"One of the amazing things about the internet economy is how different the list of top internet properties today looks from the list ten years ago. It wasn’t as if those former top companies were complacent – most of them acquired and built products like crazy to avoid being displaced. The reason big new things sneak by incumbents is that the next big thing always starts out being dismissed as a “toy.” ~ Chris Dixon Why do so many miss the biggest innovations and most revolutionary technologies ...
Feb 08, 2024•41 min
"Bitcoin wastes energy. You've heard it a million times. But what if its the exact opposite of the truth in every way? What if its actually our energy grid that is wasteful, and Bitcoin can fix it? What if its renewable energy that is unreliable and uneconomical, and bitcoin mining can balance it out. What is its fiat that's wasteful and unfair, and Bitcoin can correct it? And what if the entire premise is built upon the failure to even understand what it is that Bitcoin does? I think it's time ...
Feb 05, 2024•1 hr 39 min
"One night during my visit to Bondo, Carl asked me to pause as the sunset was fading, to look at the hills around us: the lights were all turning on, all across the foothills of Mt. Mulanje. It was a powerful sight to see, and staggering to think that Bitcoin is helping to make it happen as it converts wasted energy into human progress." ~ Alex Gladstein Can you imagine what it may be like to lack access to the most basic necessities like electricity, only to finally have the opportunity to turn...
Feb 02, 2024•1 hr 42 min
"I think AI can make a lot of things better, and if you put them together, if you are aware of the resources at your disposal, I think the average person can do more than the wealthiest person 200 years ago could have done" ~ HopeTS What if YOU could build the app you needed to solve your own problem? Ai has unleashed this ability to millions who have the knowledge necessary to tap into it, if only they understood how powerful this tool is. Building an app, specific to your exact needs to simpli...
Feb 02, 2024•1 hr 23 min
"To put it simply, there are now corporations with billions of dollars of investment in not just the asset, but the ecosystem. Mining is a huge economic drain on the system, and all it accomplishes is censorship resistance. If censorship resistance isn’t worth tens or hundred of billions or dollar per year to the corporations; they will find a way to end it. When they do try to end it, they can point to the ETFs enduring appeal and ignore any constitutional brinkmanship from OG Bitcoiners who th...
Jan 31, 2024•1 hr 10 min
In today's chat we dive into destroying economic myths and unraveling the political divides of our time toward what future they may be leading us to. What can we make of the balkanization of the US, a push for Texas independence, the unraveling of a global reserve currency and what could we see in the dollar's demise? We dive into all this and more with renowned Austrian economist, and author of Choice among many other books, Dr. Robert P. Murphy. References from the show Bitcoin Audible - Read_...
Jan 30, 2024•1 hr 15 min
"Bitcoin enables perhaps the most powerful mode of ownership ever devised; it would be akin to gold inside a safe that can’t be penetrated with all the energy the universe, and with a password that you know but which could not be guessed over the entire lifetime of the universe." ~ Allen Farrington What if buying an ETF of Bitcoin, is contradictory to the very investment thesis of Bitcoin itself. Knowing the investment thesis for bitcoin, should entail the understanding that bitcoin's value prop...
Jan 26, 2024•33 min
"It’s important to step outside of the hype and critically-analyze what is and is not useful. It’s very easy to get caught up in “potential” applications, and allow the imagination to go all exponential on you. It’s a very human thing. Turning that imagination into something tangible is what a business and an entrepreneur does. It’s our hope this report will be useful along that path." ~ Alek Svetski Today we dive into Part 2 of the Bitcoin & Ai Industry Report to learn the intricacies and c...
Jan 25, 2024•2 hr 4 min
"Retrospectively, a lot of ex-DigiCash employees understand why Chaum was so paranoid. As a cryptographer you have to assume the whole world is trying to rip you off. A certain amount of paranoia is part of the job. Chaum had also worked for intelligence agencies, and that didn't fortify his faith in the good intentions of humankind. His vision of the privacy of the individual was almost an obsession. In 1996 he said, in the relations magazine of Honeywell-Bull: "The difference between a bad ele...
Jan 24, 2024•52 min
Sometimes in life and the course of history, there are moments where simply stating the truth, in a clear and understandable way, can stir a fire in thousands or even millions of people. Devon Eriksen, author and destroyer of socialist nonsense, joins us today to get to know him and his perspective. We discuss the nature of story, the importance of culture, the power of stating the simple truth, the dangers of being right too early, and what we need to do to turn the tide of a dying moral code a...
