Bitcoin Audible

The extreme left often claims to follow logic and "the science". But I've noticed a glaring pattern that contradicts this. And once you see it, you can't unsee it.

In this Take, I share my thoughts on the "holy trinity" the woke left actually worships. It starts with treating other people's money like magic. But seizing wealth is just the beginning. I break down the dangerous obsession with political authority and blind submission driving this hostile new religion.

Chapters

(00:00:00) - Woke left claims logic

(00:00:55) - Other people’s money

(00:01:38...

The sentiment lately has been total garbage. We’re deep in a bear market, the red candles are stacking up, and people are getting nervous. So, I got the guys back around the table to ask a really uncomfortable question: what happens if Bitcoin actually dies?

We keep things pretty casual but talk through some heavy stuff. We debate the real dangers of leverage, the bizarre obsession with paper Bitcoin equities, and the petty developer drama surrounding mining protocols. Along the way, we come back to why many of us are still effectively all in on Bitcoin, an...

"In this X post, I said I don't know the consequences of BIP-110. Plenty of people called that incompetent, cowardly, or both. Others praised it as humility. It's neither. It's just true. I don't know the consequences, and here's my claim. Neither do you."

~ Jimmy Song

I am reading Jimmy Song’s latest piece and things get a bit heated today. The debate around BIP-110 has everyone absolutely certain they know what will happen to Bitcoin. But as Jimmy points out, they don't. And honestly, neither do I.

Do we really understand the so...

"comma develops open source ADAS software. You can call it self-driving software, but currently what we ship is something where the user is supposed to pay attention all the time."

"We want the software to be open source so that people have full control. The hardware is something you have root on. We don't have any access to your device in terms of that's necessary to make it operate normally. There's some telemetry that you can turn off if you want. The device is something you buy, you run open source software on it and there's no...

Over 10.5 million Bitcoin are currently underwater. Everyone is panicking about a grueling bear market, but I see things differently. In today's Take, I explain why this recent drop actually signals deep liquidity and a historically accurate market bottom. The traditional four-year cycle is breaking. And as the national debt keeps doubling and the fiat printing won't stop, let's talk about why staying patient right now means everything.

Chapters

(00:00:00) - Another big dump & 10.5M BTC underwater

(00:01:25) - Capitulation signal that’s called every bear bottom

(00:02:22) - From 90% crashes to a muted bear

Elon Musk is officially a trillionaire. Naturally, people are calling it yet another failure of capitalism, and I'm calling BS.

I compared his wealth to Andrew Carnegie’s fortune. On paper, Musk’s number looks insane, but when you measure them against the total money supply of their eras, the truth completely flips. I believe we aren't seeing runaway capitalism, but we are simply measuring success with a broken tape measure.

I explain why fiat is failing, why you should be mad at central banks instead of builders, and how we finally opt out.

Ch...

***"We're entering the Bitcoin golden era with all the new technologies we're discovering because for the first decade Bitcoin was still very, at least for the first five, six years, there was so little capital in the industry that not a lot was getting built. Plus Bitcoin still had all these early on issues. Now we're getting to the moment where Bitcoin is extremely solid.

It's a trillion dollar industry, right, or a trillion dollar asset. So I think we're just entering the golden era."

~ Gustavo Flores***

I sat down with Gustavo Flores...

I break down the Treasury’s claim that it seized $1B of Iran’s "crypto" and explain why this was actually Tether, not Bitcoin – and why that distinction matters.

I digs into how stablecoins, ETFs, and exchanges recreate the same centralized, confiscable banking system, contrasted with true Bitcoin self-custody.

When you consider Iran, Russia, and Afghanistan as case studies, it is clear that every other reserve asset becomes politicized. The writing is on the wall for centralised finance, and the world will be forced onto Bitcoin because it is the only neutral money that simply keeps...

"Keeping Bitcoin running is the primary concern here. Making sure that Bitcoin is available to be used as money by everyday people, any actor who wants to come onto Bitcoin and send one UTXO from one to another. That's the most important piece for me when thinking about defending Bitcoin.
And the biggest difference, of course, is that this is a decentralised system. There is no central controller. There's no central control room giving out commands and saying 'this has to change, you must do this.'
We are a decentralised group of individuals who are acting...

The whole crew is back for another roundtable, and things get wild right out of the gate. I sat down with Steve, Mechanic, and Jeff to talk through the absolute mess that is the current state of things. Jeff shares an update on his Canadian immigration purgatory, which spirals into a bigger conversation about living like an outlaw and whether any of us are truly free from the system.

