Bitcoin Takeover Podcast

Alex Waltz is a prominent Bitcoin historian and film maker, who specializes in digging up information from the first months of Bitcoin's existence. Recently, he launched the ”First Bitcoin Miner” project in order to question whether or not Hal Finney truly was the second mining node on the Bitcoin network. In this episode, we talk about his work and some geeky facts about Bitcoin's history. Read B...

Martin Matejka is the CEO of Firefish, a company which offers a platform where BTC holders can connect with fiat borrowers in order to achieve the ”never sell your bitcoin” status. In this episode, we talk about how these BTC-backed loans work, and also pursue a more philosophical conversation about the purpose of Bitcoin and whether or not it's currently achieving it. Sponsors: Proudly sponsored...

Grafton Clark is best known in the Bitcoin space for his work at SatoshiLabs and Vexl. But more recently, he discovered vibe coding and completely fell in love with it. In this episode, we talk about all the cool stuff you can just build with help from AI... and where Bitcoin fits into this equation. Hopefully, this dialogue will inspire you to create something cool, that reignites your love for c...

Josh Swihart is the founder of ZODL: the Zcash Open Development Lab. Basically a for profit reincarnation of the old Electric Coin Company, which inherited the dev teams and projects. During his previous Bitcoin Takeover podcast appearance in November 2024 (S15 E62), Zcash was a struggling privacy project with very little support and a rather disappointing price action. In June 2026, Zcash is the...

Kieran Mesquka is a contributor to privacy projects, best known for his work on Railgun for Ethereum. He is also an advocate for freedom-maximizing technologies and a connoisseur of Zero Knowledge privacy. In this episode, we talk about what it's like to build shielded pools and anonymization tools in a political landscape that actively fights against it. Time stamps: 00:01:10 - Introducing Kieran...

Almost 9 years since the big split of the Bitcoin community, it's time to learn more about how the Bitcoin Cash chain developed. Calin Culianu is the creator of Fulcrum, an efficient privacy-preserving SPV client. Steve Thurmond is the most ardent advocate for Cash Stamps: a convenient paper wallet system that's used for gifting. Throughout the episode, more BCH community members will join to have...

Milan De Reede is the co-founder of Nano GPT: a service that allows you to access all the premium (as well as free) AI models from the same interface, as you pay with bitcoin (and a bunch of other supported coins) for every query and prompt. It successfully allows users to experiment, save money on otherwise expensive subscriptions, and build without any limits (outside of the tokens budget). In t...

Zach Herbert is the CEO of Foundation, a company which specializes in building hardware wallets that offer extra security features. The latest model, the Passport Prime, aims to also replace YubiKey for Two Factor Authentication and other more expensive encrypted storage devices. But now thanks to AI and the open source app store, new possibilities have opened up. Buy your Passport Prime using pro...

Hunter Beast is the author of BIP360, the most popular proposal to add quantum resistant signatures to Bitcoin. Mark Karpelès is the former CEO of Mt. Gox and the creator of Tiban wallet. In this episode, they talk about the looming quantum threat. Time stamps: 00:00:56 Introducing Hunter Beast 00:02:38 Hunter Beast's New Role at Surmount Systems and Quantum Urgency 00:05:28 The Timeline for a Qua...

Jeremy Rubin is the author of BIP 119 (OP_CTV, Check Template Verify) and co-author of BIP 348 (CSFS, Check Sig From Stack). More recently, he started working on Char: a decentralized shared sequencer for Bitcoin layer 2s. In this episode, which we recorded at the LayerTwo Labs booth during the Bitcoin 2026 conference in Las Vegas, we talk about the challenges involved in improving Bitcoin and why...

After 15 years of being a Bitcoin-only maximalist and about a decade of promoting BIP300 as a soft fork, LayerTwo Labs CEO Paul Sztorc decided to launch Ecash: a hard fork of Bitcoin in which every BTC holder gets free coins. There's a catch, though: while everyone can claim 1 ecash for every bitcoin that they own, Satoshi can only claim half. Meaning that a returning Satoshi will only be able to...

Amir Taaki is one of the first Bitcoin developers to join the project and today he stands out as one of the most prominent cypherpunks and privacy advocates. Currently, he is working towards building DarkFi. Harry Halpin is one of the most prominent privacy advocates in academia, and an entrepreneur who focuses on maximizing human rights. Today, he is the CEO of Nym and he works towards normalizin...

Amaury Séchet is the developer who forked Bitcoin in August 2017 to create Bitcoin Cash. Three years later, in the aftermath of an internal conflict about developer funding mechanisms, he also forked Bitcoin Cash to create Ecash (XEC): the evolution of the Bitcoin ABC client which adds the Avalanche protocol for a combination between the battle-tested Proof of Work security and the instant Proof o...

