Bitcoin Well Podcast

Bitcoin is sitting near $84,000 heading into this conversation, 892 days past the halving, with sentiment firmly in greed and ETF demand still described as accumulating. Dr. Jeff Ross joins the podcast to explain why none of those numbers are the real story. Jeff argues that the separation of money and state is the next necessary evolution in a long historical pattern, the same kind of institution...

In February 2022, Chrystia Freeland told Canada's banks they could freeze accounts without a judge, and they froze 257 of them. Two courts have since ruled it unconstitutional. The Rhodes Trust, founded by Cecil Rhodes as (in his own words) a secret society to place its people where the levers are, made her CEO anyway. Zach reads his essay on what the state could reach and what it couldn't: the ba...

Today's FOMC decision carries real weight: markets are pricing an 87% probability of a 25 basis point hike, the first since 2023, after the Fed held in July on a divided 9-3 vote. Core inflation is running at 3.3%, the labor market is still warm, and Bitcoin is sitting around $77-79K heading into the announcement. Ansel Lindner (Bitcoin & Markets) joins us to break down what actually matters here:...

In 2008, Zach sat down to read the official story of 9/11 so he could stop thinking about it. That was 18 years ago. This Reads episode walks the record, not the theories: Operation Northwoods and its 35-year classification, the Gulf of Tonkin attack that never happened, Colin Powell's vial, the 567-page Commission report that never mentions Building 7, and NIST conceding 2.25 seconds of freefall....

Liquid, the Blockstream sidechain built to give Bitcoin users faster and more private transactions, hit a consensus split this week and "white hat hackers" pulled $320 million out of it. Bitcoin itself never went down. The layer built on top of it did. Rob from Bitcoin News joins us to go deep on what actually happened with Liquid and why this keeps being the pattern: the same week, the ColdCard a...

There is a camera on a pole near you right now, and it is photographing every car that passes. Adam O'Brien's essay "Jump Out of the Pot" turns that camera around and points it at your bank account: the 1970 Bank Secrecy Act that made banks informants, the 1976 Supreme Court ruling that made your financial records the bank's property instead of yours, and the 257 Canadian accounts frozen in hours...

Q sits down with Nolan Bauerle (CountBTC) for a conversation that goes way past the price chart. Nolan's frame: the Iran war was decided the day Lloyds of London pulled war insurance, because the real fight was between physical energy delivery and the paper version of it (Brent, futures, risk premiums). Fiat is words. And the world is shifting toward something more symbolic, simpler, and physical....

There's a camera on a pole near you right now, tracking every car that passes. Your city bought it to catch stolen vehicles. It's already been used to track romantic partners, reach into immigration cases, and build a national database that runs warrant-free searches across tens of thousands of cameras. Your bank account is the same machine. It's just older, and nobody built a satirical Darth Vade...

Bitcoin ran from $64K to $79K-plus in a single week, hashrate hit an all-time high near 1,020 EH/s, and fees stayed cheap — and almost none of the mainstream coverage mentioned any of that. It was the same ETF-flows, institutional-buying, short-squeeze story on repeat. GMONEY (Bitcoin self-custody consultant, host of "Bitcoin is Digital 1776") and Rod Palmer (Bugle News, media and culture) join us...

Everyone agrees Bitcoin's big returns are gone. That agreement is the trade. In this Reads, Zach walks through why the diminishing returns thesis quietly became the most crowded belief in Bitcoin, how gold and silver just ran a $15 trillion proof of concept that killed the law-of-large-numbers argument, what a $40 trillion national debt does to a central bank that no longer sets its own policy, an...

Last week was about custody failing. This week it's about whether the infrastructure underneath Bitcoin — mining itself — is quietly being captured. Bob Burnett sits on OCEAN's board, runs Barefoot Mining, and went on record defending how OCEAN handled the BIP-110 fork after miners demanded leadership be ousted and Adam Back called for docked pay. This is his first real chance to tell the full sto...

This isn't just a ColdCard story anymore. In this emergency episode, Portland Hodl, Bitcoin Core contributor and creator of Slipstream, reveals that an open-source AI model with none of the safety guardrails of US frontier models is now tearing through the entire hardware wallet industry's code. ColdCard was first. Then BTCPay Server. Then Nunchuk. As of this morning, Trezor too. We get into what...

$116 million vanished from "self-custody" wallets after a ColdCard firmware bug quietly broke wallet randomness for five years. The response from the market was almost nobody expected: $853 million flowed into Bitcoin ETFs the same week — the most custodial option available. Eric Yakes (author of The 7th Property) and Trey Sellers (Fire BTC) join us for a two-part conversation: what actually happe...

