Bitcoin is up about nine thousand dollars since Monday's close, close to fourteen percent. Every explanation printed for it this week is a reason to own bitcoin. None of them says who did the buying.

The reasons are good ones. American gross federal debt passed $40 trillion for the first time. The Treasury said its bond buybacks may run larger than the ones it has already announced, and a buyback here means the government going into the market and repurchasing its own older bonds, which is meant to hold their price up and bring long-term borrowing costs down. Those costs rose again the next day. Whatever the buybacks were meant to do, they did not do it for long.

From there, most people took the obvious step. The money is being debased, and bitcoin is what you hold when it is.

That step skips a question. A reason to own something is not a record of anyone buying it, and the people who usually do the buying have been moving their cash off the exchanges since May.

Bitfinex counted it. The stablecoins held at exchanges, which is the money sitting ready to spend, are fourteen billion dollars smaller than in May. Their line, published on Thursday with bitcoin already up more than five thousand dollars on the week: "Until stablecoin supply turns, the rally stays unfunded."

They wrote that in the middle of the move, not before it.

That number is worth understanding, because the whole argument turns on it. Stablecoins are dollar tokens. The ones held in accounts at exchanges are the balance somebody has already moved onto a trading venue and can spend on a coin the same minute, which makes it the closest thing crypto has to a count of ready cash. Fourteen billion dollars of it has gone since May, and the count published on Thursday, four days into the move, still showed it gone.

So roughly a billion dollars of bitcoin was bought in three days while the balance everyone watches kept falling. Somebody bought. Whoever it was did not spend the money that number counts.

There is a public record of who did. It came out on Wednesday.