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The Peter McCormack Show — Business
The Peter McCormack Show

The Peter McCormack Show – politics, macro, Bitcoin and AI, long-form interviews. Twice-weekly conversations about money, power, and the shifts reshaping the next decade.

Peter McCormack interviews politicians, economists, investors, journalists, founders and Bitcoiners. Past guests include Liz Truss, Lyn Alden, Curtis Yarvin, Matt Goodwin, Mike Green, Balaji Srinivasan, Rupert Lowe, Firas Modad, Scott Horton, Jeff Booth, Connor Leahy, Andrea Miotti, Neema Parvini, Dr Tim Gregory and Simon Dixon.

Recurring threads: the debt and inflation endgame, UK political collapse and what comes after, Reform and the populist wave, the Middle East and the American war machine, AI safety and the race for superintelligence, energy and net zero, Bitcoin adoption and policy, and the slow-motion decline of Western institutions.

Long-form – most episodes run 60 to 120 minutes. New episodes 2 to 3 times per week. Video on YouTube and Spotify.

Host: Peter McCormack, a retired rapper from Bedford, UK, trying to understand this crazy world.

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Latest Episodes:

Bitcoin Journalism with Leigh Cuen - WBD230 Jun 09, 2020

Show notes

Location: Zoom Date: Friday 5th June Project: Coindesk Role: Journalist

The role of a journalist is to question, educate and inform. A truly free press is a fundamental pillar of a free society, and unbiased and objective reporting is crucial in getting a broad understanding of any industry.

News corporations are now arguably more partisan and divided than ever before, highlighted by how Fox News and CNN have become partisan propaganda outlets. Fox News is pro-Trump and will defend him and his policies almost without exception; alternatively, CNN is pro-democrat and will question almost everything Trump and his administration do. Within Bitcoin, there can be a similar lack of objectivity and willingness to challenge the status quo critically.

The Bitcoin community are often referred to as its immune system, by being aggressive and vocal about anything that seemingly questions the direction or ethos of the network they protect it from coercion and negative outside influences. While this is mostly a useful stance in an industry that has more than its fair share of scammers and questionable projects, this can make the role of journalism within Bitcoin tricky to navigate.

Despite long and firmly held beliefs, Bitcoin evolves, as does the size of the user base and how they use Bitcoin. Journalists must challenge commonly held beliefs, even if these means hard criticism from Bitcoiners.

In this interview, I am joined by Leigh Cuen, a journalist and writer at Coindesk. We discuss the importance of journalism, Bitcoin as a peaceful revolution and the strict narratives that are held by Bitcoiners.

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Bitcoin & Black America with Isaiah Jackson - WBD229 Jun 05, 2020

Show notes

Location: Zoom Date: Wednesday 3rd June Project: Bitcoin & Black America Role: Author

On May 25th George Floyd was killed by Minneapolis police officer, Derek Chauvin. Police were called over allegations that George Floyd had used a counterfeit $20 bill. During the arrest, Chauvin restrained Floyd by placing his knee on his neck and pinning him to the ground, during this time Floyd was pleading with the officer repeatedly stating "I can't breathe".

After 8 minutes and 46 seconds and with paramedics on the scene, Chauvin finally took his knee off Floyd's neck, he was unresponsive and later pronounced dead.

Following Floyd's death, there have been widespread protests across America which have now spread to other countries. In several places in the US, these protests have been violent with looting, fires and large scale destruction.

While the black community is reeling at yet another death at the hands of a police officer, Isaiah Jackson, the author of Bitcoin & Black America suggests that building a black economy offers a way out of institutionalised racism.

In this interview, we discuss the killing of George Floyd and the subsequent protests and riots, racism in the US, and how the black community can use Bitcoin.

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Spending Bitcoin with Ragnar Lifthrasir - WBD228 Jun 02, 2020

Show notes

Location: Zoom Date: Wednesday 27th May Project: Guns N' Bitcoin Role: Chief Range Officer

Bitcoin's immune system has evolved from years of defeating threats, staving off bad actors and protecting the core principles of the network.

Many Bitcoiners consider Bitcoin as gold 2.0, threatening the corrupt practices of central banking. As such, small blocks, the fee market and hodling are essential components of defeating fiat. With such staunch views from within the community, even just opening up these topics for debate can see a backlash from Bitcoiners.

Why has spending Bitcoin become such a contentious issue for some? It was the Silk Road and Wikipedia, which proved the importance of censorship resistance, enabling people to circumvent oppressive government rules.

Developers working on Bitcoin are held to the highest levels of scrutiny, and rightly so, but why aren't the ideas around Bitcoin usage equally scrutinised?

In this interview, I talk to Ragnar Lifthrasir from Guns N' Bitcoin. We discuss the Bitcoiner narratives, why spending Bitcoin is as important as hodling, libertarianism, guns and the 2nd amendment.

