Popular Episodes

Today I talk with the Kiwi Bitcoin Builders. This New Zealand-based group connects people working on various Bitcoin projects, from tools for merchant acceptance of Bitcoin, through to mining businesses, Bitcoin meetups, education, and even developing on the lightning network.

Dr Matthew Birchall is a Research Fellow at The New Zealand Initiative. The New Zealand Initiative is a policy think tank conducting independent research on a wide range of issues. We talk about Matthew's report “Paving the Wave: Learning from New Zealand past to Build a Better Future.” The report explores how the country effectively tackled infrastructure projects in the past, and offers guidance on how the country can rediscover this talent.

In this episode I talk with Umi Miyahara, Business Development Lead at Breez. Breez is a self-custodial Lightning-as-a-Service company bringing peer-to-peer bitcoin payments to apps and services globally with the free and open-source Breez SDK. We talk about Umi’s journey through traditional finance and fintech startups, her Bitcoin story, and the evolution of the Lightning Network.

I talk with Christian Lewe from Blockstream Research. Christian is working on Simplicity, a more robust programming language designed as an alternative to Bitcoin Script. The project that has been in the works for over ten years and has been described by Adam Back as “the last soft fork”, and as Christian shares, enabling simplicity could bypass a lot of the contentious soft fork discussions about things like covenants as this functionality is possible with Simplicity.

Niko Laamanen is the founder of Konsensus Network, a company that focuses on localising and distributing important literature about bitcoin, Austrian economics, and sovereignty. Niko recognised the importance of being able to convey the Bitcoin message into other languages.