Popular Episodes

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.

Andrew Cummins formerly worked for Bitcoin Magazine as the Growth Marketing & Analytics Manager, and he shares the journey that took him from New Zealand to Colorado Springs, including his Bitcoin story, being on the ground at the Bitcoin Miami Conference, and his future plans.

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 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. 

I talk with James Viggiano about recent comments made by the Governor of the Reserve Bank of New Zealand. Not soon after we spoke, James shared a clip that went viral of the governor talking frankly about the exorbitant privilege of money printing that the central banks and governments have. James and I talk about some of the game theory from the perspective of the Reserve Bank of New Zealand to defend the Kiwi Dollar and their attempts to talk down inflation, and shift the narrative even as the cost of living crisis continues. We also talk about the opportunity for what New Zealand could look like on a Bitcoin standard and how that could interface with the legacy financial system.