Bitcoin’s #1 Trailer Park Supervisor, With Brad Mills

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In this holiday episode I met up with super early Bitcoin adopter Brad Mills to discuss the strange new world we're entering as Bitcoin reaches new all-time highs, and the global financial system enters a period of unprecedented stress. Why were the very first Bitcoiners drawn to Bitcoin, before anyone else believed in it? Could there be common characteristics amongst these earliest adopters which might make them a strange kind of community? What is the world they'd like to see Bitcoin bring about? And, perhaps most important, how will the world change with a bunch of newly minted, left-libertarian billionaires looking to shake things up?

We were supposed to discuss the Weird World of DeFi, but that's gonna have to wait for a future episode because we got sidetracked discussing Brad's interesting history, what led him to Bitcoin, and the strange future implied by a bunch of wild-eyed libertarians running around as freshly minted millionaires.

I hope you enjoy the episode!

Navigating The Reality Tunnels, with Emerson Brooking

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In this episode, I met Emerson Brooking, a fellow at the Digital Forensics Lab and author of LikeWar, to take a deep dive into the topic of online disinformation. I put to Emerson my feelings that what people are calling the 'post-truth' world has in fact been in gestation long before the internet, and that a lot of the arguments about today's epistemic disorder come down to sour grapes over the apparition of new information incumbents capable of creating and distributing disorderly narratives, at scale. His responses surprised me.

If you're interested in digging deeper into this topic, you can check out the latest episode of my new documentary project, SCHISM, at youtube.com/SCHISM.

How Decentralization Could Save Online Privacy, with Orchid’s Alex Kehaya

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In this episode, we meet Alex Kehaya of VPN Orchid to discuss the company's radical new decentralized approach to improving privacy for internet users. As you'll hear, Orchid's model solves a lot of the problems associated with traditional models —  providing better anonymity and privacy, and reduced exposure to the honeypot problem that's always plagued centralized services.  This episode will be of great interest to anyone looking to augment their online privacy without relying on a single centralized service — and the potential for decentralization to improve our digital lives.

‘Taking Crypto Offgrid’, with Rich Myers

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In this episode, we meet Rich Myers of mesh networking company GoTenna. Rich is developing the Lot49 protocol, which both allows Lightning transactions over a local mesh network and uses Bitcoin incentives to increase the adoption of the network. Rich and I discuss the history of wireless networking and how P2P meshes could turn out to be critical in a time of crisis; why and to what extent we can consider our contemporary networks compromised through what Rich calls 'The Eye of Sauron' problem; and how Lot49 enables an internet-minimized micropayments solution which could function in a distressed, post-COVID environment.

Taking Down OneCoin: The $4.6bn Crypto Ponzi, with Tim Tayshun (Pt. 1)

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First part of a two-part interview in which Tim Tayshun (AKA Tim Curry) of
BlockchainBTM discusses taking on OneCoin, the massive crypto Ponzi scheme responsible for bilking investors out of $4.6bn dollars.

We discuss: how OneCoin was supposed to work vs. the dismal reality, its colourful cast of leaders and the lengths they went to in order to establish OneCoin as a valuable investment, and the risk OneCoin posed to the growth of Bitcoin itself.

Faircoin: The Grassroots Crypto, with Enric Duran

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This is part one of a two-part series with Enric Duran, leader of the Faircoin project and founder of Fair Coop. Faircoin is a fascinating experiment in cryptocurrency: a LETS-style community currency which also functions as an exchange-traded token. With it, Duran's Fair Co-op wants to power an international co-operative movement based on ideas and principles emerging from the Catalan Integral Co-operative: peer-to-peer organization, and horizontal governance by consensus.

We discuss how the Fair Co-Op project co-opted (!) the original Fair Coin for its own use; trust and reciprocity in small communities and how crypto can extend this into the wider world; and just how to think about the 'ecological cost' of Bitcoin as a means to create a truly trustless global exchange network.

Enric Duran raised around four hundred thousand Euros in 2008 by creating multiple overdrafts with fake solvency, and then invested this money into building the cooperative movement in Spain in 2008, leading to the creation of the Catalonia Integral Cooperative movement in 2010. Since 2014, Duran’s focus has been on working with FairCoop to generate the alternative ecological and post-capitalist ecosystem that FairCoin is based on.

