Kenji Tateiwa is CEO of Agile Energy X who are mining Bitcoin in Japan and helping to reduce grid congestion with flexible load that matches the variability of renewable energy. We discuss the long term outlook for Japan as it moves towards renewable energy more broadly and the challenges with the existing infrastructure network and how the innovation of Bitcoin mining can help with this. Kenji also share his background in nuclear energy and we talk about strategies for communicating the Bitcoin mining story to the public.

James Pierog is co-founder and CEO of Bitcoin Prediction Market, a new company back by Bitcoin startup accelerator Wolf, enabling bets on real-world events using the Bitcoin Lightning Network. We explore what a prediction market is, why Bitcoin is the perfect medium for this, and what new forms of crowd intelligence through prediction markets could mean in an increasingly complex world. Along the way we discuss the intersection of philosophy and mathematics, the wisdom of the crowd, AI, and the challenge of dealing with rapid change.

I host the Kiwi Bitcoin Builders monthly catchup for August 2024 (Recorded 25 August). We talk about upcoming Bitkiwi events, Lightning Pay, Alby, as well as other things people have been working on.

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 Trey Sellers, VP of Enterprise Sales at Unchained. Unchained are global leaders in collaborative custody solutions for Bitcoin with their Unchained Vault product that uses a multi-sig arrangement so that there is never a single point of failure for your Bitcoin. We discuss some of Trey’s writing about the FIRE movement: Financial Independence, Retire Early, and how a low-time-preference strategy of saving and investing can help you achieve financial independence earlier in life. We also discuss some of the fundamental metrics for tracking Bitcoin adoption. Finally Trey shares Unchained Connections, a new way to help friends and family to custody their own Bitcoin and get it off of exchanges.

This episode is a release of the “Bitcoin in New Zealand” live panel talk in collaboration with Bitkiwi at their event at Dux Central in Christchurch, July 20, 2024. We had three awesome guests, James Viggiano, Brad Henderson, and Andrew Wells.There are some great Bitcoin projects happening in New Zealand and I’m excited for the future. A big thank you to everyone who attended the event, it was great to catchup in person and for me to get back home for a little bit. 

I talk with Sam Kivi, CTO and Director at Grid Share, a New Zealand company building flexible load infrastructure centred around renewable energy and Bitcoin mining. We talk about Grid Share’s Bitcoin mining operation at Monowai Hydroelectric Power Station in the South Island of New Zealand, their plans to grow the business to explore methane capture from landfills enabled by Bitcoin mining, and the broader opportunities for demand response and renewable energy infrastructure growth in New Zealand.

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.

I host the Kiwi Bitcoin Builders monthly catchup for May 2024. There was just a few of us this time talking about running our own Bitcoin Lightning nodes, self Sovereign AI, silent payments, PayNyms and more.

I host the Kiwi Bitcoin Builders monthly catchup for April 2024. This is a way to bring together people working on awesome Bitcoin businesses and projects in New Zealand. We share what we have been working on and what has been happening in the space. We hear about the Bitcoin Alive conference that was held over in Sydney, follow up on the success of the Lightning Pay beta, as well as hear from Satflow, a new Kiwi Bitcoin business exploring MEV on Bitcoin.

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.

I host a Kiwi Bitcoin Builders call with a few people working on Bitcoin businesses, education, and projects in New Zealand. We debrief on the success of the recent Bitkiwi meetup event in Queenstown and also share some of the things that people are working on.

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.‍

Nicolas Dorier is founder and maintainer of BTCPay Server as well as NBitcoin Library. We talk about the BTCPay Server roadmap for the coming year, including Bitcoin Service Provider functions, and the bigger vision for the platform. We also discuss Nicolas experience going through the Blocksize War and how it prompted the development of BTCPay Server, his approach to assessing proposed changes to Bitcoin, and how he gets his technical information. We also talk about the impact of transaction fees and Layer 2 solutions.

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.

I talk with gSovereignty, based in Hong Kong, going deep into questions about individual sovereignty and freedom. We also discuss the relationship with the legacy nation state and how Bitcoin and Nostr may interface with collectivist societies such as China. We talk about the Hong Kong protests, the dynamics of state and media, and Bitcoin’s eventual showdown with the Cantillon Pyramid. We also talk about G’s work in Nostr, including running the Nostrovia podcast, and building nostr.rocket – helping Bitcoiners organise projects in a way that is not beholden to the state.

Roland Bewick is a kiwi Bitcoiner and Lightning Developer working on Alby and Lightsats. We talk about Roland’s background and how he become involved in Bitcoin, how value4value and new kinds of revenue models for creators could work in the future, as well as the other possibilities that Bitcoin enables as the money of the internet.

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 Rob Clarkson about scaling Bitcoin’s Layer 2 Lightning protocol, and how changes happen to Bitcoin more generally. Rob provides a technical introduction to some of the proposals such as ELTOO, APO, CTV, and we talk a bit about what covenants and vaults mean in Bitcoin.

Evan Lin is a New Zealand software engineer currently working on the Bitcoin Dev Kit (BDK). We talk about Evan’s journey to get funded by Spiral to work full-time on open-source Bitcoin projects, his experience working and living in Taiwan, and how we can encourage emerging developers to put their time and effort into Bitcoin.