Popular Episodes

I speak with Brad Loewen, host of Beyond the Price, exploring Bitcoin adoption in East Asia. Brad and I both attended the Bitcoin Asia conference in Hong Kong recently, organised by BTC Inc, the same company behind Bitcoin Miami, Bitcoin Amsterdam, Bitcoin Magazine, along with their investment arm UTXO Management. Now it was clear that there would be some ordinal-related discussions at the conference which I wanted to verify for myself, however I was not expecting the sheer degree of emphasis on these, as well as the overall VC, compliance & KYC, public mining, and financial services direction of the conference. As we explore, I have come to question BTC Inc's motivations, their choice of sponsors and programming, and their commitment to Bitcoin as freedom and privacy tech.

Andrew Begin is Director of Marketing at Galoy, a company building Bitcoin-native banking infrastructure for organisations. We talk about Galoy’s Bitcoin projects including the open-source Blink Wallet, made popular through Bitcoin Beach in El Salvador. I learn about the vision for the product as well as its Stablesats functionality and how this work. We discuss the power of communities taking ownership of their financial infrastructure, and the opportunities for grassroots Bitcoin adoption in Africa and Latin America. Finally we talk briefly about permaculture and regenerative farming and the connections with Bitcoin thinking.‍

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 G Sovereignty, a Bitcoiner based in Hong Kong and developing applications on Nostr as well as host of the Nostrovia Podcast. We talk about a presentation that G gave titled Bitcoin vs. The State: Four Phases of War, exploring the power dynamics of Bitcoin, its security model, and the steps that the state may enact as it begins to comprehend the true implications of Bitcoin upon its exorbitant privileges. We also discuss the future of Bitcoin-powered economies and what these might look like.

A down-to-earth and impromptu catchup with HG, a local Bitcoiner from Christchurch who flew up to be at the Bitkiwi meetup in Wellington recently. We discuss Bitcoin in NZ, local initiatives, and who we think is the one kiwi we would like to see get orange pilled!