Chat_169 – Bitcoin Proving its Case with Walker America
“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 the U.S. dollar. China’s money supply is huge right now, and nobody asked your permission before letting international policy dilute the value of your hard work. We are watching an incredible shift happen in real-time. Powerhouse nations and heavily sanctioned regimes are suddenly eyeing the exact same monetary network, proving that true, neutral money works whether you are allies or sworn enemies.
I recently sat down with Walker America to pull the curtain back on this whole financial illusion. We talked about the completely made-up nonsense of the Federal Reserve’s inflation targets, and how the legacy system lets financial giants buy up the world with free fiat, just so they can rent it back to us. But the biggest paradox we explored is why the United States dollar actually cannot hyperinflate right now. A total currency collapse requires a giant release valve, and you might be surprised by what has to happen to the Bitcoin network before that pressure can finally escape.
A huge thank you to Walker for hosting this conversation on RoxomTV. We had such a great back-and-forth about our breaking financial system that I had to drop this episode straight into your feed.
Guest Links
Walker on X (Link: https://twitter.com/WalkerAmerica)
Walker on Nostr (Link: https://primal.net/walker)
Walker’s YouTube channel (Link: https://www.youtube.com/@walkeramerica)
The Bitcoin Podcast’s Website (Link: https://bitcoinpodcast.net/podcast)
Affiliate Links
Become sovereign, hold your keys, be censorship resistant with the Bitbox hardware wallet. Get 5% off everything in the store with code GUY (Link: https://bitbox.swiss/)
Get 10% off the best Bitcoin board game in the world, HODLUP! Or any of the other great games from The Free Market Kids! Use code GUY10 at checkout for 10% off your cart! (Link: https://www.freemarketkids.com/collections/games-1)
(Under construction) Check out the list of products and services I use and recommend on BitcoinAudible.com (Link: https://bitcoinaudible.com/)
Host Links
Guy on Nostr (Link: http://tinyurl.com/2xc96ney)
Guy on X (Link: https://twitter.com/theguyswann)
Guy on Instagram (Link: https://www.instagram.com/theguyswann)
Guy on TikTok (Link: https://www.tiktok.com/@theguyswann)
Guy on YouTube (Link: https://www.youtube.com/@theguyswann)
Read_946 – When the Experimenter Fails the Marshmallow Test
“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 lens of the Stanford Marshmallow Experiment, and the implications are genuinely devastating. Is high time preference a moral failing, or the only rational response to a system that has been lying to young people their entire lives? And if broken social trust is the real disease, can sound money actually cure it – or is some of the damage already permanent?
Check out the original article: When the Experimenter Fails the Marshmallow Test by John Carter (Link: https://barsoom.substack.com/p/when-the-experimenter-fails-the-marshmallow)
References from the episode
Number Go Down by Allen Farrington and Sacha Meyers – this read fits hand in glove with today’s piece, and if this episode hit for you, that one will too (Link: https://fountain.fm/episode/fLqds61ds9YbsnqGOkE8)
Host Links
Guy on Nostr (Link: http://tinyurl.com/2xc96ney)
Guy on X (Link: https://twitter.com/theguyswann)
Guy on Instagram (Link: https://www.instagram.com/theguyswann)
Guy on TikTok (Link: https://www.tiktok.com/@theguyswann)
Guy on YouTube (Link: https://www.youtube.com/@theguyswann)
Bitcoin Audible on X (Link: https://twitter.com/BitcoinAudible)
The Guy Swann Network Broadcast Room on Keet (Link: https://tinyurl.com/3na6v839)
Check out our awesome partners!
Become sovereign, hold your keys, be censorship resistant with the Bitbox hardware wallet. Get 5% off everything in the store with code GUY (Link: https://bitbox.swiss/)
Get 10% off the COLDCARD with code BITCOINAUDIBLE (Link: https://bitcoinaudible.com/coldcard)
Get 10% off the best Bitcoin board game in the world, HODLUP! Or any of the other great games from The Free Market Kids! Use code GUY10 at checkout for 10% off your cart! (Link: https://www.freemarketkids.com/collections/games-1)
“The only two ways to coordinate human societies at scale are free markets and physical power. Any ideology rejecting free markets is just advocating for power. Socialism, communism, and fascism all converge to the same endpoint–rule by the biggest thug.”~ Naval Ravikant
Read_945 – Milei’s Austrian Scam by the Numbers
“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 Latin American demagogue?
