The Coin Bureau Podcast: Crypto Without the Hype

Latest Episodes:

Bank Runs in China and a Crisis in Sri Lanka Aug 04, 2022

Show notes

Welcome to the inaugural Wednesday edition of the Coin Bureau Podcast! We’re changing up the format a little for these extra weekly shows to bring you even more invaluable insights from the team here. Once-upon-a-time we used to upload the audio files from our popular YouTube videos as podcasts and, due to popular demand, we’re going to be doing so once more.

Each week, we’ll select two videos to bring to you in audio format, so that you can enjoy some of our YouTube content in the same way you listen to podcasts. This week, we’ve chosen to focus on a couple of seemingly localised crises that could have big implications for the global economy - including the crypto sector. These are the recent bank runs witnessed in China and the ongoing economic and political collapse in Sri Lanka.

We talk a lot about how economic events in the United States ripple out across global markets, but that’s not to say events elsewhere can’t also be consequential. It can be hard to get a clear picture of what is happening inside China, but it’s clear that all is not well in the country’s property sector and economy in general. As China is the world’s second largest economy, a crisis there will affect us all in due course.

Meanwhile, Sri Lanka’s woes could be a harbinger of things to come elsewhere. Some ill-conceived environmental policies and years of political mismanagement have left the country in a parlous state and such problems are not unique to Sri Lanka. As the economic outlook grows ever-more gloomy across the world, what is happening in this small but populous country could be replicated elsewhere.

Guy and Mike will be back talking crypto later this week as usual, but in the meantime we hope this change of format is to your liking - please let us know what you think and if you’d like to hear more episodes like this in the future.

We hope you enjoy the show.

Producer for iHeart Media: Noel Brown

Editor: Semir Mutapcic

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

What is the Metaverse and Should You Care? Jul 29, 2022

Show notes

Chances are you’ve heard talk of the metaverse before and there’s perhaps an equally strong chance your eyes glaze over when you hear the term. But, the metaverse is coming, money is being spent on it and we should all be paying attention.

In this episode we dig into what the metaverse is, where the idea for it comes from and - crucially - where it's all heading. Ever since Facebook rebranded to Meta last year, the concept of the metaverse has become harder and harder to ignore and the implications for society are going to be enormous.

We explore some of the work being done to make the metaverse a reality and consider how some aspects of it are already a part of our daily lives. We consider what forms it could take in the future, as well as the downsides and potential benefits of adding an extra dimension to our already cluttered lives. Either way, whether the idea of the metaverse excites or terrifies you, you’d better get used to it because you’re going to be hearing a lot more about it in the coming months and years.

We reference a few resources in this episode, all of which are worth your time if you’d like to learn more. The brilliant Arthur Hayes article can be found at:

https://cryptohayes.medium.com/rock-paper-scissors-says-go-a3641dfe132c. There’s also Time’s cover story here: https://time.com/6197849/metaverse-future-matthew-ball/ as well as a useful piece from Vice here: https://www.vice.com/en/article/93bmyv/what-is-the-metaverse-internet-technology-vr

The two books we mention are:

Snow Crash (1992) by Neal Stephenson

The Metaverse: And How It Will Revolutionize Everything (2022) by Matthew Ball (The Time Magazine piece comes from here)

We hope you enjoy the show.

Producer for iHeart Media: Noel Brown

Editor: Sam Moult

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Cryptocurrency Categories: Part 2 Jul 22, 2022

Show notes

Having looked at the various categories of cryptocurrency coins last week, it’s now time to explore the world of tokens. This is where things can get a little out of hand.

Ever since Ethereum came along and made creating a crypto token an easy thing to do, the number of different tokens in existence has skyrocketed. Many are worthless, many are scams and many - however well-intentioned - will come to nothing. But, despite that, some of the biggest cryptocurrencies out there exist as tokens, running on blockchains such as Ethereum and its growing number of competitors. Tokens cannot therefore be dismissed out of hand.

So, in this episode we explore some of the different categories of token and what purposes they serve. Some, such as stablecoins and memecoins, we’ve met before. Others may be less familiar. And yes, we’ll take a look at a few with stupid names as well.

Knowing which category a cryptocurrency coin or token fits into is a great starting point for further research, as it can help immediately establish whether the project in question might have merit, or whether it’s one great big waste of time. And, as we all know, time is most definitely a finite resource.

We hope you enjoy the show.

Producer for iHeart Media: Noel Brown

Editor: Sam Moult

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Cryptocurrency Categories: Part 1 Jul 15, 2022

Show notes

There are thousands of cryptocurrencies out there, which means it can be hard to see the wood for the trees. But one easy way of initially assessing a crypto project is to look at what category it falls into. This is a vital first step towards understanding what its use case is (if indeed it has one).

Over this and the next episode, we’ll look at some of the principal categories cryptocurrencies fall into. The first distinction to make is that between cryptocurrency coins - those which live on their own dedicated blockchains) and cryptocurrency tokens (those built on other blockchains). In this episode, we’ll be looking at the coins, with tokens to follow next week.

