With Twitter up in arms about a potentially invasive privacy measure and compliance for an invasive regulatory requirement, it's time to break down exactly what is going on, and what we should or should not be concerned about. What is the Travel Rule, what is AOPP, and what should I do with my hardware wallets? That's what this episode is about. There will be no ads on this show as I just want to talk about this issue and share my own conclusions after digging into what the reality of this situa...
Jan 30, 2022•55 min
"What is money? Why is it used? Which type of money is best? And why?" - Eric Yakes Today we are diving into the foundational chapter of Eric Yakes' book The 7th Property. What are the characteristics of money, and how can we use them to understand the security and comparative value of competing monetary goods? The full book as well as the audiobook (by yours truly) can be found at amazon if you want to dig in further: Paperback: https://www.amazon.com/7th-Property-Bitcoin-Monetary-Revolution/dp...
Jan 28, 2022•35 min
“This makes Bitcoin miners uniquely symbiotic with energy grids serving as “demand response” partners. If energy is ever in short supply, people get priority over Bitcoin miners. However whenever there is excess energy, it gets monetized. This symbiotic relationship leads to more energy abundance generally.” - Brandon Quittem Another great piece coming at you today from The Bitcoin Times Ed 4, and by returning author Brandon Quittem, who did the incredible Mycelium Series for understanding Bitco...
Jan 26, 2022•1 hr 57 min
"Money, in the ideal (which we’ll likely always only ever strive for, and not achieve), turns a portion of ‘our work, here and now’, into a portion of ‘everyone’s work, anywhere and forever’." - John Vallis Continuing the incredible piece from yesterday by John Vallis around how the human consciousness even creates value and meaning, and how deeply tied to that process and our ability to peacefully coexist is to the nature of our money. And through that lens, what is Bitcoin? Check out the origi...
Jan 19, 2022•1 hr 39 min
“Sacrifice is thus a critical component of value, as it is the use of one’s own limited resources, as that against which all action is measured and justified.” - John Vallis Why does it always seem that the Bitcoin rabbit hole inevitably leads to the questions of "what is money" & "what is value?" How do we always find ourselves at such fundamental question when exploring Bitcoin? Today we dive into Vallis's "Money Messiah" on the very nature of value and meaning, how it relates to our relig...
Jan 18, 2022•2 hr 11 min
"This confluence of Fed hikes and investor naivety “presents the setup for a severe washout” as the “pernicious effects of rising interest rates on future cash flows will likely prompt speculators and investors at the margin to dump or severely reduce their crypto holdings.” - Nik Bhatia We take a little break to discuss the crazy state of the markets right now, and how this could affect the Bitcoin price in the short term. Nik Bhatia summarizes the bearish warning from Arthur Hayes and digs int...
Jan 14, 2022•45 min
“The people at the end of the line who are flipping NFTs do not fundamentally care about distributed trust models or payment mechanics, but they care about where the money is.” - Moxie Marlinspike As a follow up to the model and concept of web3 built on top of Bitcoin and Lightning, it seems prudent to have an exploration of web3 built on top of crypto. Moxie Marlinspike brings us an excellent piece with a bit of experimentation of his own to get at the core of what NFTs, Dapps, and the “Crypto”...
Jan 12, 2022•1 hr 26 min
"Our goal is basically to realize this concept we have created called the atomic economy. This is just my way to create a narrative and mental model to represent hyperbitcoinization, or a future world where we actually broke free from having government regulations control the economy, having big tech control our data, and having big banks control our assets. If we actually ended up in that world, what would it actually look like?" - John Carvalho Today we dive into an amazing conversation with J...
Jan 11, 2022•2 hr 12 min
In a follow up to the State of Lightning Report from Arcane Research and OpenNode, we dive into the possibilities for how Lightning will change the global market, the potential for truly on-demand services, streaming money, the access it could bring to billions with no banking, & why I think it will change how we interact with the web itself. Lightning is the beginnings of a new frontier and we take time in today's show to talk about where that frontier will take us. Don't forget to check ou...
Jan 06, 2022•1 hr 35 min
"What the Internet has done for information, Bitcoin and the Lightning Network will do for money. " - Elizabeth Stark Finishing the amazing report from Arcane Research on the state of the lightning network and development ecosystem. Covering the development path, the major players in the space, and the nation states beginning to pay attention and their role in Bitcoin's future. Don't miss part 2 oif the State of Lightning report. Check out the many graphics and data that helps show the compariso...