Jan 23, 2024•1 hr 44 min
"I hope Bitcoin sticks around and grows more popular, but in its current form to most in #TradFi it is the opposite of SOUND MONEY, especially if it takes cult-like behavior to make it grow. It needs the STATE to force its use on everyone. That is what makes it MONEY." ~ Samantha LaDuc Today we dive into the enlightening twitter thread from financial analyst Samantha LaDuc on why Bitcoin cannot be and is not money, one of which is because money is enforced by the state, but that's only just the ...
Jan 20, 2024•1 hr 3 min
There are so many myths and misconceptions around AI models. What they can do, how they are trained, even the fundamentals of how the data for them is even collected and formatted to make sense. The idea that we can "train our own model" by just feeding it a ton of conversation or notes is unrealistic, but why exactly is that? Today we get into a 2 Part read which will be one of the most value dense we have covered on the show yet. It breaks down the entirety of the process of identifying the co...
Jan 18, 2024•1 hr 38 min
"Part of the problem of Lightning’s shortcoming regarding scalability of Bitcoin ownership is that in order to open a channel, or control a UTXO, you actually have to transact on the base layer. After that Lightning can facilitate a very large number of transactions off-chain but a user must still transact on-chain to onboard themselves to Lightning, It massively increases the number of transactions Bitcoin can process but it does nothing at all to increase the number of people who can own bitco...
Jan 17, 2024•49 min
There are a lot of speculation, claims, predictions, and accusations around the successes and faults of the Lightning Network. But where do this things fall when we look at the boots on the ground metrics? When we really look at the hard data, what can we know for certain? Today we dig into the past few years of lightning development and growth with Sam Wouters from River, author of the incredible Lightning Report released in August of last year. If you are interested in the truth of Lightning, ...
Jan 15, 2024•1 hr 32 min
The legacy financial system has arrived. One January 10th, numerous Bitcoin ETFs were approved. But is this even a good thing? What does this signal for the legitimacy of Bitcoin as an asset? What does it mean for the sovereignty of the network? This could both bring trillions of dollars in liquidity into Bitcoin and break through the Overton window of the average person. This may make bitcoin "real" for many who refused to pay attention before. But the big question... the real risk, is if we ca...
Jan 13, 2024•59 min
Today we explore the tools for voice changing ai and text-to-speech. What is Guy using, and what are the impacts of instant and easy voice copying be on content creation, copyright, the meme lords, fraud, and personal identity. Referenced in the show ElevenLabs.io (Link: https://elevenlabs.io/) Altered.ai (Link: https://www.altered.ai/) Episode #011 - The Fears of Ai (Link: http://tinyurl.com/4v9rj98r) Could Ai Go Nuclear? - Ai Unchained #003 - The Dark Side of Ai with Alex Lewin (Link: http://t...
Jan 11, 2024•52 min
" Channel liquidity and offline receives, in my opinion, are the two most obvious reasons why self-custodial lightning is not popular. When most users hear about any of these, they just think "screw that" and move to a custodial wallet because it is so much easier. If these were our only two problems, I think self-custodial lightning would be fine. It may never be the predominant way people use lightning, but we could get the UX good enough that we have a significant portion of people using ligh...
Jan 09, 2024•51 min
"The computers used to create valuable new Bitcoin tokens and validate transactions consume around the same amount of energy as a medium-sized country such as Sweden would generate. Hence the stinging critique of how this cryptocurrency wastes the planet’s precious resources." — Ian Birrell Is it true that Bitcoin only wastes energy and is the sole purview of financial gambling and speculation in the western world, or are there boots on the ground showing the real results of the "pioneer species...
Jan 08, 2024•41 min
"Bitcoin appears to be a decentralized Ponzi scheme not a decentralized currency. People don't spend it because they want it to go up. The dollar works because of inflation. It keeps velocity up like hot potato. If you want to store value silver gold and land. Because it's beautiful useful and valuable. Bitcoin is a Ponzi scheme without an individual attached to it to go to prison. So the media can control swings for profit. That's my opinion about bitcoin. The purpose isn't currency the purpose...
