"Bitcoin transaction fees limit network abuse by making usage expensive. There is a cost to every transaction, set by a dynamic free market based on demand." — Matt Odell Is Bitcoin broken, are the high fees the end of Bitcoin as money? Are the fees themselves even the problem? How does this relate to not wanting people to be pooping in the park? Today we dive into a short, but solid post by Matt Odell to make sense of what is going on with fees, and then a Guy's Take to clear up some previous d...
May 10, 2023•34 min
"This very dominance is causing certain countries to seek a way to be less dependent on the USD and the UST. To extract themselves from the whims and needs of a central bank that lives a world away from their own economy. Yet still finds a way to dominate it." — James Lavish Today we take a ride through a twitter thread by James Lavish, exploring the major developments in the splintering of the world monetary and banking system. While the dollar remains dominant through sheer inertia, the trend ...
May 09, 2023•50 min
"The question of who controls the ability to merge code changes into Bitcoin Core’s GitHub repository tends to come up on a recurring basis. This has been cited as a “central point of control” of the Bitcoin protocol by various parties over the years, but I argue that the question itself is a red herring that stems from an authoritarian perspective — this model does not apply to Bitcoin. It’s certainly not obvious to a layman as to why that is the case, thus the goal of this article is to explai...
May 06, 2023•1 hr 5 min
Bitcoin is a public good. The maintenance and stewardship of the network rests on the conviction and work of 10s or 100s of thousands of node operators who work to validate and ensure consistency among the rules and the truth of the data propagated throughout. NFTs and BRC tokens have come to the Bitcoin timechain, stamping large amounts of data to the chain, and causing bloat in the UTXO set, as well as validation and bandwidth costs. Is the sky falling? Is this totally unimportant? Or is there...
May 03, 2023•1 hr 4 min
"The fall of First Republic Bank was the second-largest bank failure by assets in US history, putting us in the 2008 conversation. Times are different, but the bank failures are relatable in size. The total assets of three 2023 failures have already eclipsed the total assets of all the banks that failed during the Great Financial Crisis" — Nik Bhatia, Joe Consorti Today we dive into a short breakdown of the breakdown of the banking system with The Bitcoin Layer. The banking crisis is here to sta...
May 03, 2023•40 min
"If Tor is an anonymous remailer, meaning a protocol facilitating the anonymous forwarding and receiving of messages between peers, Nostr can function as an anonymous bulletin board. CoinJoin coordinators can publish their services via a Nostr event type, and CoinJoin wallets can be enabled to automatically pull from those relays to display within their clients." — L0LA L33TZ Today we dive into a really cool topic on how major privacy concerns can be thought of in relation to our interactions wi...
May 02, 2023•1 hr 9 min
"Banks are highly regulated public-private partnerships in an environment where new charters are excruciatingly hard to obtain, and as such remain de facto arms of the state. It has been and remains trivial to deputize them to carry out political objectives. If there was any doubt, it’s now evident that the Obama administration and its successor in Biden’s regime are comfortable circumventing the First Amendment by engaging nominally private companies to do their dirty work." — Nic Carter Today ...
Apr 27, 2023•1 hr 47 min
"The title of this book may evoke the kind of question that i hear once in a while: "Why do you use the word 'selfishness' to denote virtuous qualities of character, when that word antagonizes so many people to whom it does not mean the things you mean?" To those who ask it, my answer is: "For the reason that makes you afraid of it." But there are others, who would not ask that question, sensing the moral cowardice it implies, yet who are unable to formulate my actual reason or to identify the p...
Apr 26, 2023•1 hr 53 min
"Central Banking is successful alchemy in this sense. The money- issuing institutions of the world have found a way to create new money with no cost. No mining is required. They are the alchemists of our era. The Central Banks’ promise of stable prices is as absurd as the alchemists’ promise of cheap gold. The whole point of a value- measurement tool, or a type of money, is in its costliness. It has to somehow connect to reality because of the subjective nature of value. Money created without co...
Apr 24, 2023•34 min
"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