But we couldn't ignore the recent news. We talk about the crazy story of a guy who used Claude to brute-force a lost Bitcoin wallet from eleven years...

"Bitcoin is being embraced by the U.S. and the U.S. financial system and it is it being embraced by Iran and the Iranian regime at the exact same time and both of them know that they can use it without the other one threatening it. And that puts it in an insanely unique place in a world where there are no monies that work like that anymore."

~ Guy Swann

We live in a world where global money printers are silently bleeding your savings out the back door. But the real threat isn't only...

"Generation X and the millennials both tried to do everything right, according to what the boomers told them was the path forward: save money, study hard, get a ‘job’. At every stage we got rugpulled. Most of us have nothing to show for any of that.

Zoomers looked at what happened to Gen-X and the millennials and said, quite rationally, fuck that."

~ John Carter

What happens when you raise an entire generation on the promise of a second marshmallow – and never deliver? John Carter's piece reframes the tired boomer/zoomer spending war through the len...

"The peso scam is around a thousand times larger than the Libra scam, and its victims are the poorest, about 95% of Argentines."

~ Saifedean Ammous

Javier Milei swore he'd burn down Argentina's central bank and dollarize the economy. Two and a half years later, the money supply has quadrupled, the debt has ballooned, and a quarter-trillion-dollar carry trade is hollowing out the nation. Is the self-proclaimed Rothbardian actually running one of the most inflationary presidencies in Argentine history? And what does it mean for Austrian economics when its loudest political champion looks more like just another L...

"Our little home controller, building controller, it knows our electric rate, it knows the way that electric rate changes based on the time of day. It knows the PV flux, the solar flux from the solar panels. So it knows if there's excess power that the building's not using.
It also knows our natural gas rate. It also knows the Bitcoin price and the network difficulty. This is all just in our software.
And in real time, our building can choose, it can flip between heating with gas or with hashrate to save you the most money."<...

"If you think of River or Gemini or Coinbase or whatever, think of all of those as silos and how people custody Bitcoin. If some sort of compromise were to come into the Bitcoin ecosystem at the private key generation level, that could create an incident that could set Bitcoin back by 10 or more years because it would be almost indistinguishable from a protocol compromise and that we would be talking about Bitcoin being hacked again and not individual custodians being hacked. So I think we need to decentralise how people do Bitcoin custody as much as possible and...

"It's often discussed that arbitrarily lowering interest rates and the zero interest rate policy era leads to massive recklessness and unethical and irresponsible behavior. But there's something even more sinister that actually occurs. A lot of people notice how massive corporations are just buying up all of the hard assets and then renting it back to us. [...] Zero interest rate policy isn't merely something that leads to reckless investments. It essentially amounts to free rent for the rich for everything in the economy. If you can rent anything for free, what do you do? You lease everything and then r...

"If your money isn't sound, it is not reflecting any proof of work. It is not reflecting anything about who should be able to consume, or how much there is available to consume. It's just being corrupted, it's being defrauded, so that certain people get bad price signals. And this will incentivize them and everyone else to literally make economic decisions that appear to be economically profitable, that are actually destroying the society."

~ Guy Swann

Why is it that 5,000 years of human civilization built monuments and railroads and cathedrals – and we built WeWork and Quibi?

"It is not markets that made money possible. It is collectibles, which we now call money, that make markets possible."

~ Nick Szabo

What if everything we've been told about how money emerged is backwards? Nick Szabo's first article in nearly a decade tells the story of a stolen canoe, a tribal feud, and a string of shells – and uses it to challenge one of the most repeated ideas in economics. Did money come from barter, or did it come from something far older and far more human?

Check out the original article: The Fa...

In this roundtable, we sit down with Steve, Mechanic, and Jeff, and honestly, we struggle to stay on Bitcoin for half of it. Our catch-up quickly turns into a rant about LLMs acting like corporate yes-men, and the frustrations of running AI locally.

But we do get back to the money. We talk about the St. Louis Fed literally copyrighting Bitcoin price data, France tracking self-hosted wallets, Steve’s update on UTXOracle, and why the quantum computing threat looks a lot more like a funding scam with terrible marketing.

On the technical side, we get in...

"They say the ruler is bent, then use the bent ruler to measure the table.

They say the clock is broken, then solemnly read out the hour.

They say the instrument is false, then ask it, with perfect seriousness, for one final certification.

This is, in itself, a form of bondage.

To measure gold in fiat terms is, in Jung’s sense, to deny the shadow: to denounce the paper system in public while continuing, in private, to let it decide what counts as value." 

