"These two jobs are almost always in tension. Any added protection to keep a bad actor out adds a risk that it may also trip up the owner, and any new backup or alternative way to access creates a new potential security hole." - @max_guise Today we dive into a practical piece on how to build a unique self custody model that allows the user room to make mistakes, but still retain control, or the ability to recover their funds. Safely storing Bitcoin keys can be incredibly challenging and the unfo...
Aug 12, 2022•1 hr 13 min
Following up on the release of Keet.io and a simple to use, responsive, encrypted, & scalable P2P data sharing protocol in Holepunch, its network backend, we bring the CEO of Holepunch Mathias Buus, and the CSO of Holepunch and CTO of Bitfinex, Paolo Ardoino on the show to talk about what the long term vision of this project truly is. This isn't just a better video chat app, this is the first building block in a plan to rebuild the internet & potentially break down the walls of the inter...
Aug 09, 2022•1 hr 56 min
"It’s not and never was about equality or perfection. It’s about fairness and consequence. Bitcoin is “Responsibility go Up” technology." - Aleks Svetski The principles and rules of Bitcoin do not establish utopia, they do not create a perfect equality for all participants, instead it creates fairness and enforces equal responsibility on all who use the Bitcoin system. It is rules without rulers, it is a form of natural, incorruptible law, and all the consequences that come with that. Svetski br...
Aug 04, 2022•47 min
Orange pilling the everyday user with Mash. Combining simple, fast onboarding into the Lightning ecosystem and enabling a unique monetizing experience with micropayments and payment flows to any content imaginable. Author Jesse Berger joins to announce the experience available for exploring his book, Magic Internet Money. Pay for the book, or by the chapter, or the page. Pay only for what you want to read, and not a sat more. Find out more in today's chat, Mashing it with Magic Internet Money. E...
Aug 02, 2022•1 hr 37 min
"Holepunch makes Hypercore more accessible by abstracting away low-level technical details of the protocol. It takes Hypercore one step further by simplifying the architecture and enabling more people to build apps with it — which enabled a single frontend developer to build Keet in under four months" - Namcios Keet is going to change the game. P2P encrypted and decentralized, video, audio, and file sharing. Built on Holepunch and Hypercore, a technology stack that has the potential to drastical...
Jul 29, 2022•1 hr 16 min
"If a money (the most salable good) is easy to create more of, then any rational economic actor would just go out and create more money for herself, diluting the whole supply of it. If an asset has a monetary premium on top of its pure utility value, then it’s strongly incentivizing market participants to try to make more of it, and so only the forms of money that are the most resistant to debasement can withstand this challenge." - Lyn Alden The full, unabridged reading of Lyn Alden's excellent...
Jul 27, 2022•2 hr 45 min
“Fedi and Fedimint will help put monetary power back into the hands of everyone, everywhere,” said Fedi Inc. co-founder and CEO, Obi Nwosu, in a statement. “This creates brighter futures for billions and especially for those struggling under oppressive regimes, which ultimately makes the world a better place.” - Namcios The cypherpunk mission of Chaumian Ecash may finally be realized, as a federated payment model on top of Bitcoin. Fedi, the company implmenting a user-friendly, community custody...
Jul 26, 2022•47 min
"Like any powerful technology, bitcoin can be used for good or ill. As proponents of the technology like to say, bitcoin is “money for enemies” because it’s a bearer asset that can be verified rather than trusted, and it’s hard to block payments for anyone. It’s like a commodity; something that can be partially regulated within certain jurisdictions but that in the holistic sense, exists outside of anyone’s control." - Lyn Alden Today we hit the third and final part of Lyn Alden's incredible bre...
Jul 20, 2022•1 hr 25 min
"To put it into perspective, this international monetary system based around centrally-managed fiat currency is only 16 years older than me. My father was 36 when the US went off the gold standard. When I grew up, after a period of financial hardship, I began collecting gold and silver coins as a kid; my father gave me silver coins as savings each year. The Swiss dropped their gold standard when I was twelve years old, which was six years after Amazon was founded, and three years before Tesla wa...
Jul 18, 2022•1 hr 7 min
"If a money (the most salable good) is easy to create more of, then any rational economic actor would just go out and create more money for herself, diluting the whole supply of it. If an asset has a monetary premium on top of its pure utility value, then it’s strongly incentivizing market participants to try to make more of it, and so only the forms of money that are the most resistant to debasement can withstand this challenge." - Lyn Alden The true rabbit hole of Bitcoin begins at the questio...
