There is a classic joke. A girl tells a boy: if you can get everyone on the forum arguing, I’ll go out with you. The boy posts a thread titled “PHP is the best programming language in the world.” The forum immediately erupts. The girl says, you’re amazing, let’s go. The boy replies: no — I have to make everyone believe PHP is the best language. The joke lands even if you know nothing about PHP, because the absurdity is universal.

Yesterday, that joke edged closer to reality. PHP disclosed two critical vulnerabilities, both scoring a top-tier 9.2 on the CVSS scale (out of 10; anything above 9 means “it can lay bare everything you own”). In the real world, countries including the Netherlands and Finland took government websites offline, and millions of sites patched overnight — unsurprising, given that roughly 70% of legacy websites still run on PHP [1].

The mechanism is simple and frightening: an attacker only needs to send one carefully crafted malformed HTTP request to trigger a memory error and seize control of the server (remote code execution) — no account or password required. It is like walking into a bank to make a deposit, except instead of handing over money you hand over a jumble of instructions that crashes the deposit system and, in the process, spills the bank’s own credentials back to you.

The flaw most likely existed as far back as 2024, dormant and unused, until it was finally discovered — prompting a global emergency notice.

Why do traditional software programs always have holes? Because code is written by humans, and humans make mistakes; among hundreds of thousands or millions of lines, some corner of the logic is never thought through completely. What has changed is the pace. Where people once hunted for bugs, AI is now on the field, and it finds vulnerabilities faster than humans can write patches. These two PHP flaws were first surfaced by GPT-5 and Gemini. AI hunts bugs at tens to hundreds of times the speed of human security researchers.

As of now, beyond the European sites taken down for emergency repair, other countries have reported varying degrees of data leakage — possibly related, possibly not; official reports should be treated as authoritative. There are already hackers sharing records of tens of millions, even hundreds of millions, of users, thoughtfully offered as free downloads.

Anyone paying attention has felt it: starting in 2026, vulnerabilities, hacks, and crypto thefts have arrived in an unrelenting stream. This is the investment landscape that now demands a rethink — and it is precisely why the principle of holding only Bitcoin, with keys (the seed phrase) self-custodied, is the right one.

Some will raise the familiar, never-settled objection: “Bitcoin has vulnerabilities too.” This is not an attempt to declare a side right or wrong. But if the goal is to understand Bitcoin — to stake wealth and time over the next few years, even the next decade, on a choice worth verifying as correct — then the path is not to take an extreme position.

Recall Bitcoin’s three essential properties: decentralization, fixed supply, and immutability. As long as those three hold, Bitcoin remains the Bitcoin it has been since 2009.

To make this concrete, think of Bitcoin in five layers:

Mathematics (cryptography) → consensus protocol (ledger rules) → client software and hardware → exchange companies → users.

Against the history of crypto hacks, attacks, and lost-coin incidents, one consensus emerges: virtually every earth-shaking hack and theft has occurred at layers three through five. None has ever occurred at layer one.

Only twice has anything touched layer two [2]. The first was the hard fork at block height 74,638 on August 15, 2010, which responded to an integer-overflow bug that had caused Bitcoin to be inflated. The second was the inflation-class bug CVE-2018-17144 in 2018, found and patched before anyone could exploit it — so it caused no actual oversupply.

So the claim “Bitcoin has never had a vulnerability” is false, or at least imprecise. It has had bugs. It has had inflation bugs. It has had moments that nearly capsized the chain.

But the other claim is true: Bitcoin has never once seen a case where “someone sends a request and your coins are transferred away.” In seventeen years, zero times.

The two statements are not contradictory. They describe two different species.

A caveat: layer two, the consensus protocol, is not absolutely safe either. If you controlled tens of billions of dollars, you could force a change to the protocol — inflate supply, rewrite data — but whether the tens of thousands of other nodes worldwide would accept your data is another matter entirely.

The real Bitcoin network is a “decentralized ledger” maintained jointly by tens of thousands of independent full nodes around the world. Its underlying logic is extremely minimal, almost stubbornly so. It does not support complex smart contracts (unlike Ethereum, where it is easy to write buggy code). It does exactly one thing:

Using pure mathematics (SHA-256) and cryptographic signatures (secp256k1), it records who sent how much to whom [3].

As long as this thermodynamic and cryptographic foundation is not overturned, and as long as the private key is fully in the holder’s hands and unknown to anyone else, no force on earth — not the most skilled hacker, not the most powerful state apparatus, not the most advanced supercomputer — can move even 0.00000001 Bitcoin (one satoshi) from the chain against that holder’s will.

A 51% attack is not a Bitcoin vulnerability; that number represents the cost of attacking. You would need more than 51% of the network’s hashrate — energy comparable to the combined consumption of several mid-sized countries — which is physically infeasible. And the 2^256 space of private keys exceeds the total number of atoms in the observable universe, so that mathematically, before the heat death of the universe, no one can guess a key by brute force.

This is why those who truly revere the technology, having seen the softness and the holes in the world, choose to hold Bitcoin firmly. The asset held is not merely a digital asset, but an absolute form of individual property rights that bows to no third party and depends on no software vendor “not making mistakes.”

(For further reading, see The Sovereign Individual.)

Understanding Bitcoin takes a little technical knowledge, and a little faith. Note the word: understanding, not believing. The firm conviction here is that Bitcoin is the only asset that requires trusting no one.

With a bank, you trust it will not misappropriate. With an exchange, you trust it will not gamble with your coins. With a payment app, you trust it will not one day zero out your balance. Most of the time these trusts hold, because most of the time people follow the rules.

But that is a trust, not a structure.

Bitcoin reverses the arrangement. It does not ask anyone to trust a counterparty; it asks them to trust exactly one thing: a private-key signature cannot be forged.

That assumption is far weaker — and far more stable — than “some company will never do evil.” From 2017 to this moment, across 972,559 blocks, there has been no outage, no altered ledger, and no “your coins were sent away.”

Everything above is a technical judgment. It is not a reason to buy. Price, position size, and desire are outside the scope of this article.

References

  • [1] The two PHP vulnerabilities disclosed in October 2026 each scored 9.2 on the CVSS scale and were reportedly first identified by the GPT-5 and Gemini models; their earliest inception is traced to 2024, prompting a global emergency-patch effort.
  • [2] Bitcoin’s only protocol-layer (layer-two) inflation incidents: the August 15, 2010 integer-overflow bug at block height 74,638 (resolved by hard fork) and CVE-2018-17144 in 2018 (found and patched before any exploitation, causing no actual oversupply).
  • [3] Bitcoin’s security rests on SHA-256 hashing and secp256k1 elliptic-curve signatures, with the ledger maintained by tens of thousands of independent full nodes; a 51% attack represents attack cost rather than a protocol flaw.