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Debunking Goldman Sachs Bitcoin Thesis with Bill Barhydt - WBD227 May 29, 2020

Show notes

Location: Zoom Date: Thursday 28th May Project: Abra Role: Founder & CEO

This week, Goldman Sachs held an investment advisory call for its clients during which it slammed Bitcoin as an investment and refused to accept it as an asset class.

Goldman's take on Bitcoin was in equal parts bearish and ignorant, with the investment bank listing five reasons for not classing Bitcoin as an asset or a suitable investment:

Bitcoin does not generate cash flow like bonds.
Bitcoin does not generate any earnings through exposure to global economic growth.
Bitcoin does not provide consistent diversification benefits given its unstable correlations.
Bitcoin does not dampen volatility given historical volatility of 76%. Goldman points to March 12 when bitcoin fell 37%.
Bitcoin does not show evidence of hedging against inflation.

Goldman raised numerous regularly debunked points as a negative, from scarcity to hard forks to illicit use cases, and compared Bitcoin to the Tulip mania of the 17th century.

Godman's investor call is not Bitcoin's first time Wall Street has challenged Bitcoin. In 2017 Jamie Dimon, the CEO of JP Morgan called Bitcoin a fraud and Warren Buffet has called all cryptocurrencies worthless. So why do some on Wall Street refuse to accept Bitcoin? Is it down to ignorance or does Bitcoin threaten their business model?

In this interview, I am joined by Bill Barhydt, the CEO and Founder of Abra. We discuss and debunk Goldman Sachs' arguments against Bitcoin as well as the reasons behind their lazy research.

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Bitcoin Trading 101 with Flood - WBD226 May 26, 2020

Show notes

Location: Zoom Date: Friday 22nd May Role: Independent Trader

Despite being the best performing asset over the past decade, Bitcoin is an incredibly volatile asset and risky to trade. Outperforming the market is hard, and very few people manage to beat the strategy of buying and holding.

Unlike traditional markets, bitcoin markets are open 24/7/365, and traded on both regulated and unregulated exchanges. High leverage options and low liquidity altcoins make it easy for a newcomer to wipe out their trading accounts quickly.

While few traders are profitable, a large number of the Bitcoin community find the temptation to increase their bitcoin stack hard to resist. I always recommend against trading, especially if you are new to Bitcoin, but this doesn't stop people. So, if you want to try trading, what are the basic things you need to understand?

In this episode, I talk to Flood, an independent Bitcoin trader. We discuss the key things a newcomer to trading needs to know from which exchanges to use, trading strategies, leverage, finding your edge and the common mistakes.

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Bitcoin is the Answer with Cameron & Tyler Winklevoss - WBD225 May 22, 2020

Show notes

Location: Zoom Date: Monday 18th May Project: Gemini Role: Co-Founders

The Social Network, directed by David Fincher, introduced Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss to the world. The film told the story of how Mark Zuckerberg stole their idea to create Facebook, and would later settle for $65 million.

After settling the court case and retiring from their careers in rowing, where the twins represented the USA in the 2008 Beijing Olympics, they started a fund and discovered Bitcoin. In 2014 they created Gemini, now one of the largest regulated cryptocurrency exchanges.

The film portrayed the twins as cliche sporting jocks, an image which has been hard to shake off. Cameron and Tyler are more at home building things and their success since Harvard is not luck.

My picture of the twins, like most, was created from the Social Network and their appearances on mainstream news discussing finance, but I wanted to know more about them. This interview is, therefore, the interview I have wanted to hear from them. We discuss The Social Network, Facebook and Mark Zuckerberg, how they discovered Bitcoin, regulations and the role of Wall Street.

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Liquid Bitcoin with Adam Back & Samson Mow - WBD224 May 19, 2020

Show notes

Location: Zoom Date: Friday 15th May Project: Blockstream Role: CEO & Chief Strategy Officer

Bitcoin: decentralised, permissionless, censorship-resistant and unconfiscatable. Unique properties which make it a unique form of money

For Bitcoin to keep growing, these features mustn't be compromised. However, scaling solutions for Bitcoin, may trade off some of these features for other benefits.

With the vast majority of the community in agreement that block sizes must remain small to maximise decentralisation, Bitcoin is best scaled using layered solutions. The Liquid Network, like the Lightning Network, is a layer two solution that, by sacrificing some aspects of decentralisation and censorship resistance, can improve speed and scalability.

Liquid is a project spearheaded by Blockstream and is aimed at traders, exchanges and market makers to offer faster and more confidential transactions than the Bitcoin basechain. It also adds the ability to build tokens on the network.