Jan 06, 2024•1 hr 1 min
The models, the tools, the implementations, everything is moving incredibly fast. But a very interesting trend that I've been seeing, is that the open source benchmarks are improving just slightly faster than the closed source alternatives. Slowly but surely, they are catching up. The day may come where the open source models are the best models, the ones with the greatest number of tools, and the largest variety of implementations, because naturally they're open and available for everyone to wo...
Jan 05, 2024•51 min
"Since 2017, bitcoin has been Stone Ridge’s treasury reserve asset because of my extreme aversion to risk. We run net short USD – which is fancy way of saying we net borrow fiat - to pay bills and make investments. We save in bitcoin. It would be impossible to overstate the corporate advantages of being on the Bitcoin Standard. Since 2017, we’ve doubled our franchises to ten, more than 10x’d our trading profits, and delivered 25% annualized ROE for our shareholders. Our firm compensation, rent, ...
Jan 03, 2024•1 hr 31 min
"This decision, which is legally sound, has the effect of declaring all private mortgages on real and personal property, and all U.S. and State bonds held by the Federal Reserve, National, and State banks to be null and void. This amounts to the emancipation of this Nation from personal, national, and state debt purportedly owed to this banking system. Every American owes it to himself to study this decision very carefully, for upon it hangs the question of freedom or slavery." ~ Jerome Daly Is ...
Jan 01, 2024•1 hr 1 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...
Dec 30, 2023•1 hr 58 min
"We’re less than a year from another halving, awaiting systemic implications from federal regulation and institutional adoption, standing at the precipice of an American primary election into which Bitcoin has irrevocably inserted itself. Welcome to the big leagues." ~ Mark Goodwin and Alex Bergeron We are headed into a new era for Bitcoin. The stakes are higher, and the challenges will be even greater. There will be inevitable shifts in how we use and how we think of Bitcoin as a system. And th...
Dec 27, 2023•1 hr 4 min
"You’re a thirsty bitch. You like to gargle Peter’s balls." ~ DeaterBob Merry Christmas! In this reboot episode, we revisit the infamous debate between Bitcoin plebs American HODL and DeaterBob. They're on the same mission of pushing Bitcoin adoption, but their principles and who they're willing to buddy up with couldn't be more opposite. This episode is a lighthearted journey into the hilarious underbelly of discussions in the Bitcoin community. Check out the original article at AH & Deater...
Dec 26, 2023•48 min
"There is a Remnant there that you know nothing about. They are obscure, unorganized, inarticulate, each one rubbing along as best he can. They need to be encouraged and braced up because when everything has gone completely to the dogs, they are the ones who will come back and build up a new society; and meanwhile, your preaching will reassure them and keep them hanging on. Your job is to take care of the Remnant, so be off now and set about it." ~ Albert Jay Nock In this reboot episode, we revi...
Dec 24, 2023•1 hr 6 min
"You got to go from proto banking to full service banking and then to central banking and you know interconnected central bank. So now a lot of that is actually a technological story and I don't think it gets covered enough because most people covering it. Historians and economists aren't necessarily looking at the lens of technology and at most they'll give a caveat like oh the telegraph allowed this. But it's like no, that's actually not like a footnote.That's a core thing that happened, that ...
Dec 22, 2023•1 hr 38 min
Ai is a powerful tool, and thus, necessarily comes with incredible risk. It could obsolete millions of workers, taking jobs and productive capacity away from humans and consolidate it into corporations. It could make the average individual too dangerous, putting incredible power into the hands of bad people. It may even present an existential threat to humanity, a veritable nuclear bomb, made available to everyone in the world... What could all of this mean? Doesn't it suggests we need to tightl...
Dec 21, 2023•1 hr 4 min
"Regulators will continue coming down on those custodians, making more demands for information, more demands on restrictions for what users can do with their money, they will not stop. So short of actually activating covenants on Bitcoin, what can we do?" ~ Shinobi As we move into an era of bitcoin where the surveillance and control apparatus will seek to gain their stranglehold on the industry, but we still don't have a scaling solution for the whole world, how do we mitigate the time during tr...
Dec 20, 2023•43 min
In this episode I dive into the ongoing shift from closed systems to open, permissionless digital realms, drawing parallels to the internet revolution. I discuss the importance of privacy as a fundamental right, and explain why government attempts to regulate and control Bitcoin are contemptible and flawed. With a focus on recent FinCEN rules and Senator Warren's proposed bill, I advocates for a re-evaluation of regulatory approaches, challenging the authorities to understand the true nature of ...
Dec 18, 2023•55 min
