Notes from the Desk of Someone Who Has Not Slept Since February 28th
Confidential · Issue #48 · Monday, 23 March 2026
Situation Board · Bitcoin: ~$70K, down 3 straight days · Gold: sub-$4,500, –3% on week · BTC hashrate –12% from March 1 peak · XOM +28% YTD · XLE +29% YTD · MIRAN dissent: wanted 25bp cut · S&P –7% from recent high, 4th losing week
Sunday night. Oil somewhere between $112 and whatever the next headline makes it. Bitcoin under $70,000 for the third day running. The VIX at 24, which is insane — not because it's high, just because it isn't higher. There's a man in Florida threatening to level power plants via the same platform people use to argue about football. The Nikkei opens down 3.5%. Someone in a Tokyo trading room is doing math about strategic petroleum reserves that hasn't needed to be done since 1973, and they're getting the same answer: not enough.
I keep a notepad. It has gotten messy.
Here is the thing about Bitcoin that nobody wants to say out loud, because it sounds either too bullish or too conspiratorial depending on which direction you're squinting: the Iran war destroyed part of the Bitcoin mining network, and the market barely processed it.
Walk through the logic slowly.
Iran built a sanction-proof treasury over roughly seven years. It licensed Bitcoin mining. It subsidized energy. The IRGC ran facilities out of power plants that no SWIFT exclusion could touch. Estimates from Elliptic put Iran at about 4.5% of global hashrate at peak. At 2024-2026 prices and network conditions, we're probably talking $3–5 billion in cumulative mined value across the full operational arc. A sovereign Bitcoin operation, hidden in plain sight, running on gas flares and political defiance.
Then on February 28th, the strikes began. Kuhak. Aghdasiyeh. Shahran refinery. Fardis storage. The grid went into emergency load-shedding. Mining rigs need consistent power above almost everything else. You can't hashrate through brownouts. The 7-day average global hashrate peaked near 1,083 EH/s on March 1st — the day after the campaign started — and had fallen to roughly 954 EH/s by March 16th. A drawdown of nearly 12% in two weeks. Some of that is a US snowstorm. Most of it, when you look at the timeline, is Iran going dark.
And yet. Bitcoin hit $76,000 on March 17th.
Mining supply gets removed from the network. The halved issuance schedule absorbs the shock. Demand from Iranian citizens — capital flight, Nobitex transactions spiking 700% within minutes of the initial strikes — partially offsets the miner selling that no longer exists. The network's difficulty adjustment, that beautiful brutally indifferent algorithm, just recalibrates. Fewer miners, same reward. Survivors get fat. It's a self-healing system that accidentally benefited from the destruction of one of its biggest state-sponsored participants.
I don't know what to do with that. Neither does the market. Bitcoin fell three straight days after hitting that $76,000 high, sitting sub-$70,000 on Friday as Fed rate hike repricing — 50% chance of a hike by October now, per some desks — finally started mattering more than any individual headline. Gold is at sub-$4,500 and falling, which makes even less intuitive sense until you realize gold's narrative as the canonical war hedge is colliding with a Fed that might actually need to raise rates to fight oil-driven CPI, and real yields rising is still kryptonite for the yellow metal, geopolitics be damned.
The Part Where I Try to Explain the Kharg Island Situation Without Screaming
There is an island. It is fifteen miles off the Iranian coast. It handles 90% of Iran's crude exports. JPMorgan said, in a note earlier this month, that seizing it would cut Iranian oil output in half and halt nearly all of the country's exports. S&P Global's doomsday scenario — $200/barrel in Q2, Brent above $100 through year-end, recession in Germany, Japan, the UK — essentially has Kharg Island on the cover page.
The US military already struck it. On March 13th. Trump called it "the most powerful bombing raids in Middle East history." He deliberately spared the oil infrastructure — "for reasons of decency," he said, adding that he would "immediately reconsider" if Iran kept blocking the strait.