Jul 15, 2022•1 hr 27 min
"Imposing limitations on monetary goods has always required tremendous amounts of time and energy, and trust. And yet, with all our efforts, we still have been unable to fix the supply of any of the modern monetary assets of the world. Someone, somewhere, has always found a way to increase the supply. Whether because of some emergency reason to protect the greater good, or out of sheer greed, or out of complete ignorance, humans have succeeded 100% of the time in debasing the monetary premiums o...
Jul 12, 2022•59 min
"In a world awash in euphemisms and blatant lies, calling something by its proper name is rebellious in itself. Bitcoin is about freedom and self-sovereignty, not about asking for permission. It is about independence and verifiable truth; extreme ownership and responsibility; hope and human rights. The best way to fight bad ideas and bad terminology is with good ideas and good terminology. Thus, we should all make an effort to call things by their proper names, try to understand their inner work...
Jul 07, 2022•54 min
"People hold money to hedge against future uncertainty. This is why it is so crucial for a monetary system to optimize for minimizing its own uncertainty. Bitcoin’s purchasing power is an external quantitative risk that can be insured against, not an internal qualitative uncertainty." - Pierre Rochard Link to the read: https://pierre-rochard.medium.com/the-utility-of-saving-c56f7c170fc1 Check out Pierre on Twitter: twitter.com/bitcoinpierre Dig deeper into these ideas with an excellent piece fro...
Jul 01, 2022•29 min
What if, sitting in the middle of a chaotic monetary environment, increasing capital controls, balkanizing political regimes, a failing petrodollar hegemony, collapsing institutional trust, increased sanctions & weaponized infrastructure, & aggressive, widespread inflation... there sat a global, neutral, decentralized, robust, & incorruptible network to store and transfer value? What would it look like if that network was infiltrating the global monetary order, in a sly round about w...
Jun 30, 2022•1 hr 46 min
I promised, and it's finally here. It's time to get a little perspective, with the price at all time lows, exchanges and lending platforms imploding, a massive crypto deleveraging event, the Fed tightening, and the market heading into deep recession... HOW could you be bullish? Because I'm paying attention. It's time to zoom out, focus our lens past all the noise, take a serious look at the past year in Bitcoin, to get a clearer picture of the cascading dominoes... This will be part 1 of a serie...
Jun 24, 2022•1 hr 35 min
"Coding, mining, infrastructure, and markets are all independent, happening in competing jurisdictions and geopolitical rivals, often done by anonymous or pseudonymous actors, all with different philosophies and goals, but with one uniting motivation: to keep Bitcoin going." - Alex Gladstein Bringing back an article from a year ago from the always fascinating Alex Gladstein. "Can Governments Stop Bitcoin" is a short exploration of the potential attack vectors via government bodies and how Bitcoi...
Jun 21, 2022•1 hr 10 min
"Base money is a liability of the central bank, and it’s used as a reserve asset by commercial banks. Broad money is the liability of commercial banks, and it’s used as a savings asset by the public. Treasuries are liabilities of the federal government, and they’re used as collateral by the central bank and commercial banks. In other words, liabilities are collateralized by other liabilities, all the way down." - Lyn Alden Today we dive into another great piece from Lyn Alden's newsletter on the...
Jun 16, 2022•39 min
With the markets in chaos, with services halting withdraws, & Everyone's a Scammer" by Michael Goldstein, is one of those works. Another piece that stood the test of time made available by the Nakamoto Institute, not to be missed by any serious Bitcoiner out there. Don't forget to check out Goldstein's amazing work and the enormous collection of quintessential Bitcoin writings over at the Nakamoto Institute: https://nakamotoinstitute.org Mentioned in the Guy's Take, check out Marty's Bent on...
Jun 14, 2022•47 min
"Bitcoin is a lifeboat on the sinking fiat ship. Lifeboats on a sinking ship don’t need a marketing department." - Francis P. As New York puts a ban on Bitcoin mining in the state, as the white house decides it's going to come up with "Bitcoin mining policy guidance," it seems like a good time to prepare our response. Cry Harder. Francis Pouliot brings us a fun and short exploration of Brandolini's law, the problem of arguing with idiots, & why Bitcoin isn't changing, no matter how much the ...
