Chat_175 – Building in the AI Era with Luís Novo & Matt Ahlborg
***”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 […]
Chat_174 – Preparing Bitcoin for an Unknown Future with Hunter Beast
***”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 […]
Chat_173 – The Time Has Come for Privacy on Bitcoin with Dan Gould
***”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 […]
Chat_172 – Sovereign Devices in a Subscription World with Harald Schäfer
“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 […]
Chat_171 – Building Instant Fiat-to-Bitcoin Bridges with Gustavo Flores
***”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 […]
Chat_170 – Can Anything be Secured in the Digital Age? with Luke de Wolf
“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 on the network. And so the defence of the system is not down to, say, the CEO dictating that everyone has to have their password be 64 characters and change it every three months, which is bad practise, by the way. It’s everyone working together to do their part. So that’s the biggest difference.”
~ Luke de Wolf
I sat down with Luke de Wolf to talk about the real security risks facing Bitcoin today. Luke has spent his career protecting critical industrial control systems like oil pipelines and electrical grids. Now, he is taking that hardcore cybersecurity mindset and applying it to the Bitcoin network in his brand new book, *Defending Bitcoin*. And trust me, it is a conversation you need to hear.
We spent a lot of time debating the heated topic of arbitrary data and the drama surrounding BIP 110. Should we enforce strict rules to keep the blockchain pure, or is trying to force a chain split a bigger threat to Bitcoin’s integrity as money? Luke actually changed his mind on this recently, and he lays out exactly why the stakes could be too high to play games with consensus. His perspective really cuts through the noise and challenges the tribal thinking happening on both sides.
But we didn’t just stop there. We also get into mining centralization, selfish mining attacks, and why we need to view Bitcoin as high-stakes critical infrastructure. The decisions we make now could determine if this network survives long-term.
Guest Links
Luke on X (Link: https://twitter.com/lukedewolf)
BTCHel’s Website (Link: https://btchel.com/)
Defending Bitcoin’s Website (Link: https://defendingbitcoin.com/)
Bitcoin Infinity Show on YouTube (Link: https://www.youtube.com/@BitcoinInfinityShow)
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)
G…
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)
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)
<…
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
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 Bit…
Chat_165 – Family and Focus with Aleks Svetski
“I think there will come a point where you get excessive, you swing too far on the individual side of the spectrum, and then it becomes advantageous to group together again, and you become more fulfilled, more happy, more culturally flourishing in collectives again.”
“I think there’s a resurgence of the desire for people to build tribes, communities, even fucking network state, even microstates, and saying that we’re going to do this, and we’re going to really group together because getting 10,000, 100,000, million people, 10 million people of a similar mindset, similar ideology, similar vision for the world is way more powerful than individuals doing it.”
~ Aleks Svetski
In this Chat, Svetski and I talk about something I think a lot of people feel but don’t say out loud: the internet just doesn’t feel as real as it used to.
We cover learned helplessness, micro-echo chambers, the collapse of trust, and why the future of social life may look a lot more like curated groups, in-person communities, and small circles of people you actually know.
So this episode isn’t a standard industry update, but more of an honest, slightly cynical, and deeply hopeful look at why the best way to handle a world that feels increasingly fake is to double down on the things that are undeniably, physically real.
Chapters
(00:00:00) – Shifting tribalism and the need for community
(00:04:15) – Unplugging from Twitter and public social media
(00:14:37) – AI agents and the death of public internet
(00:23:31) – Learned helplessness from social media hysteria
(00:26:05) – Telescopic versus microscopic thinking models
(00:44:20) – The necessity of life consequences and dueling
(00:51:04) – Political power and the illusion of constitutions
(01:01:43) – The role of borders and cultural trust
(01:13:07) – Bitcoin as a standard framework for excellence
(01:23:24) – Autonomous bazaars and the reality of collectivism
(01:32:19) – Being completely offline as the new status symbol
(01:34:24) – Information overload and the reality of mental obesity
(01:37:40) – Physical scarcity and the booming experience economy
(01:49:11) – Identity shifts and embracing fatherhood
Guest Links
Aleks on X (Link: https://twitter.com/)
Satlantis Website (Link: )
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: h…
Chat_164 – Skating To Where The Puck Will Be with Matt Hill
“We are trying to make it possible for people to use computers as simple of a statement as this: use computers, without intermediaries and custodians. The more they do, the more the lines will diverge. Until there’s a chasm between the centralised model and the decentralised model with a clear line between them. And we will force either a reconciliation at the natural, technical level, let the best product in the market win, or we will force the hand of the authoritarians to say that our model is illegal.
And then we have a different reconciliatory approach. Which is, okay, it’s revolution time.”
~ Matt Hill
Big tech platforms have spent years trapping us behind their gates. And honestly, I am sick of it. The “cloud” is just someone else’s computer, and companies are skimming our data at every single turn. CEO of Start9, Matt Hill, is my guest today, and is actually doing something about it. We sat down to talk about how bad the institutional theft of our privacy has gotten, and why building your own digital escape hatch is no longer just for hardcore nerds.
Matt brought the fire in this one. He walks me through the absolute beast that is StartOS 0.4.0 — the OS they spent the last three years rebuilding from absolute scratch. He also gave us the rundown on their upcoming StartWRT router, and breaks down how they finally made complex networking feel like putting together simple Ikea furniture.
But the conversation goes way deeper than just hardware and updates. We get into the existential threat of AI, what happens when people get automated away, and why you desperately need to run your agents locally. Matt sees the current systems sinking like the Titanic, and we spend a lot of time trying to figure out exactly how to scramble for the higher decks. If you have been procrastinating on taking control of your own computing, this conversation will give you the push you need.
Chapters
(00:00:00) – The divergence of centralized and decentralized models(00:06:34) – Rebuilding StartOS and extending development timelines(00:10:05) – Introducing StartWRT and true open-source routing(00:32:18) – The danger of centralized cloud computing infrastructure(00:44:06) – AI advancement and the loss of human purpose(01:06:14) – Unchecked inflation theft negating time-saving technology(01:18:09) – Developing essential digital defense systems to resist tyranny(01:28:56) – A total code rebuild for ultimate network stack control(01:46:36) – Automating server management with the local StartBot AI(01:57:24) – Packaging custom open-source software on the fly(02:08:40) – Simplifying network isolation with StartWRT security profiles(02:24:35) – Chaining outbound VPNs for complete internet traffic privacy(02:37:48) – Exposing home services safely using virtual private routers
Guest Links
Matt on X (Link: https://twitter.com/_MattHill_)
Start9’s Website (Link: https://start9.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! (Li…
