Upcoming Bitcoin Takeover podcast interviews: S15 E27 with David Seroy (Alpen Labs) S15 E28 with Zooko (cypherpunk who worked on Ecash with David Chaum, blogged about Bitcoin in January 2009, built ZK stuff with Zcash) S25 E29 with Peter Rizun (former maintainer & advocate of Bitcoin Unlimited, now into hardware) And maybe a couple more surprises in between 🙃

Can you guess which Bitcoin Core developer said this in 2013?

At this point, if I was a Bitcoin Core developer, I’d just quit and get a better paying job at Google or whatever Because no matter what you do, you’re under attack. The users have ridiculous expectations, wouldn’t chip in $5/month, but criticize you for making any money off your work and make up conspiracy theories to suggest the exchange that pays you wants to destroy Bitcoin. You’re supposed to live like a monk, bow your head to any user of the free software you’re working on, never have any opinions of your own which contradict some high priest influencer or book-selling Austrian economist. You also can’t do anything meaningful due to a culture of not bringing any controversial changes. So your contributions are trivial and hardly a footnote in the history of Bitcoin, while the project at large needs to scale and become more private. Fuck this shit, life’s too short.

So I guess “sell in May, go away” doesn’t apply this year 🙃

The OP_Return size drama started because Citrea needs higher limits to inscribe ZK proofs for their layer 2 They can inscribe that extra data in other ways which require more resources from node operators, or they can bypass the node policies entirely by paying miners. It’s reasonable to remove the limit, since it can’t prevent larger data inscriptions. If anything, it keeps the Bitcoin network honest and predictable. But the Ocean miners/Knots node runners are the perfect example of why Bitcoin most likely won’t scale and become fungible. Instead of addressing the issue for what it is, they talk about filtering dick pics and other kinds of undesirable jpegs. Make no mistake: Citrea is building a financial layer for bitcoin, so it can be used as money in ways that the Bitcoin chain currently does not enable. Ironically, the filterooors pretend that they’re saving Bitcoin’s use case as money. You can’t make this shit up 😂

Bitcoin Takeover Podcast graphics: somewhat artistic, edgy, unconventional Other podcasts related to Bitcoin: bland, corporate, too focused on branding

Average dude with $MSTR in his bio, who posts almost daily about ETF inflows, and makes fun of Laszlo for buying pizza with his bitcoin: "You don't understand Bitcoin"

Alright so it seems like Zooko has agreed to join the podcast in early June! We’ll talk about Chaumian Ecash, Mojo Nation, Bitcoin, Zcash, post-quantum cryptography, his famous triangle, Least Authority, grocery shopping & why he isn’t Satoshi. Might break the 8h 12m record!

You hate Bitcoin Core because they don't engage in transaction censorship to validate your purity tests. I hate Bitcoin Core because they don't seem to care about making Bitcoin private and BTC fungible. We are not the same.

Bitcoin would be more efficient as a Proof of Work/Proof of Stake hybrid, in which the miners & the full nodes share the rewards. This way, there's the thermodynamic security, plus an inventive to keep your node running & HODL. Reaching consensus on upgrades would also be easier, and non-mining nodes would matter more. Preferably, such an upgrade would also restore CPU/GPU mining to allow anyone to participate.

I’ve never seen a more anti-cash city than Amsterdam. Most small businesses don’t accept it. Restaurants act like they’re doing you a huge favor, they always say they have no change. You can’t even buy bus tickets with cash. Supermarkets that accept cash will verify every bill as if you’re trying to use counterfeit money. Wtf?!

“Ethereum conferences are for sissies and soyboys”

At this point, I’m going to assume that everyone who’s against the OP_Return increase is a spook trying to do the kind of social damage which prevents us from ever upgrading Bitcoin in a significant way That, or a useful idiot who learned about Bitcoin from memes. But with this amount of infighting for such a trivial issue, we’re never gonna get scaling upgrades or base layer privacy. Probably not even covenants.

The biggest philosophical difference between Monero and Zcash is that Monero is anti-Bitcoin, fueled by a CryptoNote whitepaper which criticizes Bitcoin’s design and proposes “healthy competition”. Zcash is Bitcoin-friendly, originating from a soft fork proposal for Bitcoin.

A quantum resistant Zcash fork which changes the mining algorithm to be ASIC-resistant, adds every useful OP code, and copies the Bitcoin UTXO set to allow everyone to claim their coins. That’s the ultimate backup for Bitcoin. Same monetary policy, same users, better tech.

In one week, the Vitalik Buterin interview has surpassed 65k views/downloads across Twitter, YouTube & Spotify! It is now more successful than last year’s interview with Roger Ver and I hope y’all learned something new. Who do you think will break Vitalik’s record? https://www.youtube.com/live/l8vt5P3chwk?si=Slwx54Zc6v_BTyAN

At an Ethereum conference, A BCH guy and a Solana guy told me that they like my Bitcoin podcast. I feel like the king of nerds 🤴🏻

Fun fact: the first episode of the Bitcoin Takeover podcast was recorded in mid-January 2019 Then got published alongside the rest of season 10 on February 6th (the show's anniversary). To date, 282 episodes have been recorded – 2 got deleted, 280 were published!

Upcoming Bitcoin Takeover podcast episodes: S16 E25 with Dr. Chandra Duggirala & George Burke from Portal (cross-chain atomic swaps using Lightning). S15 E26 with Peter Rizun (former maintainer of Bitcoin Unlimited, currently a hardware guy). Who else would you like to see on the show?

Let the builders come to Bitcoin The sustainability of the 21 million coins limit depends on it