~ Craig Tindale

"When you really dig into the heart of how finance, how our monetary system and how our political system work, and how deeply married they are, you begin to see something that's pretty disturbing. That cheating and manipulation aren't simply something that arise in bad behaviors. They're fundamentally required by the system itself. They're baked in. They are the standard. It is the law. And if that is our reality, then the only way we can actually restore honesty and sensible standards is to create a money that refuses to bend to the law. So the question is, have...

"The whole point of libertarianism is that we should recognise that we don't know how to plan the world. We don't know what the solution is going to be. You can't have a central planner decide it.If it was really just that libertarians understood how the world worked, then you could have a central planner. You would just need them to be libertarians. That's not how it works at all. It's antithetical to the whole concept.

That's why the Block Size War was such a huge success, because it did not hard-fork. It did not d...

"The idea that some authority can deduce the correct level of this balance is not merely wrong, it is not even wrong, it is methodologically incoherent. Asking for the 'correct' interest rate is like asking how much the color orange weighs." 

~ Allen Farrington & Sacha Meyers

What if deflation isn't the economic boogeyman we've been told to fear, but the very *signal* that progress is happening?

In Part 2 of Allen Farrington and Sacha Meyers' brilliant essay, we dismantle the central myth of fiat economics – that printing money creates growth – and reveal why falling prices are the...

"The fiat economist universally chooses to set the printing press to brrrrrrrrrr. While the enlightened elite watch their stock portfolios moon and their debts disappear, the common man is told to be thankful that he was 'this close' to the horror of living in a world where his wages bought more every year, and his government respected his private property. Imagine how hard it would be for that government to raise debt in such a world. It would have to justify its spending. We cannot have that."

~ Allen Farrington & Sacha Meyers

What if falling prices a...

“what matters now is not belief, but endurance.
bitcoin does not promise comfort. it does not promise justice. it does not promise to save anyone. it offers one thing only: a set of rules that do not bend to price, politics, or persuasion. whether that is valuable depends entirely on who is holding it and why.
the mathematics will almost certainly hold long enough. the question has always been whether we will.”

~ Hugh Hendry

Today, we are back with part two of Tyler Durden's piece "Modern Money Only Works By Cheating".

Most...

"I think there will come a point where you get excessive, you swing too far on the individual side of the spectrum, and then it becomes advantageous to group together again, and you become more fulfilled, more happy, more culturally flourishing in collectives again."

"I think there's a resurgence of the desire for people to build tribes, communities, even fucking network state, even microstates, and saying that we're going to do this, and we're going to really group together because getting 10,000, 100,000, million people, 10 million people of a similar mindset, similar ideology, similar vision for the world is...

“This piece is my attempt to finally map the terrain I'd been circling for years: Bitcoin's hardness, its fragility, its human governance, and its uneasy relationship with a world that increasingly runs on elastic money and digital abundance. It's not a defence. It's not an indictment. It's an audit.”

~ Hugh Hendry

We keep pretending modern money is a stable system, but Hugh Hendry explains the quiet part out loud: fiat only survives by cheating, bending the rules, and offloading pain onto the future.

What if Bitcoin’s "flaw" - its rigid, unchanging code - is actu...

"We are trying to make it possible for people to use computers as simple of a statement as this: use computers, without intermediaries and custodians. The more they do, the more the lines will diverge. Until there's a chasm between the centralised model and the decentralised model with a clear line between them. And we will force either a reconciliation at the natural, technical level, let the best product in the market win, or we will force the hand of the authoritarians to say that our model is illegal.

And then we have a different reconciliatory approach...

"Residents withdrew over 1.6 trillion rubles, or $19.7 billion in January, desperately turning to cash amid increased state controls."

As governments push CBDCs to clamp down on dissent and capital flight, is Bitcoin our last line of defense for true sovereignty? Today with the Financial Freedom Report we dive into global news - from Hong Kong's surveillance crackdowns to offline AI-Bitcoin kits like BlackBox - plus my take on why Lightning could make digital cash frictionless. Will these innovations outpace authoritarian overreach, or is the cashless trap closing in?

Check out the original article from the Financial...

This week, the whole crew is back for another Roundtable. I sat down with Mechanic, Steve, and Jeff to talk about the painful reality of Bitcoin mining today, the chaos of global politics, and some wild stories about corporate power plays.

We started by looking at why mining is under so much pressure right now. The industry is getting a brutal and much-needed reality check. Fiat-fueled operations are feeling the squeeze, and it’s a reminder that if you aren't building on a foundation of hard money and efficiency, the market will eventually push you out.

