Bitcoin Takeover Podcast

Rijndael is the CTO of Taproot Wizards – a group of bitcoiners who want to make Bitcoin magical. In this interview, he talks about why OP_CAT matters and what kind of features we should expect to see in Bitcoin once a covenant soft fork gets activated.

Pete Rizzo is a veteran Bitcoin journalist who still remembers the time when Bitcoin & crypto were the same undivided community. In this episode, he talks about why Bitcoin history matters & how he approaches journalism.

Crypsi is the representative of an art collective which expresses its anti-establishment ideas through physical paintings & collages, as well as digitally tokenized ideas. In this episode, he explains why memes are art & why memecoins matter.

Marek Narozniak is a Polish physicist who works on a MimbleWimble implementation that can get added to Bitcoin via extension blocks to become a privacy layer. He also specializes in quantum computing, and busts some FUD about their threat.

Back in 2014, Eli Ben-Sasson co-authored the Zerocash paper, which proposed a ZK SNARK system that creates anonymous Bitcoin payments. Around the same time, he also spoke about the compression benefits of zero-knowledge proofs – a full Bitcoin node can be synced within seconds just by verifying against a valid proof. More recently, he became interested in STARKs and built a company around this cryptographic breakthrough. If SNARKs require a trusted setup, then STARKs are a major leap towards trust minimization. If Bitcoin activates the OP_CAT soft fork, then this ZK rollup scheme also becomes possible to enable great privacy and low-sized transactions.

OpenDelta is a synthetic dollar (stablecoin) that's built on top of Bitcoin's newly-launched Runes protocol. In this episode, co-founders Nick Schteringart & Konstantin Wünscher discuss about how and why they built this.

MWEB was activated on Litecoin's main net in 2022, providing a useful mix of privacy and scalability. It's a fascinating soft fork that's 100% compatible with Bitcoin. In this episode, Charlie Lee explains how MWEB works & why it matters.

David Bailey is the owner of Bitcoin Magazine. Ideologically, he is a Bitcoin maximalist who wants everything to happen on Bitcoin and get traded for BTC. During this episode, we also mint a special ordinal... which you can buy for 3.125 BTC!

Aaron Day has been a bitcoiner since 2012 – and in the aftermath of the scaling wars, he decided to support the big block camp due to ideological reasons. Today, Aaron is concerned that adoption might not catch up with the rise of CBDCs.

Ray Youssef is the CEO of NoOnes, a P2P marketplace which enables people from the Global South to exchange bitcoin for gift cards or local currencies. As he describes it, NoOnes is the platform where "everyone eats" – meaning that all parties make advantageous trades that help them feed themselves and their families. Consequently, Ray is an advocate of free market money who agrees with Roger Ver on some points. In this episode, he explains what those points are and why he believes Bitcoin was truly hijacked.

Charlie Lee is the creator of Litecoin and the current managing director of the Litecoin Foundation. Some may also remember him as Engineering Director at Coinbase. But very notably, Charlie Lee is one of the earliest believers in the power of the Lightning Network and an investor in Lightning Labs. I've decided to invite Charlie on the Bitcoin Takeover podcast for the third time in order to ask him a simple yet puzzling question: how come Litecoin is still successful and thrives in a world where the Lightning Network exists and offers instant transactions on Bitcoin? Furthermore, I tried to figure out what it is that makes Litecoin successful 13 years on and how it can support Bitcoin with scaling.

Polish bitcoiner & libertarian Tomek Kolodziejczuk is co-organizing the 2nd annual Bitcoin Film Fest. In 2024, the event happens at the same time as the European Halving Party. In this episode, we talk about Bitcoin-related art, the current state of cinema, and why the halving (or halvening?) is such a major event.

Amaury Séchet is the developer who forked Bitcoin to create Bitcoin Cash in August 2017. A year later, he became one of the first people to find out about the inflation bug in Bitcoin – yet he chose to not exploit it and collaborate with the Bitcoin Core devs instead. Deadalnix was also one of the first large blockers to figure out that Craig Wright is not Satoshi. On the other hand, he appears to be a fan of dev taxes. Why did he not destroy Bitcoin? Why do large blockers keep on creating forks? How was Craig Wright exposed among the big blocker circles? In this episode, we learn more about this lesser known part of Bitcoin history.

Adam Soltys is a Canadian bitcoiner, best known for his work on Raretoshi – a marketplace for Liquid network NFTs. Cole is a marketer who likes the Lightning network. Together, they built Coinos: a custodial & newbie-friendly Lightning wallet.

As of 2024, Roger Ver has been in Bitcoin for 7 years and in Bitcoin Cash for 7 years. This episode is a reflection on his journey and an attempt to bring back one of the greatest Bitcoin advocates and entrepreneurs.

