"Clients applying this reasoning should remember that, in bitcoin, no one is too big to fail. There is no government or money printer capable of restoring lost coins, so there are no bailouts. Trusting a single company, no matter their qualifications, to protect your bitcoin creates significant counterparty risk." ~ Dhruv Bansal We come at you with another read today, this one on the maturation and new developments in the collaborative custody industry. Today we are used to thinking of Bitcoin s...
Nov 29, 2023•1 hr 34 min
If you are looking to maximize your productivity, to use the Ai tools available in a way that genuinely gives you that 5x improvement of your capabilities, this is the episode for you. These are the 5 ways I am currently using Ai more than any other to maximize my output. For other links mentioned in the episode: Ai transcription video from YT (Link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZDw8ZNFBKes) Premai.io (Link: https://www.premai.io/) gpt4all (Link: https://gpt4all.io/index.html) confyui (Link: ...
Nov 29, 2023•1 hr 1 min
"A recent anonymous proposal specifies a system using timelocked Bitcoin transactions and chaumian ecash mints to create an economic incentive for BitTorrent users to seed files." ~ Shinobi Bittorrent was one of the most important protocols in the world during its day, but it always had one striking drawback, for any content that wasn't very popular, availability was always a problem. Even more so today as the network has found itself a smaller and more fringe part of internet culture. What if t...
Nov 27, 2023•58 min
"The difference between the Linden Dollar, World of Warcraft Gold, Fortnite V-Bucks, the Euro, and the U.S. dollar is in scale, not in nature. While V-Bucks are created and controlled by Epic Games (the company that created Fortnite), the U.S. dollar is created and controlled by the Fed. One impacts millions of people, the other billions. The mechanism that keeps these monies in check--the rules of the game, if you will - is the same in both cases: central decree." ~ DerGigi For those who are ne...
Nov 24, 2023•1 hr 14 min
The election of Javier Milei is unlikely the be the next El Salvador, but I don't think it needs to be in order to be significant. There is something deeper going on for Javier to win on the message he is sending. And I think it shows the signs of a shifting tide, and Bitcoin is the island that's coming into view. References made in the episode for further reading: Find the many books and products recommended on this show at prodcast.io (Link: https://prodcast.io/collections/bitcoin-audible) Bro...
Nov 22, 2023•1 hr 11 min
"The recurring cycle of economic booms followed by inevitable busts has remained a puzzle for generations of observers. While mainstream Keynesian and monetarist theories propose monetary interventions to smooth these fluctuations, the Austrian School offers a compelling and alternative perspective" ~ Michael Matulef The bust will not be escaped. We cannot print our way out of it, we cannot cover it up with more artificial interest rate controls. We have drunken ourselves into an economic and fi...
Nov 20, 2023•54 min
"Our first instinct when interacting with a Large Language Model should not be “wow these things must be really smart or really creative or really understanding”. Our first instinct should be “I’ve probably asked it to do something that it has seen bits and pieces of before”. That might mean it is still really useful, even if it isn’t “thinking really hard” or “doing some really sophisticated reasoning”. We don’t have to use anthropomorphization to understand what it is doing to provide us a res...
Nov 17, 2023•1 hr 48 min
"Ultimately, my goal with Coinos is to make Bitcoin a super simple user interface for "normies" to be able to come on and not have to understand how things are working under the hood... Just get on the website, make your account and you're good to go." - Adam Today we bring on the team from Coinos on the developing merchant market, how to build tools and services in an uncertain regulatory environment, and how to onboard your local market into the Bitcoin ecosystem easily and for their benefit. ...
Nov 16, 2023•1 hr 33 min
Is Bitcoin destined to become another fiat system? Where we end up in a world where the dominant instrument isn't Bitcoin at all, but just more IOUs? Where Bitcoin substitutes replace real Bitcoin? Does it not just become another fiat system, or are there fundamental incentives and technological trends that prevent this and push us ever closer to total sovereignty? With smaller and smaller communities and institutions able to organize and exit in an independent way... where a Bitcoin world means...
Nov 15, 2023•1 hr 51 min
"Unique to the emergent Bitcoin financial system is the application of cryptography to fundamental financial functions. Novel technologies exist, are being built, and have been theorized that will enable previously unseen functionalities, robustness, and, ultimately, competition amongst Bitcoin financial intermediaries. Key to these novelties is the characteristic of peer-to-peer (“P2P”) exchange; that Bitcoin financial intermediaries will surely exist as commercial options, but that newly possi...