Many of the biggest crypto projects, including Bitcoin and Ethereum, are coins, but what do they all do? We’ll dive into stores of value, smart contract cryptos, payments coins and much more, all of which will help to put the cryptos we talk about into some sort of context.

With new cryptocurrencies emerging all the time, the number of categories is expanding too, so in this episode, we focus on a few of the most significant sectors of the industry. What we discuss today should go a long way towards helping any newcomers out there make sense of all those strange names you see when you open up CoinMarketCap or Coin Gecko to check the market.

We hope you enjoy the show.

Producer for iHeart Media: Noel Brown

Editor: Sam Moult

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

How to keep your crypto safe Jul 08, 2022

Show notes

We’ve talked before about the importance of self-custody for your crypto assets, but recent events have served to underscore how vital it is. In the past, we’ve discussed the vulnerability of exchanges to hacking and theft (ask Mt. Gox users about that) and this is still a concern, although exchange security has come on leaps and bounds since then. But, as the recent woes of platforms like Celsius and Voyager Digital have shown, hackers are not the only threat to your crypto’s safety.

When you keep your crypto on an exchange or a lending and borrowing platform - in short, when you entrust your crypto to another entity - you have to trust that entity to manage it properly. You do not control the private keys to your crypto under these circumstances - the platform you’ve entrusted it to does. And, remember that oft-repeated mantra: not your keys, not your coins.

So, in this episode, we take a look at the best ways you can take charge of your crypto and store it as safely as possible. We look at ‘cold’ and ‘hot’ storage, discuss the best types of wallets out there and go through some simple steps you can take to protect not just your crypto, but yourself as well. This could be one of the most important podcast episodes you ever listen to.

Oh, and for anyone still wondering, Mike’s wallet transfer did come through, pretty much as soon as we’d stopped recording. Typical.

Check out Coin Bureau’s video on the best hardware wallets on the market: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4q8nK4XxmkA

And here are the links to some wallet manufacturers:

Ledger: https://www.ledger.com/

Trezor: https://trezor.io/

Keepkey: (Shapeshift is the company that builds the Keepkey device) https://shapeshift.com/keepkey

We hope you enjoy the show.

Producer for iHeart Media: Noel Brown

Editor: Sam Moult

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Cryptoslate's Nate Whitehill Jul 01, 2022

Show notes

The crypto space is evolving from day to day and keeping on top of everything that’s going on is a time-consuming job. There’s a lot of noise out there and it can often be difficult to trust whether what you’re reading is true or not. Credible sources are therefore invaluable.

One such source is Cryptoslate, a crypto news, data and opinion platform that is one of the best resources out there for trustworthy information about what’s going on in the space. Founded in 2017 and fully independent, Cryptoslate is one of those sites you should have bookmarked in your browser.

Because there’s so much going on at the moment, we thought we’d use this episode as an opportunity to take stock and reflect on some of the most turbulent few weeks in crypto’s history. And who better to join us than Cryptoslate’s founder and CEO, Nate Whitehill?

Nate gives us his perspective on what’s been happening recently and tells us about how he came to found Cryptoslate. Sitting down with him was a real pleasure and his views on current events and where we could be headed next are invaluable. We also made him promise to come back again in the future - ideally when the market is looking a lot healthier than it is now. And, if you’re finding crypto to be a stressful place to be, Nate’s way of letting off steam certainly does sound like fun.

We hope you enjoy the show.

Producer for iHeart Media: Noel Brown

Editor: Sam Moult

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Ethereum: Part 4 Jun 24, 2022

Show notes

Normal service is being resumed this week, as we take our final look (for now) at Ethereum.

The project which started off as an idea in the head of a supremely gifted, 19-year-old Bitcoin enthusiast has now grown into a behemoth. It underpins a huge sector of the crypto industry and has triggered an avalanche of development, both of projects looking to build on top of it and of projects looking to emulate or outdo it. Without Ethereum, crypto would look completely different.

In this episode, we bring the history of Ethereum up to the present day and look at what is currently going on with the project. We’ll see how the original model of Ethereum has proved unable to cope with demand and how the switch to a new, proof of stake network is looking to resolve the issue. Exciting times lie ahead.

We’ll also look at the first NFT project to get Ethereum users excited and how it illustrated the need for the network upgrade we’re now witnessing. We’ll also look at some other projects looking to improve the Ethereum experience and look ahead to what the future holds.

One final shoutout for those two books about Ethereum everyone should read:

The Infinite Machine (2020) by Camila Russo

The Cryptopians: Idealism, Greed, Lies and the Making of the First Big Cryptocurrency Craze (2022) by Laura Shin

We hope you enjoy the show.

