Popular Episodes

I talk with Kieran Nolan about his work combining Bitcoin, teaching, and open-source technology. Kieran’s official role is STEM Wizard, teaching at a primary school in Melbourne, Australia. He has been able to bring tech and learning together into the classroom, including helping kids to run Bitcoin nodes, building projects on Nostr, setting up Minecraft servers with other schools, and more. We discuss teaching and learning, and how kids can be better equiped for our rapidly changing world as well as the challenges with bureaucracy and standards-based education in government schools. Kieran is involved in a huge range of other Bitcoin and education projects including the Mornington Peninsula Bitcoin Group, The School of Bitcoin, the Digital Playhouse Foundation, and more.

Brandon Bucher is a Bitcoiner based in New Zealand working on several Bitcoin-related projects and an important figure in the local Kiwi Bitcoin community. We zoom out to discuss the recent high on-chain transaction fees, and what we can expect from discussions about scaling solutions moving forward. We talk about how rough consensus works for making changes to Bitcoin and what the situation was like during the period of the Blocksize Wars and SegWit activation from 2015 to 2017. Finally we discuss the importance of education and support for self-custody of bitcoin.

Rabble is a software developer and hacker based in Wellington, New Zealand. Rabble was lead engineer at Odeo, where he hired Jack Dorsey into the company, which would later pivot into becoming Twitter. Since then he has been focussed on building impactful projects and social media with the open & decentralised vision that Twitter originally had in its early years but which was eventually lost. Rabble has created the Nostr client Nos.social, and is involved with ⁠Ahau.io⁠, a Māori community tool built on Nostr’s predecessor protocol, Secure Scuttlebutt.

I talk with Brett Scott, author of The Heretic’s Guide to Global Finance and Cloudmoney: Cash, Cards, Crypto and the War for our Wallets. Brett does a lot of work supporting the protection of physical cash, and I reached out to him about an article he wrote “The War On Informality” which explores the implication of financial surveillance by credit cards and private banks.This is a thought-provoking episode. We explore the Commodity Theory of Money vs Credit Theory of Money, power dynamics, the importance of cash, and more. Brett offers some interesting critiques of certain Bitcoin narratives and provides some alternative frameworks for looking at how money works.

I share a conversation I had on Darcy Ungaro’s podcast, NZ Everyday Investor. Darcy has kindly allowed me to share the show with you here. I am on the other side of the mic, talking about my thoughts on housing in New Zealand, what it means to be a sovereign individual, and some bold reckonings about the future of the nation state project.