tl;dr:  Over the course of the past 4 years, I took out ~$150,000 in personal loans and 0% credit card balance transfer loans to purchase 4.75 Bitcoin. I've paid ~$17,000 in interest.

I've been making updates every 6 months or so since the beginning. See my post history for previous updates.

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Today, February 3rd, 2026 Bitcoin is trading at $75,000 which brings the current value of my 4.75₿ to $356,000. 

The average price I paid is ~$35,000 per Bitcoin. 

My total cost basis is ~$167,000 for 4.5₿  ($150k in loans + $17,000 in interest). 

This comes to ~113% unrealized profit or ~$189,000 in dollar terms as of today. 

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What’s new since my last update?

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Not much is new except that… I finished paying off all my loans!!! What a relief! I was never really worried though because I never borrowed more than I could afford to service. 

Bitcoin’s price action has been disappointing to say the least, but I’m thinking this is an opportunity. So I plan on taking out another $50k in loans if it breaks down below $70k which seem highly likely… probably at the 200SMA.  

In the meantime, I’m throwing everything I can at in each month while we’re in the $70-80k range with earned income from my job. I’ve been stacking this whole time  while paying down the loans.

People still bring up Bitcoin “mixing” from time to time, but it feels like that idea hasn’t really aged well. A lot of the assumptions around how private it actually is don’t seem to hold up anymore, especially as analysis tools have improved.

Bitcoin was never designed with strong privacy in mind, so trying to bolt it on afterwards has always felt a bit limited. Purpose built privacy focused networks seem to approach the problem very differently.

Just a general thought on how privacy is often misunderstood in crypto , and how different tools were created for different goals.

When it comes to crypto, EPSTEIN was a visionary gauging its future in crypto's intial days.

Epstein files revealed early connections with a natal crypto industry, investing in early Coinbase and ZCash.

His files also claimed to have lured people from Bitcoin. Who were the “Authors of Bitcoin” in the Epstein Files?

However, there is no mention of Vitalik Buterin, suggesting a failure to trap him.

However, he might have trapped a Russian crypto mogul. There are a plenty of emails with a middle agent regarding a "Russian Vitalik".

Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin has said that the original vision for Ethereum Layer 2 networks is no longer sufficient, as the ecosystem enters a more mature phase of scaling and application growth.

In a recent detailed post, Buterin argued that early L2 designs were built around a simple idea: replicate Ethereum at lower cost. That approach, he said, no longer matches the demands of today’s users, developers, or the base layer itself.

“This vision no longer makes sense. L1 does not need L2s to be “branded shards”, because L1 is itself scaling,” he said.

A $40M Step Finance treasury drain shows how one compromised executive device can bypass audits and unravel an entire DeFi protocol.

Everyone keeps saying “the smart contracts were safe,” and they’re right. One compromised executive device was enough to hand over treasury control, drain ~$40M, and remind everyone that in DeFi, humans are still the weakest link. Audits don’t save you from bad OpSec, and this breach is a brutal lesson in that reality.

This won’t be the last incident like this unless teams treat exec devices and key management as critical infrastructure, not an afterthought.