Jun 10, 2022•30 min
"The reverse of that process – a so-called “death spiral” – was inevitable. Any time the immeasurably over-levered global fiat monetary system, for whatever reason, experienced one of its periodic external shocks that skyrockets immediate demand for actual US dollar liquidity, UST investors would demand USD liquidity faster than the brittle and fundamentally flawed Terra ecosystem could provide. At some point, one UST would be worth materially less than one USD, further rattling investors and ki...
Jun 08, 2022•1 hr 33 min
This episode is partly a follow up from Read_628 on reviving a promising renewable energy technology. Partly a discussion of the incredible economic subsidy that Bitcoin mining provides to bridge the Innovation Valley of Death for numerous energy resources. And partly a discussion of how Bitcoin so greatly changes the economics of stranded energy, that it could be the final piece in pushing us into the Third Industrial Revolution. You don't want to miss this conversation with Nathaniel Harmon, o...
Jun 02, 2022•1 hr 39 min
"A typical Bitcoin mining operation will spend considerable amounts of time, energy and money cooling their ASIC miners with air conditioning or liquid immersion cooling, and these costs eat into profitability. However, the main waste product of OTEC is a nearly-infinite and continuous supply of 5ºC cold water. Not only does OTEC produce free cooling, it provides a level of cooling that almost no one else in the mining industry has access to — enough to overclock mining rigs by 30% to 40%, accor...
May 31, 2022•1 hr 20 min
"Coming off the Bitcoin 2022 conference, you might feel a little down from the high of meeting and spending time with Bitcoiners. I've also found that going to these events leaves you with an additional sense of urgency to do something more, or to become more involved somehow. One way to do that is to participate in Bitcoin projects or work in a Bitcoin job." - Stephan Livera For as many times as I've been asked about how best to get a Bitcoin job, its hard to admit that I have never done an epi...
May 26, 2022•42 min
"When I thought about what is the defining difference between the Bitcoin maximalists and my yuppie elite friends, the surface level distinctions that popped out were political (e.g., libertarianism, Trump support, second-amendment rights, Black Lives Matter). But these stem from a deeper divide: the degree to which a person has trust in the system." - Croesus Today we bring back an oldie but a goodie while Rad, the wife & myself are chillin int he hospital recovering from Rad's journey into...
May 23, 2022•49 min
"Several exchanges in the industry fuel bubbles for a quick buck as well. If something starts to get momentum, including meme coins like DOGE or SHIB that don’t realistically have a substantial future, they promote those coins to their users, which can suck retail investors into buying the bubble top. Plus, a lot of Youtube and TikTok influencers pump small coins, and use their audience as exit liquidity." - Lyn Alden For those of you who may be unaware, there was a recent blow up of a deca-bill...
May 19, 2022•50 min
"This created a ticking time bomb with a very short timer. That money was going to "work" in completely artificial markets that were being driven by pure central planning insanity instead of actual fundamentals. As everyone and their mother who had excess cash was shoveling it into financial and real estate assets, global supply chains were quickly breaking down." - Marty Bent Today we dig into what exactly is going on in the financial markets, why equities are crashing over a tiny increase in t...
May 16, 2022•54 min
So what exactly did I get wrong in Guy's Take #54, and why? Let's dig back into the economic of CTV and transaction commitments, to clear up what I was misunderstanding around unrolling large batch transactions and who pays the cost of doing so. Are the incentives aligned or not? We discuss in today's Guy's Take episode. Here is a link to the article we will be covering soon by Shinobi on the real controversy regarding CTV and its activation method if you want to get a head start: https://bitcoi...
May 12, 2022•51 min
"Despite all of these constraints, the free market finally provided the competition these incumbent banks so desperately needed. Bitcoin and the Lightning Network have arrived to show the world that we finally have the technology available to bring cheap global payments to everyone in the world." - Sam Callahan Today we dig into the absolute mess of differing standards, wall gardens, high fees, jurisdictional conflict, & liability risks that abound in our global financial and payments infras...
May 10, 2022•1 hr
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May 09, 2022•14 min
[Caveat - A critical piece of the puzzle I lay out in this episode was something I incorrectly understood, which makes this entire thought experiment moot. I explain further in Guy's Take #55] Today I want to isolate the problem I brought up briefly in the previous CTV episode and expand on how I've been exploring the concept and how it might be a problem to the economics of transaction fees and how it alters the liability of who pays for the cost of the data. I think this relates to issues from...
May 05, 2022•49 min