Check out the original article: Milei’s Austrian Scam by the Numbers by Saifedean Ammous (Link: https://x.com/saifedean/status/2056436088944631996)
References from the episode
Safedean’s previous piece on the Argentine carry trade (Link: https://saifedean.substack.com/p/anatomy-of-the-milei-ponzi)
Hans-Hermann Hoppe’s work, since the Mises Institute apparently parted ways with him (Link: https://hanshoppe.com/)
Anything by Murray N. Rothbard if you want the real Austrian foundation (Link: https://mises.org/profile/murray-n-rothbard)
The story of Cincinnatus if you’ve never read it, it’s worth your time
Host Links
Guy on Nostr (Link: http://tinyurl.com/2xc96ney)
Guy on X (Link: https://twitter.com/theguyswann)
Guy on Instagram (Link: https://www.instagram.com/theguyswann)
Guy on TikTok (Link: https://www.tiktok.com/@theguyswann)
Guy on YouTube (Link: https://www.youtube.com/@theguyswann)
Bitcoin Audible on X (Link: https://twitter.com/BitcoinAudible)
The Guy Swann Network Broadcast Room on Keet (Link: https://tinyurl.com/3na6v839)
Check out our awesome partners!
Become sovereign, hold your keys, be censorship resistant with the Bitbox hardware wallet. Get 5% off everything in the store with code GUY (Link: https://shop.bitbox.swiss/?code=GUY)
Get 10% off the COLDCARD with code BITCOINAUDIBLE (Link: https://bitcoinaudible.com/coldcard)
Get 10% off the best Bitcoin board game in the world, HODLUP! Or any of the other great games from The Free Market Kids! Use code GUY10 at checkout for 10% off your cart! (Link: https://www.freemarketkids.com/collections/games-1)
“Frodo: I wish the Ring had never come to me. I wish none of this had happened.
Gandalf: So do all who live to see such times, but that is not for them to decide. All we have to d…
Chat_168 – Hashing for Heat with Tyler Stevens
“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.”
~ Tyler Stevens
I am constantly shocked by how much of our everyday infrastructure is basically begging for a Bitcoin upgrade. Almost half of the world’s energy is used for heat, and a quarter of it is just “comfort heat” to keep our homes and water warm. What if we generated all of that with bitcoin miners instead?
I sat down with Tyler Stevens, a former aerospace thermal engineer who is currently helping spearhead the Hashrate Heatpunks movement. I’ve been running my own hacky miner-heater setup downstairs to survive the winter, but Tyler and the guys at the 256 Foundation are taking this to an entirely different scale. We talked about stripping away our reliance on monopolistic giants like Bitmain and finally building a fully open-source mining stack.
The stakes here are high. If even a fraction of normal households swap their standard electric heating elements for ASIC chips, we’re looking at a huge decentralization shift for the grid and an explosion in Bitcoin’s security budget. We also get into the reality of sovereign smart homes, avoiding creepy cloud-connected thermostats, and why the “energy waste” critics are entirely blind to how thermodynamics actually works. This was an incredibly fun conversation and it proves we are still incredibly early to what home mining will eventually look like.
Guest Links
Tyler on X (Link: https://twitter.com/tylerkstevens)
Exergy’s Website (Link: https://exergyheat.com/)
256 Foundation’s Website (Link: https://www.256foundation.org/)
Hashrate Heatpunks’ Website (Link: https://heatpunks.org/)
The Space’s Website (Link: https://denver.space/)
Affiliate Links
Become sovereign, hold your keys, be censorship resistant with the Bitbox hardware wallet. Get 5% off everything in the store with code GUY (Link: https://bitbox.swiss/)
Get 10% off the COLDCARD with code BITCOINAUDIBLE (Link: https://bitcoinaudible.com/coldcard)
Get 10% off the best Bitcoin board game in the world, HODLUP! Or any of the other great games from The Free Market Kids! Use code GUY10 at checkout for 10% off your cart! (Link: https://www.freemarketkids.com/collections/games-1)
(Under construction) Check out the list of products and services I use and recommend on BitcoinAudible.com (Link: https://bitcoinaudible.com/)
Host Links
Guy on Nostr (Link: http://tinyurl.com/2xc96ney)
Guy on X (Link: https://twitter.com/theguyswann)
Chat_167 – Why Your Keys Matter with Seed
“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 what better way by leveraging private freedom preserving open source software.”
