Bitcoin Takeover Podcast

Andrew Poelstra is a mathematician who heads the research department at Blockstream. Over the years, he experimented with many Bitcoin OP codes – some of which are also enabled on Liquid. In this episode, he explains why he likes and prefers OP_CAT.

Paul Sztorc returns with a twist: he's talking about sidechains, rollups, BitVM, Lightning, and ever other scaling solution... but can't say the words "Drivechain" or "BIP 300". If he breaks the rule, he must send a Lightning transaction and drink vodka.

Aaron van Wirdum is a veteran Bitcoin journalist who has been writing for Bitcoin Magazine since 2014. On January 3rd 2024, after nearly five years of working on this project, he launched The Genesis Book: a reflection on the history before Bitcoin.

Nicolas Dorier talks about the early days of BTCPay Server, activating SegWit before it was cool on NBitcoin, contributing to TumbleBit, writing a book about coding Bitcoin projects in C#, and working with colored coins.

Robin Linus revolutionized Bitcoin development in 2023 with BitVM: a virtual machine that can do off-chain computation for the purpose of enabling smart contracts. With it, Bitcoin can get trust minimized sidechains. But there are so many more uses cases!

Agustin Kassis & Mariano are Argentinian bitcoiners who work in a Fight Club-style house to build La Wallet: a Lightning wallet which is associated with a Nostr account and enables users to have both a payments card and a digital identity device.

Bitcoin & Friends was a pretty popular original cartoon back in 2019 and 2020. On January 3rd 2024, thanks to some major breakthroughs in animation software, the series is getting a reboot which takes the story to a whole new level. Stay tuned!

Tuur Demeester is a prominent Bitcoin investor who strongly believes in the power of Bitcoin-only companies. In this episode, he explains how and why he invests in Bitcoin projects, suggests when market tops are reached & comments on the Supra Cycle.

Kevin Loaec is the CEO of Wizardsardine – the Bitcoin company that builds Liana wallet, a powerful piece of software which optimizes for inheritance. In this episode, Kevin explains why miniscript matters & how he rates the most popular hardware wallets.

Ryan Condron has been a Bitcoin miner for longer than a decade. He started out with a GPU rack, upgraded his rig to FPGAs, and then was one of the first people to run ASICs. Today, he aims to decentralize hashrate with Lumerin – a hashrate marketplace. Ryan Condron has been mining Bitcoin for longer than a decade. In the beginning, he started out with a rack of video cards. Soon, he had to upgrade...

Sergio Demian Lerner has made a plethora of contributions to Bitcoin: from finding early security bugs, and all the way to designing & launching the first sidechain RSK. In this interview, he talks about his work & research – with a focus on the future.

John Light, Super Testnet and Alexei Zamyatin are part of the new generation of Bitcoin developers. They like zero knowledge proofs, they're opinionated when defending covenants & they are not afraid to look for breakthroughs beyond the Bitcoin research.

Edan Yago talks about Sovryn: a financial application which allows users to take loans against their bitcoin. It's built on Rootstock (RSK, Bitcoin's first sidechain) and it conceptually goes against most mainstream narratives about what Bitcoin can do.

Alexis Roussel is a man of many talents, with plenty of accomplishments in his resume. But most notably, he is a bitcoiner who's working to build the Nym mixnet system and he's fighting for the rights of the individual in Switzerland.

Hernán Marino is an Argentinian bitcoiner who recently started contributing to Bitcoin Core. In this episode, he talks about his views on Bitcoin maximalism, what it's like to be a bitcoiner in a hyperinflationary country, and his hopes for the future.

Sergi Delgado is an engineer at Chaincode Labs, whose specialization and previous academic research is in peer to peer (P2P) networks. In this episode, he talks about his views on existing proposals to improve Bitcoin. In this podcast episode, Chaincode Labs engineer Sergi Delgado talks about Bitcoin development challenges, the Lightning network, and the importance of testing and security. Sergi t...

Wasabi Wallet now offers a "Buy Anything" button that lets you buy physical items with greater privacy?! How does that even work? ZK Snacks CEO Max Hillebrand & ShopInBit CEO Lando Rothbardian join the show to explain everything about this integration.

Bitcoin has recently fixed the presidential elections in Guatemala. How so? Rafael Cordon of Simple Proof is here to explain all about the power of OpenTimeStamps and how they can leverage the Bitcoin blockchain to prove that something really happened. (00:01:12) Rafael Cordon discusses the use of Bitcoin in the Guatemalan elections to prevent fraud and uphold the integrity of digital information....

Lea Petrasova is the president of the Vexl Foundation, one of the project's co-founders, and certainly one of the most ardent supporters of exchanging bitcoin in a peer to peer fashion. In this episode, she explains why you should consider using Vexl. Vexl: Introduction and Purpose (00:01:51) Lea Petrasova introduces Vexl as a mobile app that allows users to buy and sell Bitcoin peer-to-peer witho...

Firefish enables people to borrow fiat money against their bitcoins in a trust-minimized way, using a multisig setup with oracles. Martin and Igor, the two FireFish co-founders, talk about how and why you should be using their service. **Firefish: A New Use Case for Bitcoin as Collateral (00:01:54)** Discussion on how Firefish is using Bitcoin as collateral for loans and expanding the use cases fo...

Lisa Neight (creator of the Base58 Bitcoin academy) and Calle (creator of Cashu) joined the Bitcoin Takeover podcast during the Hackers Congress in Prague. They speak about free open source software, popular Bitcoin scaling solutions, cars & more!

The 11th edition of Labitconf takes place in Buenos Aires this year, just a week before the final round of the presidential elections in Argentina. Rodolfo Andragnes tells us all about the event & his hopes for a libertarian president like Javier Milei.

Philipp Hoenisch is the founder of 101010: a project which aims to create synthetic bitcoin-backed stablecoins on top of the Lightning network. These stablecoins aim to minimize trust, as there's no central issuer or institution in the middle.

Phil Zimmermann is the creator of PGP & the cryptographer who made it safe to publish cryptography projects on the internet. In this episode, Mr. Zimmermann talks about Bitcoin, his opinion on various cryptography projects & his friendship with Hal Finney. This episode is sponsored by Wasabi wallet, Cryptosteel, Satodime, and ShopInBit. Time stamps: The cypherpunk movement in the 1990s [00...

Michael Bumann (aka Bumi) is a Lightning network developer best known for working on Joule and creating Alby. Today, Alby is one of the most popular wallets for sending and receiving Nostr zaps. In this episode, he explains more about his work & vision.