Bitcoin Audible

In this Take episode, I break down the “Great Hackening” ripping through Bitcoin right now – from Coldcard’s catastrophic entropy bug to Liquid’s recent 4,000 BTC exploit, Lightning implementation issues, and a few major wallet update and data breaches.

I also explain how AI has completely flipped the economics of attack and defense, why Bitcoin is the canary in the digital coal mine, and what practical steps you must take to protect your stack. This episode is a roadmap for surviving and ultimately benefiting from this brutal security stress test.

Chapters

(00:00:00) - The Great Hack...

In this third Coldcard Q&A, I tackle entropy, device trust, DIY signers, and why I’m leaning harder than ever on multi-sig. I walk through why understanding encryption must become a mandatory survival skill, rather than a niche hobby, if we want to resist a dystopian future. I also share where I moved my personal stack, explain how multisig actually saved me, and explore the impossible ethical nightmare of white-hat hackers trying to rescue compromised wallets.

Chapters

(00:00:00) - Introduction

(00:00:22) - The future of Coinkite

(00:02:28) - Refunds or going dark?

...

The roundtable is back, but we're missing a familiar face. Mechanic has officially stepped down from Ocean, so it’s just Jeff, Steve and I digging into the aftermath of BIP110, from why the soft fork failed to what Luke and Mechanic’s departure means for Ocean and Bitcoin Core’s influence.

We debate whether the real existential risk is block-template centralization, how much BIP110 helped or hurt Knots and Ocean, and why some of us think the strategy overplayed its hand. We close with a wild proposal to pressure Coinbase into proving reserves using their wrapped BTC to...

In this episode I continue unpacking the Coldcard RNG disaster, wrestling with whether it was malicious or just shockingly incompetent design and attitude. I walk through how arrogance, licensing changes, and convoluted security theater may have let a fundamental failure sit unnoticed for years, possibly causing key collisions and bizarre “free Bitcoin” situations. I also warn about fake Sparrow and Wasabi mobile apps ruggedly stealing funds from people scrambling to move their funds, and set up a part three focused on lessons learned and best practices.

Chapters

(00:00:00) - Introduction

(00:00:51) - Malice vs incompetence

In this Guy's Take, I walk through listener questions and comments on the Coldcard random number generation failure and what it really means for Bitcoin self-custody. We dig into why the RNG bug went unnoticed for years, the difference between source-available and truly open source hardware, and how dice rolls and strong passphrases change your threat model. I also share how I’m thinking about safer setups going forward.

Chapters

(00:00:00) - Why Coldcard Questions Remain

(00:01:18) - Features vs Core Failure

(00:03:19) - Speed Over Security Risk

(00:04:54) - Car Without An En...

***"In the early days, the average user could probably use a Coldcard and know the amount of entropy required. The average Bitcoin user today, no clue. And so the times have changed, our message should have changed. And where I come down to is essentially what you said HODL, you should custody your bitcoin at the level that you are ready for. And that is a process. Day 1, don't shame someone for using an ETF. Applaud them for exposure and remind them that this isn't the end and as your experience, your knowledge, your position size increases, you may...

Thousands of careful Bitcoiners just got wiped out by a Coldcard entropy bug, and I use this episode to push back hard on the idea that self-custody is dead, and "don't trust, verify" failed us.

I walk through the brutal history of centralized custodial failures, explain why "holding your own keys is still orders of magnitude safer, and extract three real lessons from this recent disaster. This is about keeping perspective, learning the right lessons from pain, and making Bitcoin self-custody stronger, not weaker.

Chapters

(00:00:00) - Intro

(00:00:41) - Is self custody...

***"I think that self custody is not going to be dead. I think that there is going to have to be a group, a vanguard of people that do this and take it seriously. The revolution won't work without that. Everything under the spectrum is acceptable. But if you know what you're here for, you got to put pressure against those systems. And that is by taking the self-custody yourself. That's why we make tools for those people."

~ Lloyd Fournier***

Self-custody is not dead, but it is a ridiculously hard problem to solve. And recent...

In this episode, I unpack the claim that BIP-110’s failure proves corporate miners and suitcoiners now control Bitcoin. I walk through the real dynamics between miners and validating nodes, compare BIP-110 to the UASF, and explain why broad consensus is strictly required to change Bitcoin’s rules. Ultimately, BIP-110’s failure actually confirms Bitcoin’s defensive power structure rather than undermining it.

Chapters

(00:00:00) - Who Really Controls Bitcoin?

(00:02:15) - Defining 'real' Bitcoin nodes

(00:02:57) - Horse and carriage analogy

(00:04:20) - Why did BIP-110 failed

(00:04:42) - What UASF and SegW...

