Bitcoin Magazine Podcast

Latest Episodes:

WTF is Happening with the Fed!?: How We Got Here. WTF-1 Mar 28, 2020

Show notes

Following the COVID19 crisis the US government and specifically the Federal Reserve have been incredibly quick to action. Bitcoin Magazine brings you this special in an attempt to explain what the federal reserve is doing and how it affects you.

Topics:

-Fed setting up two new credit facilities where buyers on secondary market can take out loans -Fed will be buying their debt

-Primary Market Corporate Credit Facility (PMCCF), Secondary Market Corporate Credit Facility (SMCCF) and Term Asset-Backed Securities Loan Facility (TALF)**

-$1 trillion in daily repo

-Unlimited QE--early march, announced $700 billion QE ($500 bln in treasury bons, $200bnl in MBS)

-Zero interest rates

-Zero reserve requirements

-Bond yields are negative

Primary dealers: J.P. Morgan, Barclays Capital, Wells Fargo, and Citigroup. TD Securities, Morgan Stanley, Cantor Fitzgerald, and Goldman Sachs

Please rate and share the podcast!

You can find us @BitcoinMagazine on Twitter.

Colin Harper on Twitter @AsILayHodling

Christian Keroles on Twitter @ck_SNARKs

[SPONSORS]

Swan Bitcoin: Bitcoin Investing Made Easy
Bisq: Bisq is an open-source, peer-to-peer application that allows you to buy and sell Bitcoin in exchange for national currencies. No registration required.

Weekly Bits #19: Quarantined Mar 19, 2020

Show notes

We're all quarantined! But don't worry, we're still bringing you the content you need in these critical (often boring) times. Sit back, relax, and enjoy our first quarantine episode. Colin Harper fills in for Peter Chawaga and is joined by Flip -- computer mastermind behind all things dot com over at Bitcoin Magazine. They discuss being quarantined, prepping, coin-mixing, the value of gold and other precious metals, and even their favorite quarantine recipes. Enjoy!

Twitter

Colin Harper - @AsILayHodling

Flip - @flip_btcmag

Amir Taaki on What Drives Bitcoin's Dissident Narrative Mar 16, 2020

Show notes

“The legacy of our civilization is a state based on a hierarchical system of control and specialization of labor, which leads to all of the modern problems we have. To create a different kind of society, that's free, where people have liberty and natural wealth, the emerging field of cryptography offers us power."

-Amir Taaki

With markets around the world plunging into a downward spiral, now is a great time to revisit the original reasons why people started working on Bitcoin.

Amir Taaki was one of Bitcoin’s first-ever dedicated developers and perhaps the one most infamously focused on maintaining privacy and freedom from authority.

In 2014, Taaki created Dark Wallet, the first privacy-focused Bitcoin wallet to include a CoinJoin mixer. That same year, he received even more notoriety as Dark Wallet was twice named in the Financial Action Task Force’s (FATF) report on the potential money-laundering and terrorist-financing risks posed by cryptocurrencies.

In this episode, Dave Hollerith talks with Taaki, who after years spent working with the Syrian Democratic Forces fighting the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) and helping build their society, is now contributing to multiple cryptocurrency and privacy projects not yet revealed to the public.

Taaki takes a critical, perhaps unwarranted, view on the Bitcoin movement of today, but he also has a valuable perspective on many of the topics covered.

Topics:

What Bitcoiners can learn from the Free Software movement
How Bitcoin has changed between 2014 and today, and why Taaki believes the ecosystem needs to create a new narrative.
The pros and cons of American startup culture on Bitcoin's development
How Taaki' opposing views of Bitcoin led to conflict with Gavin Andresen, and later the creation of the BIP system.
How Taaki believes the Bitcoin of today is not radical enough
The limits of mesh networks at a large scale
Why Bitcoin needs a stronger narrative to defend against co-option by larger corporate and state entities.
What Bitcoiners can learn from Taaki's experience helping build an autonomous free society in Syria
The narrative the Bitcoin ecosystem needs to adopt according to Taaki
Nym, the Barcelona hacker academy and Taaki's other unpublicized projects
The similarities and limits of comparing Bitcoin to religion.

Resources:

Twitter:

Amir Taaki (@Narodism)
Dave (@dshollers)
Bitcoin Magazine

Sponsors:

Etoro

Weekly Bits #18: The Art and Culture of Bitcoin Mar 11, 2020

Show notes

Building on Bitcoin Magazine's Art of Bitcoin issue, Colin and Peter discuss the grassroots history of the Bitcoin logo, the power of artistic propaganda to convert precoiners and how Bitcoin's art world reflects the technology itself.

The Art of Bitcoin Issue

Yassine Elmandjra on Whether Bitcoin Should Correlate Mar 10, 2020

Show notes

What is Bitcoin? This question is constantly posed to us at Bitcoin Magazine. The truth is that the answer varies depending on who you ask. With the recent economic shock from the global spread of COVID19, now feels like the right time to revisit it.

In this episode, Dave Hollerith talks with Yassine Elmandjra, crypto analyst at Ark Invest about whether or not Bitcoin does and should correlate to the stock market and global economy more broadly.

Yassine doesn't claim to know what Bitcoin is, but he has a firm grasp of the many things it can be in a realistic future, and more importantly, he has a lot of experience explaining its value to less familiar and more skeptical peers and institutions.