Producer for iHeart Media: Noel Brown

Editor: Sam Moult

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Blood in the Streets: A look at the state of the crypto market Jun 17, 2022

Show notes

You might have noticed that the crypto market - as well as pretty much every other market - is once again in freefall. As the Federal Reserve and other central banks around the world raise interest rates to try and combat runaway inflation, and fears of a global recession intensify, these are tough times to be an investor in… well, pretty much anything.

There are however some crypto-specific crises unfolding which, combined with everything happening in the wider economy, have helped push prices further down. We are living through days where one bit of bad news is followed all-too-swiftly by another.

There is, as you can probably imagine, a lot to discuss in this episode and so we thought we’d enlist a couple of friends of the Coin Bureau to help us try and make sense of it all. Josh Moden and Tom Busby are CryptoBusy - fellow YouTubers who are also crypto traders and so have a unique perspective on what’s playing out in the markets. The four of us have all squeezed into our (rather cosy) studio in London to chew over everything that’s been going on over the last few days.

In this episode, we take a look at recent news from the Fed and dig into the unfolding crises at crypto companies Celsius and Three Arrows Capital. We discuss the recent layoffs at Coinbase and how for some, these troubling times are in fact a golden opportunity.

But it’s not all doom and gloom. Bear markets are tough and this one is going to be no different, but there are ways to cope with all the bad news. When the flames eventually die down, green shoots will quickly begin to appear. Josh and Tom share their coping strategies with us and tell us why they have high hopes for the future.

It was great to have Josh and Tom join us as our inaugural guests on the show and we hope they’ll be able to join us again. CryptoBusy is a great channel and should be an essential part of your crypto research portfolio. Follow them here:

Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/c/CryptoBusy

Twitter: https://twitter.com/CryptoBusy

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/cryptobusy/

We hope you enjoy the show.

Producer for iHeart Media: Noel Brown

Editor: Sam Moult

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Ethereum: Part 3 Jun 10, 2022

Show notes

We ended on a cliffhanger last week, with the infamous DAO hack having hit Ethereum and its community hard. So, how did they deal with it and what did it all mean for Ethereum?

With millions of dollars worth of ETH having been stolen by a hacker who had spotted a flaw in the DAO’s smart contract, Ethereum’s developers and community were faced with some tough decisions. Do nothing, or take action? And if so, what sort of action to take? And what would the implications of their possible actions be? Could Ethereum survive this? We’ll see how the whole saga proved to be one of the most dangerous - and important - episodes in Ethereum’s history.

As we saw with Bitcoin, a successful cryptocurrency project arguably needs to endure more than a little hardship in order to prove itself. The DAO hack - and subsequent attacks on the network - proved to be the trials by fire that Ethereum needed to undergo in order to show that it was robust enough to survive.

Happily, Ethereum managed to do just that and, once it had, better and more prosperous days lay ahead. In 2017 the ICO boom began and Ethereum found itself at the centre of a frenzy of investment and excitement as crypto began to go crazy. The potential that Ethereum had long promised was finally unleashed.

For more information and especially more detailed descriptions of what went down during the DAO episode, check out those two excellent books on Ethereum we mention in the episode:

The Infinite Machine (2020) by Camila Russo

The Cryptopians: Idealism, Greed, Lies and the Making of the First Big Cryptocurrency Craze (2022) by Laura Shin

*NB - this episode contains strong language. Blame Mike for that.*

We hope you enjoy the show.

Producer for iHeart Media: Noel Brown

Editor: Sam Moult

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Ethereum Part 2 Jun 03, 2022

Show notes

We only scratched the surface of what Ethereum is all about in the last episode, so it’s time to dive deeper. Last week was mostly about the early history of Ethereum and the colourful characters who came together to create it. Before we pick up that thread though, it’s worth taking a look at what Ethereum makes possible.

It’s no exaggeration to say that the cryptocurrency space has been transformed almost beyond recognition thanks to Ethereum. From tokens to NFTs to decentralised finance and more, Ethereum opened up a world of possibilities and established itself as one of the structural pillars of cryptocurrency.

So in this episode, we’ll explore a few of the things Ethereum has pioneered, and how they have grown into fully-fledged sub-sectors of the wider cryptocurrency industry. Then, we’ll carry on looking at the history of the Ethereum project and delve into one of its most challenging episodes. As ever, there’s a lot to discover.

As with the last episode, the two books on Ethereum by Camila Russo and Laura Shin are bith excellent reads and well worth checking out:

The Infinite Machine (2020) by Camila Russo

The Cryptopians: Idealism, Greed, Lies and the Making of the First Big Cryptocurrency Craze (2022) by Laura Shin

*Side note: when we talk about gas fees, Guy mentions that they can run into the hundreds of dollars. This is an understatement. Gas fees can run into the thousands and reach some truly eye-watering sums. It’s just that Guy himself is far too penny-pinching to even countenance paying such a price.

We hope you enjoy the show.

Producer for iHeart Media: Noel Brown

Editor: Sam Moult

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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