~ Seed
In today’s chat, I sat down with Seed, the creator of the SeedSigner project, and his backstory is completely wild.
He told the story of how he got pulled into Bitcoin through a forensic case tied to a local Silk Road user, why he panic sold in 2017, and how that path eventually led him back to the basics and into building one of the most respected DIY signers in the space. But the real tension in this episode is the part most people skip over: what actually keeps your coins safe when things get messy in the real world.
We talk about the grim reality of wrench attacks, what actually happens when law enforcement flips a house upside down with a search warrant, and how a former forensics cop secures his own wealth. If you think a standard hardware wallet hidden in a sock drawer is enough, hearing his threat models might completely rewrite your long-term storage plans. And yes, we got into a few stories that made me think about my own setup a lot differently.
Guest Links
Seed on X (Link: https://x.com/sesi_the_man)
SeedSigner on X (Link: https://x.com/SeedSigner)
Today in Bitcoin History on X (Link: https://x.com/daily_btc_lore)
SeedSigner’s Website (Link: https://seedsigner.com/)
Affiliate Links
Become sovereign, hold your keys, be censorship resistant with the Bitbox hardware wallet. Get 5% off everything in the store with code GUY (Link: https://bitbox.swiss/)
Get 10% off the COLDCARD with code BITCOINAUDIBLE (Link: https://bitcoinaudible.com/coldcard)
Get 10% off the best Bitcoin board game in the world, HODLUP! Or any of the other great games from The Free Market Kids! Use code GUY10 at checkout for 10% off your cart! (Link: https://www.freemarketkids.com/collections/games-1)
(Under construction) Check out the list of products and services I use and recommend on BitcoinAudible.com (Link: https://bitcoinaudible.com/)
Host Links
Guy on Nostr (Link: http://tinyurl.com/2xc96ney)
Guy on X (Link: https://twitter.com/theguyswann)
Guy on Instagram (Link: https://www.instagram.com/theguyswann)
Guy on TikTok (Link: https://www.tiktok.com/@theguyswann)
Guy on YouTube (Link: https://www.youtube.com/@theguyswann)
<…
Guy’s Take_107 – Free Rent for the Rich
“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 rent it back to the public for a profit.”
~ Guy Swann
Why do massive corporations own everything, while the rest of us are stuck renting our lives back from them? Most people see the trend, but very few understand the actual mechanism driving it. In this episode, I break down how zero interest rate policy isn’t just “reckless investment” – it’s a fraud machine that hands the rich free rent on every productive asset in the economy. What happens when you can borrow anything for less than it’s worth? You buy everything.
References from the episode
Read_944 – Proof of Work in the Real Economy: Wyatt’s chapter from The Bitcoinization of Finance (Link: https://fountain.fm/episode/4v4LrOxS12vM15dE3tHT)
Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds by Charles Mackay (1841) (Link: https://ia800405.us.archive.org/28/items/memoirsofextraor01mack/memoirsofextraor01mack.pdf)
Affiliate Links
Become sovereign, hold your keys, be censorship resistant with the Bitbox hardware wallet. Get 5% off everything in the store with code GUY (Link: https://bitbox.swiss/)
Get 10% off the COLDCARD with code BITCOINAUDIBLE (Link: https://bitcoinaudible.com/coldcard)
Get 10% off the best Bitcoin board game in the world, HODLUP! Or any of the other great games from The Free Market Kids! Use code GUY10 at checkout for 10% off your cart! (Link: https://www.freemarketkids.com/collections/games-1)
Host Links
Guy on Nostr (Link: http://tinyurl.com/2xc96ney)
Guy on X (Link: https://twitter.com/theguyswann)
Guy on Instagram (Link: https://www.instagram.com/theguyswann)
Guy on TikTok (Link: https://www.tiktok.com/@theguyswann)
Guy on YouTube (Link: https://www.youtube.com/@theguyswann)
Bitcoin Audible on X (Link: https://twitter.com/BitcoinAudible)
The Guy Swann Network Broadcast Room on Keet (Link: https://tinyurl.com/3na6v839)
“Men, it has been well said, think in herds; it will be seen that they go mad in herds, while they only recover their senses slowly, one by one.”