Now, per Axios and multiple sources: the White House is considering occupying the island. Marines. Ground troops. A physical seizure of the thing that processes 90% of Iranian crude, located inside a war zone, in the Persian Gulf, with no exit strategy in the press briefing because there is no exit strategy in the press briefing.
One administration source was quoted saying they needed "about a month to weaken the Iranians more with strikes, take the island and then get them by the balls and use it for negotiations."
That quote is doing a lot of work. Let it sit with you for a moment.
The market hasn't fully priced this in. The S&P is down 7% from its high but still north of 5,000. The logic seems to be: this resolves fast, oil comes back down, the Fed cuts once, everyone exhales. That logic requires the Kharg Island occupation scenario to stay a rumor. Right now it's four Axios sources and a Pentagon deployment of thousands of additional Marines. Rumors with logistics are different from rumors without them.
What Bitcoin Has Actually Become in This War
Here is the thing the CoinDesk piece got right last week, and the thing people keep dancing around: Bitcoin is now the world's only 24/7 geopolitical pricing mechanism for people who need to transact when everything else is closed.
The war started on a Saturday. The first market to price it was Bitcoin. It fell 8.5% at the open. By the time Tokyo opened, it had given the FX desks a reference point. It wasn't acting as a safe haven. It wasn't acting as pure risk. It was acting as price discovery — the only place where someone who knew something could register that knowledge while London, Frankfurt, New York, Tokyo, and Sydney were all locked.
This is new. And it is more important than any individual price level.
Every subsequent shock has found buyers at a higher floor than the last: $64K, $66K, $68K, $69,400, $70,596. The ceiling holds at $73,000–$74,000. Four rejections. A compression pattern that has to resolve in one direction. With the 48-hour ultimatum expiring tonight and Kharg Island occupation "under serious consideration" by Thursday, either this resolves diplomatically and Bitcoin breaks north through $74K on a cease-fire rally — or something escalates and we find out whether $70,000 is actually the floor everyone thinks it is.
Gold at sub-$4,500, meanwhile, is the market saying something quiet and strange: this is an inflation shock, not a deflation event, and rising real rates hurt all the havens equally. The Bitcoin-gold correlation flipped positive this week for the first time in weeks. They're both getting hit by the same thing: a Fed that has quietly pivoted from "one cut in 2026" to "actually we might be hiking in October" without ever saying it explicitly. Governor Miran dissented at the March FOMC — the only vote for a cut. The rest held. One of them is reading the same data the rest of us are and reaching a different conclusion. It is not clear that Miran is wrong. It is not clear that he's right either. The data, politely, suggests both outcomes are now on the table.
The Sentence Stephen Miran Voted Against
The FOMC statement language is worth quoting not for what it says but for what it doesn't: "The implications of developments in the Middle East for the U.S. economy are uncertain."
That sentence is doing the kind of heavy lifting that should require a structural engineer. Uncertain. Brent at $112. PPI hot two months running. Gas at $3.94 national average. Marines deploying to the Gulf. The RBA just hiked to 4.10%. The BoE is pricing 64 basis points of hikes through year-end. The UK 10-year gilt hit its highest yield since 2008 on Friday. The German bund, 2011.
Uncertain.
There is a version of the next six weeks in which Trump's ultimatum works — Iran opens the strait, oil falls, the data softens, Miran gets his cut, and everyone pretends the last four weeks were a manageable volatility episode. There is another version in which American boots land on Kharg Island, Iran retaliates against Gulf energy infrastructure, Brent goes to $150, and Powell gives a press conference where he reads a statement that contains the word "uncertain" again, this time with visibly less conviction.
S&P Global's $200/barrel scenario — the one they buried in the tail section of their March outlook — is not a tail anymore. It's a named road. It has addresses on it.
I don't know which version we get. I do know that the VIX at 24 is not pricing the Kharg Island ground invasion scenario. I know that the S&P at 5,000+ is not pricing $150 oil. I know that Bitcoin at $70,000 is exactly where it should be: unresolved, compressing, waiting for the 48-hour clock to tell it where to go next.
The notepad is getting messier.