In this interview, I talk to Adam Back and Samson Mow Blockstream's CEO & Chief Strategy Officer. We discuss The Liquid Network, the tradeoffs between Liquid and the basechain, how it differs from Lightning network and tokenised securities.

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Bitcoin in One Lesson - WBD223 May 15, 2020

Show notes

Location: Zoom Date: January to March 2020

Bitcoin can be intimidating for beginners. The protocol is complicated, the community can be unforgiving, silly mistakes can lose you money, and it is easy to succumb to altcoin marketing.

Bitcoin offers you the opportunity to hold a new type of monetary asset, one which can't be seized by the government and is censorship resistance, and it is changing the world.

Bitcoin is multifaceted. Some treat Bitcoin as a speculative tool for growing wealth, others as a way of avoiding financial censorship from traditional payment channels, and some use it as a way of claiming their monetary sovereignty and removing power from the banks and state.

On 31st October 2008, Bitcoin was introduced to the world by its pseudonymous creator, Satoshi Nakamoto. Bitcoin brought with it an alternative to the banking system, a way of truly controlling your finances and the opportunity to 'be your own bank'.

Being your own bank is incredibly powerful but is often a confusing and misused term. There are currently 1.7 billion people across the world who do not have access to proper banking services. Bitcoin can fix this by allowing users to hold, send and receive value.

Governments have a history of putting pressure on payment systems and censoring transactions. In 2010 Visa, Mastercard and PayPal all stopped allowing payments to WikiLeaks. Bitcoin fixed this.

Bitcoin's power is in its decentralised, censorship-resistant, neutral, permissionless network that allows you to transact globally without any intermediary or third party and with whoever you want for whatever reason you want. Bitcoin doesn't care.

We will soon be living in a cashless society, government-issued 'fiat' currency will become entirely digital, and we will wave goodbye to any remaining shreds of financial privacy that still exist. Some governments will look to create a cryptocurrency alternative; providing the perfect tool for increased financial surveillance and oppression and represents the antithesis of Bitcoin.

We may have to choose whether we use Bitcoin or a state-run digital currency. So, why should we choose Bitcoin?

In this episode, I have compiled various clips from my 17-part Beginner's Guide to Bitcoin with some of the leading experts in the space. As an introduction to Bitcoin, this guide covers essential Bitcoin topics from how it works to its monetary policy.

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Is Bitcoin Trading a Dirty Business? With Willy Woo - WBD222 May 12, 2020

Show notes

Location: Zoom Date: Sunday 10th May Project: Hypersheet Role: Co-Founder

On May 11th, at block 630000 Bitcoin had its 3rd halving, cutting the block reward issued to the miners from 12.5BTC to 6.25BTC. This reduction in the subsidy is seen by many as a bullish event for Bitcoin. With the block reward cut in half, the amount of Bitcoin available for the miners to sell in the market drops from 1800 BTC/day to 900 BTC/day, reducing the sell pressure from newly minted coins.

Bitcoin's recent drop in price has been attributed, by some, to miners selling off some of their Bitcoin, to support lower revenues with the blog subsidy halving.

While miners have typically been the largest sellers in the Bitcoin market, now that the subsidy has again cut in half, Willy Woo has claimed the majority of the sell pressure will not come from the exchanges.

Woo puts this down to the rise in popularity of the derivatives and futures markets on exchanges such as BitMex and Deribit. These exchanges take fees of up to 0.075% per trade and offer high leverage options of up to 100x. As the popularity of these exchanges has grown, so have the fees.

With the selling pressure from miners dropping and the sell pressure from the exchanges growing, is trading detrimental to the growth of Bitcoin?

In this interview, I am joined by Willy Woo, an on-chain analyst and the co-founder of Hypersheet. We discuss Bitcoin trading, the rise of the unregulated, high leverage futures platforms and if trading is damaging to the growth of Bitcoin.

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Libertarianism & Politics with Adam Brown & Sean Finch - WBD221 May 08, 2020

Show notes

Location: Zoom Date: Tuesday 5th May Project: The Libertarian Party Role: Party Leader & Coordinator

Long before Bitcoin dropped on the world, libertarians have criticised government-issued fiat money, arguing that it goes against their core beliefs of political freedom and autonomy, viewing gold as a superior currency. Many libertarians were early to Bitcoin, understanding its sound monetary policy.

I have spoken with many US-based libertarians, but like any political movement or philosophy, there is no one size fits all approach, and the libertarians range in their beliefs from full anarcho-capitalists to minarchists. So, I wanted to get a different perspective from libertarians in the UK, engaged in the political process to ultimately reduce then bring an end to the state.

In this interview, I talk to Adam Brown & Sean Finch, the party leader and coordinator for the UK Libertarian Party. We discuss the current political landscape, the push for less government, healthcare and freedom of speech.

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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