Bitcoin Audible

In this episode of Bitcoin Audible, I read James O'Beirne's "Bitcoin Core’s Loss of Focus" and offer my perspective on its critical arguments. Has Bitcoin’s development strayed from its core mission of empowering trustless self-custody for all? Let's unpack the challenges, potential solutions like CTV, and the broader implications for Bitcoin's future scalability. Is the community prepared to face...

While impatiently waiting for my Jade Plus I started digging into the Jade docs and found a unique idea for securing a hardware wallet using a blind oracle. In the theme of our adventures breaking down various security models and leveraging servers or secondary devices for added protection and convenience, this presents a really interesting new too. And of course its open source, so you can run on...

"Our philosophy with building Pubky was, all right, we're not going to say never on a server. We're going to say, use a server if you want. Don't use a server if you don't want. Either way, it's fine because no matter what happens to you, you can redefine it later. So it's just basically adding the censorship resistance, this credible exit to using servers. And that's a big part of what pub key en...

What happens when the Fed's one tool for controlling inflation, stops working? The conditions in the market and in our political institutions is such that this may be where we find ourselves. If they lower interest rates, then inflation will run hot and new money will flood into the economy. But if they raise interest rates, then the massive govt debt and ongoing deficit will require trillions in...

Roger Ver went on tucker carlson recently to discuss how the government infiltrated Bitcoin development, took over the protocol, and killed its potential to ever be electronic cash. He wrote a book titled Hijacking Bitcoin to lay out this story. But there's actually another story of a small group who tried to hijack Bitcoin, who sought to force out the developers who wouldn't go along with what th...

"Bitcoin is anti-fragile it secures $2 trillion worth of value currently and there's a huge monetary incentive to maintain that security and there's a number of very intelligent people who are working on that problem of just making sure that is quantum resistant. There might be a period of time where there's like you know a transitionary period that could be quite you know stressful but once that'...

"Imagine waking up in a world where every piece of information you encounter is carefully filtered by faceless algorithms. Your online interactions are curated not by your preferences, but by the agendas of corporations and governments. You can only speak within the walls of platforms that commodify your every word, every click. This isn’t a dystopian novel — it’s the current reality of the intern...

**"Bitcoin is the most potent device ever invented for transferring wealth from the impatient to the patient. Be patient." — Ross Stevens **Ross Stevens brings us back another brilliant piece in the Stone Ridge investment letter breaking down new models for finding stability in volatile markets, finding the third side of a page, sailors lost at sea, the greatest source of life inequality, and how...

**"This was one of my early objections to Bitcoin is that "Well, everything gets hacked eventually", right? Everything has some security flaw, so we're still looking for the security flaw, but we'll eventually find the security flaw in Bitcoin. But I didn't have that heuristic but for the fact that Bitcoin is secured at the edges, right? It's secured by each user's public/private key pair. That's...

December brings with it a return to the glory days of FUD. Blackjack has done the unthinkable, and the 21 million limit to Bitcoin is in grave danger. Saylor is running his own personal Ponzi that's absolutely killing it. The Blocksize War is back again and Roger Ver is suddenly relevant thanks to the feds who control Bitcoin being very mad at him for writing a book. All this and a partridge in a...

"Ecash got reintroduced with the two open source projects Fedimint and Cashu. In my opinion, the main reason for this revival is the following fact: Unlike an implementation of ecash in the fiat world, that would rely on the permissioned system to "allow" something like ecash to exist, bitcoin does not come with that limitation. The permissionless nature of bitcoin allows for these protocols to ex...

"The payment network has no value if your asset is not desirable. Like this is not, you cannot have this, like I'm just gonna build all of this stuff on top of it. And if none of the assurances of the underlying, those things don't matter because its value is in the quote unquote utility of payments. Money is its own utility. Money is its own utility because where on earth do you hold value in som...

"There are so many reasons to be interested in peer-to-peer. You can be interested in it for resilience, because there are no middlemen, so it's going to work if any of your devices are online. You can also just be interested in it from this angle, the idea that if you have full control of your data, and the code that you're using, that you're running on that data, then anybody can fork it, modify...