Nov 09, 2023•1 hr 25 min
LIGHTNING IS DEAD! Did you hear about the new exploit discovered that may be the "nail in the coffin" of the broken and defeated Lightning network? I bet you did, but did anyone you heard it from actually know how it worked?... Probably not. That's what we dive into today, trying to make sense of the new Lightning exploit, how it works, the risk, and whether or not the sky is falling. Find out in today's Guy's Take episode. A shout out to Shinobi, Matt Corallo, John Carvalho , and numerous peopl...
Nov 07, 2023•1 hr 5 min
"We have no interest in causing confusion, mistakes, or deception. That sounds more like a job for those responsible for telling the market they wouldn’t raise rates after a massive monetary expansion, and then went on to raise them faster than at any time in U.S. financial history." — Mark Goodwin Today we have a very entertaining development thanks to the fools at the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago. Bitcoin Magazine is being threatened with a lawsuit over t-shirts they are selling that mock t...
Nov 04, 2023•40 min
It's often said that Bitcoin is too limited, that you can't build anything interesting on top of the Bitcoin chain... what if that was not only true, but that there were no limits? What if literally anything you could write into code, any program, app, game, theoretically even an entire operating system could be constructed such that its valid execution determined the ownership of Bitcoin? What if there were no limits, and you could build everything on Bitcoin? Today we dive into BitVM with Robi...
Nov 01, 2023•1 hr 18 min
"Will Bitcoin adoption improve the monetary policy behaviors of the Federal Reserve? I submit that it won’t. I do not see the incentive for the Federal Reserve to give into anyone or anything, let alone Bitcoin. Be honest, Bitcoin is surely not big enough to be a threat to the U.S. dollar. The United States is far more concerned with U.S. dollar dominance being threatened by, say, the Chinese yuan. Bitcoin on its own has not destabilized anything." — George Kaloudis Will the Federal Reserve be "...
Oct 26, 2023•38 min
"Timeout Trees is a very concrete and specific proposal for a channel factory design that actually attempts to address the real issues of use and implementation instead of a half-defined and vague concept. That is massive progress in terms of addressing Lightning's long-term scaling limitations." — Shinobi Today we dive into a cool proposal that takes advantage of covenants to build the first, practical implementation of a "lightning factory," or in other words, a way to create hundreds, even th...
Oct 24, 2023•50 min
We are diving back into the Bitcoin basics series today! Now that we understand how bitcoin works, what is important, how to stay safe, and how to use it, it's time to answer the most basic question for getting started... How do I get some Bitcoin!? Let's dive in with Bitcoin Basics episode 008. Wallets: getalby.com | Phoenix Wallet Nostr: primal.net Buy Bitcoin: Sign Up to Buy & Sell Bitcoin | River SwanBitcoin Strike FoldApp CashApp Other episodes: Basics_06 A huge thanks to our sponsors, ...
Oct 18, 2023•41 min
"After four years of work, James O'Beirne's assumeutxo option to allow instant UTXO set bootstrapping for your Bitcoin node is merged into Bitcoin Core." — Shinobi There has always been a gap between the sovereignty, privacy, and security of software, and the usability of it. But thanks to an enormous amount of work and brilliant developers, day by day that gap is getting smaller. Where the most secure tools, the most robust node setups, the non-custodial options, are getting easier, faster, and...
Oct 17, 2023•37 min
"There used to be tradeoffs between Lightning and fiat: UX vs. sovereignty; UX vs. speed; UX vs. cost; off-the-shelf fiat payment widgets vs. coding a node into an app. With the Breez SDK, Lightning beats fiat across the board. It’s faster to implement (as Ross says, “It’s like one or two API calls to set up a node, one to send a payment and one to receive payment”), cheaper to use, legally less complicated (check your jurisdiction), more private, and the UX is on par with fiat for the user and ...
Oct 13, 2023•43 min
"It requires no consensus changes to Bitcoin at all. The trick is lifting all of that logic off-chain and being able to challenge a few steps of the computation on-chain if the other party asserts a dishonest outcome. In short, BitVM will bring arbitrary Turing-complete computation, in an enforceable way, to bitcoin itself – today." What if you could enforce the ownership of Bitcoin, with literally any code you could think of writing? That may just be possible, today, without any changes or soft...
Oct 11, 2023•53 min
I hope you listened to the recent read by Beautyon, Bitcoin and Software Reliability , because today we continue our FUD Relief series. I suspect you have heard the claim that "Bitcoin doesn't innovate" and that newer and shinier blockchains are destined to replace it. I explore this idea today and suggest that the very framing of the claim suggests they have misunderstood Bitcoin's highest value. I break it down in today's Guy's Take episode. Check out our amazing sponsors: 9% off the Coldcard ...