Thanks to the efforts of CommerceBlock CEO Nicholas Gregory and CTO Tom Trevethan, Statechains are now a reality on the MercuryLayer. Originally designed by Ruben Somsen, Statechains serve the purpose of transferring ownership of bitcoins in a private, scalable, and affordable environment. However, the original Statechain design requires the ANYPREVOUT soft fork – something Bitcoin didn't get. But thanks to the efforts of Nicholas Gregory and Thomas Trevethan, MercuryLayer works around the limitations to make Statechains happen without the need for a soft fork.

Bryan Bishop is a computer programmer who currently moderates the Bitcoin-dev mailing list and considers a position as BIP editor. In this episode, he talks about his work in Bitcoin, his Webcash experiment, and why he is an advocate of biokaching.

As the CEO of Synonym, John Carvalho has experimented with many Bitcoin layers & protocols – including OmniBolt, Lightning & sidechains. In this episode, he explains what lessons he's learned and why he believes in more conservative ways to scale Bitcoin.

Eric Voskuil is the maintainer of Libbitcoin & the author of Cryptoeconomics. In this episode, he offers details about the Libbitcoin incident that took place in the summer of 2023 and also criticizes some aspects of the cult of Michael Saylor.

Fiatjaf is the creator of Nostr, a decentralized social media protocol which enables everyone around the world to communicate without censorship. Surprisingly, he doesn't agree with some existing Nostr software, no longer likes Lightning & promotes BIP300. Nostr Bitcoin and Lightning (00:00:47) Fiatjaf's creation Nostr, association with Bitcoin, and differing opinions on its development and use. Creation of Nostr (00:01:55) Decentralization and BlueSky (00:07:31) Comparison between Nostr and BlueSky, and the importance of decentralization. Peter Todd's Criticism (00:09:33) Fiatjaf's response to Peter Todd's criticism and the misunderstanding of Nostr's decentralization. Nostr's Popularity and Lightning Criticism (00:15:31) The influence of Jack Dorsey on Nostr's growth and the controversial opinion on Lightning's limitations. The Future of Bitcoin and Lightning (00:20:43) Fiatjaf's skepticism about Lightning as the future of Bitcoin, deferring to Antoine Riard as a reliable source for insights. Challenges of running nodes (00:23:21) The challenges and limitations of running Lightning nodes for normal users and the evolution of the uncle Jim model. Issues with small transactions (00:26:11) The impracticality of sending very small transactions in the Lightning network due to fees and protocol limitations. Difficulties of being a custodian (00:29:21) The challenges and limitations of being a custodian in the Lightning network. Complexities of Lightning protocol (00:34:18) Exploration of the complex features and potential bugs in the Lightning protocol, as well as the challenges of routing and receiving payments. Struggles of managing a routing node (00:36:40) Personal experiences and challenges faced while managing a routing node in the Lightning network. Drivechains for scaling Bitcoin (00:39:29) Discussion on the potential of Drivechains as a solution for scaling Bitcoin, including technical and consensus considerations. Criticism of Drivechains (00:42:12) Concerns regarding Drivechains, including the potential increase in human politics and voting processes. BIP301 and voting concerns (00:43:24) Discussion on the automatic voting process and concerns about adding politics and complexity to the Bitcoin network. Focusing on Future Bitcoiners (00:47:04) BitVM and Roll-Ups (00:53:14) Discussion about the BitVM project and roll-up systems, including skepticism and concerns about its overhyped nature. State of Soft Forks (00:59:22) Conversation about the absence of soft forks and the emergence of workarounds in the Bitcoin space. Liquid and Decentralization (01:02:48) The nature of Liquid as a blockchain and the concerns about its decentralization and reliance on geopolitics for security. The vilification of miners (01:04:31)The narrative shift in Bitcoin, from miners activating changes to users activating with full nodes. Miners' role in soft fork activation (01:05:46) Criticism of Drivechains (01:06:22) Two-way pegs and price (01:08:17) Concerns about the value of pegged BTC on sidechains and potential market fluctuations. Arguments against miner theft from sidechains (01:09:30) Debunking the idea of miners stealing from successful sidechains and its impact on Bitcoin's value. Mining centralization and Drivechains (01:11:52) Miner-extracted value (MEV) and its relevance (01:15:18) Exploration of miner-extracted value (MEV) and its applicability in the Bitcoin context. Accidental hard fork and network cooperation (01:17:13) LayerTwo Labs and Drivechain adoption (01:18:26) Can LayerTwo Labs activate Drivechains & push adoption? Challenges of running Bitcoin nodes (01:21:02) On the difficulty of running Bitcoin nodes and UTXO set management.