A few months ago I was on a flight and I noticed that a teenager was wearing a “Lizzy McAlpine on tour” hoodie I said to myself “oh, that’s what cool kids are listening to these days” and wrote down the artist’s name on my phone Forgot about it until last night when I was reading my notes. Then I searched for some songs on YouTube and was blown away! As it turns out, Lizzy McAlpine is an incredible singer-songwriter who sort of reminds me of Joni Mitchell in the early 1970s (the “Blue” album). I had no expectations, so I was pleasantly surprised. Would definitely listen to a full album or check out a concert.

the true bear market is the friends we lost along the way some of whom became suits others who lost their mind because of jpegs but most of them lost focus and forgot why they came here in the first place the time for healing begins now!

I really want to interview more Bitcoin devs working on interesting projects It’s just that all I see in my feed is Knotzi vs Coretard drama And I don’t know where I can find new ideas What’s the most revolutionary proposal you’ve seen lately?

I was a bitcoiner back in 2004 When I was playing MMORPGs with friends Buying in-game items from each other with cash Dealing with scammers who were pretending to help you level up your character if you gave them your password, but would steal your items. Joining guilds, fighting silly tribal wars knowing anyone could easily be on the other side but we’re here because of some friends. The only difference is that we never aimed to overthrow banking with in-game gold. And we actually had much more fun, there was a true feeling of brotherhood and friendship.

So when the EU leaks everyone’s bitcoin holdings next year Which country is the safest against $5 wrench attacks, SWATing, having your family members kidnapped for ransom, and/or being kidnapped yourself? It sure isn’t France, the country of the ECB president 🤔

What is the Bitcoin maximalist reaction to the fact that the European Union wants all citizens to declare all the coins they hold in self-custody? The boating accident? A casual HFSP in between the steak lunch and the steak dinner? How about acknowledging that you were wrong and the purity virtue signaling and the NGU greed kept millions of people away from privacy projects and DeFi and now every user who humbly stacked sats on the most compliant podcaster-endorsed KYC exchange out there and withdrew to the hardware wallet they bought under their name using their home or office address is just one bureaucratic LLM query away from becoming a criminal if he doesn’t disclose every little UTXO? Bitcoin has no untraceable kind of privacy. Your LSP can leak all the data about your activity to the government. Your favorite custodial Lightning wallet can rug you on demand. Running your own Lightning node will most likely make you lose a lot of money and doesn’t scale anyway. While you were jerking off to price charts, the regulators caught up. Now they want your name and your wallet addresses on a list that will definitely get leaked in the future. No privacy, no hope for the future, your hard-earned coins will most likely enrich some EU bureaucrat. You got duped, anon. Thank you for playing!

Total Bitcoin Takeover podcast Season 16 downloads (up until December 5th 2025): 471271 Almost half a million! Thank you all for listening!

Arbitrary data (aka “spam”) is the red herring The goal of Knots is to create a precedent for transaction censorship & UTXO confiscation Why? Because institutional investors, some of which back Ocean pool, consider Satoshi’s coins an existential risk and want to freeze his BTC to effectively prevent him from ever selling. Some of the quantum resistance debates aim for the same goal. But they have lesser credibility due to the unconvincing evidence that quantum computers will be able to crack elliptic curve digital signatures anytime soon. Follow the money.

The block size wars were a mistake All of this development energy should have taken place on one Bitcoin

Interesting altcoins that test + refine ideas first proposed for Bitcoin: Zcash: Zerocash, soft fork proposed for BTC in 2014 Litecoin: MimbleWimble Extension Block, soft fork proposed by Andrew Poelstra for BTC in 2016 Monero: ring signatures, Confidential Transactions, Dandelion++, Bulletproofs, all of which were proposed individually for Bitcoin Decred: CoinJoin by default, smaller blocks & stable Lightning Network Bitcoin Cash: dynamic block size, OP_CAT + a bunch of restored OP codes from the Satoshi era (AND, OR, XOR, DIV, MOD, MUL, LSHIFT, RSHIFT) What else?

Satoshi Nakamoto gave everyone the blueprint to create unstoppable money. Some say that he created the last form of money we’ll ever need, but he also supported the creation of BitNames (later Namecoin). The only kind of maximalist Satoshi proved himself to be is Proof of Work and merged mining maxi. He didn’t care that much about Austrian economics and the “everything divided by 21 million coins” meme. Satoshi was a cypherpunk who gladly supported different use cases for his tech, but wanted a whole galaxy of coins to get secures by the same miners.

Remember last year’s 7-hour interview with Amir Taaki? Well, this year he has booked the entire new year’s eve 😂 So we might just break every record! Got no plans for December 31st 2025? Join our livestream!

