Bitcoin Magazine Podcast

Our guest this week is Niall Ferguson. Niall is the Milbank Family Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University, a senior faculty fellow of the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs at Harvard, and a visiting professor at Tsinghua University, Beijing. He is the author of 15 books, including The Ascent of Money and has at least two in the works in the upcoming Doom: The Politics of Catastrophe as well as part two of his excellent Henry Kissinger biography.  Niall also writes a regular column for Bloomberg Opinion. In this episode we dig into Niall’s recent Bloomberg piece “Bitcoin Is Winning the Covid-19 Monetary Revolution” and discuss the history of financial evolution, including how the current iteration of that evolution is playing out between China and the US and how he views Bitcoin in that context. We also discuss the qualities that make Bitcoin a significant advance and the broader importance of decentralization and sovereignty. Find Niall online at niallferguson.com and on Twitter @nfergus

In this episode of The Van Wirdum Sjorsnado, hosts Aaron van Wirdum and Sjors Provoost discuss RSK’s shift from a federated sidechain model to the project’s new Powpeg solution. RSK is a merge mined Ethereum-like Bitcoin sidechain developed by IOVlabs. Bitcoin users can effectively move their coins to this blockchain that operates more like Ethereum, and move the coins back to the Bitcoin blockchain when they so choose. Some Bitcoin miners utilize their hashpower to mine bocks on the sidechain, and earn some extra transaction fees by doing so.The tricky part of any sidechain is allowing users to securely move their coins between blockchains. This is technically done by locking coins on the Bitcoin blockchain and issuing corresponding coins on the sidechain, and vice versa: locking coins on the sidechain to unlock the coins on the Bitcoin blockchain.So far, RSK did this by locking the coins into a multi-signature address, for which the private keys were controlled by a group of well-known companies. A majority of them was needed to unlock the coins, which they were to only do if and when the corresponding sidechain coins were locked.RSK is now switching to a Powpeg model where the keys to the multi-signature address are controlled by special tamper-proof hardware modules that are in turn programmed to only unlock coins on the Bitcoin blockchain if and when the corresponding coins on the sidechain are locked, and the transactions to lock these coins up have a significant number of confirmations.Aaron and Sjors explain how this works exactly, and discuss some of Powpeg’s security tradeoffs.

On this episode of the Bitcoin Magazine Podcast, host BranBTC sat down with Kraken’s Bitcoin specialist (and everyone’s favorite Bitcoin maximalist) Pierre Rochard to discuss the STABLE Act that was recently introduced to the public by members of the U.S. Congress. Rochard initially took a broad view on the topic, insisting that looking too closely at the language and intent of the STABLE Act would miss the bigger picture. Instead, he wanted to focus on the conditions of our society that have allowed preconceived notions of money to grant an elite class unfathomable power over the lives of everyday Americans.For more information on the STABLE bill itself, as well as its vast implications and potentially unintended consequences, read through CoinCenter’s article, which breaks down the bill.

Fed vs ECB - FED 33 In this episode of Fed Watch, Christian and Ansel get into specifics on the plans of the ECB in regard to their digital euro. We are told in the media that central banks are very much going to be releasing a Central Bank Digital Currency (CBDC) and it will have damaging effects. However, on this podcast we get our information directly from the source. First, we must answer is a digital euro likely and why, which is what we do in this episode. In later episodes we will cover the side-effects of CBDCs if there are any. On November 30, 2020, the President of the ECB, Christine Lagarde released a blog post detailing the ECB’s current thoughts on money and how a digital euro, or CBDC, fits into their plans. I talked about this on my recent episode of Bitcoin & Markets, and Christian wanted to explore the idea of the worries of the ECB specifically, because their thinking seems to be heavily worried about monetary sovereignty. That term, “monetary sovereignty” came up several times is Lagarde’s blog post in context to why they feel pursuing a CBDC is necessary. This contrasts Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell’s comments which focus on patience and conservatism instead of worries about monetary sovereignty. Why is this? Most likely this is because their already are digital stablecoins, similar to how a digital euro would function, in the market. There is a big problem in the free market offerings of these stablecoins, from the ECB vantage point; they are 99% US dollar based. If the ECB were not to act, the market might completely bypass use of the euro in favor of a digital dollar. That is a scary possibility for the ECB, so they must provide that option for the market, and maybe even require its use in some cases to maintain the euro’s global position. This episode also discusses the recent MicroStrategy “bonds for bitcoin” proposal. Listen to find out if this is the first signs of the long awaited “speculative attack” on fiat by bitcoin, and what to watch out for as this move receives the keen attention of regulators. We also discuss jurisdictional arbitrage at length. How does bitcoin enable jurisdictional arbitrage even within the regions, like between US States or European countries? Of course, as good bitcoiners, this leads us to a cosmic back and forth about citadel locations, and the best place to live in the future from a freedom and economic standpoint.  Fantastic episode, heavy on central bank commentary. Do not forget to subscribe to Fed Watch’s new RSS feed, so you don’t miss any of our great guest insights in the future. Ansel Lindner Economist, author, investor, and bitcoin specialist. Find more from Ansel at BitcoinDictionary.cc, BitcoinAndMarkets.com, and BTCM.co.

