The Best in Bitcoin made Audible.
Guy Swann makes the knowledge of Bitcoin, the world's most secure, independent money, accessible to everyone. Exploring Bitcoin from an investment perspective, economic analysis, its philosophical foundations, & technological primitives. Reading and distilling thousands of hours of others' works on Bitcoin, Guy explains everything you need to know.
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"Bitcoin is being embraced by the U.S. and the U.S. financial system and it is it being embraced by Iran and the Iranian regime at the exact same time and both of them know that they can use it without the other one threatening it. And that puts it in an insanely unique place in a world where there are no monies that work like that anymore. " ~ Guy Swann We live in a world where global money printers are silently bleeding your savings out the back door. But the real threat isn't only the U.S. do...
"Generation X and the millennials both tried to do everything right, according to what the boomers told them was the path forward: save money, study hard, get a ‘job’. At every stage we got rugpulled. Most of us have nothing to show for any of that. Zoomers looked at what happened to Gen-X and the millennials and said, quite rationally, fuck that." ~ John Carter What happens when you raise an entire generation on the promise of a second marshmallow – and never deliver? John Carter's piece refram...
"The peso scam is around a thousand times larger than the Libra scam, and its victims are the poorest, about 95% of Argentines. " ~ Saifedean Ammous Javier Milei swore he'd burn down Argentina's central bank and dollarize the economy. Two and a half years later, the money supply has quadrupled, the debt has ballooned, and a quarter-trillion-dollar carry trade is hollowing out the nation. Is the self-proclaimed Rothbardian actually running one of the most inflationary presidencies in Argentine hi...
"Our little home controller, building controller, it knows our electric rate, it knows the way that electric rate changes based on the time of day. It knows the PV flux, the solar flux from the solar panels. So it knows if there's excess power that the building's not using. It also knows our natural gas rate. It also knows the Bitcoin price and the network difficulty. This is all just in our software. And in real time, our building can choose, it can flip between heating with gas or with hashrat...
"If you think of River or Gemini or Coinbase or whatever, think of all of those as silos and how people custody Bitcoin. If some sort of compromise were to come into the Bitcoin ecosystem at the private key generation level, that could create an incident that could set Bitcoin back by 10 or more years because it would be almost indistinguishable from a protocol compromise and that we would be talking about Bitcoin being hacked again and not individual custodians being hacked. So I think we need ...
"It's often discussed that arbitrarily lowering interest rates and the zero interest rate policy era leads to massive recklessness and unethical and irresponsible behavior. But there's something even more sinister that actually occurs. A lot of people notice how massive corporations are just buying up all of the hard assets and then renting it back to us. [...] Zero interest rate policy isn't merely something that leads to reckless investments. It essentially amounts to free rent for the rich fo...
Guy Swann reads a chapter from "The Bitcoinization of Finance" by Wyatt O'Rourke, contrasting the Gilded Age's sound money with the ZERP era's easy money, which fueled unproductive speculation. He argues that sound money, backed by proof of work, is a prerequisite for markets and sustainable society, with Bitcoin offering the only decentralized and incorruptible path to economic health. Without it, economies rot, leading to societal collapse and a breakdown of trade.
"It is not markets that made money possible. It is collectibles, which we now call money, that make markets possible." ~ Nick Szabo What if everything we've been told about how money emerged is backwards? Nick Szabo's first article in nearly a decade tells the story of a stolen canoe, a tribal feud, and a string of shells – and uses it to challenge one of the most repeated ideas in economics. Did money come from barter, or did it come from something far older and far more human? Check out the or...
In this roundtable, we sit down with Steve, Mechanic, and Jeff, and honestly, we struggle to stay on Bitcoin for half of it. Our catch-up quickly turns into a rant about LLMs acting like corporate yes-men, and the frustrations of running AI locally. But we do get back to the money. We talk about the St. Louis Fed literally copyrighting Bitcoin price data, France tracking self-hosted wallets, Steve’s update on UTXOracle, and why the quantum computing threat looks a lot more like a funding scam wi...
