"I believe that in the open /attention/ information economy we find ourselves in, value will mostly derive from effective curation, dissemination, and transmission of information, not the exclusive ownership of it." — Dergigi Today we dive into another great piece from Gigi exploring more possibilities and incredible shifts in the dynamics of information, censorship, and control with the addition of Nostr and open social protocols in tandem with Bitcoin and Lightning. Piece by piece, the revolut...
Apr 19, 2023•1 hr 7 min
"Can you imagine a world in which you are restricted from buying meat for a while because you have already used your “carbon credits” for the month? Your “financial privileges” could potentially be restricted at any time at the whim of a government bureaucrat, and if you are a big enough troublemaker you could be “de-platformed” from the system permanently." - Tyler Durden Check out the original article at: IMF Unveils New Global Currency Known As The "Universal Monetary Unit" To "Transform" Wor...
Apr 18, 2023•52 min
The Lightning Network finally strikes in this Bitcoin Basics episode! Now that we understand the fundamentals of keys, wallets, transactions, and the node, we can finally take a dive into Lightning. What is it, what makes it tick, how do you own something that isn't "on chain," and what are the best tools to start exploring? All this and much more in today's show. Here are the many links for further exploration and learning to dive into: Wallets and Apps to check out: Phoenix Wallet: https://pho...
Apr 14, 2023•1 hr 25 min
"This was how more mainstream Bitcoin culture degraded from intellectual expressions of ideas (2017-era debates) to tribal recreations of the past. The old enemies were replaced with new enemies who were more convenient for the times, but we retained the "Bitcoiners against the world" ethos of the scaling era, which led to many newbies being overly defensive of their beliefs. It’s worth noting that this is a recurring cycle (and of course, a general trope of “the good ol’ days”) because in 2017 ...
Apr 13, 2023•2 hr 20 min
"“In the old days they didn’t even use tables and chairs. They sat on beer crates and ate off the tops of beer barrels. You’d be surprised how much fun that was. Somehow it made old men feel young again. And they’d drink beer out of cans or growlers. Those beefsteaks were run in halls or the cellars or back rooms of big saloons. There was always sawdust on the floor. Sometimes they had one in a bowling alley. They would cover the alleys with tarpaulin and set the boxes and barrels in the aisles....
Apr 11, 2023•43 min
"Of all the objections to Bitcoin, the objection that it “wastes” electricity is the most absurd. This thinking betrays a fundamental misunderstanding of how electricity works, how markets work, and what waste is." – Beautyon Today we take a break from all the discussion of doom and impending economic obliteration to hit a favorite topic of mine, from a simple, but important angle. This article came back across my view and I realized it was one I had never covered and thought it would make for a...
Apr 06, 2023•50 min
"Generally, what we’re talking about here is unregulated (or lightly regulated), uninsured investors, LLCs, Funds and privately controlled “Shadow Banking” assets. In 2021, these OFI Assets scattered around the planet amounted to $152.0 Trillion (Again, not including China’s non reported OFI) or roughly 172 x JP Morgan’s relatively miniscule $884 Billion of Cash and Equivalents immediately available to liquidate/sell/wire-out without generating a FASB 115 loss. I hope this simple calculation put...
Apr 06, 2023•1 hr 39 min
Prices are relative, Bitcoin is infinitely scalable, stability for the sake of stability is undesirable, maximal instability in prices maximizes resilience in the markets, and so much more. Today we dive into a bit of a wandering Guy's Take to follow El Gato's piece on the idea of a free banking system and what it might look like in a future with PBDCs, instead of CBDCs. I break down where he has some wonderful ideas, but fundamentally misses the foundation necessary to get us there. Guy's Nostr...
Apr 04, 2023•1 hr 52 min
"and the uniparty is in strong agreement here. both know that losing control of the money and the banks is an existential threat to their aristocratic and unaccountable powers. sure, this all sounds like a lot of change and a lot of risk and a wildly new set of systems, but you’re not going to fix that which has become this broken without change. the mal and mis-incentives are far too great and the entrenched interests like it this way. and it’s going to break." - El Gato Today we dive into a pi...
Apr 01, 2023•45 min
"Thus was the dubious “clear and present danger” standard born. Holmes himself sought to redefine the standard later that same year when he dissented in Abrams v. United States (1919). The Justice felt that the court was not applying his own standard appropriately and openly questioned the government’s ability to limit free speech. But by then, the slippery standard was off and racing. It would fly for another half century..." – Joel Bowman Ever wondered where the oft used, infuriating excuse fo...
