Popular Episodes

I talk with Bitkiwi Paul about the next Bitkiwi meetup that is happening on Saturday October 28th in Auckland. We also discuss the social layer of Bitcoin in New Zealand and how it has grown enormously over the last 12 months. This time last year I didn’t really know any Bitcoiners in person, but here we are with a thriving community of Bitcoin projects, businesses, and collaborations that I am involved in, and I know there are many others out there doing the same. A lot of Proof of Work has gone into building on Bitcoin over the last few years and that is going to be important as more and more people start finding and learning about Bitcoin.

I talk with Rupert Carlyon, Founder and Managing Director of Kōura Wealth KiwiSaver. KiwiSaver is the voluntary retirement savings scheme for New Zealand and Kōura Wealth offers a Carbon Neutral Crypto Fund KiwiSaver product, which is Bitcoin only. This is a way for everyday kiwis to get some kind of Bitcoin exposure with government and employer matched contributions and tax benefits. New Zealand was very late to the game with retirement savings schemes and the impact of this is beginning to be felt with very low savings, and old-age poverty issues. With all the talk about the Bitcoin ETFs globally, it is interesting to explore how traditional finance in New Zealand interfaces with Bitcoin, and the regulatory challenges they have had to overcome to get this product launched.

I talk with Glen Herud, the founder of Happy Cow Milk Company. Glen is focussed on decentralised dairy farming, where individual farmers are able to process and pasteurise their milk themselves using Glen's hardware specs, and connect in with a platform for supply and distribution of dairy products directly to businesses and consumers.

I talk with Jimmy Djabali of Swiss Bitcoin Pay, an app for easily accepting Bitcoin payments at point of sale. This is an important area of development, and unfortunately there are still not that many solutions out there for making accepting Bitcoin as a business easy. Swiss Bitcoin Pay seeks to fix this with a simple interface that is suitable for shops, restaurants, or any kind of customer-facing business.Jimmy shares how the project came about and his vision for it, as well as the Bitcoin merchant situation in Switzerland including the city of Lugano which has over 300 merchants accepting Bitcoin already. 

Zed is a Bitcoiner originally from the Czech Republic, but now living in Wellington, New Zealand, where he organises a Local Bitcoin meetup.We dive into Zed’s story, leaving the Czech Republic to go to London around the time of the occupy movement where he first discovered Bitcoin.We talk about Bitcoin art and the role of popular culture in sharing new ways of thinking, as well as the cultural background that Zed brings to Bitcoin, having being born into a communist system. We also talk about how people such as the Gypsies of Europe or the New Zealand Māori represent a different kind of relationship to the state that we can learn a lot from.