~ Charles MacKa…
Read_944 – Proof of Work in the Real Economy
“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?
In this episode, I read Wyatt’s case for a return to proof of work in the real economy, then push it further: sound money isn’t just nice to have. Without it, the market doesn’t break – it never emerges in the first place. And when it loses that property, society rots until it dies.
Check out the original article: The Bitcoinization of Finance by Wyatt O’Rourke (Link: https://braiins.com/books/bitcoinization-of-finance)
References from the episode
The Bitcoinization of Finance by Wyatt O’Rourke – the book this chapter is pulled from, available now (audiobook coming soon, narrated by yours truly) (Link: https://braiins.com/books/bitcoinization-of-finance)
Broken Money by Lynn Alden – referenced in the chapter and one of the best macro reads out there (Link: https://www.lynalden.com/broken-money/)
The Price of Tomorrow by Jeff Booth – also referenced, and a foundational read on deflation and innovation (Link: https://www.jeffbooth.ca/books)
Human Action by Ludwig von Mises – the original Austrian breakdown of boom-bust cycles (Link: https://mises.org/mises-wire/ludwig-von-misess-human-action-marking-70-years-continuing-relevance)
The previous Read episode on Nick Szabo’s The Fabric of Desires – perfect companion piece to this one (Link: https://fountain.fm/episode/ByGugoFYLU0uFDPI6Z2t)
Host Links
Guy on Nostr (Link: http://tinyurl.com/2xc96ney)
Guy on X (Link: https://twitter.com/theguyswann)
Guy on Instagram (Link: https://www.instagram.com/theguyswann)
Guy on TikTok (Link: https://www.tiktok.com/@theguyswann)
Guy on YouTube (Link: https://www.youtube.com/@theguyswann)
Bitcoin Audible on X (Link: https://twitter.com/BitcoinAudible)
The Guy Swann Network Broadcast Room on Keet (Link: https://tinyurl.com/3na6v839)
Check out our awesome partners!
Become sovereign, hold your keys, be censorship resistant with the Bitbox hardware wallet. Get 5% off everything in the store with code GUY (Link: https://bitbox.swiss/)
Get 10% off the COLDCARD with code …
Read_943 – The Fabric of Desires
“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 Fabric of Desires by Nick Szabo (Link: https://jan3.com/blog/the-fabric-of-desires)
References from the episode
Nick Szabo’s blog, Unenumerated – where so much of his foundational writing lives (Link: https://unenumerated.blogspot.com/)
Aqua Wallet, the superapp by Jan3: Bitcoin, Lightning, and Liquid all in one, with USDT on Liquid too (Link: https://aqua.net/)
The Nakamoto Institute: the best archive there is for Szabo’s work and early Bitcoin thought (Link: https://nakamotoinstitute.org/)
Carl Menger’s On the Origins of Money – worth reading even where I think it falls short (Link: https://www.socsci.mcmaster.ca/~econ/ugcm/3ll3/menger/money.txt)
Host Links
Guy on Nostr (Link: http://tinyurl.com/2xc96ney)
Guy on X (Link: https://twitter.com/theguyswann)
Guy on Instagram (Link: https://www.instagram.com/theguyswann)
Guy on TikTok (Link: https://www.tiktok.com/@theguyswann)
Guy on YouTube (Link: https://www.youtube.com/@theguyswann)
Bitcoin Audible on X (Link: https://twitter.com/BitcoinAudible)
The Guy Swann Network Broadcast Room on Keet (Link: https://tinyurl.com/3na6v839)
Check out our awesome partners!
Become sovereign, hold your keys, be censorship resistant with the Bitbox hardware wallet. Get 5% off everything in the store with code GUY (Link: https://bitbox.swiss/)
Get 10% off the COLDCARD with code BITCOINAUDIBLE (Link: https://bitcoinaudible.com/coldcard)
Get 10% off the best Bitcoin board game in the world, HODLUP! Or any of the other great games from The Free Market Kids! Use code GUY10 at checkout for 10% off your cart! (Link: https://www.freemarketkids.com/collections/games-1)
“There’s always a story. It’s all stories, really. The sun coming up every day is a story. Everything’s got a story in i…
Roundtable_020 – Anything But Bitcoin
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 into the proposed cluster mempool changes in Bitcoin Core. Mechanic also shares his view on renting hashrate, and how much money giant pools waste by ignoring empty block speedups.