Mar 31, 2023•40 min
Bitcoin is ultimately just a piece of software, the network – the global, censorship resistant, immutable system – is ultimately just a collection of millions of people individually confirming and agreeing on what Bitcoin is. And to be truly sovereign as a bitcoiner, to confirm the truth of Bitcoin for yourself, & to participate in that global network, is to run a Bitcoin Node. This is Bitcoin Basics Episode 5: The Node. The Blocksize War: https://www.amazon.com/Blocksize-War-controls-Bitcoi...
Mar 30, 2023•1 hr 24 min
"The question that the fiat system answers is the following: who is allowed to counterfeit currency, and how much? Further, who is allowed to have access to money, and who isn't? The answer is political and enforced by violence. The Bitcoin system is answering the same questions, and the answers are as simple as they are ethical: nobody is allowed to counterfeit money, and anyone can access it. No exceptions." – Gigi Today we dive into an amazing piece published at Citadel21, and by the one and ...
Mar 27, 2023•1 hr 16 min
"The financial system in the United States, and for most of the rest of the world for that matter, can basically be thought of as an Excel spreadsheet managed by the Federal Reserve. That’s all it really is. Some of the cells on the spreadsheet are assets, and some of the cells are liabilities. It’s just a ledger that they administrate, and that we all use." – Lyn Alden A subtle but important shift has occurred recently... the Fed became, for the first time in modern history, unprofitable. Lyn A...
Mar 23, 2023•46 min
I joined John today for an over 2 hour rip on the nature of Bitcoin, numerous technical developments, the trade offs of those in the past, the consequences of changes - even those considered well analyzed and understood, the chaos of consensus around altering consensus, the spirit of Bitcoin vs the letter of the law, and SO much more! This was such an awesome discussion on the nuance and complexity of Bitcoin that I felt I had to share it with the Audionauts. Hope you guys enjoy Don't forget to ...
Mar 22, 2023•2 hr 30 min
There is no magic wand. There is no such thing as a free lunch. When we bail out an institution, a bank, or "depositors" for billions of dollars, someone else LOSES billions of dollars worth of wealth. Their life got harder, their job got cut, the car they needed became less affordable, the house they hoped for their family stays out of reach, they PAID for it. Unfortunately, our government and central bank is either not mature enough to realize that magic is for children, or they are robbing fr...
Mar 20, 2023•1 hr 11 min
"One aspect that is still massively under-utilized is the programmability of Bitcoin. While simple things like scheduled payments and automated payment splits do exist, we are undoubtedly still trapped in conventional thinking when it comes to the flow of sats. I’d like to share a simple idea that was shared with me a couple of months ago in the hopes that it will spread far and wide and, in the best case, that someone will just go ahead and implement it. (Or a better version of it.) Here is the...
Mar 17, 2023•58 min
"One immediate lesson many drew from this event was a reconsideration of the risk of fiat liabilities in an environment where trust is lacking (including the trust not to violate territorial integrity and Westphalian sovereignty). This event reinforced the nature of fiat money as a system of centrally maintained ledger entries denominating a unit of account corresponding to a sovereign authority's sphere of power. As such, the use of such a liability as a medium of exchange (or store of value) i...
Mar 16, 2023•1 hr 21 min
"The 20th century was the first where technology enabled forms of violent state competition, as well as peaceful globalization, across the full scale of the Earth. Moreover, the same technology made possible the organization of massive state systems to project power and maintain integrated, centralized control over large, diverse populations and cultures." - Matthew Pines Bitcoin Audible is officially 5 years old today! And what a time to be celebrating an anniversary for the show than with a ba...
Mar 14, 2023•53 min
"Lightning is the way to make bitcoin the universal mainstream currency it was designed to be. This is how we’re going to bring open financial services to everyone. And we’re scaling Lightning by inviting people to participate and share in the gains." – Roy Sheinfeld As a loose follow up to a recent article on bringing lightning to every user in any app, Roy, from the Breez team, brings us another article laying out their plans to take the LSP model to anyone, by providing an automatic LSP softw...
Mar 10, 2023•46 min
"Over the long run, I view the outcome, one way or the other, more as a matter of technology than politics. From the top-down side, there is the development of Big Data and automated data surveillance capabilities. From the bottom-up side, there is the development of encryption tools and open monetary/information networks. Whichever direction proves more powerful will play a major role in how all sorts of things operate in the decades ahead" – Lyn Alden Concluding the incredible piece by Lyn Ald...
Mar 08, 2023•43 min
"For proponents of privacy and open networks to win becomes a matter of making the technology easy to use, too costly to stamp out, and well-understood by the public." – Lyn Alden Today Lyn Alden brings us another great piece that breaks down the old structure of our monetary and information systems, the consequences that have arisen from them, and ultimately what solutions have be borne of their abuses and frictions. With an exploration of what is needed. and not in this new systems, and what c...
