on your jurisdiction — in many places, probate filings turn into public court records once probate opens — but wherever you are, it's the wrong place for a private key. Record that the Bitcoin exists, not how to access it.

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A setup where several keys are required (for example, 2 of 3) to move the funds. You can split those keys between you, an heir, and a trusted third party, so no one can act alone, but any two together can if needed.

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The Bitcoin keeps existing on the blockchain, intact, but no one can claim it from any institution — unlike a bank account, there's no recovery process. It's lost forever.

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Yes. It's part of your estate like any other asset, and your heirs need to be able to identify that it exists. What shouldn't go there is the private key or the seed phrase that generates it.

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Yes, and the framework changed recently. Until July 1, 2026, providers had to register with the Bank of Spain. Since that date, the competent authority is the CNMV, and any provider needs a CASP (Crypto-Asset Service Provider) authorization under the EU's MiCA regulation. Neither regime is a guarantee of solvency, but MiCA's mandate is broader — it also covers client fund protection, not just anti-money-laundering checks.

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Yes. MiCA authorization requirements are tied to where the customer is located when using the service, not their nationality — if you're resident in Spain, the same rules apply to any provider serving you, whether you're Spanish, American, British, or anything else.

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It depends what 'safe' means to you. Self-custody removes the risk of a third party failing, but shifts all the technical responsibility onto you. A regulated exchange or custodian reduces that responsibility, but adds counterparty risk. There's no universal answer.

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That if you don't control the private key, your Bitcoin is, in practice, a claim against whoever does control it — it works as long as that entity keeps working and lets you withdraw.

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Not exclusively, but it's built for large holdings that prioritize a formal contractual and audit framework over the simplicity of a retail exchange or the full control of self-custody.

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Net Unrealized Profit/Loss: the fraction of Bitcoin's market cap that is paper profit (or loss). Calculated as (market value − realized value) / market value: above 0 the market as a whole is in profit; below 0, in loss.

More in: Bitcoin NUPL: Why It Duplicates MVRV, and When to Read It Anyway

A negative NUPL (capitulation: the market as a whole in loss) has historically coincided with cycle bottoms, and values above roughly 0.75 (euphoria) with tops. Like any fixed threshold, these have compressed cycle after cycle.

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They measure the same thing from different angles and are mathematically convertible (NUPL = 1 − 1/MVRV). MVRV is a ratio (market/cost); NUPL expresses that same information as a percentage of unrealized profit, which is more intuitive to read.

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Yes. NodeWitness offers, for free, the core Bitcoin cycle metrics (MVRV, HODL waves, holder distribution, exchange flows, a cycle Score with a public backtest) calculated from public sources and our own Bitcoin node. It doesn't cover altcoins or offer thousands of metrics: it covers the Bitcoin cycle.

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The Advanced plan costs $49/month (billed annually) with around 300 metrics at daily resolution, 4 years of history, and no API access. The Professional plan, with 1,500+ metrics and up to 15 years of history, is custom-priced; its Vector product starts at $749/month.

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Depth and breadth: hundreds of metrics for altcoins too, resolution down to 10 minutes, entity-adjusted metrics, per-exchange data, and a commercial API. If your work depends on that, no free tool replaces it today.

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Almost no free API or website offers them with proprietary data: they require walking the entire Bitcoin UTXO set. At NodeWitness we calculate them from our own node and publish them for free, explaining the method.

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No. The historical reconstruction places the Score in the Neutral zone (-15.8) on the day of the October 2025 top ($124,777). Its 71 days in the Distribution zone that year had started in January, nine months before the actual top.

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Because the Score's legitimacy depends on being able to check its track record, not on blind trust. Hiding where it fails would break the exact principle the whole project is built on: show the why, don't ask for faith.

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No. The distribution signal only shows a real hint at a multi-year horizon (24 months or more); at 3-12 months, the subsequent return has, on average, beaten a random entry.

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Not exactly. They're a reconstruction using 7 of the live Score's 10 indicators (without our own node, which weighs more than any other). The Score has been live since July 1, 2026, and two separate records exist. Since July 8 we freeze, every day, the values of the indicators that feed it exactly as they're known that day, so nobody can edit them afterward. The Score as published on the site is kept for July 12 and then for every day since August 2, 2026.

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The Score's formula hasn't been touched: it's been evaluated several times under an internal protocol and no variant has met the bar for robust improvement. What did get fixed was the Score DCA simulator: its "best result" badge used a metric that excluded the pending reserve and systematically favored Score DCA — it was switched to an honest metric on July 11, 2026.

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Not in any demonstrated way. Audited with walk-forward validation (calibrate on 2018-2021, validate on 2022-2026), Score DCA lags traditional DCA in both halves of the history. It behaves like a lower-exposure strategy: it wins when the period ends in a depressed market, loses when it ends in a rally — there's no proven average advantage.

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No. The live formula has been the same since July 1, 2026. Since then, close to 10 improvement variants have been evaluated across 3 separate rounds of experiments, and none has met the internal bar for adoption.

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Because the process runs the other way around: each variant is calibrated on one stretch of history and validated on a completely different one, never the same one, and it's only adopted if it improves things robustly in both at once. The record of what was tested and when is dated, and this page commits to reflecting any future change.

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The revision that arrives once our own Bitcoin node finishes syncing: the heaviest-weighted indicator will be able to run on complete data instead of partial, and everything will be re-evaluated under the same protocol. No date yet.