Guest Links
Steve Simple Nostr (Link: https://tinyurl.com/3s6a8yn8)
Steve Simple on X (Link: https://x.com/stevesimple)
Bitcoin Mechanic Nostr (Link: https://tinyurl.com/2tm827ut)
Bitcoin Mechanic on X (Link: https://x.com/GrassFedBitcoin)
Jeff Swann Nostr (Link: https://tinyurl.com/3sjc3bcp)
Jeff Swann on X (Link: https://x.com/agoristview)
Affiliate Links
Become sovereign, hold your keys, be censorship resistant with the Bitbox hardware wallet. Get 5% off everything in the store with code GUY (Link: https://bitbox.swiss/)
Get 10% off the COLDCARD with code BITCOINAUDIBLE (Link: https://bitcoinaudible.com/coldcard)
Get 10% off the best Bitcoin board game in the world, HODLUP! Or any of the other great games from The Free Market Kids! Use code GUY10 at checkout for 10% off your cart! (Link: https://www.freemarketkids.com/collections/games-1)
Host Links
Guy on Nostr (Link: http://tinyurl.com/2xc96ney)
Guy on X (Link: https://twitter.com/theguyswann)
Guy on Instagram (Link: https://www.instagram.com/theguyswann)
Guy on TikTok (Link: https://www.tiktok.com/@theguyswann)
Guy on YouTube (Link: https://www.youtube.com/@theguyswann)
Bitcoin Audible on X (Link: https://twitter.com/BitcoinAudible)
The Guy Swann Network Broadcast Room on Keet (Link: https://tinyurl.com/3na6v839)
Read_942 – Stepping Outside the Fiat Frame
“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
1 BTC = 1 BTC. If fiat is broken, why do we still trust it to tell us what gold or Bitcoin is worth? Craig Tindale argues that even the rebels against fiat money remain captive to its grammar – measuring their escape in the very units they claim to reject. But is stepping outside the fiat frame really that simple, or does the nature of price itself trap us in ways even Bitcoiners haven’t fully reckoned with?
Check out the original article: Stepping Outside the Fiat Frame by Craig Tindale (Link: https://x.com/ctindale/status/2040918715961901280)
References from the episode
My recent two‑part series Read episodes: “Number Go Down” by Allen Farrington & Sacha Meyers and “Modern Money Only Works by Cheating” by Tyler Durden – both great companions to this episode.
(Number Go Down: https://fountain.fm/episode/fLqds61ds9YbsnqGOkE8)
(Modern Money Only Works by Cheating: https://fountain.fm/episode/UN8NHIQ3tR9tdc9ER89h)
Host Links
Guy on Nostr (Link: http://tinyurl.com/2xc96ney)
Guy on X (Link: https://twitter.com/theguyswann)
Guy on Instagram (Link: https://www.instagram.com/theguyswann)
Guy on TikTok (Link: https://www.tiktok.com/@theguyswann)
Guy on YouTube (Link: https://www.youtube.com/@theguyswann)
Bitcoin Audible on X (Link: https://twitter.com/BitcoinAudible)
The Guy Swann Network Broadcast Room on Keet (Link: https://tinyurl.com/3na6v839)
Check out our awesome partners!
Become sovereign, hold your keys, be censorship resistant with the Bitbox hardware wallet. Get 5% off everything in the store with code GUY (Link: https://bitbox.swiss/)
Get 10% off the COLDCARD with code BITCOINAUDIBLE (Link: https://bitcoinaudible.com/coldcard)
Get 10% off the best Bitcoin board game in the world, HODLUP! Or any of the other great games from The Free Market Kids! Use code GUY10 at checkout for 10% off your cart! (Link: https://www.freemarketkids.com/collections/games-1)
Guy’s Take_106 – When Cheating Is The Law
“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 we done that?”
~ Guy
What if the cheating, the manipulation, and the bailouts aren’t bugs in our financial system, but the very features that keep it alive? In this rant, I push back hard on the idea that “elastic money” saved us from the 2008 collapse, the 1929 catastrophe, or any other economic event we’ve “papered over”, and argue it’s the very thing guaranteeing a far worse one. Is hard money really the villain of the 20th century, or have we been telling ourselves a comforting lie?