Karl Kreder, better known as Dr. K, is the architect of the Quai network: a layered blockchain stack which maximizes the power of proof of work to enable high transaction throughput. Similar in design with Peter Todd's idea of Tree Chains, Quai finds itself at the bleeding edge of cryptocurrency research: and might one day help scale Bitcoin too. Recently, Quai got listed on Kraken and appears to...

Lukas Hozda is the incumbent genius at Braiins mining: the Jack of all trades who's been with the company since he finished high school and can get assigned to any project. He wrote "Programming Bitcoin in Rust" and lately he's scrutinized BIP110. Time stamps: 00:00:46 – Introducing Lukas Hosoda, author and Rust developer at Braiins 00:03:08 – Discovering Bitcoin at age 12 and mining 00:07:04 – Ca...

Summer Meng is the CEO of Bitmars: the largest distributor of Bitmain ASIC miners in Europe and North America. Often described as the ”ASIC Queen”, she is the person to contact if you need to supply a mining farm with the latest and best-performing hardware. In this episode, she talks about the challenges involved in ASIC miner distribution and her journey from simple employee to company CEO. Time...

Chad Masterson & Charlie Plainview are the co-founders of OPNET: a protocol that brings smart contracts, DeFi & stablecoins to Bitcoin's base layer. No tokens, wrappers, or bridges are required. But how does it really work & how is it different from Omni, Counterparty, and Citrea? Time stamps: Time stamps: 00:00:36 Introducing Danny and Chad from OPNET 00:01:37 Defining OP NET and Consensus Protoc...

Kristian Csepcsar is the Chief Propaganda Officer at Braiins: the first Bitcoin mining pool and also the oldest Bitcoin company in existence. In this episode, he talks about the role that Braiins plays in the Bitcoin world (inside and outside of mining) and the moments that shaped the Proof of Work industry. Time stamps: 00:01:09 Introducing Kristian Csepcsar, Chief Propaganda Officer at Braiins 0...

Charlie Spears is a co-founder of Blockspace media, an organization which specializes in publishing articles and podcasts about Bitcoin mining and scaling. In this episode, we talk about the rise of AI, Bitcoin culture, and the upcoming OP_NEXT event. Time stamps: 00:01:07 – Introduction & Spook Joke 00:05:04 – Blockspace Media Origins 00:08:34 – Technical Glitches 00:11:27 – The Gwart Show 00:13:...

Time stamps: 00:00:46 Introducing Ray 00:02:05 Ray Steps Down as CEO of NoOnes & Legal Troubles Begin 00:03:10 The Arrest & Deportation in Mexico 00:06:29 US Charges & Legal Proceedings 00:11:07 Motivations Behind the Prosecution 00:17:08 Conditions of Release & Ankle Bracelet 00:20:57 NoOnes’ Status & Company Structure 00:25:35 NoOnes vs Paxful in User Base 00:28:39 Product Design Philosophy 00:3...

John Carvalho is the CEO of Synonym: the company behind the Bitkit wallet and the Pubky social tagging protocol. In this episode, he talks about the progress he's made with his products, the relevance of BIP110, and two concepts which he calls ”Bitcoin depression” and ”Lightning derangement”. Time stamps: 00:00:47 Introducing John Carvalho 00:01:42 Podcast Sponsorships & Cake Wallet Giveaway 00:03...

Mark Karpelès is the former CEO of Mt. Gox, the defunct Bitcoin exchange. Recently, he requested the Bitcoin community to hard fork the chain in order to recover 79956 BTC that was stolen from his exchange. In this episode, he explains all about it. Time stamps: 00:01:19 Introducing Mark Karpelès & His Recent Activities 00:03:29 Mark’s Entry into Bitcoin & Move to Japan 00:06:01 Acquiring Mt. Gox...

Cameron Robertson first discovered Bitcoin in 2009, after reading a post on hacker website Slashdot. About a year later, he started mining and mingling with other Bitcoin enthusiasts in the Silicon Valley area. More recently, he created a product named the Burner: an affordable, NFC-based card that enables anyone to gift, save, and spend their BTC within a simple browser-based and mobile-optimized...

Between 2014 and 2019, Riccardo Spagni (aka Fluffy Pony) led the development and engineering efforts of the Monero privacy. But he's also been a prominent bitcoiner since 2011, who did mining and supported e-commerce. He built a solid reputation on the Bitcoin OTC trading platform, created the PayBee and Globee payment processors, and even invented OpenAlias in order to simplify the now-standardiz...

Colin Harper is a veteran Bitcoin journalist, who is known for the well-researched articles that he wrote for Coin Central, Bitcoin Magazine, Luxor Mining, and Blockspace Media. More recently, he became the co-host of the Blockspace Podcast. In this episode, we talk about Colin's insights into Bitcoin mining, the relevance of the recently-revealed Epstein files, and his approach to doing journalis...