This week on the Bitcoin Magazine Podcast, Christian sits down with macro analyst and thinker Lyn Alden to discuss her recent piece titled 7 misconceptions about Bitcoin. In the piece Lyn breaks down what she would consider are the most common misunderstandings or objections to Bitcoin and explains why these are in fact misconceptions that will not negatively impact Bitcoin or the investment thesis into Bitcoin.  This is an excellent podcast for Bitcoin enthusiasts looking to sharpen up their arguments as well as new entrants into Bitcoin interested in learning why Bitcoin could make sense as a part of a balanced portfolio. This podcast is full of intelligent and articulate ways to defend and explain how and why Bitcoin will continue to increase in usefulness and value.  Lyn's original article: https://www.lynalden.com/misconceptions-about-bitcoin/ We discuss the following topics:  Motivations behind writing the article.  Lyn address, Bitcoin is a Bubble. Look at it in log and the bubble looks more like a pattern.  Lyns Opinion on the Bitcoin Halving.  Lyn likes to discuss things in terms of probabilities.  Bitcoins intrinsic value is zero  Altcoin/fork issue  Bitcoin is too Volatile  Bitcoin is catching on with Gold investors.  Governments will Ban Bitcoin  Bitcoin isn’t Scalable  Bitcoin wastes Energy  Why DCA instead of Trade? 

In this episode of The Van Wirdum Sjorsnado, hosts Aaron van Wirdum and Sjors Provoost discussed Bitcoin mempools, Child Pays For Parent (CPFP) and package relay. Package relay is the project that Gloria Zhao will work on as part of her Brink fellowship, which was announced earlier this week, and would make the Lightning Network more robust (among other benefits). Mempools are the collections of unconfirmed transactions stored by nodes, from which they forward transactions to peers. Miners usually select the transactions from their mempools that include the highest fees, to include these in the blocks they mine. Mempools can get full, however, at which point transactions that pay the lowest fees are ejected. This is actually a problem in context of CPFP, a trick that lets users speed up low-fee transactions by spending the coins from that transactions in a new transaction with a high fee to compensate. Tricks like these can be particularly important in the context of time-sensitive protocols like the Lightning Network. In this episode, van Wirdum and Provoost explained how package relay could enable CPFP, even in cases where low-fee transactions are dropped from mempools, by bundling transactions into packets. And they explore why this may be easier said than done.

On this episode of the Bitcoin Magazine Podcast, CK sits down with the team behind the MintGox Lightning-enabled gaming initiatives. Desiree Dickerson of Lightning Labs, plus Simon Cowell and Christian Moss of ZebeDee take turns discussing why Bitcoin and Lightning are such game changers for the future of human commerce in general, and gaming specifically.  One of the key points of the conversation revolves around how it is necessary for folks to onboard onto Bitcoin without permission, and to onboard directly onto the Lightning Network where they can transact with small amounts.  As discussed on this episode, the group thinks that micro payments enabled by Lightning opens up a completely new paradigm in the way value and services will be exchanges.  Lastly, the group covered how the most meaningful activities in the world are being uploaded to the web. It discussed how this really favors both Bitcoin and gaming as the world goes digital.  Follow the guests.  MintGox @MintGox Christian Moss @MandelDuck Simon Cowell @SECowell Desiree Dickerson @dickerson_des

In this off the cuff episode of Fed Watch, Christian and I dive more deeply into the technology driven deflation debate we started last week with our guest Jeff Booth. We bring up the chicken or the egg conversation that did not get answered fully last time; is the deflation from technology first or is the inflationary environment first? In other words, which force is primary? We discuss that topic again, and also touch on the problem that not all technology is equally inflationary. Modern finance preceded the industrial revolution and it is widely accepted that technological advance and economic stimulus are directly correlated. Ansel attempts to make the claim that it is the culture and capital structure that results from debt-based fiat money that incentivizes massive technological advancement. Without debt-based fiat money the deflationary pressure from innovation will return to the natural and gradual speed we saw throughout the days of the classic gold standard. Don’t forget to subscribe to Fed Watch so you don’t miss any of our great guest insights in the future.

Our guest this week is Lixin Liu head of hardware at Cobo and creator of Cobo Vault out of Shanghai. Lixin’s background in hardware and international product development made him Discus Fish’s choice when F2 Pool decided to get into the hardware and security game. We talk about building out Bitcoin hardware from the ground up, why it is valuable to the Bitcoin network to have increasing competition in the hardware product space, the difference between what Chinese miners and western retail users want in hardware products, trends he is seeing in institutional custody interest in Asia and more.

In this episode of the Bitcoin Magazine podcast ck and Dergigi Bitcoiner and senior developer at Swan Bitcoin take a deep dive the Bitcoin rabbit hole.  Ck and Dergigi discuss Bitcoin circular nature anyhow people often project themself onto Bitcoin. To Gigi, Bitcoin is a mirror and we all see what we want in it.  We go deep into conversation around Bitcoin distributed nature and Gigi explains why trying to kill bitcoin is akin to trying to eradicate the world of ants.  Finally we discuss Bitcoiners’ religious zeal towards Bitcoin and why Bitcoin hardliners are in fact good for Bitcoin.  Make sure to follow all of Dergigi’s work at https://dergigi.com/ and keep an eye out for his incredible developments on the Swan Bitcoin product.