Charts, cycle structure, weekly movers, individual assets read through the site's rules. The journal is where the ranking's own numbers do the talking — cycle by cycle, week by week — while the blog argues for the rules the ranking is built on. Every piece is dated, sourced from the same data the site publishes, and stamped with the build it was read from.
The 2021 cycle bottomed at $15.6k, below the 2017 peak of $19.8k — the first time in a decade a cycle low breached the previous cycle's high. In 2026 it is happening again: the 2025 cycle's June low of $58k sits 16% below the 2021 peak of $69k. The timing metric that projects an Oct–Nov 2026 confirmed bottom, the five-epoch shrinking arc it rests on, and the 2017 cycle's +240% mid-cycle bounce that warns the current +48% recovery off $58k may not be proof of the bottom yet.
The companion post argued from the spec that SegWit was a hard fork by function. This one runs the experiment. Ten Bitcoin Core regtest nodes at six hashpower ratios; direct anyone-can-spend and BIP144 stripping tests on real Bitcoin Core 0.12.1; the precise split trigger isolated. Both sides validate honestly by their own rules; the rules diverge; hashpower and market chose the 2017 outcome, not correctness.
SegWit is universally called a soft fork because legacy nodes did not crash when it activated. That standard is a poor test. Legacy nodes lost the ability to verify signatures the whitepaper's Section 2 says are the definition of ownership, and the activation was forced on miners by economic threat. On the mechanics, it was a hard fork wearing a soft-fork label.
On 1 August 2017 the network activated a block-size upgrade; three weeks later a separate SegWit upgrade activated on the same network. Calling one "Bitcoin" and the other "a fork of Bitcoin" is inheritance by ticker, not by protocol history — the site's stated position, with the Satoshi block-size scaling quote and the whitepaper signature argument.
Two words for two things that get treated as synonyms in casual writing. A hard fork is a protocol upgrade. A chain split is what happens when a hard fork doesn't get the coordination it needs and two groups of nodes keep running two versions. Same mechanism at activation, different outcome in the days that follow.
Same protocol lineage, same SHA-256, same 21-million cap — and three separate cryptocurrencies in the ranking. Applying the counting rule to its hardest case: each independently has its own chain and its own consensus, and none of the reasons people give for treating them as one survive the test.
Twenty-eight chains carry a hashrate figure and they use twenty different algorithms. A single ranking that adds them all up ranks nothing at all — the honest table has twenty entries, most with one chain in them.
Every figure in a Journal post is stamped with the data build it was read from — the site rebuilds every six hours, so a number here will drift from the current ranking. The stamp is there so you can tell how far.
The Blog is the argument for the site's four counting rules — small, opinionated, rarely added to. The Journal is the record of what the data does under those rules — dated, factual, updated regularly. Read the blog for the reasoning and the journal for what it looks like on any given week.