The BIP-110 activation weekend came and went with almost zero miner support. Now the Bitcoin Knots camp is talking about a proof-of-work change to fire the miners entirely. Q hosts the post-mortem Spaces with Hodl, Otto, Wicked, and guests to break down what actually happened, what a POW change would mean in practice, why the 51% attack risk on the new chain is enormous under SHA-256, and whether...

Q wanted a place where Bitcoiners could disagree without it turning toxic. This four-hour Spaces — featuring Hodlonaut, Knut Svanholm, and a rotating cast of guests — is what that actually looks like. The BIP-110 debate, ordinals as spam vs. legitimate fee market activity, whether this moment is worse or better than the Block Size Wars, Craig Wright threatening to sue Bitcoin Magazine, the 2032 ha...

$130 million. That's how much Bitcoin has vanished from "self-custody" wallets since a firmware flaw in Coldcard hardware wallets was disclosed — one of the largest security failures in Bitcoin's history, and it happened to people who did everything right by taking their coins off exchanges. This week we're joined by Pete Rizzo — Bitcoin historian, former Bitcoin Magazine and CoinDesk editor — to...

Bitcoin is at $64K USD. The Korean stock market just dropped 30% in a day. Asian markets are flashing red from Japan to Taiwan. The Fed is about to hike rates. And Galaxy Research dropped a $5M bet that quantum computers will break Bitcoin before the ecosystem can respond. Q, Riley, and Zach cover all of it: why every global stock market is a cousin of the US market, what the S&P priced in gold ac...

This is not a drill. On July 30th, 594 Bitcoin — roughly $38 million — was swept from 500 wallets in about 25 minutes. Nobody was phished. Nobody's device was touched. A firmware bug in Coldcard meant the random numbers generating people's seed phrases weren't actually random. A predictable seed is a math problem an attacker can solve. Zach — who owns a Mark III — breaks format to give you the imm...

Bitcoin clawed back to $64K. BlackRock added $600 million. ETF inflows ran 5 straight days. The loud screen was euphoric. The quiet screen — fear and greed index locked at 28, gold near all-time highs, Treasury yields ripping — was telling a completely different story. Zach reads his original piece on the gap between price and belief, why the crowd doesn't trust this rebound, why an ETF share is a...

Bitcoin just crashed from a $122K all-time high to $63K, and this week alone brought five separate bombshells. Trump accused China of stealing 220 million US voter files and Bitcoin dropped within hours. The US struck 80+ Iranian military targets. Russia's Duma just legalized Bitcoin for cross-border trade. Treasury and Commerce are in an open turf war over who controls the government's 300,000+ B...

In January 2026, US forces seized Nicolás Maduro and announced they'd run Venezuela through a transition. The stated prize was the oil. Nobody pretended otherwise. Zach reads his original piece pulling the thread from Nixon closing the gold window to the petrodollar handshake to Venezuela, Libya, Iran — and the uncomfortable possibility that the Strait of Hormuz closing was the planned outcome, no...

Michael Saylor built the biggest corporate bitcoin bet in history. Now the charts are red and the questions are getting louder. On this episode of the Bitcoin Well Podcast, we sit down with Chris Alaimo (Strategic Advisor at Simple Bitcoin) and Joe Consorti (Horizon) to dig into what's actually happening with Saylor's position, whether "forced seller" fears are real or overblown, and what it could...

Bitcoin Well Reads: Your House Is a Savings Account but It Just Stopped Paying. Florida home prices are technically up 1.8%. Inflation ran 4.2%. That's a real loss most owners will never feel — and that's exactly the point. Zach reads his original piece on housing demonetization: the quiet, drift-based process by which the monetary premium stacked on top of shelter starts migrating away — not in a...

Bitcoin Well Reads: The KIDS Act Was Never About Kids. It's About Control. On June 29th, 2026 the House passed the Kids Act — an omnibus bill sold as protecting children online. Almost nobody covered the part that actually matters: the slow construction of an internet where the price of admission is your government ID. Zach reads his original piece connecting the Kids Act to KYC, the UK Online Saf...

He was quietly cashing in while everyone else got rugged. On episode 1 of the Bitcoin Well Podcast, we sit down with Tatum Turn Up — yes, the guy behind Between Two ASICs — to break down what's really going on with Trump, crypto rug pulls, and what it means for bitcoiners. We also get into the mining side of things, since that's Tatum's actual day job — expect real insider perspective on where tha...