Oct 10, 2023•57 min
Get 50,000 free sats, plus sats back on everything you buy by signing up with Fold and the Spin+ Debit Card. bitcoinaudible.com/fold Obi Nwosu, co-founder and CEO of Fedi, joins us today to talk about the new innovations and challenges in re-decentralizing the web and how both Bitcoin and Ai are at the core of making it possible. Guest Links Follow Obi on X (Link: https://x.com/obi) Follow Fedi on X (Link: https://twitter.com/fedimint) Fedi Website (Link: https://www.fedi.xyz/) Host Links...
Oct 09, 2023•1 hr 20 min
Obi Nwosu, co-founder and CEO of Fedi, joins us today to talk about the new innovations and challenges in decentralising the web and how both Bitcoin and Ai are at the core of making it possible. This conversation was recorded for the AI Unchained podcast, but I decided to cross post it here since a lot of the conversation is themed around Bitcoin. Guest Links: Follow Obi on X: https://x.com/obi Follow Fedi on X: https://twitter.com/fedimint A huge thanks to our sponsors, and don't forget t...
Oct 09, 2023•1 hr 20 min
"With Bitcoin, lives and money are at stake. Interruption of its service can cause a cascade of losses and unintended consequences for potentially millions of people and billions of fiat dollars. If it is possible to build a Bitcoin that cannot fail, that should be the goal, and no compromise should be acceptable." — Beautyon Before we get into a Guy'a Take to continue our FUD Relief series - addressing the failures to understand the value and purpose of Bitcoin - it's time to bring a brilliant ...
Oct 05, 2023•40 min
"Our existing financial system is a mirage of wealth and liquidity, sustained by an ever-expanding money supply. Bitcoin emerges as the ultimate shield against the inevitable reckoning that will shatter this illusion." — Theo Mogenet Today, we dive into another great piece from Axiom BTC on the mission to reprice the world in sats. We all understand the incredible benefit of Bitcoin as a long term store of value, and that's its monetary properties give it unique capacity for long term savings. H...
Oct 03, 2023•1 hr 11 min
What if we could mitigate the enormous centralizing effects of the massive server farms and huge corporate entities, by pooling the GPU power of the millions of users and tinkerers who have unused or regularly idle computational power, into a decentralized marketplace for buying and selling Ai execution, and we could power it all with instantly settled sats over lightning? It just so happens that we can, and this ambitious project is being brought to life with GPUtopia. Chris David from the proj...
Sep 30, 2023•1 hr 9 min
In this episode, I talked with Zack ₿omsta, the visionary leader behind Pivotal Pleb . Pivotal Pleb is on a mission to level the playing field for decentralized miners. Zack shares insights into how their technology is driving decentralisation and empowering individual miners, allowing them to play a vital role in the Bitcoin network. Join us as we unravel the importance of accessible mining solutions and their impact on the future of Bitcoin. A huge thanks to our sponsors, and don't forget to c...
Sep 29, 2023•1 hr 54 min
"Today historians focus on the symptoms of Rome’s fall, the consequences: The moral decay, the economic decline, the fall in public safety, the multiplying plagues from dysfunctional public services, the hollowed-out military that ultimately invited barbarian invasions. But we know these well - in fact we're living through many of them. What's a lot more interesting is the why. Because that's how you stop it." — Peter St. Onge Are we living through the Fall of Rome? There are so many parallels w...
Sep 28, 2023•36 min
"If the merchant wants the bitcoin and you pay in fiat_, that is you shifting the burden of fiat friction on to them. And paying your valued vendors in bitcoin is the opposite of mutually assured destruction–it's mutually assured survival." — Parker Lewis Ultimately, the decision to accept Bitcoin as payment will be driven by the fact that those merchants understand the value of Bitcoin and why it is expected to store value into the future. What does that mean for how we think about finding our ...
Sep 25, 2023•58 min
"Take the idea of proof-of-stake as a base layer consensus mechanism, and throw the idea away for right now. That's not what this is, and the problems that need to be solved to enable proof-of-stake as a second layer system instead of a stand alone base layer are not the same. #Proof-of-stake is essentially a #federation, but where anyone can join and can't be stopped from doing so, and with a mechanism to punish members for acting malicious. As a base layer that creates all kinds of existential...
Sep 20, 2023•1 hr 9 min
"This has been one of the most effective psychological operations that has ever been conducted on the public in human history. The high priests of central banking started running with this narrative and people have come to believe that it is a law of physics. Economies cannot operate efficiently unless there is a steady flow of new monetary units being created and introduced to the economy. If new monetary units aren't being created people will hoard their money and grind the economy to a halt."...
Sep 15, 2023•33 min