***"Today can you also use Coinbase to sell your coin? Yes. But can you guarantee that if Coinbase disappears, your funds will be with you? No. Because, it is, at the end of the day, their custody. Whereas in statechains, a really cool perspective is, if the server or the custodian, disappears, because of the design of the system, money comes back at you on L1. You can broadcast an exit or you can do nothing and the money comes back to you. So if something bad happens to us or to [the] server, then still [the] money is...

***"It's going faster than most people thought. We thought that these models would be useful, but not extremely useful, for a while. Now you look at this and you feel [that] if I'm not using this the entire day, I'm losing on something, I'm staying behind, I have to keep running this like crazy. But we haven't prepared for it. People are connecting all of their life to these cloud providers, you know: 'Hey, manage my life'. And then you're giving them everything you have. I don't think the industry had enough time to prepare for the right tools...

In this episode, Steve, Jeff, and I walk through the catastrophic Coldcard entropy failure, how a trusted hardware wallet ended up generating weak keys, and how attackers are now brute-forcing Bitcoin wallets in minutes. We dig into AI’s role in widening the attack surface, the dangers of source-available over true open source, and our own arrogance around hardware security. I share practical steps to get your coins off compromised devices, why multi-sig saved me this time, and how we can turn this gut punch into genuine anti-fragility for Bitcoin self-custody.

Chapters

(00:00:00) - Introduction

...

This is an emergency episode to warn everyone of the catastrophic Coldcard entropy bug that’s letting attackers regenerate users’ keys and drain wallets without device access.

I walk through concrete, step‑by‑step instructions to move your coins to safety (including using Sparrow, Nunchuck, and even exchanges as a last resort), who’s most at risk across MK3, MK4, MK5, and Q devices, and what this means for hardware wallets, AI‑driven security research, and multi‑sig going forward.

This is the worst hit to self custody in Bitcoin's history. All we can do is act as quic...

There is a massive miscommunication tearing Bitcoiners apart right now. Instead of arguing over specific code like BIP 110, I want to ask a much harder question in this solo take: Is it actually censorship to address spam?

I'll explain why prioritizing financial transactions over JPEGs isn't authoritarianism, and why claiming it is destroys our ability to protect the network. We built a protocol for decentralized money, not unlimited file storage. Let's talk about what real censorship actually means.

Chapters

(00:00:00) - "Censorship" and Spam

(00:01:41) - The analogy

(00:02:52) - Free speech...

"Your savings represent hours you worked, risks you accepted, businesses you built, time spent away from people you love, and consumption you postponed for the sake of the future. When the monetary system allows others to dilute those savings without your consent, it weakens your claim on that future. Bitcoin offers a peaceful alternative, giving every individual access to property that cannot be created without limit, altered for political convenience, or administered according to a different set of rules for the powerful."

"Two hundred and fifty years ago, Americans declared that they would no longer live as...

I walk through the global push for Central Bank Digital Currencies, why voluntary rollouts have mostly flopped, and what governments really gain from programmable, fully surveilled money.

I dig into the upcoming digital euro, the U.S. Senate’s move against a federal CBDC, and the rise of OpenUSD as an open stablecoin standard.

Ultimately I argue that while CBDCs are about control, the infrastructure they create may unintentionally supercharge a global Bitcoin exit ramp. I break down why this surveillance trap might give us our ultimate exit

Chapters

(00:00:00) - CBDCs ar...

***"I'm almost 99% certain that [BIP] 110 will activate. And not only that, I think there will be a capitulation after October, where if the month of October passes and [BIP] 110 is still not merged by Core devs, it essentially reflects that they are no longer relevant because they failed to be good stewards of the protocol."

~ Hunter Beast***

In this episode I sit down with Hunter Beast for a sprawling, high-signal exploration of how to prepare Bitcoin for an unknowable future. We cover formal verification and Lean 4, AI-accelerated proofs, surveillance and BIP39 risks, faith and natural...

What is the most important project in Bitcoin? It isn't BIP 110 or some shiny new payment protocol. We actually have a massive security vulnerability sitting at the base layer: Bitcoin mining isn't really mining anymore.

Right now, we have millions of hashers but barely a handful of real miners deciding what transactions make it into a block. And that means a few centralized pool operators could easily censor the network.

In this Take, I explain why the critical distinction between a hasher and a miner matters. But more importantly, I outline how newer protocols are...

***"I think I got kind of orange-pilled and privacy-pilled in this way when Snowden exposed all this surveillance that was happening by default through every system you've ever touched.

That's when I started treating all digital infrastructure as inherently recording devices. They're trying to take information and, even if someone doesn't really want or intend to store the information, it's possible that it gets leaked through a hack. And when it comes to money, that reveals all the relationships someone has. And without privacy, there's no way for that to be free. For Bitcoin to kind of...

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...