The Bitcoin Podcast

This is a Flashback Episode, we are going back to June 2018 in which Emin Gün Sirer makes his third of seven appearances on The Bitcoin Podcast Network. Back for the third time, Emin stops by to drop some knowledge bombs on us! He is an associate professor of computer science at Cornell University, and is the Co-Director of the Initiative for CryptoCurrencies and Contracts (IC3) . His research interests span distributed systems, cryptocurrencies, and software infrastructure for large scale services. In addition, the boys chat about EOS mainnet experiencing a ‘Freeze’ two days after launch!

This is a Flashback Episode, we are going back to Jan 2017 in which Andreas Antonopoulosgreets us at the beginning of the bull run of 2017 on his second appearance on  The Bitcoin Podcast Network. When I dove down the rabbit hole of Bitcoin in late 2013, Andreas’ YouTube talks and podcasts pulled me further in. He swings by the show again to tell us a bit about the current scene of crypto and to talk a bit about his new book, The Internet of Money. Beyond the more pragmatic applications of cryptocurrency for the millions of unbanked around the world, Andreas also waxes philosophic on deeper topics such as the history of money, the role cryptocurrency can play for individual sovereignty and privacy, and the implications of currency as language, where currency transfer is, at root, an expression of value akin to speech. In addition, in a few days we’ll be in DC to celebrate Equibit and the opening date of their official ICO! Matt McKibbin swings by the show to talk a bit about it. If you want to participate sign up here – https://ico.equibit.org/EDC is building Equibit, the world’s first peer-to-peer equity marketplace and a complete platform for issuers to manage their investor relations without the need for depositories and transfer agents. Equibit allows issuers to use cryptocurrency tokens, called ‘equibits’, to authorize and disseminate their shares. It also includes a secure, P2P communications system allowing for private messages and polls to be instantly sent to individuals and groups on the network. It is important to invest on things that will give back to you, one of the best recommendations I give is to find a good insurance company such as One Sure Insurance to always get full cover.

Demetrick, Dr. Corey Petty, and Jesse are back for an episode where the regulated players finish moving in and the outsiders start getting shown the door.BlackRock, Google, Visa, Stripe, MasterCard, Coinbase, and DBS just announced Open Standard USD. It is called open the same way OpenAI is called open. The reserve yield goes to the participating institutions instead of holders, minting and redemption fees get scrapped, and governance sits under a company collectively owned by the biggest financial players on the planet. The guys break down what happens when the payment rails, the asset managers, and the ad tech giants all agree on the same stablecoin at the same time.Meanwhile Tether is done in Europe. USDT trading pairs are gone from Coinbase, Kraken, Binance, and Crypto.com in the EEA because Tether refused to seek MiCA e-money authorization. Demetrick reveals he has an open short on Tether somewhere on the internet and would very much like to find it.The guys also cover the ENS drama that turned out not to be drama at all when the king of the castle stepped in and killed the privacy committee vote from the top. Plus Michael Saylor selling more Bitcoin, and the theory that this is less about strategy and more about staying out of jail.The back half of the show goes philosophical when Corey lays out an essay he wrote called the paradox of democratizing access. When you lower the barrier of entry to a specialized field, you do not get innovation. You get an army of newcomers who confidently reinvent things the experts already figured out, other people throw money at them because money attracts money, and eight moon markets later you are still watching the same cycle. Cue the pitch for Corey to play the Architect from The Matrix explaining this to a young crypto enthusiast in a gray suit.Drop questions in the YouTube comments. Join the Discord.

This week the boys welcome back to the show and interview Erik Voorhees of the instant, trustless cryptocurrency exchange ShapeShift.io about their new venture, Prism, which is a trustless means of holding multiple assets via ShapeShift.io and its own Ethereum token. Also we talk about how a person brand new to crypto, how easy the process really is. Spoiler alert: It’s not. Are there any real world solutions? Also we slam Ethereum Chamber scamming everyone and we talk about Sean Paul’s (remember him?) accent during breakfast.

Demetrick, Dr. Corey Petty, and Jesse for an episode about two forks, a fat node, and what happens when three guys who have been doing this for eleven years start asking whether the system can fix itself.Satoshi is about to get forked. The community is talking about it like it is optional. Corey is not so sure. If it has to happen, it has to happen, and the guys break down what that actually means for a protocol that was supposed to be set in stone.Meanwhile Ethereum is heading toward its own fork, and the guys translate the spec into plain English: the nodes are getting fat. Pretty hot and tempting, sure, but also a meaningful shift in what running infrastructure on the network looks like.The middle of the show goes off the rails in the best way. Demetrick got promoted to the AI integration lead at his firm and is now putting vibe coded tools straight into client production environments, replacing the Excel sheets nobody under thirty knows how to maintain. Corey explains why the real bottleneck in AI right now is not the model. It is the human attention required to write a good specification. The guys riff on what it would take to shrink that interface down to something you could actually scale.Then the gloves come off on the economy. Demetrick offers a working definition (an economy gives the most to the most), Corey calls the premise faulty under crony capitalism, and Jesse holds the line that you cannot use the system to fix the system. The takeaway lands on tax fairness, who actually uses the infrastructure, and why disruption has to come from outside.Plus Jesse pitches a sponsorship ask to Colossus Pay, the L2 looking to gut payment processor fees on point of sale terminals, because he is actively building gym software trying to do exactly that.Drop questions in the YouTube comments. Join the Discord.