Mar 07, 2023•42 min
"This context highlights the importance of the 1920–1921 depression. Here the government and Fed did the exact opposite of what the experts now recommend. We have just about the closest thing to a controlled experiment in macroeconomics that one could desire. To repeat, it’s not that the government boosted the budget at a slower rate, or that the Fed provided a tad less liquidity. On the contrary, the government slashed its budget tremendously, and the Fed hiked rates to record highs. We thus ha...
Mar 04, 2023•1 hr 2 min
"But for me, when I think about what Bitcoin’s properties are as a store-of-value asset and then compare those properties to the existing store-of-value assets out there… Bitcoin is by far the best. For that matter, if Bitcoin continues to outperform because of its unparalleled properties (and the world begins to come to terms with the reasons for that performance), it is a real stretch to say that Bitcoin will only convince 30% of the money stored in bonds and fiat money to re-allocate to Bitco...
Mar 02, 2023•1 hr 21 min
"People are very quick to project technology adoption curves onto Bitcoin. But the problem is that Bitcoin is not just a technology. It’s not just a smartphone, or a computer, or a social network, or a new stock or security, or a new payment method, or a search engine, or a messaging platform, or any other new product, app or service. Bitcoin is an entire techno-socio-economic transformation. It’s a reinvention of money from the ground up, incompatible with any prior primitives. So, it’s not onl...
Mar 01, 2023•1 hr 3 min
I recently had an awesome two-hour marathon chat about P2P social media with BitKarrot from the Nostrovia podcast. We chatted about the challenges and future of decentralized social media, touched on other developments in the space, and sprinkling in some extra chaos and uncertainty on the future of AI. This was a crazy ride through today's tech and the future its taking us to. Don't miss this one. Check out the Nostrovia Podcast to take a deep dive into all things Nostr! https://fountain.fm/sho...
Feb 27, 2023•1 hr 54 min
Hot wallets, cold wallets, hardware wallets, custodial wallets, lightning wallets, holy crap! What does all of this mean and how do they relate to your keys and your bitcoin? That is what we are covering in today's episode, Bitcoin Basics episode 4, all about wallets and transactions. Here is a reference to all of the wallets I use most often and for you to explore when setting up your own. I will also have this available on bitcoinaudible.com so it is easy to find down the road. Wallets Guy use...
Feb 24, 2023•1 hr 7 min
Nostr, OP_VAULT, decentralized media, privacy, the incredible progress of the past few years, the challenges of making Bitcoin hardware, why bear markets are the best time in Bitcoin, and of course, the new Coldcard Q1. NVK and I catch up on everything happening in the Bitcoin space and what has us excited to build to faster. Don't miss an awesome 2 hour marathon with the founder of Coinkite and creator of the Coldcard. NVK's Nostr Pubkey: npub1az9xj85cmxv8e9j9y80lvqp97crsqdu2fpu3srwthd99qfu9qsg...
Feb 21, 2023•2 hr 3 min
"Here is a little story of how I built a #Bitcoin Lightning payments app used by more than 10,000 users at the time running on two Raspberry Pi's from my bedroom... My conclusion: The banks are so f**kd" - CalleBTC Check out the original thread for more projects Callebtc is involved in, and follow Calle on Nostr at the links below: Thread = https://twitter.com/callebtc/status/1618332559175450626?s=46&t=7-IMl_MRDoUK3LABiP2KYw Nostr = npub12rv5lskctqxxs2c8rf2zlzc7xx3qpvzs3w4etgemauy9thegr43sf4...
Feb 21, 2023•1 hr 1 min
Not your keys, not your coins. What does this mean? Your Bitcoin keys are literally the keys to the kingdom. They are everything, they are the sole arbiter of ownership of the bitcoins behind them if you have your keys, and they are the impenetrable fortress for the bitcoins behind keys you do not have. They are the judge, the jury, and the verdict. If you can grasp and internalize the relationship between you, your keys, and your bitcoin, then you can safely and confidently use bitcoin. And tha...
Feb 18, 2023•46 min
"If Fedipools prove to be viable we could find ourselves in a world where bitcoin mining pool centralization risk is significantly reduced and the worries that many have today cease to exist. By creating a federation of different miners who act as guardians of a mint dedicated to producing blocks and distributing rewards you create a completely new and more robust incentive model at the pool layer." - Marty Bent Today we dig into another Bent by good ol' uncle Marty on a potential and exciting s...
Feb 17, 2023•40 min