References from the episode
The previous Read of “Number Go Down”, the essay by Allen Farrington and Sacha Meyers (Link: https://fountain.fm/episode/fLqds61ds9YbsnqGOkE8)
And the previous Read of “Modern Money Only Works by Cheating” by Tyler Durden (Link: https://fountain.fm/episode/UN8NHIQ3tR9tdc9ER89h)
Custodia Bank’s ongoing fight for a full-reserve banking charter (Link: https://bankingjournal.aba.com/2026/04/tenth-circuit-denies-rehearing-en-banc-in-custodia-banks-lawsuit-over-master-accounts/)
Affiliate Links
Become sovereign, hold your keys, be censorship resistant with the Bitbox hardware wallet. Get 5% off everything in the store with code GUY (Link: https://bitbox.swiss/)
Get 10% off the COLDCARD with code BITCOINAUDIBLE (Link: https://bitcoinaudible.com/coldcard)
Get 10% off the best Bitcoin board game in the world, HODLUP! Or any of the other great games from The Free Market Kids! Use code GUY10 at checkout for 10% off your cart! (Link: https://www.freemarketkids.com/collections/games-1)
Host Links
Guy on Nostr (Link: http://tinyurl.com/2xc96ney)
Guy on X (Link: https://twitter.com/theguyswann)
Guy on Instagram (Link: https://www.instagram.com/theguyswann)
Guy on TikTok (Link: https://www.tiktok.com/@theguyswann)
Guy on YouTube (Link: https://www.youtube.com/@theguyswann)
Bitcoin Audible on X (Link: https://twitter.com/BitcoinAudible)
The Guy Swann Network Broadcast Room on Keet (Link: https://tinyurl.com/3na6v839)
Chat_166 – The Great Distraction: Epstein vs. Quantum in Bitcoin with Rob Wallace on Bitcoin News
“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 decide: ‘Oh, if there is a schism in the community, one small group is going to be able to force it onto everybody else.’And that’s exactly the thing that you actually need to have society’s rules be sustainable, because otherwise, that’s all you get. You get people who will violently disagree about the tiniest shit, and then they will put a gun to everybody else’s head, and they will say: ‘You just got to come along with me or you’re screwed.'”
~ Guy
Lately, it feels like an endless stream of noise tries to predict the death of Bitcoin. So I joined Rob Wallace on the Bitcoin News channel to cut through the panic and tackle the two loudest distractions: Google’s latest quantum computing claims and the wild conspiracy that Jeffrey Epstein dictated Bitcoin’s code.
We look at the actual physics of quantum processing to see if scaling qubits without catastrophic environmental noise is even possible. But the Epstein drama is what really gets me fired up. People are rewriting the history of the block size wars to fit a comfortable narrative. We lay out why he had zero practical influence over Bitcoin, and why some folks would rather believe an elaborate lie than accept the reality of decentralized consensus.
But we do not just stay in the weeds. I also share why I am incredibly optimistic about non-custodial scaling solutions like Ark, and how vibe coding is sparking a peer-to-peer renaissance. Big thanks to Rob and the Bitcoin News channel for hosting me!
Chapters
(00:00:00) – The failure of central planning and libertarian ideals
(00:01:41) – Assessing the actual quantum threat to Bitcoin
(00:08:44) – Why quantum experiments lack genuine cryptographic proof
(00:20:06) – Prioritizing quantum resistance among protocol developers
(00:22:50) – Debunking the Epstein and MIT Media Lab narrative
(00:31:06) – The reality of the early Blockstream investments
(00:39:41) – Why the liberty movement split over Bitcoin scaling
(00:44:12) – Hard truths about network architecture and TCP/IP
(00:52:29) – Can Bitcoin truly separate money from the state
(00:55:08) – The friction of living entirely on a Bitcoin standard
(01:00:12) – Vibe coding and a new peer-to-peer renaissance
Host Links
Rob on X (Link: https://twitter.com/_Rob_Wallace)
Bitcoin News on X (Link: https://twitter.com/bitcoinnewscom)
Bitcoin News Website (Link: https://bitcoinnews.com/)
Affiliate Links
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