Topics:

The downfall of breathing narratives into existence
Bitcoin bugs and the believers of digital gold
Why noncorrelated assets are essential for mitigating risk
How Bitcoin could potentially separate not just money from the state but also property and the state
How Ark uses the Sovereign Individual thesis
Who is going to support Bitcoin's development
The Cash App's connection to Square Crypto
Underhyped v. overhyped

Resources:

Twitter:

Yassine Elmandjra (@YassineARK)
Dave (@dshollers)
Bitcoin Magazine

Sponsors:

Etoro

DISCLAIMER: The following content is for informational purposes only. You should not construe any such information or other material as legal, tax, investment, financial, or other advice. Nothing contained in this presentation constitutes a solicitation, recommendation, endorsement, or offer by BTC Media, The Let’s Talk Bitcoin Network, or any third party service provider to buy or sell any securities or other financial instruments.

Brian Merchant on The Darknet's Fake Murder-For-Hire Marketplace Mar 03, 2020

Show notes

In this episode, Dave Hollerith interviews journalist and author, Brian Merchant, on a recent story he wrote about a darknet website that offers murder-for-hire services.

Part hoax and part reality, Merchant's investigation into this scam marketplace led him into a world of white hat hackers, fake hitmen, murderous spouses and real-world victims. He explains that although this dark corner of the internet is essentially fake, it has drastically harmed the lives of innocent people and blurred the line between virtual anonymous markets and real-world life and death consequences.

Topics:

The origins of online assassination markets.
How Chris Monterio hacked into the backend of a murder-for-hire scam website
How the murder-for-hire scam had terrifying real-world implications on innocent people
The frustratingly slow pace at which law enforcement investigated the issue
How Bitcoin and cryptocurrency are implicated in these scams
How future scenarios could play out for online assassination markets

Resources:

Click Here To Kill (Harper's Magazine)
Chris Monterio’s blog (Pirate Dot London)

Twitter:

Brian Merchant (@bcmerchant)
Dave (@dshollers)
Bitcoin Magazine

Sponsors:

Etoro

Weekly Bits #17: The Stories of Bitcoin Revisited Feb 27, 2020

Show notes

From 2012 to 2014, Bitcoin Magazine produced 22 print issues covering the burgeoning technology, its budding culture and potential impact. This week, Colin and Peter revisit some of those stories with updates, reflections and new commentary.

The Stories of Bitcoin Magazine Revisited:

Bitcoin's Solvency and Security with Coinfloor’s Obi Nwosu & Blockstack's Muneeb Ali Feb 25, 2020

Show notes

In this episode, Dave Hollerith speaks with Coinfloor's Obi Nwosu and Blockstack's Muneeb Ali, two leaders who have run companies in the community since 2013.

Coinfloor is the U.k.'s largest cryptocurrency exchange while Blockstack is a developer platform and network trying to build a new internet.

Though different in what types of product they offer, both companies are taking innovative and even perhaps opposing strategies for how they can and should successfully leverage Bitcoin.

Obi Nwosu Interview:

Proof of Reserves
Why Coinfloor delisted Eth
Obi's take on why users have more power than exchanges.
Why Coinfloor wants Bitcoin buying to be safe, easy and without b.s.

Muneeb Ali Interview:

How the stacks 2.0 will relate to Bitcoin
Blockstack's milestone growth controversy
The more private internet Blockstack is building
Blockstack is pretty much the real Pied Piper from the HBO series Silicon Valley

Resources:

Weekly Bits #16: Powering Corporate Open-Source Development Feb 20, 2020

Show notes

As the world's most robust open-source digital ledger, Bitcoin has encouraged several corporations to fund the development of tools that can be accessed and leveraged by anyone. In this week's episode, Colin and Peter discuss this intersection of corporate self-interest and technical altruism.

Resources:

Paxful's Ray Youssef on How Bitcoin Unlocks Social Good Feb 18, 2020

Show notes

“I’ve come to believe charity depends on finding those people who can truly execute on the ground, those real-life angels. Bitcoin is one of the best things for these people because they can work with it. They are completely transparent, they don’t have to go through any of the financial hoops. Most of all, they can convert it to anything, anywhere. It’s beautiful.” —Ray Youssef, CEO of Paxful

While speculation and "hodling" are store of value qualities mainly used for bitcoin in North America and Europe, it's also being used as a tool for unlocking the world's unrealized capital by serving the unbanked. Paxful is one company leading this charge by offering bitcoin as a medium of exchange for people in developing countries.

In this episode, Dave Hollerith interviews the CEO of Paxful, Ray Youssef, about how his peer-to-peer exchange has enabled a new economy of currency exchange and payments all through the use of Bitcoin. Additionally, Dave asks Ray about his philosophy and experience in social good and how it directly ties into Paxful's initiative for building schools across the world.

Interesting Topics:

How Paxful enables Bitcoin as a medium of exchange
Why Bitcoin's potential to bring real change is occurring in developing places like Africa and Central America
How Paxful navigates both regulation and scams as a peer-to-peer exchange
A growing commercial corridor for Bitcoin and iTunes gift cards between Africa and China
A growing class of entrepreneurs who build businesses off of Paxful
Paxful's #BuildingwithBitcoin philanthropy initiative
Bitcoin 2020 Conference in SF

Resources:

Twitter:

Ray Youssef (@raypaxful)
Dave (@dshollers)
Bitcoin Magazine

Sponsors:

Etoro

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