Popular Episodes

In this group chat we talk about the new RBNZ Issue paper on the future of money, point of sale hardware experiments on the Lightning Network, and how New Zealand government and business can be educated about the role of Bitcoin. We also discuss improved ways to bring about retail adoption and get Bitcoin into the hands of kiwis, along with a whole lot more!

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.

James Swarbrick is the director of Swarbricks, a Bitcoin-accepting law firm in New Zealand. We talk about his thoughts from a legal perspective about the recent collapse of the Dasset crypto exchange, as well as discuss an article he wrote about how the hack of another exchange, Cryptopia, helped develop law in New Zealand. Finally we talk about the role of self-custody and inheritance planning for Bitcoin.

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.‍

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.