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So that the most reasonable suspicion about any indicator — 'surely they tweak the model after seeing what result they want' — can be checked against real dates, not our word.

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That's the right question to ask of any backtested model, which is why the protocol is built specifically against it: every variant is validated on a stretch of history it never touched during calibration, and the dated record of what failed (close to 10 variants, zero adopted) is public precisely so that claim can be checked instead of taken on faith.

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Dollar Cost Averaging: investing a fixed amount at regular intervals (e.g., $50 every week) instead of all at once. This smooths out your average purchase price and removes the need to time the exact entry point.

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A DCA variant that adjusts how much you invest each period based on the cycle phase marked by the NodeWitness Cycle Score: it contributes more when the market is in the accumulation zone and less (or pauses) when it's in the distribution zone.

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No. It's a simulator that shows, using real historical data, how that strategy would have performed against traditional DCA. It doesn't execute purchases or manage funds — it's an educational tool, not an investment service.

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No. In a market that rises steadily over time, investing everything upfront (lump sum) tends to beat DCA, because the earlier you're in, the longer your money is exposed to the rise. DCA doesn't maximize returns: it reduces the risk of entering right before a drop.

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The NodeWitness Cycle Score is a number between -100 and +100 that summarizes which phase of the cycle the Bitcoin market is in (accumulation or distribution), calculated by combining several on-chain and market indicators with verifiable data, including our own Bitcoin node.

More in: The Bitcoin Cycle Score Built on a Verifiable Node, Not Borrowed APIs

No, and that's deliberate. We publish which indicators make it up, what each one measures, and where the data comes from — but we withhold the exact weight of each one and the internal combination logic. The legitimacy of that reserve comes from the public backtest, not blind trust.

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No. It's an informational heuristic about the market cycle, not financial advice. The historical backtest shows how it would have behaved, not a guarantee of future results.

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It's Bitcoin-only: it doesn't see capital rotation into altcoins or signals from other markets. It's also not a short-term timing indicator: it locates the cycle phase, it doesn't mark the exact day of a top or bottom.

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A breakdown of all circulating Bitcoin supply by how long each coin has gone without moving on-chain, grouped into age bands (from less than a day to more than 5 years).

More in: Bitcoin HODL Waves: Calculated From Our Own Node, Not a Vendor

Because it requires walking the entire UTXO set (all unspent transaction outputs) and calculating the age of each one — data no free API offers, and which is only possible with direct access to the blockchain.

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That an ever larger share of supply has gone a long time without moving, a sign of long-term holder conviction. Historically, the older bands fatten during bear markets (accumulate and hold) and thin out near tops (veteran holders start selling).

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HODL waves group supply by AGE (how long it's gone without moving); holder distribution by wallet size groups it by HOW MUCH BTC each address holds (from 'shrimp' to 'whales'). They're two different cuts of the same blockchain snapshot.

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Glassnode and CryptoQuant license similar UTXO-age data as part of their paid plans. We calculate ours independently, from our own Bitcoin node's weekly UTXO snapshot, and publish it for free with the method fully documented — nothing bought, nothing black-boxed.

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An index from 0 to 100 that summarizes crypto market sentiment, combining factors like volatility, volume, social media, Bitcoin dominance, and search trends. Low values indicate extreme fear; high values, extreme greed.

More in: The Bitcoin Fear & Greed Index Works Backwards, on Purpose

It's a contrarian reading: historically, extreme market panic (extreme fear) has coincided with price bottoms, while extreme euphoria (extreme greed) has coincided with tops — mass sentiment tends to lag the cycle, not lead it.

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From alternative.me, a free public API, with complete history since February 2018.

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Not entirely. It measures crypto market sentiment as a whole, not just Bitcoin, and incorporates factors like Bitcoin's dominance over altcoins. That's one of its limits, and a reason not to use it in isolation.

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The daily profitability of Bitcoin mining in dollars, compared against its own 365-day average. Very low values indicate miners are close to capitulation (barely profitable); very high values indicate mining euphoria.

More in: Puell Multiple in Bitcoin: Miner Profitability, the Hash Ribbon, and Cycle Bottoms

Daily BTC issuance is multiplied by the day's price, then divided by the 365-day moving average of that same value.

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Below 0.5 has historically coincided with cycle bottoms (miner capitulation); above 4, with cycle tops (extreme profitability).

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It compares the 30- and 60-period moving averages of network hashrate. When hashrate turns upward after a drop, it confirms — from a different angle, network security rather than price — that the miner capitulation flagged by a low Puell Multiple is running its course. We calculate it directly from our own Bitcoin node rather than a third-party feed.

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Market Value to Realized Value: the relationship between what the market says Bitcoin is worth today (market value) and what holders paid for it on average (realized value). A high MVRV points to large unrealized gains; below 1, the market as a whole is underwater.

More in: Bitcoin MVRV Ratio: Why Its Cycle Thresholds Keep Shrinking

Historically, an MVRV at or below 1 (market price meeting or falling below holders' aggregate average cost) has coincided with cycle bottoms. Above 3, with tops — though that 3 is getting harder to reach each cycle, see below for why.

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Because as Bitcoin matures, its volatility compresses and each cycle's peaks run lower than the previous one's. Across the last five cycle tops we tracked, the peak MVRV went 7.74, then 5.25, 4.72, 2.85, and 2.29 — a sustained decline, not an isolated case.

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From the Coin Metrics Community API, a free public source. That's different from HODL waves, which we calculate ourselves by walking the full UTXO set from our own Bitcoin node.

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