Dec 31, 2021•1 hr 20 min
“The Lightning Network, and the possibility to perform micropayments instantaneously, will most likely change how we pay for certain services. We already see the first steps, but the alternative to stream money will revolutionize many popular services in the future.“ - Arcane Research Today we are diving into Part 1 of The State of Lightning Report from Arcane Research. What it is, its early life, how its evolved, the state and direction of development, what we are predict about its future, and ...
Dec 29, 2021•1 hr 5 min
“Crypto exchanges with numerous coins have an incentive to get you excited about new coins, because they make money from trading volumes. Even if it’s just meme-coins like Doge or Shiba Inu with briefly-lived spikes, they want to get you in on the action, especially near the top of the spike when enthusiasm is high. Their financial incentive is for their users to hold a large number of coins, and trade those coins frequently, and are happy to highlight whatever coins happen to be popular at the ...
Dec 22, 2021•1 hr 41 min
"If Bitcoin were built on a proof-of-stake model, where the more coins you have the more votes you have on how the network functions, the large exchanges and custodians could have used the millions of coins they held on behalf of clients to vote in their own favor. This is similar to how Vanguard and BlackRock hold trillions of dollars of indexed equity assets for their users and maintain the voting rights on those assets." - Lyn Alden Man have we got a great one today! From Lyn Alden we have pa...
Dec 21, 2021•1 hr 20 min
"These pioneers are akin to the Bitcoiners who showed up post-Mt. Gox, through to the Class of 2020. These are the individuals who saw the promise and opportunity of Bitcoin and seized it, despite the dangers that mainstream society warned us of. In the same way that the Oregon Trail was fraught with perils, so too is the journey from precoiner to Bitcoin maximalism. A greenhorn in digital assets has to navigate the treacherous landscape of cryptocurrency information available online, fending of...
Dec 18, 2021•1 hr 9 min
"If Bitcoin had existed in Tesla’s time, it would have removed the need for a corrupted monetary arrangement. Bitcoin mining is a permissionless and censor-resistant reward mechanism that incentivizes the cheapest and most reliable sources of energy. Tesla could have, hypothetically, self-funded his experimentation with mining rewards. The more successful and efficient his prototypes were, the more successful his mining would become, and the more funding he would secure to scale up his operation...
Dec 16, 2021•1 hr 10 min
"Neither is a Central Bank Digital Currency a State-level embrace of cryptocurrency—at least not of cryptocurrency as pretty much everyone in the world who uses it currently understands it. Instead, a CBDC is something closer to being a perversion of cryptocurrency, or at least of the founding principles and protocols of cryptocurrency—a cryptofascist currency, an evil twin entered into the ledgers on Opposite Day, expressly designed to deny its users the basic ownership of their money and to in...
Dec 13, 2021•1 hr 17 min
If you missed the awesome Twitter spaces we had with Lixin Liu from Keystone and Douglas Bakkum from Shift Crypto, you can't stop crying because we have it here on Bitcoin Audible for your listening pleasure. What are the security benefits or trade offs with airgapped hardware wallets, what are the general challenges of Bitcoin hardware security, and why and how do most people lose their Bitcoin and what can we do to fix it? All this and more in today's chat with some amazing minds building Bitc...
Dec 11, 2021•1 hr 27 min
“'Smart contracts' as a term was coined by Nick Szabo back in 1996 before the idea of a blockchain was even a twinkling in Satoshi’s eye. They had nothing to do with DAOs, or decentralized exchanges or any of these types of constructs that people tend to think of when they hear the term.” - Shinobi Throwing out the hype, the shitcoin buzzwords, the DAOs, and all the obscure claims about smart contracts on the various "crypto" platforms out there, and let's get down to the origins and true meanin...
Dec 08, 2021•57 min
"Even if we could somehow convince the world or the U.S. government to adopt a gold standard, there’s not really anything stopping them from claiming “it’s an emergency” and that we need to drop the gold standard and “temporarily” close the gold window. In this way, Bitcoin provides stronger assurances about our money than gold ever could.” - Stephan Livera Is libertarianism without Bitcoin a lost cause? How does Bitcoin change the game in the fight for sustainable liberty, and what is the argum...
Dec 07, 2021•48 min
“Money appreciates in value over time so that individuals can plan their future knowing their wealth will be protected. This leads to market participants’ time horizons lengthening, creating more investment, more entrepreneurship, more productivity and increased living standards. This boom in entrepreneurship is what ultimately drives humanity forward.” - Cory Klippsten Bitcoin is going to change things. If we fix the money, we fix the world. But if we can truly pull this off, what does that fut...