It’s more ethical to support interesting altcoins that may push Bitcoin to improve than to put on a suit and shake hands with bankers. One is evolutionary and cypherpunk. The other is regressive and defeatist.

Searching for some Black Friday deals to improve your cypherpunk experience? Use promo code “BTCTKVR” to get special discounts for: – all metal backups on the Cryptosteel website – awesome Bitcoin miners for your livingroom from Braiins – cold storage devices from Satochip – hardware wallets from @BitBox – BitAxe Bitcoin miners from solomining.de More details:

Bitcoin Takeover

Use Promo Code BTCTKVR, Get Special Discounts!

Here's where you can use promo code BTCTKVR to get special discounts (and the benefits): Buy metal backups from Cryptosteel, get a 10% disc...

Over the last week I’ve spoken with 3 Bitcoin devs who are migrating part of their work to Zcash Not because Zcash pays them – they’re frustrated by the shitty dev culture where they must constantly ask for permission to build stuff One is a Lightning dev, one is a Starkware dev, another one is a Counterparty/Ordinal dev and artist. Not everyone wants to take part in the “Knotzi vs Coretard” debate. The revenge chain scenario is very real.

On Bitcoin Takeover podcast, I’ve interviewed 3 of the people sitting at this dinner table (Sergio Lerner, Zooko & @Peter Todd) And over the next couple of months I think I will have 3 more (this is a picture from 2014, taken by Matthew D. Green at Princeton University)

I told you Zcash is the revenge chain against the current mental derangement in Bitcoin. Just like Ethereum was the revenge chain for builders who were fed up with the block size war in 2016-2017. To many investors, Bitcoin is not sound money digital energy banana. It’s a tech stock which promises to accomplish the goal outlined in the whitepaper: peer to peer electronic cash. If the goalpost shifts from “let’s make bitcoin the ultimate form of money, with contracts, fungibility & quantum resistance” to “Bitcoin is already perfect, let’s fight about jpeg inscriptions instead”, investors will notice and try to minimize their exposure to risk. So far, Ocean mining has been the most destructive actor in Bitcoin since Craig Wright. The hatred, infighting & division they caused will take years to heal. Meanwhile, Zcash is just building stuff. It’s technologically interesting, way ahead of its time, but still familiar thanks to its Bitcoin roots. Zcash is bringing devs on board to work on privacy that scales to billions of people (Tachyon). Zcash is working on shielded assets (imagine stablecoins that are truly censorship resistant because you cannot know who sent them, to whom, and in which amount). Zcash is the Bitcoin we were promised more than a decade ago, refined and improved over the years. While Bitcoin is dangerously stagnant, Zcash is evolving. And investors love throwing their money at something that’s vibrant and promising. Haters will point out that Zcash was dead until a few months ago. Well, that’s also when bitcoiners lost the plot. Think about it. Also, some of the same things that were being said about Bitcoin in 2013 (that it’s persistent, mathematically sound & usable as both a store of value and a medium of exchange) can be said about Zcash too. There’s a lot of virtue in not giving up… and this industry provides more incentives for developers to pivot to new VC-funded projects. But the Zcash team has been consistent over the last 9 years and honestly deserves this influx of users & developers. It’s fine to be in denial when confronted by new information. But don’t let any ideology blind you. In 2017, it was infighting bitcoiners who guaranteed Ethereum’s status as the number 2 coin. Eight years later, some of the same names are causing an exodus to Zcash. There’s also a narrative shift that’s going on, with privacy (something bitcoiners of today fear) becoming more important in everyday life. A decade ago, financial privacy was for paranoid nerds. Today, it’s what billions of CBDC forced adopters need. Embrace the change, or else stay zidelined and bitter. Either way, you can’t say nobody tried to explain to you what’s happening.

> endorse Trump to put an end to Operation Chokepoint 2.0 > Trump gets elected, says he will stop lawfare & let crypto in the USA thrive > start Bitcoin treasury companies, get rekt by the market > Blame Chokepoint 3.0

Up until last year I was really upset that I never get invited to any of the Bitcoin Magazine conferences Not in Nashville/Vegas, not in Amsterdam, not in Abu Dhabi I used to write for BM, currently run one of the most popular podcasts & also produced competing magazines Ironically, now I get invited to Ethereum conferences despite holding no ETH and not doing anything relevant for their community 🤷🏻‍♂️ But now I also understand the value of being counterculture and not selling out to the suits. While brushing shoulders with politicians and corporate CEOs can be educational, I feel more at home among idealistic nerds who want to change the world with their code. Punk rock is not played in every large expo hall. And I like punk rock quite a lot.

Steve Bannon to Jeffrey Epstein, about people evading taxes with bitcoin: “NSA has ‘em”