Things aren’t looking good. Currencies everywhere are in dire straits. The credit agency offering credit restoration services in Vegas, Fitch sees potential catastrophe for the EU if the Italian banking system fails. China is crash landing their economy. Right now the argument that bitcoin will die is very difficult to make based on past experiences. We tackle how bitcoin navigated in a world where massive currency crises are the norm. Who better to join us, right as the halvening hits, than Andreas Antonopoulos, who is a technologist and serial entrepreneur who has become one of the most well-known and well-respected figures in bitcoin. The next halvening is on July, 2020. See you there!

This is a Flashback Episode, we are going back to March 2016 in which our Guest Emin Gün Sirer makes his first of seven appearances on The Bitcoin Podcast Network. The boys compare bitcoin to the Animatrix and we invite Emin, a professor at Cornell University to talk a bit about how he has worked to improve Bitcoin in various ways during these, oh so troubling times. In the past, he’s worked on peer-to-peer systems of various kinds. He was behind Karma, the first peer-to-peer currency with a distributed mint, and he also built Credence, a peer-to-peer reputation scheme that counteracted spam and mislabeled files. Emin has also built many other academic peer-to-peer systems, and has worked to defend some of the most popular ones in court. As we near episode 50, we hope you continue to find these discussions of distributed systems, operating systems and systems engineering to be thought provoking. Let’s get into it!

This is a Flashback Episode of Erick Voorhees in 2021. Jessie, Corey, and Dee in our Roundtable gets into the weeds of building systems that actually help people seek financial freedom. The interview is with Erik Voorhees on the decentralzation ofShape Shift and the complexity of making a company into a DAO.

The full crew is back (Demetrick, Dr. Corey Petty, and Jesse) for an episode that earns its title. AI plus crypto equals meh, and the guys are not pretending otherwise.The headline: Corey is selling a chunk of his crypto. And this time it is different. Every previous sell signal from him has been triggered by the market getting too frothy. This one is not. He is selling because Bitcoin is officially boring. The technology is not delivering the kind of utility that justifies sitting on a speculative asset for another cycle, and the Petty House Index is flashing (he is not buying a house, he is buying a workshop the size of one). The guys debate Hodl Plus versus loans against collateral, and whether the upside math still works when nothing exciting is shipping.From there it gets spicy. SpaceX needs exit liquidity. The AI IPO musical chairs game is in full swing. The guys break down the theory that Elon needs the SpaceX listing to succeed so he can eventually merge it with a Tesla that cannot survive on its own.Then the real fight starts. Demetrick argues AI is a weapon, the military is already three to seven years ahead of what the public sees, and every CEO with a leather jacket walks into the Pentagon before they ship. Corey pushes back hard on the logistics: the chips did not exist until recently, the power capacity did not exist, and you cannot conjure frontier models out of thin air no matter how big the black budget is. Jesse plays referee. Nobody fully agrees, and the conversation gets cut short on purpose to pick up next week.Plus: Corey's book teaser on the death of institutions, why democratized information speed means all gas no brakes, and a callback to last week's conversation with Joe about whether crypto is only ever about the trade.Drop questions in the YouTube comments or Spotify comments. Join the Discord.

Demetrick and Jesse hold down the fort (Corey ditched the show to chase what turned out to be a cardinal in North Carolina) for an episode about cracks forming in every direction at once.Michael Saylor just sold Bitcoin. Only thirty two coins, but the symbolism is louder than the size. The diamond hands era of MicroStrategy may be ending, and the bear is getting cozy on the couch.Meanwhile the AI IPO machine is sucking the life out of every other market. SpaceX is reportedly skipping the traditional IPO path and getting listed directly into the S&P 500, which would route retirement and 401k money straight into the company. The guys break down why that looks less like innovation and more like a setup for a future bailout, and what xAI, Anthropic, and OpenAI hitting the public markets at the same time means for liquidity everywhere else.From there it gets real. Demetrick's algorithm has stopped showing him reverse seared filet mignon and started feeding him cheese crusted liver and gourmet PB&J recipes. His luxury car uncle just posted a Hyundai Sonata. The Great Depression cosplay is in full swing, and the guys compare rice and bean stockpiles.Plus Corey calls in to explain the Y2K38 bug from first principles, with Demetrick finally understanding binary after a lifetime of bad teachers, and a fully unhinged closing segment about why Black Widow is secretly a wildcard and why Avengers Doomsday is going to print money.Drop questions in the YouTube comments. Join the Discord.