Dec 03, 2021•56 min
“Often, in an argument, what people think they are arguing about is not the real subject of disagreement, which is deeper and often unspoken, if it is even understood. So it is here. The divisions that have opened up in society about the covid vaccines are not really about the covid vaccines at all: they are about what vaccination symbolizes in this moment. What it means to be 'vaxxed' or 'unvaxxed', safe or dangerous, clean or dirty, sensible or irresponsible, compliant or independent: these ar...
Dec 01, 2021•1 hr 16 min
“If price is truth, then a market capitalization of over $1 billion for over 100 different cryptocurrencies tells a story: we live in a multicoin world. But does that mean that bitcoin has competitors on its path to world reserve currency? No.” - Nik Bhatia “Which crypto should I buy?” I’m sure you’ve heard it a thousand times if you’ve been in this space for even a few months. Are Bitcoin and crypto really in the same space, fighting for the same markets? Or is there a more fundamental differen...
Nov 30, 2021•47 min
"The Bitcoin network itself and the personal owning of bitcoin is an act of peaceful rebellion against the fiat money system." - Dr. Wolf Von Laer There are a million different ways to discuss the benefits and attributes of Bitcoin, how it will influence the world, how it will change economic calculation. But what is most important for us and our hopes for the future, is the freedom it enables. And this isn't in some esoteric, vague sense, but in a real sense, for both the collective, and the in...
Nov 26, 2021•48 min
“as the internet has slowly but surely eroded the obstacle of restricted information access in the past decades, the limiting factor for an individual to make intellectual progress merely shifted from an accessibility problem to a filtering problem (filtering the information that is relevant from the information that is not).” - Willem Van Den Bergh Another excellent piece from Willem on the core issue of information flow in the modern age. What is the difference between systemic versus regional...
Nov 25, 2021•1 hr 46 min
"Hudson’s thesis was that America had forced other countries to pay for its wars regardless of whether they wanted to or not. Like a tribute system, but enforced without military occupation. “This was,” he writes, “something never before accomplished by any nation in history.” - Alex Gladstein Another banger from Gladstein this week that follows Michael Hudson's work, Super Imperialism from the 1970s, critiquing and laying out the framework of power resulting from a global reserve system backed ...
Nov 18, 2021•1 hr 53 min
Today we have an incredible conversation with Preston Pysh and Greg Foss on the Bond markets, the shifting sands of the global financial world, and the incredible impact that Bitcoin will have on our future direction and the outcome of these crazy times. You don’t want to miss this one guys, so dive right in. Don’t forget to check out Preston and Greg on twitter if you haven’t. They are must follows in this space, all signal: https://twitter.com/FossGregfoss https://twitter.com/PrestonPysh For t...
Nov 16, 2021•1 hr 53 min
"The passage of time is one thing that we can never get back. Once it has been spent, there’s no refund. Time is the ultimate currency, forever passing without the ability to return to a prior moment: ever passing, ever spent, ultimately and unequivocally finite." - Mike Hobart The mainstream ignorance of money is ubiquitous. But Bitcoin forces one to rethink everything they thought they knew. By Making a pure, independent monetary medium, we are forced to question all the fallacies and loosely ...
Nov 12, 2021•32 min
“I wish people engineered things to be self-replicating, self adjusting, self-governing, and ever-lasting. But nobody has engineered anything to do even one of these, and then along comes Bitcoin and does them all” - Tomer Strolight Bitcoin isn't merely a new innovation in the world of tech, its a wholly unique system that behaves so differently from everything today, the social, the engineering, and the organic systems that we are accustomed to, that one could easily find themselves wondering w...
Nov 05, 2021•40 min
"We’re revolutionaries. There’s no reason to be coy about it. Our goal is to replace fiat with bitcoin. “Disruption” is almost a quaint term for a change of the magnitude we’re bringing about. We’re taking power from institutions and transferring it to individuals by giving them control of the value they generate in their lives.” - Roy Sheinfeld We are at a crossroads and Lightning has an extremely difficult and important task. Do we go with the Lightning expansionists, using this decentralized ...
Nov 01, 2021•42 min
“Freedom, transparency, honesty, meritocracy, fairness, voluntaryism and hard work are great things one should strive toward, whether it is in developing money or living life and setting a good example for others.” - Hass McCook Today we dive into another great piece from Hass on the show, posted with Bitcoin Magazine on the broad disciplines around the Bitcoin technology. And how deeply tied it is to the understanding and study of social phenomena. How could one pretend to understand the social...
Oct 26, 2021•58 min