"Ossification is complacency. Yes, we all agree that Bitcoin is great. But _I do not agree_ that Bitcoin has reached its full potential. I think complacency is one of the greatest threats to Bitcoin - we must not rest upon our laurels." — Lopp Bitcoin crosses a hundred thousand dollars. Your Bitcoin investment has exploded. You're looking at it and all you can see is how much it's worth in dollars...

"Ossification is complacency. Yes, we all agree that Bitcoin is great. But _I do not agree_ that Bitcoin has reached its full potential. I think complacency is one of the greatest threats to Bitcoin - we must not rest upon our laurels." — Lopp How should we frame the debate between ossification vs continuous development and planning for future soft forks of the Bitcoin protocol? Is there a clear a...

**"On nostr we have maybe a couple hundred thousand users who are active, but all all those users are holding their keys. We're actually bootstrapping this censorship resistant network. There isn't anything like that out there. Nostr is the only game in town when it comes to truly sovereign presence on the web." - Miljan ** What does it take to create a user-friendly Bitcoin and Nostr experience t...

"Imagine a sports game where different players are motivated by distinct incentives, defenders aiming to pull the ball outside the field, midfielders prioritizing maximum passes, attackers focused on scoring the most goals, goalkeepers rewarded for saving the most shots, and coaches for the most words shouted from the bench. You can imagine that will not be an optimal team performance when they st...

Guy's Roundtable gets together for another awesome breakdown. Covering all the happenings this month: Trump wins the election, new bitcoin innovations, court rulings on privacy and free speech, bitcoin surges through the all time high, and trying to know what it is we know about the things we don't know. Mechanic, Jeff, Steve and Guy assemble to get some OG wisdom and ranting for the month in Bitc...

"This is also an interesting case study in how Bitcoin resists duplication. You can create something which looks cosmetically similar to Bitcoin, but you cannot replicate the settlement assurances which derive from the costliness of the ledger." — Nic Carter A correction needs to be made. Thanks to a great thread by Anilsaidso, with a list of fundamental pieces in Bitcoin in order to grasp a deepe...

"Never half-ass two things. Whole-ass one thing." — Ron Swanson Focus. Easily spoken, hard to live by. There are many lessons that Bitcoin teaches, and one that is more clearly true the older I get, is that every single thing in a trade off. And not just solutions, or tools, or networks, but the very thing that you spend your time thinking about, at the expense of all other things. What dreams you...

"Panic is rising. Bitcoin, the way out of their giant Ponzi scheme, does not want to die, but the survival of the fiat system depends on the lack of an alternative. The entire system is therefore in danger." — Alexandre Stachtchenko The ECB is at is again with a new, 20 page "research" paper on the economic dangers of a possible future in which Bitcoin survives. Yes it's just another pile of drive...

"Never half-ass two things. Whole-ass one thing." — Ron Swanson Focus. Easily spoken, hard to live by. There are many lessons that Bitcoin teaches, and one that is more clearly true the older I get, is that every single thing in a trade off. And not just solutions, or tools, or networks, but the very thing that you spend your time thinking about, at the expense of all other things. What dreams you...

"There is no justice in following unjust laws. It's time to come into the light and in the grand tradition of civil disobedience declare our opposition to this private theft of public culture. We need to take information wherever it is stored make our copies and share them with the world. We need to take stuff that's out of copyright and add it to the archive. We need to buy secret databases and p...

"Once you understand the economic situation of the United States and how they're in a debt spiral, there's only one way out of it and it's to turn the money printer on so that they can inflate. **Once you understand that that's their incentive, their incentive is not to spend money efficiently, it's to pump more dollars into the system, and any excuse they can use to do that, they're gonna take it...

"How could any financial system avoid being captured by those who already hold the most power and wealth? Won’t it just lead to the same unequal system again, only in a new form?” you might ask. The answer is as simple as it is powerful." — Petter Englund Will a Bitcoin-based economy simply perpetuate the same inequalities as our current system with the same elite dominating, or does it offer a fu...