Bitcoin Rails | Isabel Foxen Duke

The first public player to deploy Bitcoin miners at oil and gas production sites, Stephen Barbour is broadly credited for popularizing the idea that stranded natural gas could be used to power Bitcoin mining. By converting methane that would otherwise be vented or flared into productive economic value, this approach became a prominent counterargument to claims that Bitcoin mining is inherently har...

Less than nine months ago, investor and researcher Nic Carter sparked one of the most heated debates in Bitcoin's recent history — when he published a series of essays arguing that the network should prepare for its post-quantum transition sooner rather than later. While the essays broadly persuaded investors and institutions, many of Bitcoin's technical leaders dismissed them as alarmist — that i...

As language models evolve into extensions of memory, judgment, and decision-making—questions of ownership, privacy, and autonomy become increasingly difficult to ignore. In this interview, Vora founders Erik Cason and Jesse Posner share why the future of AI will look very different depending on our ability to do one thing: maintain self-custody of our personal data—with private keys, just like Bit...

One of Bitcoin's most prolific experimental developers, Super Testnet is known for building software at the frontier of Bitcoin research — including notable contributions to BitVM, Drivechains, Lightning, and numerous prototypes that have pushed the boundaries of Bitcoin's design space. More recently, he's become a prominent participant in discussions surrounding BIP 110, a proposed soft fork inte...

Some of the most impressive technical and commercial leaders in digital assets emerged from what insiders call the "Libra Mafia" — the team assembled by Meta to build Libra (later Diem). Though the project ultimately succumbed to regulatory pressure, it produced a generation of founders and engineers who went on to shape the industry, including Sam Blackshear, a leading expert in blockchain progra...

Neha Narula is the Director of the MIT Digital Currency Initiative, where she focuses on Bitcoin research and the broader design tradeoffs of decentralized money systems. Her work often centers on what Bitcoin gets right—and where it runs into hard limits—especially around scaling, decentralization, and how systems behave as global demand increases. In this interview, Neha and I explore longer-ter...

One of the most prolific and influential cryptographers in the world, it’s difficult to fully quantify the impact that Dan Boneh has had on Bitcoin and digital assets more broadly. Through both his own research and his mentorship of some of the space’s most important contributors — e.g. Andrew Poelstra, Benedikt Bunz and Robin Linus — few people have done more to shape the cryptographic foundation...

Few people have had a closer view of the evolution of digital money than Lightspark CEO David Marcus. After helping scale PayPal and leading Meta’s ambitious—but highly scrutinized—cryptocurrency project Libra/Diem, Marcus has spent years navigating some of the toughest challenges in the payments industry, in both traditional and digital assets. Marcus more recently turned his focus to Bitcoin wit...

According to BIP 360 co-author, Ethan Heilman, Bitcoin needs a minimum of two soft forks to become quantum resistant: P2MR (or an output type that can safely execute PQ signatures) + a post-quantum checksig (signature scheme). Ethan and the BIP 360 team (including myself and Hunter Beast) introduced the P2MR part via a BIP 360 update late last year—but the question remains, what’s the most appropr...

Paul Sztorc is one of the most controversial figures in Bitcoin—and he’s about to pull off one of his most controversial moves of all: a full-blown Bitcoin hardfork. Actuating his vision of “e-cash,” as the new protocol is called, Paul is pushing forward a new Drivechains-enabled Bitcoin experience—citing governance challenges and a “broken soft fork process” as reasons for the move. “If BIP300/30...

Tyler Stevens—author of Bitcoin Mining Heat Reuse and a leading voice in the space—joins the show to unpack the growing “heatpunk” movement in Bitcoin mining. Traditionally viewed as a drawback, excess heat from mining is being reframed by heatpunks as a valuable feature, e.g. to generate useful heat—like home heating or hot water. Use for these heat byproducts can effectively subsidize the cost o...

There are few people as consequential in crypto history as Phil Potter, co-founder of Tether and creator of the world's first stablecoin. After trading Bitcoin in “Satoshi Square” amongst peers like Erik Voorhees, Charlie Shrem, the Winklevoss twins and others, Potter became known for two things: 1. Professionalizing Bitcoin trading via the development of Bitfinex—and managing the 2nd largest exch...

This most recent bull market was inarguably defined by one dominant narrative: the rise of Bitcoin treasury companies and their dramatic retracement as crypto "DATs" flooded markets. David Bailey, former CEO of Bitcoin Inc. (Bitcoin Magazine, Bitcoin Conference) — raised $760M for treasury company Nakamoto , which catapulted to a peak valuation of 33X MNAV before sliding down below MNAV after a se...

