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

Podcast: Download

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

Podcast: Download

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

Podcast: Download

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

Podcast: Download

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.

‘The Secret Satoshis’, with Finn Brunton

Podcast: Download

This is part one of a two-part interview with Finn Brunton, author of 'Digital Cash: The Unknown History of the Anarchists, Utopians, and Technologists Who Created Cryptocurrency'. In this part we dig into the secret pre-history of Bitcoin, including the World War 2 origins of public/private key cryptography, how Proof Of Work was initially proposed as a means to fight spam,  and how the 'Extropian' movement - which, Finn explains, stood for 'more life, more energy, more time, more space, more money... more everything! - collected an uncanny number of the early engineers contributing to what would eventually become Bitcoin.

If there's one key takeaway from this episode, it's that there's no one Satoshi Nakamoto -- Bitcoin's a bricolage of math, technology and ingenuity stretching back at least seventy years. Do any of the Extropians who had themselves cryogenically preserved, we wonder, have bitcoin wallets still till accruing value -- and will they still be able to recall their word seeds when they're brought back to life in a hundred years' time?

The Dark Side Of The Moon, Taking Down OneCoin with Tim Tayshun (Pt.2)

Podcast: Download

This is the second part of a two-part interview with Tim Tayshun, bitcoin entrepreneur and activist, who dedicated himself to exposing the crypto ponzi scheme, OneCoin. We discuss: how the internet changed the business of running a ponzi; the similarities between scams like OneCoin and the crypto world's ICOs; how OneCoin modeled the way it moved money and on methods used by drug dealers; how Tim used memes to deal some deadly blows to the operation; and why Onecoin -- which by its own account should now be worth more than all US dollars in circulation --- still refuses to die.