...

“The seed phrase has been a barrier to self-custody since day one. It’s what scares normies away from keeping their own bitcoin, and it’s a legitimate reason why people accept the counterparty risk of exchanges and custodial apps.”

~ Breez

What if Bitcoin adoption is stuck not because of the tech but because we are obsessed with "perfect" security? I just read Juan Galt’s thoughts on Breeze SDK’s seedless wallets using Passkey Login, and it hit home. We have to lower the barriers for normies if we actually want them to use this.

...

[Apologies for the double post everyone. We had to pull a quick swap on this one because of a glitch.]

"Yes, AI is a big deal, but the conclusion that AI is going to kill the vertical and functional

software business model simply makes no sense. The truth is that AI simply isn't going to kill software companies. After all this panic has passed, we'll see that AI is the best thing that ever happened to the software industry."

~ Alex Immerman and Santiago Rodriguez

Ever wonder if AI is...

Did Jeffrey Epstein secretly hijack Bitcoin during the block size war? Was is all a covert operation by Jeffrey Epstein and shadowy government actors to permanently handicap Bitcoin?

The big blockers want you to think so. In this Take, I tear apart the narrative piece by piece - following the money, reading the emails, and exposing why this conspiracy exists in the first place, and what it says about the people still pushing it.

References from the episode

Joy Ito's article on the block size debate is still up...

"Yes, AI is a big deal, but the conclusion that AI is going to kill the vertical and functional
software business model simply makes no sense. The truth is that AI simply isn't going to kill software companies. After all this panic has passed, we'll see that AI is the best thing that ever happened to the software industry."

~ Alex Immerman and Santiago Rodriguez

Ever wonder if AI is really going to wipe out software companies and leave us all jobless in a post-human economy? Listen in this episode where I read a A16...

"When it comes to building in the approach, you have to be taking the approach as utilising the fundamental principles that we see in Bitcoin itself. So having a standard rule set that you apply to yourself every day with discipline and developing standard operating procedures that force us to hold ourselves accountable to higher standards. It's a daily grind, like you have to be always doing preventative maintenance, inspections and things like that so that you can kind of foresee issues before they happen and keep this infrastructure going because it's not just for self, this is bigger...

"If people are not ready for Bitcoin, just go use USDT as long as you can before dollar hyperinflation. It's like Noah's Ark: it's going to rain, we build the ark. We don't have to force people on board. Just wait there, and when you feel ready to swim, come aboard."

~ Giacomo Zucco

Earlier this year at the Plan B conference in El Salvador, I managed to pull Giacomo Zucco aside to take a pulse on the current state of the Bitcoin world.

In this Chat, we debate whether the classic...

I'm joined by Steve, Mechanic, and Jeff for yet another Roundtable episode, and honestly, the digital world is getting weirder by the minute. Are we even talking to real people online anymore, or just AI voice clones trying to steal our seed phrases?

We dive into the wild new wave of AI scams, the undeniable reality of the dead internet theory, and how AI coding tools might be the real reason Jack Dorsey just slashed Block's workforce in half. Of course, we also get into the thick of the quiet civil war happening right now in Bitcoin...

"The cypherpunk principle that 'cypherpunks write code' takes on revolutionary meaning when writing code no longer requires programming knowledge. Eric Hughes meant that political freedom comes through building systems without requesting permission, and now that building happens through natural language instruction to AI agents. You achieve sovereignty over computing through direct technical capability.

The code becomes yours in the most fundamental sense: modified by your specifications, compiled on your hardware, serving your purposes exclusively."

~ Max Hillebrand

What if every piece of software you use could be shaped entirely to your will - no bl...

The biggest mistake Bitcoin and sovereignty-focused developers keep making is trying to sell people on why they care instead of building something people actually want to use. They don't care about decentralization, sovereignty, or peer-to-peer - they care about things that work.

Looking at the user experience tells us just how far we still need to go. Why does logging into a free service feel like a hostage negotiation? Why are captchas filling every corner of the web when bots are better at solving them than humans? Is KYC and a credit card to every single service...

"The people who figure that out first won't just ship faster - they'll build things that others can't even spec, because the spec emerges last from a process that only exists in the doing of it."

~ Jesse Posner

When your AI knows your goals better than you remember them in the moment, something fundamental has shifted. This episode explores Jesse Posner's "The Secret to Vibe Coding" and the emerging art of human-AI partnership through the lens of real agentic workflows, the philosophy of naming what's happening while it's happening, and what it looks like when...