"They say the ruler is bent, then use the bent ruler to measure the table. They say the clock is broken, then solemnly read out the hour. They say the instrument is false, then ask it, with perfect seriousness, for one final certification. This is, in itself, a form of bondage. To measure gold in fiat terms is, in Jung’s sense, to deny the shadow: to denounce the paper system in public while continuing, in private, to let it decide what counts as value." ~ Craig Tindale 1 BTC = 1 BTC. If fiat is...
"When you really dig into the heart of how finance, how our monetary system and how our political system work, and how deeply married they are, you begin to see something that's pretty disturbing. That cheating and manipulation aren't simply something that arise in bad behaviors. They're fundamentally required by the system itself. They're baked in. They are the standard. It is the law. And if that is our reality, then the only way we can actually restore honesty and sensible standards is to cre...
"The whole point of libertarianism is that we should recognise that we don't know how to plan the world. We don't know what the solution is going to be. You can't have a central planner decide it. If it was really just that libertarians understood how the world worked, then you could have a central planner. You would just need them to be libertarians. That's not how it works at all. It's antithetical to the whole concept. That's why the Block Size War was such a huge success, because it did not ...
"The idea that some authority can deduce the correct level of this balance is not merely wrong, it is not even wrong, it is methodologically incoherent. Asking for the 'correct' interest rate is like asking how much the color orange weighs." ~ Allen Farrington & Sacha Meyers What if deflation isn't the economic boogeyman we've been told to fear, but the very *signal* that progress is happening? In Part 2 of Allen Farrington and Sacha Meyers' brilliant essay, we dismantle the central myth of ...
"The fiat economist universally chooses to set the printing press to brrrrrrrrrr. While the enlightened elite watch their stock portfolios moon and their debts disappear, the common man is told to be thankful that he was 'this close' to the horror of living in a world where his wages bought more every year, and his government respected his private property. Imagine how hard it would be for that government to raise debt in such a world. It would have to justify its spending. We cannot have that."...
“what matters now is not belief, but endurance. bitcoin does not promise comfort. it does not promise justice. it does not promise to save anyone. it offers one thing only: a set of rules that do not bend to price, politics, or persuasion. whether that is valuable depends entirely on who is holding it and why. the mathematics will almost certainly hold long enough. the question has always been whether we will.” ~ Hugh Hendry Today, we are back with part two of Tyler Durden's piece "Modern Money ...
"I think there will come a point where you get excessive, you swing too far on the individual side of the spectrum, and then it becomes advantageous to group together again, and you become more fulfilled, more happy, more culturally flourishing in collectives again." "I think there's a resurgence of the desire for people to build tribes, communities, even fucking network state, even microstates, and saying that we're going to do this, and we're going to really group together because getting 10,0...
“This piece is my attempt to finally map the terrain I'd been circling for years: Bitcoin's hardness, its fragility, its human governance, and its uneasy relationship with a world that increasingly runs on elastic money and digital abundance. It's not a defence. It's not an indictment. It's an audit.” ~ Hugh Hendry We keep pretending modern money is a stable system, but Hugh Hendry explains the quiet part out loud: fiat only survives by cheating, bending the rules, and offloading pain onto the f...
"We are trying to make it possible for people to use computers as simple of a statement as this: use computers, without intermediaries and custodians. The more they do, the more the lines will diverge. Until there's a chasm between the centralised model and the decentralised model with a clear line between them. And we will force either a reconciliation at the natural, technical level, let the best product in the market win, or we will force the hand of the authoritarians to say that our model i...
"Residents withdrew over 1.6 trillion rubles, or $19.7 billion in January, desperately turning to cash amid increased state controls." As governments push CBDCs to clamp down on dissent and capital flight, is Bitcoin our last line of defense for true sovereignty? Today with the Financial Freedom Report we dive into global news - from Hong Kong's surveillance crackdowns to offline AI-Bitcoin kits like BlackBox - plus my take on why Lightning could make digital cash frictionless. Will these innova...
This week, the whole crew is back for another Roundtable. I sat down with Mechanic, Steve, and Jeff to talk about the painful reality of Bitcoin mining today, the chaos of global politics, and some wild stories about corporate power plays. We started by looking at why mining is under so much pressure right now. The industry is getting a brutal and much-needed reality check. Fiat-fueled operations are feeling the squeeze, and it’s a reminder that if you aren't building on a foundation of hard mon...
