BINANCE'S BITCOIN RESERVE HAS REACHED 693,000 COINS, A TWO-YEAR HIGH AND ABOUT 30% OF WHAT ALL THE MAJOR EXCHANGES HOLD — THAT IS $53 BILLION — AND EVERY COIN OF IT IS SOMEBODY ELSE'S

Binance's bitcoin reserve is at 693,000 coins, the highest in two years and up roughly 77,000 since late April. At $77,185 that is just over $53 billion, and it is about 30% of what all the major exchanges hold between them.

Take the other denominator. 693,000 out of 21 million is 3.3% of every bitcoin that will ever exist, sitting in one company's wallets.

None of it is Binance's. That is the entire point of the number. An exchange balance is not a position, it is an inventory of other people's coins, and the size of it is a measure of how many people decided that holding it themselves was somebody else's job.

The coverage reads a rising exchange reserve as sell pressure, on the argument that coins move to an exchange to be sold. Maybe. It is equally the shape of people buying and leaving the coins where they landed, which is the same chart and the opposite story, and nobody can tell you which from a balance alone.

What the balance does tell you is unambiguous, and it has nothing to do with price. This week a federation lost nearly 4,000 coins it was holding for other people and is now negotiating with the man who took them. A hardware wallet company's mailing list was breached and 347,000 people got an email asking for their seed. Seven of the largest firms in this industry are queuing at the same regulator for permission to hold your coins professionally.

693,000 is what that queue is for. Every one of those coins can move without its owner, and 21 million of them cannot be printed. Both of those sentences are permanent and only one of them is in your favour.