“People in finance understand the financial system, but not money. People in Bitcoin understand money, but not the financial system.” In a world where financial markets make up 70% of all money flow around the world — we have two choices: come up with technical solutions that enable these use-cases in a decentralized way, or simply accept that Bitcoin will be used in a custodial way whenever more...

“BRC 2.0 is positioning Bitcoin as the prime asset issuance layer — the asset tokenization network for the most valuable assets on earth.” Late last year, BRC20 maintainer team Best in Slot extended the protocol’s functionality to include EVM smart contracts at the indexing layer — making the world’s most valuable Bitcoin-native assets protocol “fully programmable.” This upgrade, dubbed “BRC 2.0,”...

In 2023, Robin Linus introduced BitVM—aimed at enabling the verification of zero-knowledge proofs on Bitcoin for trust-minimized bridging. Since then, BitVM has been implemented by teams like Citrea and others—bringing what was once considered an impossible goal to life and paving the way for production-ready ZK rollups on Bitcoin. Cryptographer and SNARK researcher Liam Eagen (formerly Blockstrea...

Metaprotocols on Bitcoin have a long and complex history—stretching far before the launch of Ordinals, the most widely used metaprotocol in Bitcoin’s history. Ordinals’ creator Casey Rodarmor credits much of his inspiration to these early projects—including Yoni Assia’s Colored Coins, Erik Voorhees Satoshi Dice, and of course, CounterParty (widely considered the first NFT protocol) developed by Ev...

A primary maintainer of Bitcoin Core from 2011-2022, Pieter Wuille is arguably the most influential developer in Bitcoin’s history since Satoshi himself. After receiving keys to the Bitcoin codebase from Gavin Andersen, who was tasked with maintaining the codebase by Satoshi Nakamoto, Pieter went on to implement some of Bitcoin’s most dramatic and influential upgrades—including but not limited to:...

I was introduced to Silicon Valley's TJ Miller little over a year ago while he was brainstorming how we could potentially inscribe a 4-megger comedy video through MARA Slipstream. A Bitcoiner since 2018, TJ saw the potential of Ordinals to orange-pill a whole new kind of Bitcoiner — the kind that may realistically be intimidated by (or straight up uninterested in) ivory-tower technical or economic...

The ultimate Bitcoin "scaling OG,” Sergio Lerner, has been working on Bitcoin bridges since 2012. Sergio was the first person on the Bitcoin Talk forum to propose the idea that “one chain could validate the consensus of another chain,” and architected the first functioning Bitcoin sidechain, Rootstock, shortly after the canonical Blockstream sidechains paper was published in 2014. Lesser known is...

“The current mining landscape is dominated by proprietary, closed-source players who aren’t really serving the needs of the market. That creates an opportunity for open source mining to matter again.” Bitaxe creator Skot dives into the state of modern Bitcoin mining, where a small handful of industry players control nearly every facet of mining hardware and ASIC production—in a tightly sealed, clo...

In response to the AI-driven shock in global demand for computing power, large players in the Bitcoin mining industry have been forced to make significant strategic shifts to remain competitive. MARA ​— the largest Bitcoin miner in the world by hashrate — is emerging as one of the more well-positioned beneficiaries of these changing tides, having transitioned from an “asset-light” strategy (via ho...

If you’ve been following the “Bitcoin Season II” meta for some time, you’re likely already following Bitcoin tech critic Alex Bergeron —formerly comms at Blockstream and Layer-2 reporter for Bitcoin Magazine. A notorious contrarian, he’s known for being difficult to impress—and for having a soft spot for the Ark Protocol, which he sees as uniquely suited for trustless Bitcoin scaling and DeFi usec...

“Payments are the north star. Bitcoin is money, so payments need to work.” The Ark protocol is widely considered one of the most promising Layer-2 architectures in Bitcoin today—one of maybe two or three that are 'Maxi-approved' due to its unique (and rare) permissionless exit feature. Former Blockchain engineer Steven Roose (& CEO of Ark implementation 2ndbtc has been working on Ark since nearly...

"You cannot prevent arbitrary data from being published in Bitcoin transactions. Even at the consensus level… It’s mathematically impossible.” Legendary Bitcoin contributor since 2009 and self-described "weirdo with a fine arts degree," Peter Todd joins me to unpack the endless wars over Bitcoin's "true purpose," his pioneering work putting "spam" on the blockchain, and why he believes attempts to...