“The seed phrase has been a barrier to self-custody since day one. It’s what scares normies away from keeping their own bitcoin, and it’s a legitimate reason why people accept the counterparty risk of exchanges and custodial apps.” ~ Breez What if Bitcoin adoption is stuck not because of the tech but because we are obsessed with "perfect" security? I just read Juan Galt’s thoughts on Breeze SDK’s seedless wallets using Passkey Login, and it hit home. We have to lower the barriers for normies if ...
"Yes, AI is a big deal, but the conclusion that AI is going to kill the vertical and functional software business model simply makes no sense. The truth is that AI simply isn't going to kill software companies. After all this panic has passed, we'll see that AI is the best thing that ever happened to the software industry." ~ Alex Immerman and Santiago Rodriguez Ever wonder if AI is really going to wipe out software companies and leave us all jobless in a post-human economy? Listen in this episo...
Did Jeffrey Epstein secretly hijack Bitcoin during the block size war? Was is all a covert operation by Jeffrey Epstein and shadowy government actors to permanently handicap Bitcoin? The big blockers want you to think so. In this Take, I tear apart the narrative piece by piece - following the money, reading the emails, and exposing why this conspiracy exists in the first place, and what it says about the people still pushing it. References from the episode Joy Ito's article on the block size deb...
"When it comes to building in the approach, you have to be taking the approach as utilising the fundamental principles that we see in Bitcoin itself. So having a standard rule set that you apply to yourself every day with discipline and developing standard operating procedures that force us to hold ourselves accountable to higher standards. It's a daily grind, like you have to be always doing preventative maintenance, inspections and things like that so that you can kind of foresee issues before...
"If people are not ready for Bitcoin, just go use USDT as long as you can before dollar hyperinflation. It's like Noah's Ark: it's going to rain, we build the ark. We don't have to force people on board. Just wait there, and when you feel ready to swim, come aboard." ~ Giacomo Zucco Earlier this year at the Plan B conference in El Salvador, I managed to pull Giacomo Zucco aside to take a pulse on the current state of the Bitcoin world. In this Chat, we debate whether the classic four-year cycle ...
I'm joined by Steve, Mechanic, and Jeff for yet another Roundtable episode, and honestly, the digital world is getting weirder by the minute. Are we even talking to real people online anymore, or just AI voice clones trying to steal our seed phrases? We dive into the wild new wave of AI scams, the undeniable reality of the dead internet theory, and how AI coding tools might be the real reason Jack Dorsey just slashed Block's workforce in half. Of course, we also get into the thick of the quiet c...
"The cypherpunk principle that 'cypherpunks write code' takes on revolutionary meaning when writing code no longer requires programming knowledge. Eric Hughes meant that political freedom comes through building systems without requesting permission, and now that building happens through natural language instruction to AI agents. You achieve sovereignty over computing through direct technical capability. The code becomes yours in the most fundamental sense: modified by your specifications, compil...
The biggest mistake Bitcoin and sovereignty-focused developers keep making is trying to sell people on why they care instead of building something people actually want to use. They don't care about decentralization, sovereignty, or peer-to-peer - they care about things that work. Looking at the user experience tells us just how far we still need to go. Why does logging into a free service feel like a hostage negotiation? Why are captchas filling every corner of the web when bots are better at so...
"The people who figure that out first won't just ship faster - they'll build things that others can't even spec, because the spec emerges last from a process that only exists in the doing of it." ~ Jesse Posner When your AI knows your goals better than you remember them in the moment, something fundamental has shifted. This episode explores Jesse Posner's "The Secret to Vibe Coding" and the emerging art of human-AI partnership through the lens of real agentic workflows, the philosophy of naming ...
"That's the main reason I like doing this Bitcoin stuff so much, because it's connected to the real world. It's proof of work. Like, I can't sit on my computer and come up with a more logical code base or a different way to attack and get more Bitcoin. I've got to actually go out there and create something, some physical thing. And if I don't do that, it doesn't work, right? So it is proof of work at the very most fundamental level. And I love it." ~ Cade Peterson Bitcoin is often dismissed as m...