‘Printing A New Reality’, with Cory Doctorow

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In this episode we meet Cory Doctorow, sci-fi author and co-founder of Boing Boing. Cory's most recent book, Walkaway, is a story of refusing a life of surveillance and control under a high-tech oligarchy and the struggle to live in a post-scarcity gift economy where even death has been defeated. Over this one hour plus interview we discuss:
  • Whether filesharing & P2P communities have lost the battle to streaming services like Netflix and Spotify, and why the 'copyfight' is still important
  • How the European Copyright Directive eats at the fabric of the Web, making it even harder to compete with content giants
  • Why breaking up companies like Google and Facebook might be the only way to restore an internet -- and a society -- we can all live with.
After taking a detour into Cory's views on cryptocurrency and Bitcoin's chances of ''bailing out' an economy saturated with fictitious money,  we move onto discussing Walkaway and a future of 'Fully Automated Luxury Communism' versus one of mega-rich plutocrats (think Bezos) controlling the economy -- and our lives -- via massive machine empires.  How do we exit from a scenario in which machines make everything plentiful -- but none of them are owned by us?

Showrunner & Host Jamie King | Editor Lucas Marston (Hollagully) Original Music David Triana | Web Production Eric Barch

Presented by TorrentFreak

Sponsored by Private Internet Access

Executive Producers: Mark Zapalac, Eric Barch, Nelson Larios, George Alvarez, Adam Burns, Daniel, Grof.

Sponsorship slots are currently full. For future sponsorship opportunities, please email info@stealthisshow.com

‘Crypto & The Beyond’, with Primavera De Filippi

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In this episode, we meet Primavera De Filippi, author of the recently published 'Blockchain and the Law', from Harvard University Press (co-authored with Aaron Wright). Primavera is interested in how the law will change to accommodate blockchain -- and how blockchain might replace parts of the law. We've already seen how P2P filesharing strained the world's copyright law: what changes will be ushered in by P2P money? We discuss the future of blockchain-based technologies, and whether decentral systems are doomed to create new incumbents and new forms of centralisation; whether (and how) forking could be a solution against this 're-centralisation'; and how Ethereum's smart contracts may have a fatal flaw that the philosophy of law already knows about.
Primavera De Filippi is a permanent researcher at the National Center of Scientific Research (CNRS) in Paris, a faculty associate at the Berkman-Klein Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University, and a Visiting Fellow at the Robert Schuman Centre for Advanced Studies at the European University Institute. She is a member of the Global Future Council on Blockchain Technologies at the World Economic Forum, and co-founder of the Internet Governance Forum’s dynamic coalitions on Blockchain Technology (COALA). Her fields of interest focus on legal challenges raised by decentralized technologies, with a particular focus on blockchain technologies. She is investigating the new opportunities for these technologies to enable new governance models and participatory decision-making through the concept of governance-by-design.

Showrunner & Host Jamie King | Editor Lucas Marston (Hollagully) Original Music David Triana | Web Production Eric Barch

Presented by TorrentFreak

Sponsored by Private Internet Access

Executive Producers: Mark Zapalac, Eric Barch, Nelson Larios, George Alvarez.

For sponsorship enquiries, please email info@stealthisshow.com

‘The TAO of the DAO Pt. 2’ with Chris Beams of Bisq

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This is the second part of our interview with Chris Beams, founder of the decentralised cryptocurrency exchange, Bisq. We discuss the inner workings of the Bisq service, how it compares to the widely used platform Local Bitcoins, and the intricacies of designing decentral P2P systems for financial operations. From there, we move into some of the political/philosophical implications of Bisq as a Distributed Autonomous Organisation (DAO): are we evolving, with Bitcoin and other P2P networks, functionalities which parallel certain present-day institutions, and which could one day eliminate the need for  establishment altogether? And could a future democracy be composed of "opt-in" components that actually do better at providing for our basic human needs?

Showrunner & Host Jamie King | Editor Lucas Marston (Hollagully) Original Music David Triana | Web Production Eric Barch

Presented by TorrentFreak

Sponsored by Private Internet Access

Executive Producers: Mark Zapalac, Eric Barch, Nelson Larios, George Alvarez.

For sponsorship enquiries, please email info@stealthisshow.com